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> Quite a ridiculous statement. Google has inserted ML all over their products. Maybe you just don't notice, to their credit. But for example the fact that YouT

> Quite a ridiculous statement. Google has inserted ML all over their products. Maybe you just don't notice, to their credit. But for example the fact that YouTube can automatically generate subtitles for any written language from any spoken language is a direct outcome of Google ML research. There are lots of machine-inferred search ranking signals. Google Sheets will automatically fill in your formulas, that's in-house ML research, too. I noticed all the toy demos. None of these have provided Google with any competitive advantage over anyone. For the investment, Google Brain has been a massive failure. It provided Google with essentially zero value. And helped create competitors.

sudosysgen 4y ago
Automatic subtitles and translation is actually a huge feature which is very useful to the many people that don't speak English. It definitely did provide Google with a lot of value.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  > Automatic subtitles and translation is actually a huge feature which is very useful to the many people that don't speak English. It definitely did provide Google with a lot of value. It lost Google immense value. Before Google Brain the only speech recognizers that halfway worked were at Google, IBM and Amazon. And Amazon had to buy a company to get access. After Google Brain, anyone can run a speech recognizer. One that is state of the art. There are many models out there that just work well enough. Google went from having an ok speech recognizer that sort of worked in a few languages and gave YouTube an advantage that no company aside from IBM and Amazon could touch. Neither of which compete with Google much. No startup could have anything like Google's captioning. It was untouchable. Like, speech recognition researchers actively avoided this competition, that's how inferior everyone was. To now, post Google Brain, any startup can have captions that are as good as YouTube's captions. You can run countless models on your laptop today. This is a huge competitive loss for Google. They got a minor feature for YouTube and lost one of the key ML advantages they had.
  - sp332 4y ago
    But little startups are not threatening YouTube. And now they are paying money to Google for the use of Google Brain.
    - light_hue_1 4y ago
      You can run your speech recognizer on AWS, you don't need to give Google a cent. Whatever comes after YouTube, if it's a startup or not, it will have top-notch captioning, just like YouTube. Google gave up a massive competitive advantage with huge technical barriers.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    It's too late now. YouTube penetrated every single market outside of China and is now unshakeable from network effect It completely paid off already, and Google is going to be reaping the dividends of the advantage they had in emerging markets for the next 15 years. The real advantage has always been network effect. Purely technological moats don't work in the long term. People catching up was inevitable, but Google was able to cash it into a untouchable worldwide lead, and on top of that they made their researchers happy and recruited others by allowing them to publish, and they don't need to maintain an expensive purely technical lead.
loudmax 4y ago
> It provided Google with essentially zero value. Or rather, it provided enormous value. The failure was for Google to actually capture more than a tiny fraction of that value. No amount of engineering brilliance is going to save Google as long as the management is dysfunctional.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  Oh, I don't disagree at all that Google Brain provided enormous value for society. Just like Xerox PARC. Both of them were a massive drain on resources and provided negative value for the parent company. And I agree, it's not Google Brain's fault. Google's management has been a disaster for a long time. It's just amazing how you can have every advantage and still achieve nothing.

sudosysgen 4y ago

Automatic subtitles and translation is actually a huge feature which is very useful to the many people that don't speak English. It definitely did provide Google with a lot of value.

light_hue_1 4y ago
> Automatic subtitles and translation is actually a huge feature which is very useful to the many people that don't speak English. It definitely did provide Google with a lot of value. It lost Google immense value. Before Google Brain the only speech recognizers that halfway worked were at Google, IBM and Amazon. And Amazon had to buy a company to get access. After Google Brain, anyone can run a speech recognizer. One that is state of the art. There are many models out there that just work well enough. Google went from having an ok speech recognizer that sort of worked in a few languages and gave YouTube an advantage that no company aside from IBM and Amazon could touch. Neither of which compete with Google much. No startup could have anything like Google's captioning. It was untouchable. Like, speech recognition researchers actively avoided this competition, that's how inferior everyone was. To now, post Google Brain, any startup can have captions that are as good as YouTube's captions. You can run countless models on your laptop today. This is a huge competitive loss for Google. They got a minor feature for YouTube and lost one of the key ML advantages they had.
- sp332 4y ago
  But little startups are not threatening YouTube. And now they are paying money to Google for the use of Google Brain.
  - light_hue_1 4y ago
    You can run your speech recognizer on AWS, you don't need to give Google a cent. Whatever comes after YouTube, if it's a startup or not, it will have top-notch captioning, just like YouTube. Google gave up a massive competitive advantage with huge technical barriers.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  It's too late now. YouTube penetrated every single market outside of China and is now unshakeable from network effect It completely paid off already, and Google is going to be reaping the dividends of the advantage they had in emerging markets for the next 15 years. The real advantage has always been network effect. Purely technological moats don't work in the long term. People catching up was inevitable, but Google was able to cash it into a untouchable worldwide lead, and on top of that they made their researchers happy and recruited others by allowing them to publish, and they don't need to maintain an expensive purely technical lead.

loudmax 4y ago

> It provided Google with essentially zero value. Or rather, it provided enormous value. The failure was for Google to actually capture more than a tiny fraction of that value. No amount of engineering brilliance is going to save Google as long as the management is dysfunctional.

light_hue_1 4y ago
Oh, I don't disagree at all that Google Brain provided enormous value for society. Just like Xerox PARC. Both of them were a massive drain on resources and provided negative value for the parent company. And I agree, it's not Google Brain's fault. Google's management has been a disaster for a long time. It's just amazing how you can have every advantage and still achieve nothing.