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-1: as an ex-googler, I can say it was hard enough for Google itself to get its code to run, given gonzo infrastructure assumptions, proprietary libraries/langu
by asah 4y ago
-1: as an ex-googler, I can say it was hard enough for Google itself to get its code to run, given gonzo infrastructure assumptions, proprietary libraries/languages, etc.
- rowanG077 4y agoThat speaks volumes of the code quality @ Google.
- asah 4y agosorry, but that's not how code works. It's true that code quality could be terrible but in fact Google is famous/notorious for extreme code review at the line-by-line granularity, plus comments, design docs and more. The real issues are (again) in dependencies and complex tooling. You can have beautiful code and then in the middle of it, an ML inference call that assumes a crazy ML model and set of hardware to run it on.
- rowanG077 4y ago[flagged]
- owkman 4y agoAssume you got source for a game written in a proprietary game engine. If you don't have access to the game engine itself, nor the API documentation, etc, how long will it take to get this game running in your manner of choosing? The infrastructure in these companies is a huge amount of scaffolding that's non-trivial to replicate.
- ithkuil 4y agoIt's a tradeoff. Google has no incentives to allow an arbitrary component run standalone. Quite the contrary. What they do get in return for the coupling is that they can evolve the common libraries and code patterns across the board (there are even automated code refactoring tools that help you do massive code changes, automating code review sessions across hundreds and hundreds of teams, with all changes tested against all reverse dependencies etc etc). All this allows for a level of internal code quality that is hard to see elsewhere. Unless you really care a lot about that one requirement you seem to care about. In that case, yeah, you'd choose a different tradeoff.
- fluoridation 4y agoArguably it's not low quality code, but low quality system. Code can be correct, clear, and documented, and still be fragile and sensitive to platform configuration changes. E.g. "how many switches do I have to change in the build system before the code no longer builds?", "how many network jacks can I move this server over before I lobotomize the system?"
- ibejoeb 4y agoYou ought to be able to arrive at the same conclusion, then, with these LLMs. Without arrays of GPUs, it would take thousands of years to train one. Without a corpus of billions or trillions of words, one would produce output of very limited utility. I think you have to consider that some things are systems, and it is the assembly of their components that imparts the true quality.
- delecti 4y agoIt's not poor code quality to depend upon available dependencies.
- dgacmu 4y agoThe effort to open source tensorflow was at least a person year worth of work to extract it from google3. Required reimplementing a bunch of stuff.