8 ms·

Leaving CMU

75 points by taylorbuley 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aerioux 10y ago
HN: Is the future of engineeirng research private? e.g. OpenAI or Amazon/Facebook/Google/Baidu - who seem to have taken many of the world's top AI researchers.
- mafuyu 10y ago
  It always has been. Think back to Bell Labs. I think it's simply a sign that AI has matured to the point where it is widely useful and applicable.
- Qworg 10y ago
  A big chunk of it is already. MSR is the one of the largest corporate research organizations.
  - raziel2701 10y ago
    What is MSR? Google gave me a bunch of weird results...
    - swang 10y ago
      I'm guessing Microsoft Research.
    - andyjohnson0 10y ago
      Microsoft Research
  - andyjohnson0 10y ago
    I can't find the numbers, but I'm fairly sure that IBM Research is much bigger than MSR.
    - Qworg 10y ago
      Interesting. I'll modify to "one of the largest". I had thought that IBM was gutted. Thanks!
- allenleein 10y ago
  I don't think is fair to compare OpenAI to other companies.OpenAI will open the research they are doing right now.
terravion 10y ago
Does anyone know where we can find out more about what the AWS roadmap in this space is? Based on https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/ https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/ It seems like some of the competing cloud offerings might be slightly ahead in Machine Learning / Computer Vision type stuff out of the box, but I would be AWS has a plan to do more than catch-up.
harry8 10y ago
I wonder how big his pay increase is. I actually find all the "reasons that aren't $bigpayrise" crap that people go on with in these personal PR things a bit dishonest. I'd bet it's a very large pay increase. I'd be amazed if he isn't getting paid in excess of 350k Which I think is more than CMU pay. Yeah sorry to be rude and mention money, I just find it more rude to lie and make pretence it's not important when it so clearly is. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he's such a bad negotiator it's not a pay increase, maybe CMU pay in bushels of gold? But if it isn't a pay increase, it's possible to say so.
- askafriend 10y ago
  The thing is, it can be both money AND a better opportunity to make an impact that led to him making that decision. However, it probably feels wrong to write a blogpost and say "I did it for the money". So people conveniently leave the money part out but I think we can all agree that it's probably definitely a non-trivial factor in their decision. It just happens to make more sense to tactfully focus a blog post on the better opportunity at hand rather than the money.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  Yeah it probably is more than $350k, but who's going to put that on a blog. Oh look how much I am making now. People are supposed to read between the lines and I think the "it was an offer that I could not turn down" gives a pretty good hint in the right direction.
- source99 10y ago
  What does a professor at CMU make?
- beambot 10y ago
  Academics are necessarily optimizing for something other than money. Nobody spends 4-7 years obtaining a PhD and then another 5-7 years pursuing tenure if their primary motivation in life is money. The reality is: Academia can be a real shitty gig when it comes down to it. A vast majority of a professor's life is spent dealing with politics, administrative minutiae, "service", pedantic peer review, teaching, and writing grants. By the time all of that's done, you have no time left for the "fun" parts: doing the research, communicating results and having impact, and seeing its effects on the world. Not to mention the abysmal funding climate, changing role of universities, and the fact that many fields (esp. in CS) are now being pushed further, faster, and better by industry... There's a mass exodus going on right now. At least 25% of the professors I know (I'm friends with many) have either left or are thinking about leaving academia.
glup 10y ago
"At Amazon we will be investing an order of magnitude more resources towards this problem. With data and computers to match this. This is significant leverage. Hence the change." The research questions will be in the interest of Amazon, which may not align with the public good (though, admittedly, the logic of the university doesn't always align with the public good). He'll get more leverage, but I'd be surprised if he works on the same problems. How about updating the academic funding model before everyone goes to industry?
- eva1984 10y ago
  In academia most professors are doing some or most of their projects for the source of funding, which I think is not too much about public good anyway. I think it is about time for machine learning researchers to go to industry, there isn't that much data in academia. Good public datasets are rare, like ImageNet, and have been basically overfitted to the core. In industry, it is totally another story.
  - lqdc13 10y ago
    They are usually private datasets and details of the training are not usually disclosed. There could also be duplicated effort by every company competing in the field. There is also the side that it would make it harder for startups to compete as the progress is made on training on large datasets using huge clusters of machines. Such datasets and compute power is impossible to acquire for small companies.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    So maybe we need to start funding the acquisition of large public datasets in academia?
    - newjersey 10y ago
      The fact that Stanford University creates patents from publicly funded research then turns around and sells them to non manufacturing entities makes me wary of pumping any new public money into research at universities. They're clearly corrupt to the core now.
c_m_u 10y ago
CMU, CMU... Surely that acronym must mean something... Clock Multiplier Unit? Oh well, I guess we'll never know because the author never explains the intended meaning.
- danso 10y ago
  Even when just looking at the title, it's safe to assume that CMU is some kind of place, more specifically, an organization and/or institution. Reading the first sentence of the article -- "I'm leaving CMU to join Amazon" -- brings even more clarity, that "Leaving CMU" refers to a changing of occupation. The next sentence talks about machine learning, so it's safe to say that the author is in the AI/machine learning space, and that CMU is a place that, like Amazon, has some expertise in it. At that point, if you haven't already guessed that CMU means "Carnegie Mellon University" -- an acronym that's not quite "MIT" but still well-known in engineering circles -- you'll get the definition in the very first Google search result, even for just "CMU"
- jsolson 10y ago
  It seems to assume people who read a CS professor's blog or a site called Hacker News will know Carnegie Mellon University, given that it has consistently hosted a top-5 CS program for the last 20+ years.
  - countryqt30 10y ago
    Yeah, but it is VEEERY poor in all the other fields. World rank eighty something? xD
    - Arcten 10y ago
      Not all the fields; both its Drama and its Robotics programs are very good, among others.
      - tropo 10y ago
        They work well together. The drama students like wearing costumes (for example, robot costumes) and even the dumbest drama student is still way better than the typical robot AI. It's all an act.
mknocker 10y ago
Maybe he will work on Amazon's newest project : Nucleus :)
hobaak 10y ago
Amazon is playing catch-up here in machine learning. Comparing the offerings between google cloud and aws, google cloud has a lead. Not to mention TensorFlow in cloud, you can use their ready-to-use model in voice, translation and image. Does AWS have image tagging? I haven't seen yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2hxBAwG_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2hxBAwG_0

75 points by taylorbuley 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

HN: Is the future of engineeirng research private? e.g. OpenAI or Amazon/Facebook/Google/Baidu - who seem to have taken many of the world's top AI researchers.

mafuyu 10y ago
It always has been. Think back to Bell Labs. I think it's simply a sign that AI has matured to the point where it is widely useful and applicable.
Qworg 10y ago
A big chunk of it is already. MSR is the one of the largest corporate research organizations.
- raziel2701 10y ago
  What is MSR? Google gave me a bunch of weird results...
  - swang 10y ago
    I'm guessing Microsoft Research.
  - andyjohnson0 10y ago
    Microsoft Research
- andyjohnson0 10y ago
  I can't find the numbers, but I'm fairly sure that IBM Research is much bigger than MSR.
  - Qworg 10y ago
    Interesting. I'll modify to "one of the largest". I had thought that IBM was gutted. Thanks!
allenleein 10y ago
I don't think is fair to compare OpenAI to other companies.OpenAI will open the research they are doing right now.

terravion 10y ago

Does anyone know where we can find out more about what the AWS roadmap in this space is? Based on https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/ https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/ It seems like some of the competing cloud offerings might be slightly ahead in Machine Learning / Computer Vision type stuff out of the box, but I would be AWS has a plan to do more than catch-up.

harry8 10y ago

I wonder how big his pay increase is. I actually find all the "reasons that aren't $bigpayrise" crap that people go on with in these personal PR things a bit dishonest. I'd bet it's a very large pay increase. I'd be amazed if he isn't getting paid in excess of 350k Which I think is more than CMU pay. Yeah sorry to be rude and mention money, I just find it more rude to lie and make pretence it's not important when it so clearly is. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he's such a bad negotiator it's not a pay increase, maybe CMU pay in bushels of gold? But if it isn't a pay increase, it's possible to say so.

askafriend 10y ago
The thing is, it can be both money AND a better opportunity to make an impact that led to him making that decision. However, it probably feels wrong to write a blogpost and say "I did it for the money". So people conveniently leave the money part out but I think we can all agree that it's probably definitely a non-trivial factor in their decision. It just happens to make more sense to tactfully focus a blog post on the better opportunity at hand rather than the money.
rdtsc 10y ago
Yeah it probably is more than $350k, but who's going to put that on a blog. Oh look how much I am making now. People are supposed to read between the lines and I think the "it was an offer that I could not turn down" gives a pretty good hint in the right direction.
source99 10y ago
What does a professor at CMU make?
beambot 10y ago
Academics are necessarily optimizing for something other than money. Nobody spends 4-7 years obtaining a PhD and then another 5-7 years pursuing tenure if their primary motivation in life is money. The reality is: Academia can be a real shitty gig when it comes down to it. A vast majority of a professor's life is spent dealing with politics, administrative minutiae, "service", pedantic peer review, teaching, and writing grants. By the time all of that's done, you have no time left for the "fun" parts: doing the research, communicating results and having impact, and seeing its effects on the world. Not to mention the abysmal funding climate, changing role of universities, and the fact that many fields (esp. in CS) are now being pushed further, faster, and better by industry... There's a mass exodus going on right now. At least 25% of the professors I know (I'm friends with many) have either left or are thinking about leaving academia.

glup 10y ago

"At Amazon we will be investing an order of magnitude more resources towards this problem. With data and computers to match this. This is significant leverage. Hence the change." The research questions will be in the interest of Amazon, which may not align with the public good (though, admittedly, the logic of the university doesn't always align with the public good). He'll get more leverage, but I'd be surprised if he works on the same problems. How about updating the academic funding model before everyone goes to industry?

eva1984 10y ago
In academia most professors are doing some or most of their projects for the source of funding, which I think is not too much about public good anyway. I think it is about time for machine learning researchers to go to industry, there isn't that much data in academia. Good public datasets are rare, like ImageNet, and have been basically overfitted to the core. In industry, it is totally another story.
- lqdc13 10y ago
  They are usually private datasets and details of the training are not usually disclosed. There could also be duplicated effort by every company competing in the field. There is also the side that it would make it harder for startups to compete as the progress is made on training on large datasets using huge clusters of machines. Such datasets and compute power is impossible to acquire for small companies.
- adrianN 10y ago
  So maybe we need to start funding the acquisition of large public datasets in academia?
  - newjersey 10y ago
    The fact that Stanford University creates patents from publicly funded research then turns around and sells them to non manufacturing entities makes me wary of pumping any new public money into research at universities. They're clearly corrupt to the core now.

c_m_u 10y ago

CMU, CMU... Surely that acronym must mean something... Clock Multiplier Unit? Oh well, I guess we'll never know because the author never explains the intended meaning.

danso 10y ago
Even when just looking at the title, it's safe to assume that CMU is some kind of place, more specifically, an organization and/or institution. Reading the first sentence of the article -- "I'm leaving CMU to join Amazon" -- brings even more clarity, that "Leaving CMU" refers to a changing of occupation. The next sentence talks about machine learning, so it's safe to say that the author is in the AI/machine learning space, and that CMU is a place that, like Amazon, has some expertise in it. At that point, if you haven't already guessed that CMU means "Carnegie Mellon University" -- an acronym that's not quite "MIT" but still well-known in engineering circles -- you'll get the definition in the very first Google search result, even for just "CMU"
jsolson 10y ago
It seems to assume people who read a CS professor's blog or a site called Hacker News will know Carnegie Mellon University, given that it has consistently hosted a top-5 CS program for the last 20+ years.
- countryqt30 10y ago
  Yeah, but it is VEEERY poor in all the other fields. World rank eighty something? xD
  - Arcten 10y ago
    Not all the fields; both its Drama and its Robotics programs are very good, among others.
    - tropo 10y ago
      They work well together. The drama students like wearing costumes (for example, robot costumes) and even the dumbest drama student is still way better than the typical robot AI. It's all an act.

mknocker 10y ago

Maybe he will work on Amazon's newest project : Nucleus :)

hobaak 10y ago

Amazon is playing catch-up here in machine learning. Comparing the offerings between google cloud and aws, google cloud has a lead. Not to mention TensorFlow in cloud, you can use their ready-to-use model in voice, translation and image. Does AWS have image tagging? I haven't seen yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2hxBAwG_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2hxBAwG_0