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Comment by mikehines | Hacker News Reader

Can someone share the A.I. background of John Giannandrea? I read his LinkedIn profile and couldn't quite see his strength in the field.

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He doesn't have an AI background, although I'm sure he's picked up some stuff over the last few years. Google made him head of a bunch of different things because of his project management skills. (I used to work in his department.)

In addition to management, he's an amazing engineer in his own right. (I briefly worked with him at Metaweb)

Huh? He founded metaweb out of his PhD, which became the knowledge graph at Google, and is one of the most successful symbolic AI projects in history.

Symbolic AI is 20th Century AI.

Publish some papers in major conferences / journals, ship a few projects to more than 100M people, and get back to me, ok?

Nonsense, I trained a deep neural network on MNIST.

Old knowledge is ignorance. Ignorance is strength. Ergo, this is a strong hire.

He founded Metaweb but unless I wasn't paying attention he doesn't have a PhD. He's the same age as me so his academic career was in the 80's. jg isn't a big time AI guy but he is very smart and he's been deeply involved with AI projects for at least the last decade.

What is the difference between being "a big time AI guy" and being "deeply involved with AI projects for at least the last decade"?

from context, I gather it's a question of name recognition.

A PhD.

Jeff Dean doesn’t have one, which category would you classify him in?

Jeff Dean does have a PhD. Source: His own LinkedIn profile.

My bad.

Acceptance as a bona fide AI person by HN.

KG is not what most people think of as AI. It's more of a very large triple database with some confidence metrics than anything like what would pass for machine intelligence today. It's not even in the same org at Google.

Most people are ignorant then :)

Ok, KG is not what most people who work with and on it would consider AI.

He doesn't have any modern AI experience. However, since researchers like Ruslan Salakhutdinov are already working for Apple, Apple already has the tech expertise, and probably wants people who can grow and manage teams, and get the most out of their AI talent, something researchers like Russ are not experts in.

However, I think this move benefits Google as well. Jeff Dean now leads AI, and unlike JG, Jeff has both the technical chops and the managerial expertise to boost Google's AI programs. No more having to approve every project by someone who doesn't understand the nuances and capabilities of modern AI. If Sundar gives creative freedom to Jeff, we might even have singularity by 2050. I am only half joking.

If he has to run things instead of coding, maybe it will slow the Singularity's immanentization down!

>Jeff has [..] the managerial expertise

He worked most of his career as IC and never run project this large, so this statement is a stretch at best.

He's founded and managed Google Brain. That doesn't compare with someone who's more focussed on management, but I think only a handful of people in AI have both technical and managerial experience, and Jeff is one of them.

He ran TellMe and MetaWeb. He has an honorary doctorate, but no academic AI. Jeff Dean has no academic background in AI either.

Metaweb co-founder

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