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I generally agree with this though with some tweaks. I think Jeff wanted to do something that he thought was both awesome (he's liked neural networks for a long

by dgacmu 4y ago

I generally agree with this though with some tweaks. I think Jeff wanted to do something that he thought was both awesome (he's liked neural networks for a long time - his undergrad thesis was on them) and likely to have long-term major impact for Google, and he was able to justify the Awesome Thing by identifying a way for it to have significant potential revenue impact for Google via improvements to ad revenue, as well as significant potential "unknown huge transformative possibilities" benefits. But I do suspect that you're right that the heart of it was "Jeff was really passionate about this thing". Of course, this starts to get at different versions of the question: Why did Google Brain exist in 2012 as a scrappy team of builders, and why did Brain exist in 2019 as a mega-powerhouse of AI research? I think you and I are talking about the former question, and TFA may be focusing more on the second part of the question. [I was randomly affiliated with Brain from 2015-2019 but wasn't there in the early days]

dekhn 4y ago
It grew from the scrappy group to the mega-powerhouse by combining a number of things: being the right place at the right time with the right resources and people. They had a great cachet- I was working hard to join Brain in 2012 because it seemed like they were one of the few groups who had access to the necessary CPU and data sets and mental approaches that would transform machine learning. And at that time, they used that cachet to hire a bunch of up and coming researchers (many of them Hinton's students or in his sphere) and wrote up some pretty great papers. Many people outside of Brain were researchers working on boring other projects who transferred in, bringing their internal experience in software development and deployment, which helped a lot on the infra side.

by dgacmu 4y ago

dekhn 4y ago

It grew from the scrappy group to the mega-powerhouse by combining a number of things: being the right place at the right time with the right resources and people. They had a great cachet- I was working hard to join Brain in 2012 because it seemed like they were one of the few groups who had access to the necessary CPU and data sets and mental approaches that would transform machine learning. And at that time, they used that cachet to hire a bunch of up and coming researchers (many of them Hinton's students or in his sphere) and wrote up some pretty great papers. Many people outside of Brain were researchers working on boring other projects who transferred in, bringing their internal experience in software development and deployment, which helped a lot on the infra side.