8 ms·

Google Research: Themes from 2021 and Beyond

173 points by breck 5y ago

absolute100 5y ago
https://productcoalition.com/product-thinking-vs-project-thinking-380692a2d4e https://productcoalition.com/product-thinking-vs-project-thi... Kyle Evans with an excellent reminder that by default, our mind is optimizing for delivery of projects (features). Products also have unique traits that projects don't encapsulate well: SLA, measurement of success, observability, roadmap, clear long-term ownership, and more: "While project thinking focuses on coming up with solutions up-front and then delivering against a schedule, product thinking keeps the focus on the outcome. That involves some level of comfort with uncertainty and learning, which can be pretty hard. But if we want to get to the right outcome, and not just an on-time output, it is really the only way to work."
hffftz 5y ago
[flagged]
ggm 5y ago
It's all ML. Turtles all the way down.
- hooande 5y ago
  I think the Google Research blog is all ML and AI. Google/Alphabet does research into a lot of topics, but they aren't all updated on this site
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cblconfederate 5y ago
is google at all into biotech?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- twinge 5y ago
  Alphabet owns Verily Life Sciences[1] and backs Calico[2]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)
- ford 5y ago
  DeepMind also released this paper/system [0] last year, which had a lot of hype around it [0] https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/ https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/
  - shmageggy 5y ago
    Now with a drug-discovery applied spin-off https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/blog https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/blog
- colincooke 5y ago
  I'd say so. I've had the pleasure of working with some of the researchers on the applied science team, and they had great depth of knowledge and interest in current problems facing the bio space.
- gwern 5y ago
  Sure. You've probably seen articles based on genomics (eg. rapid sequencing of undiagnosed rare diseases) and brain scanning work (fruit fly) Googlers have contributed to. Google is not as big in those fields in, say, AI, but still present.
The_rationalist 5y ago
No concrete roadmap toward improving SOTA accuracy in key NLP tasks? No roadmap towards true semantic NLU? How disappointing and predictable
dannyeei 5y ago
> We are also working hard to broaden the perspective of Responsible AI beyond western contexts. This really grabbed my attention - I fear big tech is pushing American morals down the throat of the rest of the world. This is great that they’re noticing this and trying to correct for it!
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I don't think Google practices American morals. If it did, it wouldn't be at the center of so many controversies in America. That said, with morals being so different from one location on the planet to the other, it's worth wondering how Google will train its "AI." Will it pick the least restrictive set, the most restrictive set, or some kind of hodge podge? (For varying definitions of "restrictive.") My money's on a hodge podge that doesn't make anyone happy.
  - ejb999 5y ago
    >>My money's on a hodge podge that doesn't make anyone happy. My guess is on whichever makes them the most money; seems a pretty safe bet to me.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      As an American, that sounds pretty close to American morals to me.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    When you're the 800-pound gorilla in the room, you will always end up in controversies. The fact that the controversy is whether or not Google is demonetizing or making harder to find trans-friendly content in the index (instead of, hypothetically, a world where the controversy was that Google were forwarding the contact information of creators of trans-friendly content to the proper authorities for "reeducation") is indicative (thank God, and may more be like them) of their America-centric morals. You are absolutely right that for Google to serve everyone, training an AI to do so is a massive challenge. My bet is that they will train several AI and deploy them in broad domains, which is someone equivalent to how they currently operate heuristics that vary from country to country (such as the borders in Maps changing depending on where the request originates). Google seems to tend to like this approach because they think they get the best of both worlds: they satisfy the geocentric power-brokers by saying "See, we have done the right thing by you, when your people make requests they see X," while at the same time knowing that location is a bit of a fantasy online and the sufficiently savvy can get answers from other locations by causing the question to seem to originate from elsewhere in the Internet (i.e. VPN-proxying).
mikewarot 5y ago
I don't see any operating system research.
- halpert 5y ago
  This is the Google AI blog.
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    That's not what it said in the title. At the end there are links to the other research they do, and none of that pointed to OS research, as near as I could tell. I am aware of https://fuchsia.dev/ https://fuchsia.dev/, but it seems to only target handheld devices, which already use the most broken of security models, the dreaded "yes/no" access to location, photos, etc. I'm looking for a desktop daily driver that supports fine grained capabilities.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  https://fuchsia.dev/ https://fuchsia.dev/
cltby 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
xbmcuser 5y ago
You will no longer need to code to be a programmer. I give it 5 years max 10 years. They say software will eat the world. I did not expect software to come after software coders but I guess they are also part of the world. They are the largest expense as well as the fastest growing expense on most of the worlds largest companies balance sheet so replacing them would save billions.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
  I dont believe this at all. When I think of all the code I work on, most of it is complex logic about what needs to happen in the real world. i.e. if this user has x objects in their cart, and is a rewards member, go get this data if in india else from here. All of that logic has to go somewhere. I do think things like distruted systems, auto scaling, recomndations etc will go away. But the rest is just logic, whether you code it or put it in a config file, it still needs to be done
  - zaphirplane 5y ago
    I don’t see a lot of people designing their own houses without a civil engineer because they used an online cad system.
  - achow 5y ago
    Exactly. That's what OP meant. Those logic are defined by business and then translated to implementation logic by dev. Today there are many situations where one can remove outsourced dev shops, if business themselves can implement the logic that is there in their head. Lowest hanging fruits are perhaps internal IT Tools and workflows.
    - LouisSayers 5y ago
      If only this were true. In my experience business people have a hard time defining logic to the level of granularity that a developer requires. Even if it's simply a matter of wiring things up, you'd essentially require the developer mindset / training to understand how to wire everything up to accomplish the business objective. Not to mention knowing exactly what tools to do this in and ensuring any new systems can talk with older ones etc. Developer jobs aren't going anywhere, it may get quicker to accomplish a task but you're still going to need people who understand the finer details and are able to take a human requirement and break it down and wire things up.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
On par with Bell Labs? Sure seems to be close.
Lamad123 5y ago
Amazing and all, but I am sure search results keep getting worse and worse!
ray__ 5y ago
I'm surprised that there was no mention of AlphaFold2.
- phreeza 5y ago
  DeepMind is organizationally distinct from Google AI.
nonbirithm 5y ago
It's strange to see the phrase "technology should be developed with people in mind" coming from Google. Plenty of Responsible AI groups exist. Why can't there be more groups focused on the curtailing of addictive design patterns and similar issues? The fact that numerous institutions related to AI becoming too powerful exist indicates that there is some part of our capability to progress the state of science that terrifies us. But we don't apply that same type of fear to places like technological addiction that have a significant potential to alter the behavior and development of future human generations.

173 points by breck 5y ago

https://productcoalition.com/product-thinking-vs-project-thinking-380692a2d4e https://productcoalition.com/product-thinking-vs-project-thi... Kyle Evans with an excellent reminder that by default, our mind is optimizing for delivery of projects (features). Products also have unique traits that projects don't encapsulate well: SLA, measurement of success, observability, roadmap, clear long-term ownership, and more: "While project thinking focuses on coming up with solutions up-front and then delivering against a schedule, product thinking keeps the focus on the outcome. That involves some level of comfort with uncertainty and learning, which can be pretty hard. But if we want to get to the right outcome, and not just an on-time output, it is really the only way to work."

hffftz 5y ago

[flagged]

ggm 5y ago

It's all ML. Turtles all the way down.

hooande 5y ago
I think the Google Research blog is all ML and AI. Google/Alphabet does research into a lot of topics, but they aren't all updated on this site
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cblconfederate 5y ago

is google at all into biotech?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
twinge 5y ago
Alphabet owns Verily Life Sciences[1] and backs Calico[2]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verily 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)
ford 5y ago
DeepMind also released this paper/system [0] last year, which had a lot of hype around it [0] https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/ https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/
- shmageggy 5y ago
  Now with a drug-discovery applied spin-off https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/blog https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/blog
colincooke 5y ago
I'd say so. I've had the pleasure of working with some of the researchers on the applied science team, and they had great depth of knowledge and interest in current problems facing the bio space.
gwern 5y ago
Sure. You've probably seen articles based on genomics (eg. rapid sequencing of undiagnosed rare diseases) and brain scanning work (fruit fly) Googlers have contributed to. Google is not as big in those fields in, say, AI, but still present.

The_rationalist 5y ago

No concrete roadmap toward improving SOTA accuracy in key NLP tasks? No roadmap towards true semantic NLU? How disappointing and predictable

dannyeei 5y ago

> We are also working hard to broaden the perspective of Responsible AI beyond western contexts. This really grabbed my attention - I fear big tech is pushing American morals down the throat of the rest of the world. This is great that they’re noticing this and trying to correct for it!

reaperducer 5y ago
I don't think Google practices American morals. If it did, it wouldn't be at the center of so many controversies in America. That said, with morals being so different from one location on the planet to the other, it's worth wondering how Google will train its "AI." Will it pick the least restrictive set, the most restrictive set, or some kind of hodge podge? (For varying definitions of "restrictive.") My money's on a hodge podge that doesn't make anyone happy.
- ejb999 5y ago
  >>My money's on a hodge podge that doesn't make anyone happy. My guess is on whichever makes them the most money; seems a pretty safe bet to me.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    As an American, that sounds pretty close to American morals to me.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  When you're the 800-pound gorilla in the room, you will always end up in controversies. The fact that the controversy is whether or not Google is demonetizing or making harder to find trans-friendly content in the index (instead of, hypothetically, a world where the controversy was that Google were forwarding the contact information of creators of trans-friendly content to the proper authorities for "reeducation") is indicative (thank God, and may more be like them) of their America-centric morals. You are absolutely right that for Google to serve everyone, training an AI to do so is a massive challenge. My bet is that they will train several AI and deploy them in broad domains, which is someone equivalent to how they currently operate heuristics that vary from country to country (such as the borders in Maps changing depending on where the request originates). Google seems to tend to like this approach because they think they get the best of both worlds: they satisfy the geocentric power-brokers by saying "See, we have done the right thing by you, when your people make requests they see X," while at the same time knowing that location is a bit of a fantasy online and the sufficiently savvy can get answers from other locations by causing the question to seem to originate from elsewhere in the Internet (i.e. VPN-proxying).

mikewarot 5y ago

I don't see any operating system research.

halpert 5y ago
This is the Google AI blog.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  That's not what it said in the title. At the end there are links to the other research they do, and none of that pointed to OS research, as near as I could tell. I am aware of https://fuchsia.dev/ https://fuchsia.dev/, but it seems to only target handheld devices, which already use the most broken of security models, the dreaded "yes/no" access to location, photos, etc. I'm looking for a desktop daily driver that supports fine grained capabilities.
ehsankia 5y ago
https://fuchsia.dev/ https://fuchsia.dev/

cltby 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

xbmcuser 5y ago

You will no longer need to code to be a programmer. I give it 5 years max 10 years. They say software will eat the world. I did not expect software to come after software coders but I guess they are also part of the world. They are the largest expense as well as the fastest growing expense on most of the worlds largest companies balance sheet so replacing them would save billions.

ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
I dont believe this at all. When I think of all the code I work on, most of it is complex logic about what needs to happen in the real world. i.e. if this user has x objects in their cart, and is a rewards member, go get this data if in india else from here. All of that logic has to go somewhere. I do think things like distruted systems, auto scaling, recomndations etc will go away. But the rest is just logic, whether you code it or put it in a config file, it still needs to be done
- zaphirplane 5y ago
  I don’t see a lot of people designing their own houses without a civil engineer because they used an online cad system.
- achow 5y ago
  Exactly. That's what OP meant. Those logic are defined by business and then translated to implementation logic by dev. Today there are many situations where one can remove outsourced dev shops, if business themselves can implement the logic that is there in their head. Lowest hanging fruits are perhaps internal IT Tools and workflows.
  - LouisSayers 5y ago
    If only this were true. In my experience business people have a hard time defining logic to the level of granularity that a developer requires. Even if it's simply a matter of wiring things up, you'd essentially require the developer mindset / training to understand how to wire everything up to accomplish the business objective. Not to mention knowing exactly what tools to do this in and ensuring any new systems can talk with older ones etc. Developer jobs aren't going anywhere, it may get quicker to accomplish a task but you're still going to need people who understand the finer details and are able to take a human requirement and break it down and wire things up.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

On par with Bell Labs? Sure seems to be close.

Lamad123 5y ago

Amazing and all, but I am sure search results keep getting worse and worse!

ray__ 5y ago

I'm surprised that there was no mention of AlphaFold2.

phreeza 5y ago
DeepMind is organizationally distinct from Google AI.

nonbirithm 5y ago

It's strange to see the phrase "technology should be developed with people in mind" coming from Google. Plenty of Responsible AI groups exist. Why can't there be more groups focused on the curtailing of addictive design patterns and similar issues? The fact that numerous institutions related to AI becoming too powerful exist indicates that there is some part of our capability to progress the state of science that terrifies us. But we don't apply that same type of fear to places like technological addiction that have a significant potential to alter the behavior and development of future human generations.