9 ms·

Why Andrew Ng left Google and joined Baidu

105 points by thousandx 12y ago

mark_l_watson 12y ago
I very much enjoyed Andrew Ng's machine learning class, so much so that I was sad when the class ended. I wish him great success at Baidu. A little off topic, but: Corporations no longer are loyal to employees (unless they are at the top of their field). Some countries now seem much more interested in the interests of corporations than people. Therefore, I think that it is very smart for individuals to more consider themselves as 'citizens of the world' and be very open to working for whoever pays them the most, provides the best infrastructure, etc.
- johnward 12y ago
  "Corporations no longer are loyal to employees". I very much agree with this. Which is why I have no loyalty to any company I've worked for.
- mhurron 12y ago
  > Corporations no longer are loyal to employees It has been that way since at least the mid 90's. I am amazed at the number of people who still think they need to show where they work any kind of loyalty.
  - mwfunk 12y ago
    Corporations are legal entities and don't have qualities like "loyalty", so it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize them. The people that work at corporations, including managers and executives, certainly can have those sorts of qualities. Whether or not they do is another story, and that's going to vary widely from one organization to the next. Loyalty is something that's given to and accepted from people, not legal entities. I have absolutely felt degrees of loyalty to some employers and a lack of it to others.
    - johnward 12y ago
      Loyalty from a corporate perspective means things like pensions, health care, not laying off 20k people every fall, etc. Like the days that you could work for GE your entire life and actually retire. There was a mutual loyalty. The company took care of you and you therefore took care of the company. Now someone could offer me a couple thousand dollars extra in pay and I'd be gone in a heart beat. Don't forget that legal entity is made of people who decide how that legal entity will function. Also if corporations can't show loyalty, a human quality, then how can they be people?
      - mwfunk 12y ago
        I don't think they are people, but the US legal system disagrees with me of late. :(
    - tferraz 12y ago
      It does not make , but it happens. By middle managers or by endomarketing as away to make people work more for less, classic examples are in company that are going bad
  - johnward 12y ago
    I once had a friend take a low paying dev job just because he needed it. He wouldn't qualify for insurance for 3 months and had recently adopted kids. Then another offer came by that paid more and started insurance day one. The employer had the nerve to tell him that they were upset with his lack of loyalty to the company. If that company had any loyalty to the employee he wouldn't have had to work for 3 months without health insurance.
- pauleastlund 12y ago
  "Corporations no longer are loyal to employees." I don't find this to be universally true. I was at Google for five years. When my first daughter was born, they gave me 2 weeks of paid paternity leave. When they upped the policy to 7 weeks months later, they made it retroactive and gave me another 5 weeks to spend with my new family. When I was dealing with health problems, my managers were extremely understanding and put a number of different options on the table for how they could help me cope. When my wife and I decided we needed to move somewhere without a real Google presence, they bent over backwards to find a way to make it work without my leaving the company. It's difficult to separate "company X is being nice to employees because it is in their best interests right now" from "company X is showing loyalty to its employees," and in general morally upstanding behavior coincides closely with long-term self-interest. But to my mind the way I was treated constituted loyalty. The clincher to me is that Google has a newer extraordinary suite of benefits for the families of Google employees that die. That is a good, loyal, and _expensive_ thing to do, and I have a hard time seeing how it makes sense as part of some cynical calculation. I don't think a lot of employees are going to be attracted to or retained by Google because of its stellar death benefits. To be sure, I know this doesn't mean Google would never ever lay devs like me off in a downturn, nor does it mean that I would never quit Google. (In point of fact, I did.) But I definitely don't advocate, as you suggest, that developers simply go to whatever employer is paying the most right now. Go to whatever employer has built a reputation for treating its employees the best.
- djvu9 12y ago
  His success in Baidu and Baidu's success in general means more victims of their advertising business which is simply online fraud (of medicine and medical treatments). And most of the victims are probably less educated, poor people who are new to the internet. For that I despise him and whoever actively takes part in Baidu's business. And the investors. This is the worst online fraud in the world because it is literally killing people.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I found this an interesting quote: > “Frankly, Kai just made decisions, and it just happened > without a lot of committee meetings,” Ng said. “The > ability of individuals in the company to make decisions > like that and move infrastructure quickly is something > I really appreciate about this company.” That was, initially, one of the more interesting things about Google. You wanted to start a project and could get resources to run it in the various data centers relatively easily. If a guy like Ng was frustrated inside of Google by 'committee meetings' keeping him from getting things done quickly, then that says something about the current state of affairs there.
- ProAm 12y ago
  It's what happens when companies get big. Same thing happened at Microsoft.
  - antocv 12y ago
    Guess it happens when the company hires a certain level of managers/MBAs.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Ya, but one can hope they'd think in terms of quotas [e.g. You have XXXX of machine time and/or a $$$ budget of XXXXX to test ideas] rather than require committee meetings.
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      They require the committee meetings to set the quotas. Quotas suffer from the standard budgeting problem: everybody inflates their needs and hoards resources so that if they need extra in the future, they don't have to go through the budgeting process again. As a result, when a new project comes along that's not just an off-shoot of an existing high-priority project, they find that they're starved out of quota. They don't have an existing quota because the project previously didn't exist, and then when they go to get some, they find that all machines are currently allocated because everybody else overbid to secure room for expansion. Google was rolling out a fix for this process when I left them, but I'm not sure if I can share the details on it.
leothekim 12y ago
FTFA: [Ng said:] “The ability of individuals in the company to make decisions like that and move infrastructure quickly is something I really appreciate about this company.” That might sound like a kind deference to Ng’s new employer, but he was alluding to a clear advantage Baidu has over Google. “He ordered 1,000 GPUs [graphics processing units] and got them within 24 hours,” Adam Gibson, co-founder of deep-learning startup Skymind, told VentureBeat. “At Google, it would have taken him weeks or months to get that.” Weeks or months? I wouldn't expect Google to get them in 24 hours, but has it really gotten that bureaucratic there?
- agibsonccc 12y ago
  Maybe things improved after he left. Remember it's been a while. I'm the one quoted in this article btw, I'd be happy to clarify anything.
- djhworld 12y ago
  It depends, 1000 GPUs is a lot of money. Even if each GPU was $500 each, that's still $500,000 Granted, in Google terms that's pocket change, but still, I'd imagine there is a rigorous requirement for a solid business/project plan before management sign the dotted line.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Depends on the size of the company for them $500,000 is not a huge amount these days. Back in the day I looked at using a neural network for an experiment to measure the efficiency of toilets that would have been £250,000 in 1982 just for the hardware - that was a bit to much. Though back then for a single piece of HP test gear we spent around a 100 grand.
- jsnell 12y ago
  Non-standard hardware kind of implies dedicated servers. And multiple dedicated machine pools instead of a single shared one add a lot of ops complexity and are very bad for getting good utilization. If the GPUs aren't standard hardware, I'd be surprised if you could get them deployed in a Google data center in just months.
oniTony 12y ago
Somewhat misleading, as Andrew Ng had left Google in 2012 to co-found and run Coursera. Baidu got him back into AI/ML. More details on his own blog post from 3 months ago — http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message-from-co-founder-andrew-ng http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message...
noname123 12y ago
Can we just state the obvious? Chinese AI peeps left because they want to go back to China. This isn't an unusual trend, as an Chinese American, all of my cousins who came to study here abroad in US have plans to go back to China, unlike my parents' generation who came here for a PhD and stayed. And even amongst my parents' generation, my uncles who have gotten PhD and tenure at US universities and left for universities in China. The reason being that they can get paid for just as much as in US, for lower living cost, a more compatible culture and in Beijing or Shanghai for better standards of living (yes before the critics jump in with air pollution, human rights issue etc., a good US wage in China could afford you a full-time personal assistant and/or nanny to do your laundry, take care of your kids, clean and cook good Chinese food and you can live in a nicer part of the city with better infrastructure than most of US lol; and you could still come out with lower cost of living).
- 0_o 12y ago
  While Robin Li's wife and kids live in the U.S. ...
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  > Chinese AI peeps left because they want to go back to China. This isn't an unusual trend, as an Chinese American Ng is Singaporean (born in the UK), not Chinese. He has no connection to the PRC apart from his ethnicity. He may not even speak Mandarin. > Beijing or Shanghai...lower cost of living You've gotta be kidding me. I know people who specifically won't return because it's too expensive to live in Beijing or Shanghai.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Isn't Andrew Ng working in Silicon Valley? It is difficult to recruit in Beijing these days given the air quality, cost of living isn't low but not that bad either.
- g_h 12y ago
  According to Wikipedia, Andrew Ng was born in the UK, and his parents were both Singaporeans.
djvu9 12y ago
Do you guys know that reportedly 30+% or even a half of Baidu's revenue comes from false advertisements by private hospitals and medical institutes mostly owned by companies from PuTian, a city in south China? It is literally bloody dirty money. If you can read Chinese, here is some news report: http://finance.china.com.cn/industry/medicine/yygc/20140721/2553637.shtml http://finance.china.com.cn/industry/medicine/yygc/20140721/...
- ASneakyFox 12y ago
  So about the same as googles ad business? Not shocking to me.
ryenus 12y ago
Baidu as a search provider did lots of immoral things, that's why these days it's so difficult to use Google because of GFW/censoship, and why Baidu is so dominant in China.

105 points by thousandx 12y ago

I very much enjoyed Andrew Ng's machine learning class, so much so that I was sad when the class ended. I wish him great success at Baidu. A little off topic, but: Corporations no longer are loyal to employees (unless they are at the top of their field). Some countries now seem much more interested in the interests of corporations than people. Therefore, I think that it is very smart for individuals to more consider themselves as 'citizens of the world' and be very open to working for whoever pays them the most, provides the best infrastructure, etc.

johnward 12y ago
"Corporations no longer are loyal to employees". I very much agree with this. Which is why I have no loyalty to any company I've worked for.
mhurron 12y ago
> Corporations no longer are loyal to employees It has been that way since at least the mid 90's. I am amazed at the number of people who still think they need to show where they work any kind of loyalty.
- mwfunk 12y ago
  Corporations are legal entities and don't have qualities like "loyalty", so it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize them. The people that work at corporations, including managers and executives, certainly can have those sorts of qualities. Whether or not they do is another story, and that's going to vary widely from one organization to the next. Loyalty is something that's given to and accepted from people, not legal entities. I have absolutely felt degrees of loyalty to some employers and a lack of it to others.
  - johnward 12y ago
    Loyalty from a corporate perspective means things like pensions, health care, not laying off 20k people every fall, etc. Like the days that you could work for GE your entire life and actually retire. There was a mutual loyalty. The company took care of you and you therefore took care of the company. Now someone could offer me a couple thousand dollars extra in pay and I'd be gone in a heart beat. Don't forget that legal entity is made of people who decide how that legal entity will function. Also if corporations can't show loyalty, a human quality, then how can they be people?
    - mwfunk 12y ago
      I don't think they are people, but the US legal system disagrees with me of late. :(
  - tferraz 12y ago
    It does not make , but it happens. By middle managers or by endomarketing as away to make people work more for less, classic examples are in company that are going bad
- johnward 12y ago
  I once had a friend take a low paying dev job just because he needed it. He wouldn't qualify for insurance for 3 months and had recently adopted kids. Then another offer came by that paid more and started insurance day one. The employer had the nerve to tell him that they were upset with his lack of loyalty to the company. If that company had any loyalty to the employee he wouldn't have had to work for 3 months without health insurance.
pauleastlund 12y ago
"Corporations no longer are loyal to employees." I don't find this to be universally true. I was at Google for five years. When my first daughter was born, they gave me 2 weeks of paid paternity leave. When they upped the policy to 7 weeks months later, they made it retroactive and gave me another 5 weeks to spend with my new family. When I was dealing with health problems, my managers were extremely understanding and put a number of different options on the table for how they could help me cope. When my wife and I decided we needed to move somewhere without a real Google presence, they bent over backwards to find a way to make it work without my leaving the company. It's difficult to separate "company X is being nice to employees because it is in their best interests right now" from "company X is showing loyalty to its employees," and in general morally upstanding behavior coincides closely with long-term self-interest. But to my mind the way I was treated constituted loyalty. The clincher to me is that Google has a newer extraordinary suite of benefits for the families of Google employees that die. That is a good, loyal, and _expensive_ thing to do, and I have a hard time seeing how it makes sense as part of some cynical calculation. I don't think a lot of employees are going to be attracted to or retained by Google because of its stellar death benefits. To be sure, I know this doesn't mean Google would never ever lay devs like me off in a downturn, nor does it mean that I would never quit Google. (In point of fact, I did.) But I definitely don't advocate, as you suggest, that developers simply go to whatever employer is paying the most right now. Go to whatever employer has built a reputation for treating its employees the best.
djvu9 12y ago
His success in Baidu and Baidu's success in general means more victims of their advertising business which is simply online fraud (of medicine and medical treatments). And most of the victims are probably less educated, poor people who are new to the internet. For that I despise him and whoever actively takes part in Baidu's business. And the investors. This is the worst online fraud in the world because it is literally killing people.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I found this an interesting quote: > “Frankly, Kai just made decisions, and it just happened > without a lot of committee meetings,” Ng said. “The > ability of individuals in the company to make decisions > like that and move infrastructure quickly is something > I really appreciate about this company.” That was, initially, one of the more interesting things about Google. You wanted to start a project and could get resources to run it in the various data centers relatively easily. If a guy like Ng was frustrated inside of Google by 'committee meetings' keeping him from getting things done quickly, then that says something about the current state of affairs there.

ProAm 12y ago
It's what happens when companies get big. Same thing happened at Microsoft.
- antocv 12y ago
  Guess it happens when the company hires a certain level of managers/MBAs.
- opendais 12y ago
  Ya, but one can hope they'd think in terms of quotas [e.g. You have XXXX of machine time and/or a $$$ budget of XXXXX to test ideas] rather than require committee meetings.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    They require the committee meetings to set the quotas. Quotas suffer from the standard budgeting problem: everybody inflates their needs and hoards resources so that if they need extra in the future, they don't have to go through the budgeting process again. As a result, when a new project comes along that's not just an off-shoot of an existing high-priority project, they find that they're starved out of quota. They don't have an existing quota because the project previously didn't exist, and then when they go to get some, they find that all machines are currently allocated because everybody else overbid to secure room for expansion. Google was rolling out a fix for this process when I left them, but I'm not sure if I can share the details on it.

leothekim 12y ago

FTFA: [Ng said:] “The ability of individuals in the company to make decisions like that and move infrastructure quickly is something I really appreciate about this company.” That might sound like a kind deference to Ng’s new employer, but he was alluding to a clear advantage Baidu has over Google. “He ordered 1,000 GPUs [graphics processing units] and got them within 24 hours,” Adam Gibson, co-founder of deep-learning startup Skymind, told VentureBeat. “At Google, it would have taken him weeks or months to get that.” Weeks or months? I wouldn't expect Google to get them in 24 hours, but has it really gotten that bureaucratic there?

agibsonccc 12y ago
Maybe things improved after he left. Remember it's been a while. I'm the one quoted in this article btw, I'd be happy to clarify anything.
djhworld 12y ago
It depends, 1000 GPUs is a lot of money. Even if each GPU was $500 each, that's still $500,000 Granted, in Google terms that's pocket change, but still, I'd imagine there is a rigorous requirement for a solid business/project plan before management sign the dotted line.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Depends on the size of the company for them $500,000 is not a huge amount these days. Back in the day I looked at using a neural network for an experiment to measure the efficiency of toilets that would have been £250,000 in 1982 just for the hardware - that was a bit to much. Though back then for a single piece of HP test gear we spent around a 100 grand.
jsnell 12y ago
Non-standard hardware kind of implies dedicated servers. And multiple dedicated machine pools instead of a single shared one add a lot of ops complexity and are very bad for getting good utilization. If the GPUs aren't standard hardware, I'd be surprised if you could get them deployed in a Google data center in just months.

oniTony 12y ago

Somewhat misleading, as Andrew Ng had left Google in 2012 to co-found and run Coursera. Baidu got him back into AI/ML. More details on his own blog post from 3 months ago — http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message-from-co-founder-andrew-ng http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message...

noname123 12y ago

Can we just state the obvious? Chinese AI peeps left because they want to go back to China. This isn't an unusual trend, as an Chinese American, all of my cousins who came to study here abroad in US have plans to go back to China, unlike my parents' generation who came here for a PhD and stayed. And even amongst my parents' generation, my uncles who have gotten PhD and tenure at US universities and left for universities in China. The reason being that they can get paid for just as much as in US, for lower living cost, a more compatible culture and in Beijing or Shanghai for better standards of living (yes before the critics jump in with air pollution, human rights issue etc., a good US wage in China could afford you a full-time personal assistant and/or nanny to do your laundry, take care of your kids, clean and cook good Chinese food and you can live in a nicer part of the city with better infrastructure than most of US lol; and you could still come out with lower cost of living).

0_o 12y ago
While Robin Li's wife and kids live in the U.S. ...
w1ntermute 12y ago
> Chinese AI peeps left because they want to go back to China. This isn't an unusual trend, as an Chinese American Ng is Singaporean (born in the UK), not Chinese. He has no connection to the PRC apart from his ethnicity. He may not even speak Mandarin. > Beijing or Shanghai...lower cost of living You've gotta be kidding me. I know people who specifically won't return because it's too expensive to live in Beijing or Shanghai.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Isn't Andrew Ng working in Silicon Valley? It is difficult to recruit in Beijing these days given the air quality, cost of living isn't low but not that bad either.
g_h 12y ago
According to Wikipedia, Andrew Ng was born in the UK, and his parents were both Singaporeans.

djvu9 12y ago

Do you guys know that reportedly 30+% or even a half of Baidu's revenue comes from false advertisements by private hospitals and medical institutes mostly owned by companies from PuTian, a city in south China? It is literally bloody dirty money. If you can read Chinese, here is some news report: http://finance.china.com.cn/industry/medicine/yygc/20140721/2553637.shtml http://finance.china.com.cn/industry/medicine/yygc/20140721/...

ASneakyFox 12y ago
So about the same as googles ad business? Not shocking to me.

ryenus 12y ago

Baidu as a search provider did lots of immoral things, that's why these days it's so difficult to use Google because of GFW/censoship, and why Baidu is so dominant in China.