5 ms·

> ...no doubt it’s working on impressive, world-changing things behind the scenes. Not really. Those salaries are there to keep these smart people from doing s

> ...no doubt it’s working on impressive, world-changing things behind the scenes. Not really. Those salaries are there to keep these smart people from doing something world-changing that might contest Google's Internet domination. For Google, the less productive they are, the better.

rco8786 7y ago
That's awfully cynical
- gigatexal 7y ago
  Probably but there’s likely a lot of truth in it. What else does Google have other than search ads?
  - devin 7y ago
    flights, photos, maps, shopping, and a dozen other things?
    - dlkf 7y ago
      Which one of the examples you have listed can exist without SOTA search?
      - oblio 7y ago
        SOTA = ?
        abj 7y ago
        SOTA means "state of the art"
      - devin 7y ago
        They all can exist without it, and they all benefit from it. I see your aim in singling out shopping, but let’s not pretend that other services don’t provide signal to influencing the outcomes on shopping or flight purchase or whatever.
  - cmcaine 7y ago
    Good search is a huge engineering challenge and nowhere-near solved. Google's continued dominance is what makes their ad space valuable. If I were google, I would keep investing in improving search, and that would obviously include hiring machine learning and AI experts.
  - gigatexal 7y ago
    I meant as in search revenue: something like 90% of revenue is from ad sales or sales around search
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  Not really, professional sports salaries often work the same way- teams who have a superstar can't afford to have the star play for the competition even if they could win without the star playing for their team.
  - rco8786 7y ago
    Do you have an example of that actually happening? I follow sports pretty closely and can't think of any.
    - neutronicus 7y ago
      76ers signing Al Horford was probably as much about getting him off of the Celtics (because he's historically given Embiid problems in the playoffs) as it was about actually getting him.
  - icxa 7y ago
    Yeah this is one of the biggest urban legends in sports. It's just not a thing. A team won't pay a player just to keep them from going to their division rival or whatnot, it's a nice fairy tail for the ESPN talking heads to keep repeating and it generates a nice bit of juicy controversy, but it just isn't a thing. Besides it doesn't pass the smell test. If you don't value the player or you think your chances of winning are better by spending that money elsewhere, why would it be a net benefit to your team to keep a player you don't want to pay just to stop him from going to another team? Do you think the Dallas Cowboys are really thinking to themselves "Man, we don't really value RBs like that, but we really got to stop Zeke from going to the Eagles"? Nonsense! Likewise if Google really doesn't want an employee going somewhere else to put a damper on their dominance, if it really was the goal of that employee to prevent Google's dominance, don't you think there are infinitely many other avenues that person could take? If you are paying for the knowledge, what is to stop this individual from creating a pseudonym and committing to an open source AI library on a separate laptop on their free time? The answer is nothing, and in fact that happens all the time, or the employee is busy creating their side business unbeknownst to the company, leaves, and waits out their non-compete. It's a silly conspiracy to think smart people will willfully stand by getting paid to do busy work and not pick up on what's really going on, and it doesn't make sense.
ryanmercer 7y ago
>Not really. Those salaries are there to keep these smart people from doing something world-changing I think it is more due to the fact there is still a relatively few number of people with a decent amount of experience in this field. Didn't OpenAI, a couple of few years ago, poach one of Google's employees for something like a million in compensation over x years? Edit: yeah: >Tax filings by the Elon Musk-founded research lab OpenAI revealed that its best researchers are paid top dollar for their expertise. In 2016 alone, OpenAI paid Ilya Sutskever, its top researcher, an impressive salary of $1.9 million. https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-openai-paid-top-researcher-1-9-million-2017/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-openai-paid-top-research...
Gpetrium 7y ago
AI is expected to be the next revolutionary step, so with losses at Deepmind pilling up to 1billion pound [1], it is hard to imagine that Alphabet can simply tell their shareholders "We just want to park these smart people here so that they don't do great things elsewhere" and that some (or all) of the 'smart' minds are driven by profit maximization at all times. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/1fc6db8a-b919-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea203 https://www.ft.com/content/1fc6db8a-b919-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea...
mythz 7y ago
> For Google, the less productive they are, the better. So Google spends a tonne of resources developing Tensor Flow only to OSS it, commoditizing AI and making it more accessible than ever, gives away lots of $$$ on AI competitions encouraging more people to get into AI/ML, acquires Kaggle, gives away tonnes of public datasets for anyone to use, just so they can hire new AI/ML staff to pay them obscene amounts of money to do nothing? How did this line of thought become prevalent here?
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  > ...just so they can hire new AI/ML staff to pay them obscene amounts of money to do nothing? Pretty much. If somebody somewhere invents their own AI framework and uses it to build a better ad targeting system, then Google is toast. This way the risk is taken care of. (Or at least it is from the management point of view.)
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    You’re underestimating how hard it is to grow the profit of a trillion dollar company by 20-30% in a year. It takes lot of innovation (both in improving its properties and ad targeting in Google’s case for example)

rco8786 7y ago

That's awfully cynical

gigatexal 7y ago
Probably but there’s likely a lot of truth in it. What else does Google have other than search ads?
- devin 7y ago
  flights, photos, maps, shopping, and a dozen other things?
  - dlkf 7y ago
    Which one of the examples you have listed can exist without SOTA search?
    - oblio 7y ago
      SOTA = ?
      - abj 7y ago
        SOTA means "state of the art"
    - devin 7y ago
      They all can exist without it, and they all benefit from it. I see your aim in singling out shopping, but let’s not pretend that other services don’t provide signal to influencing the outcomes on shopping or flight purchase or whatever.
- cmcaine 7y ago
  Good search is a huge engineering challenge and nowhere-near solved. Google's continued dominance is what makes their ad space valuable. If I were google, I would keep investing in improving search, and that would obviously include hiring machine learning and AI experts.
- gigatexal 7y ago
  I meant as in search revenue: something like 90% of revenue is from ad sales or sales around search
creaghpatr 7y ago
Not really, professional sports salaries often work the same way- teams who have a superstar can't afford to have the star play for the competition even if they could win without the star playing for their team.
- rco8786 7y ago
  Do you have an example of that actually happening? I follow sports pretty closely and can't think of any.
  - neutronicus 7y ago
    76ers signing Al Horford was probably as much about getting him off of the Celtics (because he's historically given Embiid problems in the playoffs) as it was about actually getting him.
- icxa 7y ago
  Yeah this is one of the biggest urban legends in sports. It's just not a thing. A team won't pay a player just to keep them from going to their division rival or whatnot, it's a nice fairy tail for the ESPN talking heads to keep repeating and it generates a nice bit of juicy controversy, but it just isn't a thing. Besides it doesn't pass the smell test. If you don't value the player or you think your chances of winning are better by spending that money elsewhere, why would it be a net benefit to your team to keep a player you don't want to pay just to stop him from going to another team? Do you think the Dallas Cowboys are really thinking to themselves "Man, we don't really value RBs like that, but we really got to stop Zeke from going to the Eagles"? Nonsense! Likewise if Google really doesn't want an employee going somewhere else to put a damper on their dominance, if it really was the goal of that employee to prevent Google's dominance, don't you think there are infinitely many other avenues that person could take? If you are paying for the knowledge, what is to stop this individual from creating a pseudonym and committing to an open source AI library on a separate laptop on their free time? The answer is nothing, and in fact that happens all the time, or the employee is busy creating their side business unbeknownst to the company, leaves, and waits out their non-compete. It's a silly conspiracy to think smart people will willfully stand by getting paid to do busy work and not pick up on what's really going on, and it doesn't make sense.

ryanmercer 7y ago

>Not really. Those salaries are there to keep these smart people from doing something world-changing I think it is more due to the fact there is still a relatively few number of people with a decent amount of experience in this field. Didn't OpenAI, a couple of few years ago, poach one of Google's employees for something like a million in compensation over x years? Edit: yeah: >Tax filings by the Elon Musk-founded research lab OpenAI revealed that its best researchers are paid top dollar for their expertise. In 2016 alone, OpenAI paid Ilya Sutskever, its top researcher, an impressive salary of $1.9 million. https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-openai-paid-top-researcher-1-9-million-2017/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-openai-paid-top-research...

Gpetrium 7y ago

AI is expected to be the next revolutionary step, so with losses at Deepmind pilling up to 1billion pound [1], it is hard to imagine that Alphabet can simply tell their shareholders "We just want to park these smart people here so that they don't do great things elsewhere" and that some (or all) of the 'smart' minds are driven by profit maximization at all times. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/1fc6db8a-b919-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea203 https://www.ft.com/content/1fc6db8a-b919-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea...

mythz 7y ago

> For Google, the less productive they are, the better. So Google spends a tonne of resources developing Tensor Flow only to OSS it, commoditizing AI and making it more accessible than ever, gives away lots of $$$ on AI competitions encouraging more people to get into AI/ML, acquires Kaggle, gives away tonnes of public datasets for anyone to use, just so they can hire new AI/ML staff to pay them obscene amounts of money to do nothing? How did this line of thought become prevalent here?

otabdeveloper4 7y ago
> ...just so they can hire new AI/ML staff to pay them obscene amounts of money to do nothing? Pretty much. If somebody somewhere invents their own AI framework and uses it to build a better ad targeting system, then Google is toast. This way the risk is taken care of. (Or at least it is from the management point of view.)
- xiphias2 7y ago
  You’re underestimating how hard it is to grow the profit of a trillion dollar company by 20-30% in a year. It takes lot of innovation (both in improving its properties and ad targeting in Google’s case for example)