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Google is an AI first company Google's future is strictly tied to its AI products All AI is written with Python. Google lays off all Python team. Segmentati
by mihai_maruseac 2y ago
Google is an AI first company
Google's future is strictly tied to its AI products
All AI is written with Python.
Google lays off all Python team.
Segmentation fault
- bmc7505 2y ago> All AI is written with Python. Type error on line 3: “Python” is not a valid type for “all AI”.
- zooq_ai 2y agoWhat people / HN don't understand is does the work they do really a 10 person $5Million per year value to Google or can it be done by Two really smart Python Experts. The problem with Tech layoffs is not that they weren't doing important work, it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams.
- fragmede 2y agoThat really doesn't jive with this description of how much they were doing. Let me guess, this mythical two person team could also build Twitter and Uber over a weekend? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338
- madaxe_again 2y agoYour point notwithstanding, Twitter was originally built by a two person team over couple of weeks.
- fragmede 2y agoThat's interesting, but two people over a couple of weeks isn't the same as one person claiming they could build it over one weekend.
- throwaway5959 2y agoThey built a prototype (probably in Rails, lol). Thousands of people built Twitter, including many who have never written a line of code in their lives.
- madaxe_again 2y agoReally, no shit, I thought it was one guy and his cat who did all the coding for everything
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- raydev 2y ago> it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams. You're mistaking their intent, they are actually okay with less work being done. It's a desire to simply hit the reset button and see how much money they can save, and how much they need to build up the team again. They know it harms productivity but maybe something cheaper will come out of it. They are gambling.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nytecode 2y agoPython is only used for prototyping within google. All production ai code is run on c++
- thatguysaguy 2y agoThat is quite the claim, any source? Edit: I guess I'm not sure on whether large training runs count as prod or not. They're certainly expensive and mission critical.
- JSDevOps 2y ago[flagged]
- thatguysaguy 2y agoI have worked on a team which trains foundation models
- JSDevOps 2y agoAnd no one’s used anything other than Python? The core of Tensorflow uses C++
- thatguysaguy 2y agoThe claim was that Python is only used for prototyping at Google, not that people are writing the AI frameworks themselves in pure Python. JAX is obviously implemented in C++, but the scientists running the training runs which cost millions of dollars are writing lots of python.
- mihai_maruseac 2y agoRather than repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40182940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40182940
- dekhn 2y ago
- JSDevOps 2y ago[flagged]
- trickleup 2y agomihai is an ml engineer who works at google.
- JSDevOps 2y agoThe post could have been made clearer. And also I’m surprised but they are good at scale.
- infamouscow 2y agoWhy, exactly. Do you not have the ability to take information and draw conclusions on your own -- like a functionally mindless automaton lacking a frontal lobe?
- JSDevOps 2y agoIt wasn't made evidently clear. > take information and draw conclusions on your own That's exactly what I did do. I don't approve with your kindest choice of words, nonetheless you, being a lucky sperm, also have the right of free speech
- mihai_maruseac 2y agoYes, I admit that this was a little bit reductionistic. I was aiming it to be mostly a joke about the situation, didn't expect it to garner so much response
- trenchgun 2y agoDid you miss this? > ... and you're asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it.
- aortega 2y ago> All AI is written with Python. Only high-level is written in python, low level is Cuda that is a form of C. Also, you would think the first to replace workers with AI would be the AI companies like Google.
- mihai_maruseac 2y agoYes, and not to repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40182940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40182940
- pjmlp 2y agoCUDA is not C, it is a polyglot stack for GPGPU, using C++ memory semantics, with C, C++ and Fortran compilers, and anything else able to target PTX bytecode, including Julia, .NET, Haskell, Python JIT, Java,...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lbruno 2y agoit's an adverts company, when i looked in the past 80% of the revenue came from the ads unit
- bitcharmer 2y ago> Google is an AI first company Google is an ad first company FTFY
- pquki4 2y agoExactly. If Google's ads income suddenly got cut in half, most teams would be impacted
- phillipcarter 2y agoAnd how exactly do you think ads get served?
- tomrod 2y agoPoorly, in most cases, via various flavors of JavaScript and derived frameworks therein. Sometimes with additional overhead referred to as "targeting" which gives a worse outcome and user experience, regardless, over simpler implementations that serve to inform. Targeting forgets causality, typically. Next comes YELLING-LOUDLY-TO-COME-DOWN-TO-THE-LOCAL-CAR-DEALERSHIP-FOR-NO-MONEY-DOWN-OFFERS phase of advertisements, which type are also routinely and nearly uniformly ignored.
- motoxpro 2y agoSounds like you should start a trillion dollar ad business! Or if you're worried about ethics start a "niche" billion dollar ad business that only serves ethical ads!
- 7331 2y ago> Poorly, in most cases, via various flavors of JavaScript and derived frameworks therein Is Google using JS for the backend ad serving / AI?
- tomrod 2y agoNot sure. I'm referring to Front End, however, since the advertisee does not see the backend.
- zzz999 2y agoGoogle isn't AI first
- 4WIW 2y agoPeople are focusing on verbage and precision, but are missing the point. Having a well-maintained Python tooling is essential for _any_ company who does AI. While smaller companies can get away with open source solutions, for bigger companies it is unavoidable to have teams dedicated to maintaining and supporting Python tooling. This announcement is troubling, and may indicate one of the two: 1) Google is in dire situation, and there is no more fat to cut, so they are starting to cut muscle. 2) Google management is clueless and cannot discriminate between fat and muscle.
- slumpt_ 2y agoI suspect it’s 2. Local organizational optimizations to garner promotions for middle-managers and without regard for systemic impact.
- Vegenoid 2y agoWell, it seems like it isn't 1, as everything indicates that Google is doing better financially than ever: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/04/25/google-soars-toward-record-2-trillion-valuation-on-earnings/?sh=7c1acbd23c4d https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/04/25/google-soa...
- Jmgaleano1 2y agoOkay, let's debug this logic. Google is AI-focused, true, but they're not a one-trick pony. Python's great for Al, but it's not the ONLY language. And mass-firing your Python team seems...counterproductive. Segmentation fault indeed!
- ehsankia 2y agoWell it mostly still is a one-trick pony: ads. It has kept trying to not be a one-trick pony for a decade. In the latest report, Cloud and Hardware did add up to around 25%, so they are getting closer. They've been trying to focus on AI, but with moves like this, their position in AI will likely end up matching their position in Cloud vs AWS/Azure.
- crabbone 2y agoYou seem to imply that Google won't have a Python team... Google replaced it with a cheaper (and quite likely worse) alternative. They are still going to do the same thing (at least they believe so). They aren't changing direction or anything like that. It's unfortunate that we'll likely never know what was the actual reason they decided that the old team was... overpaid? overstaffed? overly something else? Saving money on workforce isn't the most sound business decision. After all, workforce is what generates the revenues. If you buy cheaper workforce, you should be getting ready to also lose some revenue due to quality drop... well, in large brush strokes. Maybe, in some situations the product was overpriced and making it cheaper by lowering the quality does make financial sense... Hard to tell.