14 ms·

Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow

115 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

sounds 12y ago
Thrun's role as Google VP has been mostly moot for several years now. Those close to Thrun have made no secret of the fact he's focused on Udacity and thus, whether he would like to work at Google or not, he can only do so much.
IBM 12y ago
Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
- magicalist 12y ago
  Google Brain apparently came out of there, so I'd say definitely not. The other projects have always been longer term, and it seems silly to ask why self-driving cars aren't done yet when it was never expected for them to be done yet.
- psbp 12y ago
  Well, at least three of its products are being used in the real world (Glass, Loon, Self-driving cars) and at least one is actually being sold (Glass), so yes.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    So you are saying it share's PARC's affinity for inventing things that were both difficult to manufacture and not economically viable? (Only half joking there) I think it interesting that Sebastian left, he's a smart guy and I think he understood what he could do wielding Google X as a tool, that he left means he figured he could do get more of what he wanted to do outside the confines of Google X than he could with it. That makes for a really interesting thought exercise. And that brings us back to PARC, which discovered that the people who left PARC had a bigger impact outside of the lab than in it. The reasons for that were many but mostly they consisted of Xerox not actually being a 'research' company so much as it was a 'copier' company. What does that say about Google X?
  - gress 12y ago
    Glass is a botched PR stunt, not world-changing research. So this underscores the GP's point.
  - stonogo 12y ago
    I think you typed "yes" where you meant "no." Tech company R&D gave us things like the transistor and lasers (both from AT&T) and Mandelbrot fractals and hard drives and the entire concept of a relational database (all from IBM). PARC in specific gave us Ethernet, which I think is safe to describe as "being used in the real world." Google has a long way to go; so far, all of its real contributions have been in software, and all of their hardware R&D has seen very little "real world" deployment. Otherwise it's very much just a well-marketed implementation of traditional corporate R&D.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      And fibre optics from Martesham and before that Colossus from Dollis Hill
- ThisIBereave 12y ago
  Do you mean PARC circa 1970s?
- krschultz 12y ago
  You say that like it is a bad thing.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  Probably not, but isn't that enough these days when so few companies do any sort of long-term bluesky R&D?
- julianpye 12y ago
  My former boss (CTO of Panasonic) once told me that the only way to do real R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge R&D. Everyone else was doing just product development. Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.
  - cbhl 12y ago
    What about Microsoft Research?
    - rasz_pl 12y ago
      http://www.eweek.com/it-management/microsoft-lays-off-2100-closes-research-lab.html http://www.eweek.com/it-management/microsoft-lays-off-2100-c... what about them?
      - cwyers 12y ago
        According to your link, there were 75 people at that lab. Microsoft Research has over 800 people: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=people http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=pe...
      - Encosia 12y ago
        That headline is confusingly worded, but Microsoft only laid off 50-75 people in one MSR location. That was far from the entire division: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/default.aspx
        layman 12y ago
        That's not all. There are other parts being shutdown too - Robotics apparently https://twitter.com/AshleyFen/status/513392391467048960 https://twitter.com/AshleyFen/status/513392391467048960
- simonebrunozzi 12y ago
  Sergey Brin, in my view, represents part of the problem here. Too powerful to be told that he's not delivering much.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    I still remember this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134609
- ballooney 12y ago
  I recently had to sit through a presentation by an X-er in which was played a very smug GoogleX video that spliced an annoying amount of apollo- and shuttle-era space exploration footage to pump up what was essentially floating cell towers (Loon). I found it quite disrespectful to the apollo engineers, and grasping of Google PR, to try and equate what they're doing to landing on the moon. It went quite beyond the bounds of what is reasonable with a straight face, for my tastes.
strongai 12y ago
Ironically, if he has left to concentrate on Udacity, my own belief is that he is a poor teacher. Of course it depends on which pedagogical teat you are sucking from, but my experience of Thrun's delivered Udacity courses is poor. Many of his video segments seem to involve him slavishly following his 'script', occasionally hissing out encouraging phrases such as 'Isn't this great!'. He hasn't sequenced a series of logical teaching moments in which the concepts flow nicely. It's as if he's decided his first draft is good enough. Just my opinion of course.
- ryangallen 12y ago
  Udacity has done what any good start-up should and launched a solid MVP and iterated on it, delivering free, in-demand courses in a short amount of time. No, the materials and scripts have not always perfect but they are still more valuable than many college courses I've taken. If he is in fact leaving to focus energy on Udacity, isn't that a positive move in regards to your critiques?
  - strongai 12y ago
    Yes, you make a good point. My opinion - and that's all that it is - is that his (many) abilities lie in the Google [x] direction, not as a poster boy for MOOCs.
    - twistedanimator 12y ago
      But who are we to say where he should apply his abilities? He may be interested in something new and that is where his next best contributions lie.
    - bertil 12y ago
      I've recorded my self and many others teaching: there is only terrible teachers, and people who survive the humiliation of seeing themselves try more than twenty times. I would never let anyone watch any of their first five takes first.
- dsuth 12y ago
Animats 12y ago
I wonder what he'll do next. Udacity isn't a research problem; it's a marketing and quality control problem. "Massively Online" courses have turned out to be something of a dud, anyway.
- ericd 12y ago
  The people I've seen calling MOOCs a dud seem to have had the expectation that they'd see completion rates somewhere near traditional courses, which is laughable when you consider the differences in structure, demographics, and buy in. Even despite the high dropout rates, I think they end up teaching more students than the comparable class session at a university. I took a grad class to completion on Coursera, and I think it was great - I learned quite a lot, it was free, and the quality of instruction was excellent, rivaling that of my non-lab university courses. That said, how to effectively teach an online course is very much an unsolved problem. It's not nearly as cut and dry as you suggest. As of now, they've mostly just moved the lectures to online video, put up some online quizzes, and some forums. It's promising, but it's a naive implementation still.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Is how to effectively teach an online course the problem to focus on? It's interesting to note that if MOOCs turn out to be a dud, yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs, then it's proof that people pay for a college degree, not for education. In other words, prestige seems to be the issue, not education.
    - kenferry 12y ago
      > yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs Statistically speaking, they aren't, that's the problem. Completion rates with Coursera are ~5%. Some argue that many people don't _want_ to finish the courses, but this views the product as something fixed. For any other kind of business, is "people sign up but then don't value it enough to continue" an excuse for lack of retention?
      - 12y ago

115 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

Thrun's role as Google VP has been mostly moot for several years now. Those close to Thrun have made no secret of the fact he's focused on Udacity and thus, whether he would like to work at Google or not, he can only do so much.

IBM 12y ago

Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?

magicalist 12y ago
Google Brain apparently came out of there, so I'd say definitely not. The other projects have always been longer term, and it seems silly to ask why self-driving cars aren't done yet when it was never expected for them to be done yet.
psbp 12y ago
Well, at least three of its products are being used in the real world (Glass, Loon, Self-driving cars) and at least one is actually being sold (Glass), so yes.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  So you are saying it share's PARC's affinity for inventing things that were both difficult to manufacture and not economically viable? (Only half joking there) I think it interesting that Sebastian left, he's a smart guy and I think he understood what he could do wielding Google X as a tool, that he left means he figured he could do get more of what he wanted to do outside the confines of Google X than he could with it. That makes for a really interesting thought exercise. And that brings us back to PARC, which discovered that the people who left PARC had a bigger impact outside of the lab than in it. The reasons for that were many but mostly they consisted of Xerox not actually being a 'research' company so much as it was a 'copier' company. What does that say about Google X?
- gress 12y ago
  Glass is a botched PR stunt, not world-changing research. So this underscores the GP's point.
- stonogo 12y ago
  I think you typed "yes" where you meant "no." Tech company R&D gave us things like the transistor and lasers (both from AT&T) and Mandelbrot fractals and hard drives and the entire concept of a relational database (all from IBM). PARC in specific gave us Ethernet, which I think is safe to describe as "being used in the real world." Google has a long way to go; so far, all of its real contributions have been in software, and all of their hardware R&D has seen very little "real world" deployment. Otherwise it's very much just a well-marketed implementation of traditional corporate R&D.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    And fibre optics from Martesham and before that Colossus from Dollis Hill
ThisIBereave 12y ago
Do you mean PARC circa 1970s?
krschultz 12y ago
You say that like it is a bad thing.
georgemcbay 12y ago
Probably not, but isn't that enough these days when so few companies do any sort of long-term bluesky R&D?
julianpye 12y ago
My former boss (CTO of Panasonic) once told me that the only way to do real R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge R&D. Everyone else was doing just product development. Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.
- cbhl 12y ago
  What about Microsoft Research?
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    http://www.eweek.com/it-management/microsoft-lays-off-2100-closes-research-lab.html http://www.eweek.com/it-management/microsoft-lays-off-2100-c... what about them?
    - cwyers 12y ago
      According to your link, there were 75 people at that lab. Microsoft Research has over 800 people: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=people http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?t=pe...
    - Encosia 12y ago
      That headline is confusingly worded, but Microsoft only laid off 50-75 people in one MSR location. That was far from the entire division: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/default.aspx
      - layman 12y ago
        That's not all. There are other parts being shutdown too - Robotics apparently https://twitter.com/AshleyFen/status/513392391467048960 https://twitter.com/AshleyFen/status/513392391467048960
simonebrunozzi 12y ago
Sergey Brin, in my view, represents part of the problem here. Too powerful to be told that he's not delivering much.
- yuhong 12y ago
  I still remember this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134609
ballooney 12y ago
I recently had to sit through a presentation by an X-er in which was played a very smug GoogleX video that spliced an annoying amount of apollo- and shuttle-era space exploration footage to pump up what was essentially floating cell towers (Loon). I found it quite disrespectful to the apollo engineers, and grasping of Google PR, to try and equate what they're doing to landing on the moon. It went quite beyond the bounds of what is reasonable with a straight face, for my tastes.

strongai 12y ago

Ironically, if he has left to concentrate on Udacity, my own belief is that he is a poor teacher. Of course it depends on which pedagogical teat you are sucking from, but my experience of Thrun's delivered Udacity courses is poor. Many of his video segments seem to involve him slavishly following his 'script', occasionally hissing out encouraging phrases such as 'Isn't this great!'. He hasn't sequenced a series of logical teaching moments in which the concepts flow nicely. It's as if he's decided his first draft is good enough. Just my opinion of course.

ryangallen 12y ago
Udacity has done what any good start-up should and launched a solid MVP and iterated on it, delivering free, in-demand courses in a short amount of time. No, the materials and scripts have not always perfect but they are still more valuable than many college courses I've taken. If he is in fact leaving to focus energy on Udacity, isn't that a positive move in regards to your critiques?
- strongai 12y ago
  Yes, you make a good point. My opinion - and that's all that it is - is that his (many) abilities lie in the Google [x] direction, not as a poster boy for MOOCs.
  - twistedanimator 12y ago
    But who are we to say where he should apply his abilities? He may be interested in something new and that is where his next best contributions lie.
  - bertil 12y ago
    I've recorded my self and many others teaching: there is only terrible teachers, and people who survive the humiliation of seeing themselves try more than twenty times. I would never let anyone watch any of their first five takes first.
dsuth 12y ago

Animats 12y ago

I wonder what he'll do next. Udacity isn't a research problem; it's a marketing and quality control problem. "Massively Online" courses have turned out to be something of a dud, anyway.

ericd 12y ago
The people I've seen calling MOOCs a dud seem to have had the expectation that they'd see completion rates somewhere near traditional courses, which is laughable when you consider the differences in structure, demographics, and buy in. Even despite the high dropout rates, I think they end up teaching more students than the comparable class session at a university. I took a grad class to completion on Coursera, and I think it was great - I learned quite a lot, it was free, and the quality of instruction was excellent, rivaling that of my non-lab university courses. That said, how to effectively teach an online course is very much an unsolved problem. It's not nearly as cut and dry as you suggest. As of now, they've mostly just moved the lectures to online video, put up some online quizzes, and some forums. It's promising, but it's a naive implementation still.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Is how to effectively teach an online course the problem to focus on? It's interesting to note that if MOOCs turn out to be a dud, yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs, then it's proof that people pay for a college degree, not for education. In other words, prestige seems to be the issue, not education.
  - kenferry 12y ago
    > yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs Statistically speaking, they aren't, that's the problem. Completion rates with Coursera are ~5%. Some argue that many people don't _want_ to finish the courses, but this views the product as something fixed. For any other kind of business, is "people sign up but then don't value it enough to continue" an excuse for lack of retention?
    - 12y ago