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