5 ms·

Meet the $4 Billion AI Superstars That Google Lost

55 points by _xivi 3y ago

martinclayton 3y ago
Of course I saw this and thought, who googles for "Lost" these days?
- andybak 3y ago
  Weirdly enough, I did, last week. So there you go...
visarga 3y ago
Google apologists love telling us how Google invented the damn transformers. But everyone on the original team have their own startups, and most left long ago. Can Google still brag about having the best people or innovation environment?
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  It sounds like a great place for young devs to cut their teeth. There are probably lots of 'old' devs there that are comfortable to rest and vest while passing their knowledge down to the younglings.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    It seems that the problem was not that these people didn't WANT to create products for Google, it's that they tried and failed. Obviously the reason they failed wasn't that they couldn't make their products work. So that leaves that they weren't allowed to create these products, which is the same as saying that they were forced to work on other people's ideas ... ideas that mostly didn't pan out. Or that Google didn't pay them what they were worth (by the ultracapitalist definition of worth: you're worth what someone is willing to pay). Perhaps a combination of both: that they were forced to work on unsuccessful products and couldn't get raises/promotions as a result of that. That management had it's own ideas they really, really, really needed to succeed, and when it failed they dragged a lot of people down with them. I must say, that sounds exactly like what you'd find happening in large companies.
    - epups 3y ago
      It's possible that Google simply couldn't afford them anymore. At these unicorns they are leading, their current and projected net worth is so huge that even a company like Google might not be able to justify paying it without serious disruption. I always thought that's what Alphabet was for, to be honest. Trying to keep a sort of ecosystem of acquisitions and Google spin-off startups with direct Google investment.
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        or they didn't create anything useful since that paper, and google decided not to bid on them.
- more_corn 3y ago
  I mean, they hired the best people. Google just weren’t able to provide an environment where the best people were able to turn their ideas into products.
  - belter 3y ago
    I find the possibility this statement is true, extraordinary in itself, and research material for at least five Phds in Corporate Management and Governance.
    - BoxFour 3y ago
      I find it’s not that complicated, particularly if you've had exposure to these firms: 1) They exhibit an exceptionally risk-averse stance from a legal standpoint. Consequently, matters with even the slightest chance of legal repercussions (usually revolving around privacy) undergo an exhaustive examination that can take years. Often things get killed just because of the spectre of legal/privacy review. 2) Gaining unanimous agreement within the company for a particular course of action, especially necessary for projects demanding substantial resources, can truly be likened to an arduous Sisyphean endeavor. 3) Anything that doesn't immediately and unequivocally exhibit the potential to evolve into a multi-billion dollar industry is met with significant doubt.
      - bradneuberg 3y ago
        You’ve exactly hit the nail on the head. I’ve been in larger companies and these 3 dynamics explain well why they have trouble innovating.
      - CMCDragonkai 3y ago
        It's really simple. It's a big ship with a small rudder. And maybe you're the best but you're just one guy. There's hundreds of thousands of people invested in the ship, you can try to push the rudder but you're going to hit resistance no matter what.
  - ksey3 3y ago
- o1y32 3y ago
  Whether those authors are still at Google is irrelevant. As long as Google is still hiring the best people, you should expect to see work that has just the same quality and impact, just produced by a new team. Although I genuinely don't know if this is still true.
  - sorokod 3y ago
    Fungible! You say that best researchers are fungible - why would that be true?
  - kkzz99 3y ago
    But this perfectly illustrates that just having the "best people" doesn't mean anything as long as the policies in the company doesn't allow for the innovation AND execution into products.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > As long as Google is still hiring the best people ... When has that ever been the case? Just because some company says "We do X", you shouldn't fall for the trap of believing them. All of the FAANG companies say the same thing, as do quite a few non-FAANG companies.
    - braza 3y ago
      > When has that ever been the case? Not the OP, but let me reframe the point here: I do not dare to say that Google hire the best; but what they goes quite close to get the top talent from some demographics and with certain skills and give the resources, some amount of freedom, and guidance and then collect the astonishing research results. Personally I do not think that Google Brain has more talent than TU Berlin/TU Munchen, but the main difference it’s that the former has more access to resources and certain amount of intelectual freedom to spend a bit of time in something. End result: The top conferences in AI, Machine Learning and so forth are dominated by Google and other big companies.
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    what defines the best? last i hear the interview process is a hard unsolved problem. the best would also relate to the size culture, goal of the company, existing products etc etc why would the best seek employment? i chat with a guy who claimed to charge 5000 per phone call, he would be much to busy studying to even consider employment.
- nova22033 3y ago
  Google apologists love telling us how Google invented the damn transformers. But everyone on the original team have their own startups, You don't have to be a google apologist to acknowledge the fact that they did invent the transformer. People leaving google doesn't change that fact.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  invention of transformer was not pivotal, those t2t guys who authored paper couldn't achieve any quality improvements over other SOTAs at that time. Pivotal moment was BERT, which demonstrated that with some additions transformer can achieve very significant improvements, and inventor is still at google, and transformer creators got lot of hype from that. Also, most important part is attention, which also was not invented at google.
  - visarga 3y ago
    This is an "original" take to put BERT above Attention is All You Need.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      what do you mean? could you explain?
seydor 3y ago
This paper is probably underappreciated for its future influence in neuroscience cognitive science and philosophy of intelligence. I 'd bet on it as candidate for the most important in the century ahead , because of so many questions it opened
- mustafa_pasi 3y ago
  It is maybe contender for the research paper that resulted in the most monetary gain for its authors.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Of the century? We're not even a quarter of the way through. One could've ventured a guess as to the most important scientific achievement of the century in the early 1920s but would miss the discovery of penicillin, the invention of the computer, the invention of the transistor, the eradication of smallpox, etc.
mustafa_pasi 3y ago
I honestly don't think there is a shortage of talent out there and don't think any of these people are unique irreplaceable visionaries. I think the bottleneck for successful teams is mostly funding and fit (you need big teams to get anything accomplished and they need to work well together).
- _xivi 3y ago
  > I honestly don't think there is a shortage of talent out there and don't think any of these people are unique irreplaceable visionaries It's not about these people being irreplaceable or not. The key word here is all of the paper's co-authors have left (8 in total). That's a sign of talent bleeding. and likely isn't limited to that team alone. It's an indicator that Googlers are finding better and more attractive opportunities outside the nest. Depending on the scale, that can be fatal.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  The problem is not the funding (Google is not poor) or the lack of talent. All big organizations struggle with the problem of allocating what they have effectively. It all gets bottlenecked in the organizational hierarchy. Politics and a lot of non technical people end up on the critical path to any decision making. That problem is not unique to Google. The bigger the company, the bigger this problem is. Big corporations are primarily concerned with keeping share holders happy. Share holders by and large are not very technical. Nor are most executives. And there are several layers of management in between them and the people actually coming up with new stuff. Communicating anything technical and the sense of urgency about doing something with that information to those people is very hard. For any meaningful budget to be allocated to some new and exciting but unproven thing, a lot of very busy people in that org tree need to be in agreement that that's a good thing before anything happens. That happening is just not very likely. It's literally easier to get investment outside corporate hierarchies. That's why startups are a thing. Google files lots of patents that they will probably never do anything with. And that's just the ideas they've had that get patented. Most of what Googlers come up with never gets actioned in any way. In this case what happened is that a bunch of smart Googlers invented something, wrote a paper about that, and then some external people read that paper and got inspired. Multiple startups got busy working on those ideas and Google ended up sleeping through the whole AI revolution until belatedly realizing they needed to get their shit together. Probably around the same time their shareholders noticed that something was up. Now they are in catch up mode. And they'll probably pull a thing or two together. But the point is they are reacting to the outside world and not acting on their own insights or inventions. They are one of many big companies that now know AI is a thing. They'll likely miss the next big thing as well for the same reasons. Even if they invent it.
tomp 3y ago
Llion Jones’ startup was unveiled a few days ago. https://twitter.com/SakanaAILabs https://twitter.com/SakanaAILabs
shivz45 3y ago
Near protocol?
- red2awn 3y ago
  It is a Blockchain project. https://near.org/ https://near.org/
  - 7e 3y ago
    So, useless?
archo 3y ago
https://archive.is/o8aeK https://archive.is/o8aeK
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
master_crab 3y ago
The article makes the painfully obvious mistake of conflating Google’s interpretation of value with a private investor’s. I am absolutely sure there is hesitancy at Google of overturning their search model (I.e. money printing machine) which led to the loss of the scientists. But let’s wait until they actually turn some semblance of a profit before claiming Google “lost” $4 billion.
- armitron 3y ago
  Right, especially Polosukhin's blockchain startup valuation of 1+ billion cracked me up.
xnx 3y ago
Still the possibility that Google hires them back. It's happened before.
mauer1361 3y ago
To be perfectly honest, I have remained convinced that AI technology is, for the time being, mostly a fad technology with far less real-world value and practical usability than most people think. 4 billion is an astronomically high valuation, IMO.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Maybe not astronomically. That's not a big number in a modern economy. You only have to help out maybe one industry and it's worth that much. And AI already can do that. E.g. help reading a sales effort; help qualify an investor; help target a pitch. Doing just an adequate job at these things can make agents more productive, sooner. Do it for car sales or real estate agents or financial services, that's money in the bank.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  I think current gen is a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole picture. No matter how much hardware you throw at GPT, it's not going to reason against its own ingested material, but it could be a foundational part of an actual GAI the way that a battery led to the creation of a laptop. (maybe not that far apart, but the analogy stands)

55 points by _xivi 3y ago

martinclayton 3y ago

Of course I saw this and thought, who googles for "Lost" these days?

andybak 3y ago
Weirdly enough, I did, last week. So there you go...

visarga 3y ago

Google apologists love telling us how Google invented the damn transformers. But everyone on the original team have their own startups, and most left long ago. Can Google still brag about having the best people or innovation environment?

bottlepalm 3y ago
It sounds like a great place for young devs to cut their teeth. There are probably lots of 'old' devs there that are comfortable to rest and vest while passing their knowledge down to the younglings.
- candiodari 3y ago
  It seems that the problem was not that these people didn't WANT to create products for Google, it's that they tried and failed. Obviously the reason they failed wasn't that they couldn't make their products work. So that leaves that they weren't allowed to create these products, which is the same as saying that they were forced to work on other people's ideas ... ideas that mostly didn't pan out. Or that Google didn't pay them what they were worth (by the ultracapitalist definition of worth: you're worth what someone is willing to pay). Perhaps a combination of both: that they were forced to work on unsuccessful products and couldn't get raises/promotions as a result of that. That management had it's own ideas they really, really, really needed to succeed, and when it failed they dragged a lot of people down with them. I must say, that sounds exactly like what you'd find happening in large companies.
  - epups 3y ago
    It's possible that Google simply couldn't afford them anymore. At these unicorns they are leading, their current and projected net worth is so huge that even a company like Google might not be able to justify paying it without serious disruption. I always thought that's what Alphabet was for, to be honest. Trying to keep a sort of ecosystem of acquisitions and Google spin-off startups with direct Google investment.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      or they didn't create anything useful since that paper, and google decided not to bid on them.
more_corn 3y ago
I mean, they hired the best people. Google just weren’t able to provide an environment where the best people were able to turn their ideas into products.
- belter 3y ago
  I find the possibility this statement is true, extraordinary in itself, and research material for at least five Phds in Corporate Management and Governance.
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    I find it’s not that complicated, particularly if you've had exposure to these firms: 1) They exhibit an exceptionally risk-averse stance from a legal standpoint. Consequently, matters with even the slightest chance of legal repercussions (usually revolving around privacy) undergo an exhaustive examination that can take years. Often things get killed just because of the spectre of legal/privacy review. 2) Gaining unanimous agreement within the company for a particular course of action, especially necessary for projects demanding substantial resources, can truly be likened to an arduous Sisyphean endeavor. 3) Anything that doesn't immediately and unequivocally exhibit the potential to evolve into a multi-billion dollar industry is met with significant doubt.
    - bradneuberg 3y ago
      You’ve exactly hit the nail on the head. I’ve been in larger companies and these 3 dynamics explain well why they have trouble innovating.
    - CMCDragonkai 3y ago
      It's really simple. It's a big ship with a small rudder. And maybe you're the best but you're just one guy. There's hundreds of thousands of people invested in the ship, you can try to push the rudder but you're going to hit resistance no matter what.
- ksey3 3y ago
o1y32 3y ago
Whether those authors are still at Google is irrelevant. As long as Google is still hiring the best people, you should expect to see work that has just the same quality and impact, just produced by a new team. Although I genuinely don't know if this is still true.
- sorokod 3y ago
  Fungible! You say that best researchers are fungible - why would that be true?
- kkzz99 3y ago
  But this perfectly illustrates that just having the "best people" doesn't mean anything as long as the policies in the company doesn't allow for the innovation AND execution into products.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > As long as Google is still hiring the best people ... When has that ever been the case? Just because some company says "We do X", you shouldn't fall for the trap of believing them. All of the FAANG companies say the same thing, as do quite a few non-FAANG companies.
  - braza 3y ago
    > When has that ever been the case? Not the OP, but let me reframe the point here: I do not dare to say that Google hire the best; but what they goes quite close to get the top talent from some demographics and with certain skills and give the resources, some amount of freedom, and guidance and then collect the astonishing research results. Personally I do not think that Google Brain has more talent than TU Berlin/TU Munchen, but the main difference it’s that the former has more access to resources and certain amount of intelectual freedom to spend a bit of time in something. End result: The top conferences in AI, Machine Learning and so forth are dominated by Google and other big companies.
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  what defines the best? last i hear the interview process is a hard unsolved problem. the best would also relate to the size culture, goal of the company, existing products etc etc why would the best seek employment? i chat with a guy who claimed to charge 5000 per phone call, he would be much to busy studying to even consider employment.
nova22033 3y ago
Google apologists love telling us how Google invented the damn transformers. But everyone on the original team have their own startups, You don't have to be a google apologist to acknowledge the fact that they did invent the transformer. People leaving google doesn't change that fact.
riku_iki 3y ago
invention of transformer was not pivotal, those t2t guys who authored paper couldn't achieve any quality improvements over other SOTAs at that time. Pivotal moment was BERT, which demonstrated that with some additions transformer can achieve very significant improvements, and inventor is still at google, and transformer creators got lot of hype from that. Also, most important part is attention, which also was not invented at google.
- visarga 3y ago
  This is an "original" take to put BERT above Attention is All You Need.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    what do you mean? could you explain?

seydor 3y ago

This paper is probably underappreciated for its future influence in neuroscience cognitive science and philosophy of intelligence. I 'd bet on it as candidate for the most important in the century ahead , because of so many questions it opened

mustafa_pasi 3y ago
It is maybe contender for the research paper that resulted in the most monetary gain for its authors.
thfuran 3y ago
Of the century? We're not even a quarter of the way through. One could've ventured a guess as to the most important scientific achievement of the century in the early 1920s but would miss the discovery of penicillin, the invention of the computer, the invention of the transistor, the eradication of smallpox, etc.

mustafa_pasi 3y ago

I honestly don't think there is a shortage of talent out there and don't think any of these people are unique irreplaceable visionaries. I think the bottleneck for successful teams is mostly funding and fit (you need big teams to get anything accomplished and they need to work well together).

_xivi 3y ago
> I honestly don't think there is a shortage of talent out there and don't think any of these people are unique irreplaceable visionaries It's not about these people being irreplaceable or not. The key word here is all of the paper's co-authors have left (8 in total). That's a sign of talent bleeding. and likely isn't limited to that team alone. It's an indicator that Googlers are finding better and more attractive opportunities outside the nest. Depending on the scale, that can be fatal.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
The problem is not the funding (Google is not poor) or the lack of talent. All big organizations struggle with the problem of allocating what they have effectively. It all gets bottlenecked in the organizational hierarchy. Politics and a lot of non technical people end up on the critical path to any decision making. That problem is not unique to Google. The bigger the company, the bigger this problem is. Big corporations are primarily concerned with keeping share holders happy. Share holders by and large are not very technical. Nor are most executives. And there are several layers of management in between them and the people actually coming up with new stuff. Communicating anything technical and the sense of urgency about doing something with that information to those people is very hard. For any meaningful budget to be allocated to some new and exciting but unproven thing, a lot of very busy people in that org tree need to be in agreement that that's a good thing before anything happens. That happening is just not very likely. It's literally easier to get investment outside corporate hierarchies. That's why startups are a thing. Google files lots of patents that they will probably never do anything with. And that's just the ideas they've had that get patented. Most of what Googlers come up with never gets actioned in any way. In this case what happened is that a bunch of smart Googlers invented something, wrote a paper about that, and then some external people read that paper and got inspired. Multiple startups got busy working on those ideas and Google ended up sleeping through the whole AI revolution until belatedly realizing they needed to get their shit together. Probably around the same time their shareholders noticed that something was up. Now they are in catch up mode. And they'll probably pull a thing or two together. But the point is they are reacting to the outside world and not acting on their own insights or inventions. They are one of many big companies that now know AI is a thing. They'll likely miss the next big thing as well for the same reasons. Even if they invent it.

tomp 3y ago

Llion Jones’ startup was unveiled a few days ago. https://twitter.com/SakanaAILabs https://twitter.com/SakanaAILabs

shivz45 3y ago

Near protocol?

red2awn 3y ago
It is a Blockchain project. https://near.org/ https://near.org/
- 7e 3y ago
  So, useless?

archo 3y ago

https://archive.is/o8aeK https://archive.is/o8aeK

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

master_crab 3y ago

The article makes the painfully obvious mistake of conflating Google’s interpretation of value with a private investor’s. I am absolutely sure there is hesitancy at Google of overturning their search model (I.e. money printing machine) which led to the loss of the scientists. But let’s wait until they actually turn some semblance of a profit before claiming Google “lost” $4 billion.

armitron 3y ago
Right, especially Polosukhin's blockchain startup valuation of 1+ billion cracked me up.

xnx 3y ago

Still the possibility that Google hires them back. It's happened before.

mauer1361 3y ago

To be perfectly honest, I have remained convinced that AI technology is, for the time being, mostly a fad technology with far less real-world value and practical usability than most people think. 4 billion is an astronomically high valuation, IMO.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Maybe not astronomically. That's not a big number in a modern economy. You only have to help out maybe one industry and it's worth that much. And AI already can do that. E.g. help reading a sales effort; help qualify an investor; help target a pitch. Doing just an adequate job at these things can make agents more productive, sooner. Do it for car sales or real estate agents or financial services, that's money in the bank.
BizarroLand 3y ago
I think current gen is a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole picture. No matter how much hardware you throw at GPT, it's not going to reason against its own ingested material, but it could be a foundational part of an actual GAI the way that a battery led to the creation of a laptop. (maybe not that far apart, but the analogy stands)