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Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

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Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#81

Post by IanCal »

srean wrote: post #53

HN'ers may have a good laugh at these taken from Yan LeCun's page. LeCun made it a tradition to have Hinton jokes in the lines of Chuck Norris ones (or more appropriately Doug McCllroy ones). A few will recall that neural networks all but died from the US after Minsky's damning book. Hinton gave backpropagation which is one of the foundational pillars of feed-forward neural net algorithms. With his new thrust on what…

I like the quotes, however:

> With his new thrust on whats called "deep belief networks" he is challenging his own early seminal contribution in the field

I don't know if I agree with that, he still uses backprop. Backprop has always been known to have problems when you scale to millions of connections, and his work on RBMs/DBNs is really quite old. What was novel more recently was showing that the contrastive divergence step need only be performed once, rather than 100 times, while the performance remained similar. The networks are generally still 'fine tuned' with backprop.

Still, the focus on generative networks (not sure if that's the right term still, been a while) and single layer training is fairly recent even if the concepts are quite old.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#82

Post by OGinparadise »

ok_craig wrote: post #44
kolektiv wrote: post #3

Sigh. I don't know whether I'm alone in being saddened that many of the excellent thinkers of our time, who once might have spent their lives probing the the very limits of our comprehension in their field, now end up comfortably turning their minds to the services of (in the long term) rather short sighted commercial ends. I can imagine that this sentiment is probably against the prevailing HN mood, but I've been th…

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking. I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb. Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other inter…

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking....many of them do serious intellectual research

Now that's lazy thinking. No one accused Google or Verizon or of not having "many people" that do serious research.

Personally, I see absolutely no problem with what he did, he has a family and his future to worry about. After all these years he deserves to make a lot of money money and not have to worry about money anymore. Those that criticize him for "selling out" will probably sell their start-up to just about anyone for FU money.

What I find not true, especially in the past year or two is this:

"My impression of Google's leadership, employees, and choice of projects often leads me to believe that they sell ads so they can continue making really cool stuff - not that they try to come up with cool stuff so that they can sell ads."

Part of my job requires me to surf without ad-blockers and with Chrome. There's no trick in the book they do not use to make you click on ads or sign for their services. Even Chrome, the "open source" the supposed savior of the web now has ads. It totally changed my perception of them, and it's not like Google was struggling to pay their electricity bill. As a commercial enterprise, Google has the right to do that, however they cannot have their cake and eat it too.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#83

Post by mvgoogler »

jarek wrote: post #13
jiggy2011 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair , google are doing a lot more than "making people click on ads". There must be a lot of genuinely cutting edge research into machine learning,classification,NLP etc going on in there. Google also serves the purpose of amplifying the power of great (and not so great) minds by putting so much information at their fingertips. The ads part is just what writes the cheques.

> There must be a lot of genuinely cutting edge research into machine learning,classification,NLP etc going on in there. Does the research get published or otherwise make it outside of the Googleplex? Serious question.

http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#84

Post by pmelendez »

kolektiv wrote: post #3

Sigh. I don't know whether I'm alone in being saddened that many of the excellent thinkers of our time, who once might have spent their lives probing the the very limits of our comprehension in their field, now end up comfortably turning their minds to the services of (in the long term) rather short sighted commercial ends. I can imagine that this sentiment is probably against the prevailing HN mood, but I've been th…

Not being the biggest fan of Google anymore, I got somehow saddened when I first read the news.

But after a second thought, I can understand why he did it and if I were in his shoes I would do the same.

I don't think it has to do anything with money. For a connectionist, it is a dream to have access to the massive amount of CPUs that Google has. Take that and add all the incredible and smart people that Google has in its team and then you would see his decision was a no-brainer. I feel very happy for him.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#85

Post by drpgq »

ninjin wrote: post #38
jahewson wrote: post #2

So is Google now more appealing to academics than academia?

In a way, yes. Research in industry has the advantage that you don't have to "waste" your time applying for grants in order to fund your own research group. A lot of people seem to live in an illusion that professors actually spend most of their time doing research, they are the managers of research groups more than anything else and growing those research groups is hard work and takes up close to all of your time (t…

I won't put it up here, but those that are curious can look up Hinton's salary at the University of Toronto by looking at the Ontario government sunshine list website.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#86

Post by svantana »

OGinparadise wrote: post #82
ok_craig wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking. I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb. Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other inter…

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking....many of them do serious intellectual research Now that's lazy thinking. No one accused Google or Verizon or of not having "many people" that do serious research. Personally, I see absolutely no problem with what he did, he has a family and his future to worry about. After all these years he deserves to make a…

I agree, but on the other hand I'm impressed that google services are so tolerant of ad blockers. I've never even seen a single ad on youtube for example - although they could easily "trick" the ad blockers, or even worse, block the content when ad blocking is detected. Then again, this might all change if a large enough fraction of users start using adblock...

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#87

Post by plg »

OGinparadise wrote: post #82
ok_craig wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking. I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb. Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other inter…

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking....many of them do serious intellectual research Now that's lazy thinking. No one accused Google or Verizon or of not having "many people" that do serious research. Personally, I see absolutely no problem with what he did, he has a family and his future to worry about. After all these years he deserves to make a…

"he has a family and his future to worry about. After all these years he deserves to make a lot of money money and not have to worry about money anymore."

exactly.

Academic salaries are low compared to salaries in the private sector, when equated for things like years of training, status in one's field, etc. Here are some facts:

- Google clearly has a self-interest in being a leader in machine learning technologies

- Geoff Hinton is a world recognized leader in this very field

- Google appears not JUST to be interested in selling ads ... but as many posts have said, they seem to have the ability to run in-house R & D in a somewhat more open way than most companies in the private sector

Here is some speculation:

- faced with the chance of working at Google on the very same topics one is already working on, but receiving ... 10x? 50x? even 100x? the salary, wouldn't you do it?

- think of it this way: if Geoff Hinton's google pay is a "mere" 5 million per year, then all he has to do is work under these terms for TWO YEARS and he will have made 67 YEARS of $150,000 per year salary (probably a median senior academic salary in canada)

let's stop criticizing and start getting excited about what's coming down the pipe

- and hope that google makes it all publicly available, and not just secret sauce

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#88

Post by dkersten »

kolektiv wrote: post #3

Sigh. I don't know whether I'm alone in being saddened that many of the excellent thinkers of our time, who once might have spent their lives probing the the very limits of our comprehension in their field, now end up comfortably turning their minds to the services of (in the long term) rather short sighted commercial ends. I can imagine that this sentiment is probably against the prevailing HN mood, but I've been th…

I worry that much of his groundbreaking work will now not be released to the public, or at least, not until it is no longer groundbreaking, instead looking out for corporate interests first and foremost. I don't fault the guy for this move, it certainly makes sense, but I hope we still get access to his research an future discoveries and work.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#89

Post by T-A »

niggler wrote: post #47

In contrast to many who think that people are being shepherded to the search business, I wonder if Google is trying build a new "Bell Labs"-type research division, in which case this is good news.

You mean something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X_Lab ? :)

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#90

Post by arobbins »

kolektiv wrote: post #3

Sigh. I don't know whether I'm alone in being saddened that many of the excellent thinkers of our time, who once might have spent their lives probing the the very limits of our comprehension in their field, now end up comfortably turning their minds to the services of (in the long term) rather short sighted commercial ends. I can imagine that this sentiment is probably against the prevailing HN mood, but I've been th…

Commercial motivations often drive academic achievements. Why assume it is the end of his contributions? This situation seems similar to Guinness' practice of hiring all the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge.

EDIT: Can't have apostrophes in links

Search wikipedia for Student's t-test history

old, broken link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_t-test#History

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