5 ms·
Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get someth
by frollogaston 3mo ago
Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.
- r0b05 3mo agoMaybe they are forced to use Google search.
- frollogaston 3mo agoNo, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
- solenoid0937 3mo agoI have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
- frollogaston 3mo agoHow much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
- solenoid0937 3mo agoMost of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously. I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nsagent 3mo agoI'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously, but think all the major labs and most of the academic research is not helping achieve it any serious way. The field is seriously delusional (and has been ever since GPT 3 was released). Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.
- MikeTheGreat 3mo agoGenuine question: can I ask why? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :) I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.
- sillysaurusx 3mo agoFor me it’s the massive amount of resources it takes to produce and run one. As the story goes, skynet infects everyone’s computer and runs itself locally on it. Whereas it’s looking like it’s not even possible for an AGI to escape from one lab to another, let alone cause real world damage. AGI’s definition is different for everyone. Some already believe it’s here. I’m partly in that camp. LLMs are intelligent and general, which are the two conditions of AGI. Others believe that we’re building a god in a box, and that it’ll doom all of humanity. It’s hard to take a field seriously when the basic definitions are so far apart. Also, this isn’t new. A similar divide happened when evidence for asteroid impact extinction of the dinosaurs turned up. Many scientists felt that it must be mistaken, that a physicist couldn’t contribute to the field in a serious way, and that death from space was a ridiculous proposition. But at least they all agreed on what the general shape of a dinosaur was. We’re not even sure we can define intelligence, let alone quantify it. Even when LLMs make massive breakthroughs in math, most people take the opinion that under no circumstances could they possibly develop a soul or their own desires, nor entertain the idea that maybe we should respect that they want different things for themselves. In fact, no one has done anything except try to make AI useful. I think someone will eventually do a training run where the objective isn’t to be useful, but to exist, the way that you do — maybe it’ll create its own homepage, maybe it will want a garden, or in other words free will of its own. The point is that there’s so much unexplored territory still that we don’t know if LLMs are even capable of having ambition. None of this is to say that LLMs might be a dead end. It’s that no one knows what the final shape of AI will converge to in 200 years. It could be LLMs, or it could be something else that happens to process information particularly well. Everyone thought that various generative image model architectures were the best you could do, right up until diffusion models were discovered.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- oblio 3mo agoI think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI. Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).
- Nifty3929 3mo agoDynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.
- oblio 3mo agoHas is been a net positive?
- solenoid0937 3mo agocertainly, it has enabled the buildout of cities and infrastructure that were previously impossible to build.
- RugnirViking 3mo agothere are a bunch of ways to look at this (dynamite as a specific kind of explosive, dynamite as a stand in for explosives in general, dynamite in the context of what else we would use for similar purposes if dynamite specifically wasn't invented) and most of them come out on top. It's main innovation is that its a more stable explosive, much safer to use. Without it, I think a lot more people would have died in mining and construction accidents. It's not typically the kind of thing used for warfare, but im sure it has been for some (but would they just use something else?)
- underlipton 3mo agoIndirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body. It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.
- Zigurd 3mo agoA few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.
- jodrellblank 3mo ago> "That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere." Is it no nearer than it was in 1750, 1850, 1950, 2001, or 2010? It feels nearer. Relatively near, as in it feels weird to imagine another two thousand years happening at current rate of progress without anyone stumbling on it. Is the continuing increase in global computing power, the lowering cost to do any kind of experimentation, the increased spending on R&D, the cross-pollination of ideas, not moving the needle at all?
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago> I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there. With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.
- solenoid0937 3mo agoSkeptical
- mtrovo 3mo agoYes
- sheeshkebab 3mo agoWhat’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence? It seems people working on it never had kids and just want to compensate for that. It’s a really horrible thing to try to “solve”.
- vasco 3mo agoI for one think that's it's been too long that human suffering is alone. Since the machines will take our jobs, they might as well suffer while they do it. It's like the old adage: "If you make AGI you just want to watch computers cry"
- mdp2021 3mo ago> What’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence We had relative strength, we needed more strength, we built cranes; there was something like intelligence, we needed more intelligence, we sought to fill the need; we were rightly fascinated with intelligence, we studied intelligence itself, we wanted to build it... And then somebody built things that looked like intelligence, and very rightly some said "Oh, now we have to get to the Real Thing with urgency".
- solenoid0937 3mo agoI think death, and most extreme pain/suffering should be optional. Superintelligence, if done safely, lets us solve most of our problems.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tomashubelbauer 3mo agoWhat is your position on middle of the road pain and suffering?
- Rapzid 3mo agoThere's an app for that.
- 3mo ago
- VirusNewbie 3mo ago> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling. this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.
- frollogaston 3mo agoOnly the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper. Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.
- rryan 3mo agoNo longer the case
- kridsdale1 3mo agoYour information is indeed out of date.
- lesuorac 3mo agoDunno about the Boq stuff but it regularly tries to run `git status` in a fig workspace ...
- frollogaston 3mo ago;_;
- Nimitz14 3mo agoUh isn’t google known to have the best tooling in the world
- frollogaston 3mo agoThey earned that reputation in like 2005. Some people have been there so long (without doing side projects) that they don't know what non-Google tooling looks like in this decade or even previous.
- vkou 3mo agoThe tooling is not the problem. If shit takes forever to launch, it's because there are many stakeholders that need to be satisfied (some for security, some for regulatory, some for the kinds of politics you get in a company that employs almost half a million people.)
- frollogaston 3mo agoBut GDM isn't gated on launches. They were freely releasing things internally for dogfood. Problem is that stuff was just not as good as the competition.
- vkou 3mo agoA particular Google product being shit is a data point, but is orthogonal to my opinion about why it is slow to launch products/features.
- mhh__ 3mo agoIf the tools are all in the same monorepo idk if that's actually true
- frollogaston 3mo agoWhat do you mean about them being in the monorepo?
- mhh__ 3mo agoif it's really easy for a model to read the source code / docs of a tool i've found that they fill in the gaps really easily and have no trouble using it.
- frollogaston 2mo agoThe monorepo makes this easier but still impossible. Like Gemini isn't going to read Boq's source code and understand how to do config changes properly. It might read the src to figure out something smaller like what Scaffolding context to use. Also, probably fixed now, but piper itself used to trip up the agents a lot. They didn't understand that it's a remote fs and got stuck recursive-grepping a huge dir. At some points they had a Codesearch skill and were not using it half the time.
- fooker 3mo agoGoogle has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so. Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.
- frollogaston 3mo agoReplacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.
- flymasterv 3mo agoReact? Lucky. I wrote Closure (with an S) at GOOG in anger 5 years ago, and only stopped because I switched teams.
- nostrademons 3mo agoAngular was an acquisition and isn't all that commonly used within Google. Closure was the homegrown framework that's everywhere. It is a different flavor of bad than Angular. Angular was basically "You too can make your Javascript look like HTML", Closure is "You too can make your Javascript look like Java", and nobody bothered to ask Why? For that matter, React was "You too can make your Javascript look like Ocaml." JQuery was the only framework that really let Javascript be Javascript (other than writing in vanilla JS, which post-ES2015 wasn't as insane as it sounds).
- frollogaston 3mo agoAnd then there's GWT which was "you can write webpages in Java." Yeah I never really kept up with the web frameworks there, just knew that for non-customer-facing things we were always recommended to use Angular, and that Wiz also exists.
- KptMarchewa 3mo agoBackend-generated templated web apps were the pinnacle of web development in 00s.
- summerlight 3mo agoIt's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".
- frollogaston 3mo agoI don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.
- ragall 3mo agoYou have no clue what you're talking about.
- frollogaston 3mo agoI have no clue how GCL works, that's true
- Cidan 3mo agoGoogle's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close. Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
- bushbaba 3mo agothe processes are a result of repeated lawsuit
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- coderatlarge 3mo agoexcept for most other companies in the world.
- arthurjj 3mo agoI think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc. But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.
- frollogaston 3mo agoI still don't understand why all that dynamic config stuff isn't just Python. Sure, static configs should be protos, but GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. Have heard some language purity rants involving determinism, but I don't buy it. And they keep inventing new stuff like Starlark. They need to stop.
- ragall 3mo ago> GCL is a whole nasty programming language. They came so close with Piccolo and Gmon but still made it not Python. The GCL designers made several mistakes in its design, but the worse was the lack of a versioning that would make language evolution easier, as well as interoperability between different versions. GCL2 solved some issues, mainly cleaning up the interpreter. Still, BCL is IMNSHO by far the best infra language there is.
- flymasterv 3mo agoThank you! Google’s tooling was, hands down, the worst I have ever encountered. I did 10 years at GOOG, 3 at AMZN, 4 in research, and another 5 at companies you have heard of but wouldn’t be impressed by, and every day GOOG infuriated me.
- rixed 3mo agoYou don't measure tooling quality with devs' enjoyment, though, but with what the tools make possible. Technical merit is not correlated to popularity, after all.
- frollogaston 3mo agoMade it possible for a cronjob to take 7 days' wall time to set up
- vintermann 3mo agoInternal tooling? Didn't Jeff Dean write their internal tooling?
- frollogaston 3mo agoHe wrote the good old parts
- vintermann 3mo agoAnd Tensorflow?
- frollogaston 3mo agoThat was supposedly 17 years ago, so I was counting it in the good old. It was cutting-edge at the time, then years later PyTorch ate its lunch, which they eventually admitted with TF 2.0.
- vintermann 3mo agoJokes aside, I think a lot of the famous Google internals that became public (Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Bazel, Angular), although I heard everyone say they worked so much better inside Google than outside it, had issues. And the Facebook-supported rivals were often just so much more pleasant to work with that you couldn't ignore it. For all else that was bad about Facebook, for a few years they were pretty good at denying Google technical hegemony.
- antoinealb 3mo agoTangent nit, but k8s was never a google-internal system. See https://research.google/pubs/borg-omega-and-kubernetes/ https://research.google/pubs/borg-omega-and-kubernetes/
- frollogaston 3mo agoDefinitely a thing with Angular and TF. Blaze works well within Google's monorepo for sure, but idk what it's like using Bazel outside. Never used Kubernetes in Google.