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This is obviously a talent acquisition in more ways than one (the Kaggle team, but also their ability to source machine learning talent). I wonder to what degre
by kornish 10y ago
This is obviously a talent acquisition in more ways than one (the Kaggle team, but also their ability to source machine learning talent). I wonder to what degree it's also a Tensorflow promotion move? It seems like Google is very interested in growing a community around it.
For example: some friends who run a seed-stage biotech deep learning startup were offered a considerable discount by the Google Cloud folks. Their ask? That the company switch to Google Cloud, rewrite some proprietary software in Tensorflow, and heavily publicize both moves.
I wonder if we'll see Kaggle gain a specific bent towards that ecosystem.
- manojlds 10y agoWhy does Google want to promote TensorFlow? To make people use more of their cloud offerings?
- nostrademons 10y agoLikely to avoid their mistake with MapReduce, where by around 2011 candidates were coming in to interviews and saying "MapReduce? That's sorta like Hadoop, right?" There's value in controlling mindshare; keep everything proprietary too long, and people just use open-source clones that may be inferior but can actually be used by the majority of the talent pool.
- xapata 10y agoMore specifically, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) beat Google to market. By years, if I recall correctly.
- xapata 10y agoDoes the downvote indicate my memory is faulty? I believe I was already using EMR when Google's MapReduce service was announced. I'm not referring to their internal tool, but the external service.
- nostrademons 10y agoEMR beat Google Cloud MapReduce to market, but you're forgetting that before there was such a thing as cloud services, we relied on open-source frameworks and setup our own clusters. EMR is based on an open-source framework called Hadoop, which itself was built on a closed-source Google framework called MapReduce that Google released a paper about. MapReduce came out in 2003, Hadoop in 2006, Amazon EMR in 2009, and Cloud MapReduce in 2015. ...which is sorta my point. People remember the version of the technology that makes it accessible to them, not the first one that comes out. When Google keeps thing proprietary forever and only releases academic papers, people quickly forget just how far ahead they were.
- xapata 10y agoThat's all true, but what may matter more to Google was the missed business opportunity of being first to market with a relatively easy distributed computing paradigm.
- jes5199 10y agoThat's exactly backwards - the MapReduce paper was intentionally released as vaporware to make the rest of the industry spin its gears trying to replicate an imaginary result. And that's why we have Hadoop.
- pzh 10y agoI thought the MR paper described an actual working implementation. It had performance test results, descriptions of issues they encountered and solved, and some sample source code of how MR is used. It seems like a lot of effort was put in for it to be a hoax.
- nostrademons 10y agoYou realize you're arguing with an ex-Googler who has worked on production MapReduces that were first written around 2005 and has read the initial MapReduce commit?
- kornish 10y agoI imagine part of it is that businesses built on Tensorflow play nice with Google Cloud at their TPUs, but mostly I suspect it's just a mindshare thing. If Google becomes the place that all the top data scientists want to work – such that they don't even have to be poached – that's a Very Good Thing for them. It probably doesn't hurt if those data scientists come in already familiar with a tool Google uses internally. Kind of reminds me of the genius move by Tesla to crowdsource collection of self-driving car information. Experts want to get where they have the data to train their models, and if Tesla propels itself ahead of the pack for number of miles of real-world training data, then that makes them very attractive to talent.
- mtgx 10y agoIf all machine learning experts use TensorFlow, all the machine learning chips coming out will be highly optimized for TensorFlow. Higher competition among TensorFlow chips = better acquisition prices for Google. They also don't have to go around convincing chip makers to support TensorFlow (like they did, for instance, with the VP8/VP9 codec).
- alex_dev 10y agoLast I heard was Kaggle runs atop Azure and is heavily a C# shop. It'll be interesting to see the transition to Google Cloud if that's the case.
- kornish 10y agoThat's really interesting to hear. I wouldn't read too much into it, I was mostly just speculating. It's quite likely that they mostly scooped them up for the rolodex that is their user database. In any case, congrats to the Kaggle team!
- ofek 10y agoI can confirm that Kaggle runs on Azure because I block all Microsoft IPs (to avoid the ninja Windows 10 upgrade) and must disable the blocker in order to go on the site.
- lend000 10y agoThis is a great idea. Adding it to my DNS blackhole as we speak.
- daenney 10y agoIt's really not a great idea. Either you don't run Windows, and it's not an issue, or you just blocked Windows Update and other important services Microsoft provide that work in tandem to keep your systems safe.
- ionised 10y agoThere are a shed load you can block without interefering with updates.
- daenney 10y agoYet that's not what the parent and its parent were talking about/implying. It clearly said "blocking all Microsoft IPs". And considering the Windows 10 upgrade was being pushed through Windows Update I'm not sure how you'd want to prevent that specific update by blocking an IP and not interfere with Windows Update as a whole.
- ktamiola 10y agoI am curious to see what will happen to Tensor Flow. I hope the code will get clean up... I also hope they will eventually pay somebody to do it, as the open source option clearly generates heterogeneous nightmare.
- deepnotderp 10y agoThe rewrite in TensorFlow is somewhat worrying though, since TensorFlow is open source, meaning that there's no real benefit to google if it's written in TensorFlow (except for recruitment purposes). It's worrying since it suggests that google might be planning to make it, or at least parts of it proprietary in the future.... For the record, I don't think that google will, but I'm still worried about the possibility....
- maxander 10y agoRecruitment is an important purpose, though. Having a steady supply of pre-Tensorflow-trained engineers available is presumably why they opened up Tensorflow to begin with. They're not going to benefit more than that anytime soon by closing it off again.
- estsauver 10y agoI think their play has been building specialized hardware that executes TensorFlow better than anyone else. "You could use a GPU to do this, but check out our custom ASIC that does it 400x faster for 1/5th the cost..."
- deepnotderp 10y agoNO ONE does it 400X faster... And the hardware advantage is easily negated. For example, our startup is building something like this.
- kornish 10y agoThe 400x was clearly hyperbolic – and sure. But you probably don't have one-click integration with an existing battle-tested IaaS platform. Vertical integration is powerful, and by open-sourcing Tensorflow Google is achieving useful synergies in sales and recruiting. At their vast scale, even small ROIs (as a percentage) can be massive.
- deepnotderp 10y ago
- nl 10y agoNot clear to me why this is a talent acquisition. The Kaggle team (Ben in particular) have some talents in ML, but I'd be surprised if they have anyone there working day to day on ML tasks. It seems to me more like an old school product-and-media acquisition: Google like the product, and love the audience. This is a good way to get both.
- moomin 10y agoNot the team themselves, the competitors...
- pliny 10y ago>This is obviously a talent acquisition in more ways than one (the Kaggle team
- Cyph0n 10y agoI think parent's focus was on the "sourcing ML talent" part rather than the Kaggle team itself.
- kornish 10y agoIt was; should have emphasized it more. The Kaggle team is talent for sourcing ML talent.
- toastking 10y agoPlus Kaggle is a good tool for weeding out talent. Sending an ML candidate a kaggle competition is much better than a traditional code interview.
- jonathankoren 10y agoI don't think Google actually has that problem. The whole thing is strange.
- 10y ago