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Agreed. As a Google engineer, I think a lot of our AI efforts are "safe" (as in we'll keep investing in them for a long time) because they're already providing

Agreed. As a Google engineer, I think a lot of our AI efforts are "safe" (as in we'll keep investing in them for a long time) because they're already providing substantial business value. For example, - TTS and speech synthesis have lots of uses in Android (phones, Wear, Auto, etc.) - Object recognition is very useful for photo search - Face recognition is also useful for photo search (if you tag people in Google Photos) - Neural machine translation provides better translation accuracy (for languages which we have enough training data for) It's possible Google will cut back on some more speculative ML research efforts, but certainly not those four, I would think.

joshuamorton 9y ago
As a fellow google engineer, I'd be curious to know which (public) research you think isn't marketable/valuable. As you've mentioned, object detection (which is a considerable portion of CV) is marketable. Meta learning (Vizier, "Learning to learn with gradient descent with gradient descent") are incredibly valuable from a business perspective. Model compression is important for neural networks on mobile/embedded devices, etc. One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products.
- zjaffee 9y ago
  > One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products. I think this is just true for really anything that falls purely within the domain of the computational sciences. For a ground breaking drug to hit the market, it takes 10 years of FDA trials, for high speed trains it requires large teams of construction workers only after years of safety work. In the world of software as it stands today, deploying a new model for something can be virtually instant in some cases, and even in the worst cases, it isn't taking people years to improve a small attribute of their product.
peoplewindow 9y ago
I doubt Google will cut back any time soon, but as a former Google engineer, I find this an entertaining definition of business value ;) How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it. Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Speech patterns change slowly, so would Android continue to make money if investment in speech R&D were cut back? My guess is yes, it'd be fine. Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? I don't mean "well it's neat to have translation links in web search", I mean, would people cut back on the commercial queries that are Google's main source of income if Translate quality stopped improving? I doubt it. Much of their products are like this. They're products but they aren't businesses. It's very easy to lose sight of the basics of business when inside the Google bubble. The things you mention are not providing business value in the conventional sense of the term because they aren't yielding independent profits. So they're all vulnerable. That said, vulnerable to what? I think Google is at risk of losing a lot of trust around web search and political and informational search more generally, but commercial queries are probably pretty much impregnable.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it. Google Photos is, in a sense, a big ad with prominent calls to action for selling storage space. > Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Recognition, maybe (though I think no). Applying recognized text to get the desired outcome, not even close. > Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? It powers a paid API, so, yes, it makes money in a specific, direct, measurable way.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    But selling disk storage is a very marginal business and few people take huge numbers of photos they value enough to pay for storage of (vs sticking them on Facebook or Instagram which compresses the hell out of them but does it for free). I really doubt this is a significant business for Google.

joshuamorton 9y ago

As a fellow google engineer, I'd be curious to know which (public) research you think isn't marketable/valuable. As you've mentioned, object detection (which is a considerable portion of CV) is marketable. Meta learning (Vizier, "Learning to learn with gradient descent with gradient descent") are incredibly valuable from a business perspective. Model compression is important for neural networks on mobile/embedded devices, etc. One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products.

zjaffee 9y ago
> One of the very interesting things about ML being such a corporation driven field is that it's incredible how quickly relatively recent research makes its way into products. I think this is just true for really anything that falls purely within the domain of the computational sciences. For a ground breaking drug to hit the market, it takes 10 years of FDA trials, for high speed trains it requires large teams of construction workers only after years of safety work. In the world of software as it stands today, deploying a new model for something can be virtually instant in some cases, and even in the worst cases, it isn't taking people years to improve a small attribute of their product.

peoplewindow 9y ago

I doubt Google will cut back any time soon, but as a former Google engineer, I find this an entertaining definition of business value ;) How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it. Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Speech patterns change slowly, so would Android continue to make money if investment in speech R&D were cut back? My guess is yes, it'd be fine. Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? I don't mean "well it's neat to have translation links in web search", I mean, would people cut back on the commercial queries that are Google's main source of income if Translate quality stopped improving? I doubt it. Much of their products are like this. They're products but they aren't businesses. It's very easy to lose sight of the basics of business when inside the Google bubble. The things you mention are not providing business value in the conventional sense of the term because they aren't yielding independent profits. So they're all vulnerable. That said, vulnerable to what? I think Google is at risk of losing a lot of trust around web search and political and informational search more generally, but commercial queries are probably pretty much impregnable.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> How much money does Google Photos make? Last time I used it, there were no ads in it. Google Photos is, in a sense, a big ad with prominent calls to action for selling storage space. > Isn't speech recognition nearly at human levels of comprehension, at least for US English and outside of highly technical jargon? Recognition, maybe (though I think no). Applying recognized text to get the desired outcome, not even close. > Does Google Translate make money in some specific, measurable way? It powers a paid API, so, yes, it makes money in a specific, direct, measurable way.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  But selling disk storage is a very marginal business and few people take huge numbers of photos they value enough to pay for storage of (vs sticking them on Facebook or Instagram which compresses the hell out of them but does it for free). I really doubt this is a significant business for Google.