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Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised the media is billing this as "a push for AI".

I was on both Giannandrea's and Singhal's teams at Google (I left last year). Giannandrea doesn't really have an AI or machine learning background (LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johngiannandrea). He was put in charge of machine learning relatively recently, IIRC less than two years ago. Before that he was doing Knowledge Graph - he came into Google through the Metaweb acquisition - and that technology stack really doesn't have much AI or ML in it. Google has tons of good AI people; if it wanted to, it could easily have replaced Singhal with any number of engineers with more AI experience.

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Google's problem in search has never been a lack of good engineering, its been a lack of vision for search. The fact that someone from the search team isn't leading the company says everything.

I think the IBM's Watson, Wolfram Alpha, Freebase etc were more much visionary than what Google has done in search in the last 10 years. Even Bing's API's are much more useful. The WolframAlpha and Watson kind of NLP queries have been around for almost 6-7 years now. And Google still can't handle most of them. Whats the use of having all the AI experts on the planet?

Search should be its own company split apart from Chrome and Android. The empire defense game distracts from what Search can be,

I think this gets back to the aforementioned point about Marissa's statement re: serving the 98%. Yes, WA & Watson are super useful, but they're useful in ways a huge majority of the population will never miss and thus never know about. Google has been far more focused on addressing the "obvious" problems and low hanging fruit ... it's only a matter of time before they start encroaching, imho.

Maybe the depth of knowledge in the AI field wasn't the only reason why he was chosen ?

Sure. But in that case, why interpret choosing him as "a push for AI"? The logic of "Google put an AI person in charge" -> "Google wants to focus the company more on AI" seems mostly valid, but the premise is false, so there's no reason to believe the conclusion (more than we would have otherwise).

It is just spin (so is almost everything you read in the press, fwiw) and as such represents PR people doing their job well. You only realize the spinness when you have inside information that contradicts it.

Congratulations to jg regardless. He's very smart and I'm sure has picked up enough understanding of current AI techniques in the past couple of years. Disclosure: I've known him for 30 years or so..

That part, I'm ready to bet dollars to peanuts, is a talking point pushed by Google PR, which the journalist used (just like the other 99 facts and not-so-facts served to him on a platter all ready to digest by PR) because he's on a deadline and doesn't have the time to look for alternative explanations. That's a lot of work for a very weak ROI.

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