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Google can compete for the most influential/promising ML researchers with crazy salaries and be at the forefront of both best models as well as immediately putt
by bitL 8y ago
Google can compete for the most influential/promising ML researchers with crazy salaries and be at the forefront of both best models as well as immediately putting them into their cloud offering for others to use. And their DNA revolves around ML whereas Intel's and NVidia's doesn't. Looking at past 5 years at Intel, they still don't get it; NVidia seems much more qualified and sensed the opportunity right away in a developer-friendly way, just doesn't have muscles Google does and their ML business model is right now under a threat of quick commodification - I'd be more worried about them than about Google to be honest. Google's only threat is that they will self-implode due to their inner culture and arrogance, but that's a long shot and they manage it better than SUN did.
- shaklee3 8y agoThe question is really whether those high salaries are achieving long-term payoffs. For certain things like image and audio processing, they've made some remarkable strides. However, many of those strides have to be remarkable to people outside the HN/AI community. For example, typing dog in Google photos and having it find pictures of your dog is great. However, when it misses a few and people notice that, they wonder why it's so bad. Almost as if Google should correctly identify 100% of them. Someone needs to sink the money into doing the grunt work of getting close to 100%, but the last few percent of improvement cost a lot of money. And to productize that to a user base of hundreds of millions of people is not cheap on the infrastructure, either.
- bitL 8y agoI think one of the hiring strategies is not having those very talented people outside doing damage to them, rather inside even if inefficient/underutilized. They just need to be better than their competition and frankly, looking this week at what Amazon is offering they can continue being in that mode for quite some time. General public more likely notices improvements in apps with immediate feedback like what Snapchat/Messenger is doing. There are already models surpassing human cognition in many tasks, maybe the inferencing costs aren't economical yet?
- glangdale 8y agoI remember people ascribing this hiring strategy to Microsoft (back in the day): hiring up all the researchers to ensure there never was another Microsoft.
- oneshot908 8y agoNVIDIA's developer-friendliness is mostly in the rearview mirror at this point after they went on a Jihad to destroy vendors selling GeForce-based Compute workstations and jacked up their prices to discourage anyone else from trying to do so. What was once their "Democratization of AI" agenda has become their AI Appliance business. That said, they still have a lot of momentum for now.
- bitL 8y agoI think that's how they are preparing for the imminent commodification of their Deep Learning space - by milking the cow as much as they can before they are forced to compete on price. Once TF/Torch/MXNet can reliably run on AMD/Intel hardware without changing a line of code and with comparable performance, they will feel both consumer and data center pressure and their high margin business might evaporate quickly. Still, with CUDA/cuDNN they were the pioneers and the only relevant party so they deserve some ice cream for that.
- oneshot908 8y agoNVIDIA was amazing. They drove a bulldozer through the walled garden of HPC Welfare Queens (ask any grad student from the 00s trying to get supercomputer access what GPUs meant to them) and set the stage for the current AI boom. IMO they deserve an entire fulfillment center of ice cream for that alone.
- pookeh 8y agoAlso, let's not forget Google has tons of data, and even more ways to extract additional data, to train the models on.