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It's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best of the
by m0zg 8y ago
It's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best of the best in order to fix the very thing that will kill their cash cow in the next 5 years. I'm on iOS myself (and have been faithful since the first iPhone), but $30 Google Home puck feels like it's from the future. Understands me perfectly, comes up with decent answers, doesn't require rigid commands, etc. Whereas Siri is so bad I use it only to set alarms and timers. Not even setting of reminders is reliable.
- dboreham 8y agoUm...you know JG was formerly at Google doing all that magic you love and is now at Apple, right?
- m0zg 8y agoJG was _managing people_ doing the magic. There's a difference. By himself, he can't really do much. He's not even a ML/DL guy per se.
- geofft 8y agoMagic is about management. The most talented ICs can't do much unless management supports them in it. (And I say this as an IC.)
- m0zg 8y agoNot in research.
- Aloha 8y agoEven in Research. Xerox PARC is a great example - PARC invented everything, but very little of it was immediately commercially applicable - Good management, is what turns "people producing great things", to "people producing great things regular people can use"
- threeseed 8y agoManagers decide on the culture, composition and priorities of a team. They are just as significant as individuals in the team.
- geofft 8y agoAnyone with a successful research lab is a manager: they're spending a good chunk of their time herding grad students, writing grant proposals, hiring junior faculty, etc. This model works.
- oh_sigh 8y agoManagement is a necessary but insufficient condition for magic.
- djtriptych 8y agowhat is it you think executives do?
- danso 8y agoIf there’s one company that’s proved how successful non-technical leaders can be, it would seemingly be Apple.
- greglindahl 8y agojg isn't non-technical.
- danso 8y agoSo you concede that there was “magic” being done at Google, but you want to argue that Giannandrea’s leadership of the search and AI teams had nothing to do with it?
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoDon't you think it's likely that JG will convince other top AI/ML talent to join Apple? That's usually a senior exec's main job, to recruit, retain and grow people who are building the products.
- hellofunk 8y agoUh, Jobs was not an engineer either, just a simple ol' manager, right? Managers don't have any power and capabilities, right?
- dboreham 8y agoffs jg is an Engineer.
- gumby 8y agoJG is the reason Google has all that ML effort. He joined google via the MetaWeb acquisition; when he'd finished his earn-out he wanted to leave but was asked to look around for something useful to do and consolidated a bunch of dispersed ML efforts. He also bought Deep Mind on behalf of Google. I don't know why you would say he's "not a DL/ML guy per se" -- he's a programmer, not an MBA type. You consider MetaWeb and TellMe inadequate?
- macleodnine 8y agoFor the rest of us, who is JG?
- macleodnine 8y agoHaha nvm made the connection... r/whoosh
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pier25 8y agoGoogle is a lot more than one guy
- e1ven 8y agoThey can't just throw more random people at the problem - Adding too many developers can slow projects down and make them less likely to work. (9 women can't make a baby in a month, and all that..) The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires.. Isn't this exactly what you want?
- starshadowx2 8y ago9 women can't make a baby in a month but 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months instead of 1 woman making 1 in 9 months. More people can work on more/different things in the same period of time, thereby increasing total work done. (Parallel vs sequential and all that..)
- commonsense1234 8y ago9 women cannot make 9 babies in 1 month nor 1 women can make 1 baby in 1 month. no concurrency in baby making for sure.
- gumby 8y agoThere is some potential concurrency: a woman can produce two or more babies in 9 months, although it is uncommon.
- commonsense1234 8y agothe process is not concurrent. it is still parallel.
- gumby 8y agoUnless the child processes have different fathers, which can and does occasionally happen.
- starshadowx2 8y ago
- dwighttk 8y agoWho is this best of the best that they didn't hire?
- m0zg 8y agoEveryone who cares even a little about their academic career. Apple doesn't really let you publish. Even pop-sci articles they do publish on their website don't have any names. I know no sane researcher who would agree to end their academic participation so abruptly, particularly in order to work for an organization widely perceived as a perennial laggard.
- dwighttk 8y agoso is it "they won't open their wallet!" or "they won't let you publish!"
- m0zg 8y agoHow about both. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook both pay their researchers very well and let them publish extensively. That's why they have world-leading research organizations, and Apple does not.
- danso 8y agoIf Google’s strategy is to be emulated, then why is hiring someone who was part of that strategy a bad move on Apple’s part?
- m0zg 8y agoI'm not saying it's a _bad_ move. It's just insufficient. And until they unclench wrt publishing nothing is going to change for them. And even after they do that, it will take a lot of convincing (and large wads of cash) to hire the best talent that can not only get Siri to catch up to Google, but overtake it. My problem is not with Giannandrea's new position, it's with the lack of urgency on Apple's part. My patience has been wearing thin as of late.
- Despegar 8y agoI'll take that bet. The iPhone is going to keep printing money for the next 15-20 years at least. Apple is a 40 year old company, and they're still raking in the dough from their original product category.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago15-20 years? How are you SURE that smartphones will still be a thing in 20 years? Let alone that Apple will still be the hip premium brand? 20 years is a LONG time. The average lifespan for an S&P 500 company is less than that these days.
- Despegar 8y agoShifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. The smartphone is unlikely to be replaced for a long time to come. There will be plenty of head fakes along the way no doubt (smart speakers and voice bots come to mind), but the smartphone is simply too good and has too much utility to be easily challenged. And you also have to make a bet that Apple won't come to dominate that area as well (even if they aren't first to it). AR glasses have some promise to be a new general purpose computing platform, but even then I'm skeptical that it will be able to mount a serious challenge to the smartphone.
- rabidrat 8y ago> Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. They've only happened every decade so far: 1960 (IC), 1970 (DARPA), 1980 (PC), 1990 (GUI), 2000 (Internet), 2010 (smartphone).
- Despegar 8y agoThe GUI is not something I'd break out separately from the PC. And the internet is something that massively improved the utility of PCs and increased demand for them, it wasn't something that was going to replace it.
- mav3rick 8y agoIt's quite good at accents as well.
- jondubois 8y agoApple cannot hire 'the best of the best'; those people are freaks and are probably not publicly presentable. The shareholders would not approve.
- todd3834 8y agoI used to work for Apple. Pretty diverse. Plenty of normal people and plenty of freaks.
- scrollaway 8y ago> $30 Google Home puck feels like it's from the future Is it? Is the $30 puck better than the Home assistant or does it just suck that much more in French than it does in English? (Not being snarky, genuinely asking) It doesn't understand followup commands, the Hue integration is rotten bad, and the commands definitely have to be rigid. Things like "What were my meetings on the 12th of December" aren't understood. Also having to say "OK google" and not being able to change that is so bad. At least "Hey Siri" is natural.
- dhruvarora013 8y agoCan't you say Hey Google now?
- scrollaway 8y agoNo in French, from what I can tell. (Pronounced the same)
- bagacrap 8y agoIt's exceptionally good in my experience in English. It helps when you train it on your voice. Also, it wants me to say "hey Google" these days, if you like that any better than ok Google.
- tshannon 8y agoI'm pretty sure you can say "Hey Google" as well.
- mcast 8y ago"Hey [huge corporation here]" is not a great user experience for a device meant to be at home.
- madlynormal 8y ago> Is it? Is the $30 puck better than the Home assistant or does it just suck that much more in French than it does in English? (Not being snarky, genuinely asking) Absolutely it is. In general, my Siri usage is limited to opening Google Assistant, that's how bad it is. Also, "Hey Google" works as a command on most devices.
- abritinthebay 8y agoConversely - Privacy is becoming a bigger and bigger issue and there is only one company that has shown any ability in that area to stand up for it in fundamental design choices. And that's Apple. There will never be a Google or Amazon device in my house and I'm not the only one who feels that way. In fact most of my non-technical friends find Google Home & Alexa "convenient but creepy" (to quote one excellent summation). Most of Google and Amazon's "lead" is due to their extremely user-hostile privacy stances. That's an existential problem of their own in the next 5-10 years for these products.
- jowiar 8y agoThe issue is not personnel — it is data privacy/ethics. Apple has come down heavily on the side of “we aren’t going to do creepy shit with your data”. Google, Amazon, and FB can all pull ahead because they have no such scruples.
- hackermeows 8y agoFrom what I've heard it is much harder at Apple to use your user data non-anonymized i.e they focus more on Privacy vs Google, Amazon etc where any team can use your data to do experiments and run A/B tests, ultimately what this means is that the quality of AI will be poorer. Developers of the $30 Google Home puck uses your data without thinking of the privacy consequences (internal bad actor), and hence is way better. This is what I've heard from developers/spokespeople of Apple. Has anyone else heard the same excuse ?
- trhway 8y ago>It's just unbelievable to me that the company sitting on a quarter trillion dollars is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that hoard to hire the best of the best Their current B people do hire the best of the best ... of B people. It like my current BigCo (we are straight C people) feels no talent shortage even right now in the Bay Area while also supposedly hiring only the best people - there is no shortage of C people. We enjoy our work/life balance while of course we can't even dream of producing anything even just slightly resembling Siri.
- pier25 8y agoThe fundamental problem is that Apple has been focused on making end user products for a very long time, but Google has been dealing with data and the cloud for 20 years. Apple could probably become as good as Google at its own game, but it would take a lot of effort and I don't think Tim Cook et al have the vision to move in that direction like Microsoft did. I feel Apple will become more and more irrelevant as years pass. With a bandwidth singularity end user hardware will be irrelevant in 10-20 years from now and other companies like Google and Microsoft are slowly catching up in making great end user experiences.
- ksec 8y agoFor some reason Apple is extremely stringent with their Servers / Cloud Investment. They were late to building their DC, late to owning their CDN ( despite being huge in volume ) Basically Tim Cook has a model that they should not own any "asset". the Asset Light Strategy. Compared to Google which is beating any AI , Deep Learning problems with brute force, and optimise later. Even their Maps are late, 7 years later since the first apology of Apple Maps they still aren't anywhere close to Google Map.