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> There isn't really anything in terms of cultural or organization changes that Google could have done to prevent this. If you're familiar with the political i

> There isn't really anything in terms of cultural or organization changes that Google could have done to prevent this. If you're familiar with the political infighting between Brain, Deepmind, and subteams within Brain, you'd know there was a lot of room for improvement. Also Google would benefit from being able to use and build off more open source stuff. Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo. Macro cultural trends at Google didn't help either. Stuff like not incentivizing work with longer term payoffs, and too many layers of middle management. > Only that the tech became production-ready and the rest of the world took notice, and these researchers and engineers decided that they no longer needed Google's money since there was so much available from everyone else. All that said this is very true and probably unavoidable.

braza 3y ago
> Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo My perception at that time (autumn 2017) was that Tensorflow had the biggest unforced fumble in the modern history in artificial intelligence, not having the vision to make an API aiming the researchers. They made the almost impossible and took down Theano and Torch in less than 2 years and fueled with a lot of money from Google got the ecosystem for at least 2 years. I think they thought like “hey, we won’t the comercial ecosystem, so it’s over; academics and research will follow; even this inflexible and cranky API. If they complain, push Keras to them all”. What happened in reality was, at the time that Facebook made an absolutely wise decision to lift Torch and unite research and a better UX, it just twisted the situation that for me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  > me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen? By being blinded by all that sweet ad revenue, meaning everyone's yearly performance review turns out stellar no matter what they do, because so is the company's bottom line.
- ringofchaos 3y ago
  Temsorflow 2 was their attempt to copy the pytorch experience which was more pythonic. They also lost the frontend framework mindshare with facebook with Angular vs React. As a developer i hardly use anything build by Google. On the other hand Microsoft and Facebook have more tools that developer generally like.
moandcompany 3y ago
Additionally, there were (and still are) many factions and subteams across Brain, Google Research, and Deepmind that now make up today's "Google Deepmind"

braza 3y ago

> Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo My perception at that time (autumn 2017) was that Tensorflow had the biggest unforced fumble in the modern history in artificial intelligence, not having the vision to make an API aiming the researchers. They made the almost impossible and took down Theano and Torch in less than 2 years and fueled with a lot of money from Google got the ecosystem for at least 2 years. I think they thought like “hey, we won’t the comercial ecosystem, so it’s over; academics and research will follow; even this inflexible and cranky API. If they complain, push Keras to them all”. What happened in reality was, at the time that Facebook made an absolutely wise decision to lift Torch and unite research and a better UX, it just twisted the situation that for me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen?

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
> me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen? By being blinded by all that sweet ad revenue, meaning everyone's yearly performance review turns out stellar no matter what they do, because so is the company's bottom line.
ringofchaos 3y ago
Temsorflow 2 was their attempt to copy the pytorch experience which was more pythonic. They also lost the frontend framework mindshare with facebook with Angular vs React. As a developer i hardly use anything build by Google. On the other hand Microsoft and Facebook have more tools that developer generally like.

moandcompany 3y ago

Additionally, there were (and still are) many factions and subteams across Brain, Google Research, and Deepmind that now make up today's "Google Deepmind"