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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is a bad sign. What this announcement reads like is "Hey! I won this internal political struggle!". Ok, sure, not sure why anyone outside the company should take this as good news. This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape goat for missing AI. Remember - what this announcement means is that Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure. Trying to synthesize those two separate teams (half of which wanted you to fail) into one productive and world-leading team is a hell of an ask.

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> Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure

Having been in both places (Brain and DM), this feels so far from what I experienced that I must ask, what are you basing this on?

This reads pretty normal for big tech corporate politics.

I never like the word “politics.” It carries the association of a bunch of people just playing backstabbing games to further themselves.

While this does occur, in general what I see is that with any large-enough group of people, there will be strong differences of opinions on how to steer the project to success.

In fact, I don’t think I can remember a single “political battle” that didn’t stem from a legitimate concern in how some project was being run and what they had decided to focus on.

Like it or not, politics is pretty much your day to day life at vp+ level at these companies.

But we can all pretend to live in idealism la la land where everything is operating on someone’s best intention.

You worked there and didn't know of any of the intra-company autonomy infighting that leaked into the news? [0] [1]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-res...

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...

If you've worked at a large organization, you'll know the news can paint a cartoonishly distorted picture largely informed by the perspective of the anonymous sources, journalist and news organization.

The WSJ article expressly considers that factor and goes into detail on what's under the surface.

> The end of the long-running negotiations, which hasn’t previously been reported, is the latest example of how Google and other tech giants are trying to strengthen their control over the study and advancement of artificial intelligence.

Could you provide a quote from either of these articles that supports the statement being questioned:

> Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure

Yes.

Further, I don't understand how explicit examples of company infighting over autonomy doesn't already address your point.

Fighting between Deepmind and Google leadership over autonomy doesn't really directly support that Google Brain employees and Deepmind had infighting. They seem to me to be quite different things.

It seems like a big leap to take these articles as support the statement:

> Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure

It certainly might be true, but I'm missing the connection between these articles and the statement.

> They seem to me to be quite different things.

Only if you use vague standards like

-"doesn't really directly support"

-"Google Brain employees"

How are "Google Brain employees" distinct from "Google leadership with Google Brain personnel in their respective reporting line?" What is the criteria for that distinction?

One of HNs failure-modes is inaccuracies get voted to the top if they seem correct to the majority of voters whose biases resonate with poster's.

Aside: thank you for asking. When I previously encountered incorrect top-level comments that I knew to be wrong (insider information), I'd simply ignore and move on. You've inspired me to push back more often.

But not always! There are those among us who like nothing better than to double down in a flame war. One nice thing about having visited often over the past 7 years is that I know whom to avoid responding to (for the most part).

This is a accurate reflection of biases of humans in general. A good story trumps truth.

And also why AI and LLMs are hot right now. A good story trumps truth.

this is actually what an AI would do!

Good managers insulate reports from the politics, if you weren’t plugged into it it’s either your manager did a good job or it’s the only part of Google that isn’t 90% politics.

Signed, “didn’t work at brain or dm but was involved in a lot of alphabet level decision making”.

> This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape goat for missing AI.

I read that to mean the party is over, we are treating that as a strategic subject and are streamlining our organisation. As you rightfully pointed Google basically had two competing organisations with all the complexity associated with that. That’s now over. From now on, there is only one captain steering the ship.

My outsider perspective is that DeepMind was the research arm and Brain was specifically tasked with making the company money through AI/ML applications. This appears to me that Google is combining the two to make sure that DeepMind starts turning a profit by adopting Brain's mission. Of course, DeepMind's brand is orders of magnitude more valuable so it makes sense to keep the name around. Would be happy to hear more knowledgeable takes on if this is an incorrect reading of the tea leaves.

Will we ever live in a world where people once again use first-person pronouns?

I asked GPT-4 to do it and it scattered first-person pronouns everywhere.

https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05

Happy now?

In all seriousness, can we not agree that the version with the correct grammar is a better aesthetic reading experience?

How is this relevant to the comment you were replying to?

What’s the point of earning magic internet beans if not to spend them pointlessly policing bad grammar?

Google has (or until very recently had) some of the best researchers in the industry. Google's problem isn't developing new stuff, it's turning stuff they come up with into a viable product and then developing a market around it. All of their most successful products (search, gmail, maps, youtube) were developed at least a decade ago. They've come up with decent technology since then, but they seem to have developed a catastrophic inability to actually build a business around any of it. The failures of Google+, Duo/Allo, Inbox, Stadia have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with managerial incompetence.

Google could be sitting on the most advanced AI on the planet, but none of that matters as long as they're under the current leadership.

They made the enormous mistake of releasing bard with a lightweight model. It instantly made google look like they were way behind, and made bard largely irrelevant.

Bard should have been limited access and been the absolute most power model they had.

Now everyone is questioning if Google actually can compete with OpenAI at all, despite decades headstart and far more research and funding.

This is not correct. Both DeepMind and Brain had/have separate applied groups. A lot of Brain research was/is not product focused at all. Transformers I'd say are more impactful than any other research innovation in the current AI boom and came from Brain not DM. DM does do great PR.

As much as I would like Google to compete strongly with OpenAI(i.e., ClosedAI) I somehow have this feeling that they are going to end up like IBM Watson.

ChatGPT Wouldn’t even exist without Google e.g. Transformers, Deep RL.

And that's the last thing they probably contribute with how that turned out for Google

Remember Xerox PARC and the GUI.

so sick of this line of corporate worship. "Google" didn't invent anything, the employees did, and the top talent are leaving. Ilya Sutskever was a very key person at Google before he left to start OpenAI, and at most one person from the context is all you need paper still even work there.

the view of outside google of how great they are has zero bearing on the realities inside the company. the company is people - and google is no longer the place to be if you have talent. simple as that.

> "Google" didn't invent anything, the employees did

No shit, way to be pedantic over a common simple abstraction. Do you want a list of every author for every thing that is ever invented when someone refers to something?

It’s not pedantry, people keep saying “google” “invented” this stuff and a) no, they paid the people who did, and b) those people are no longer there.

“Google” is the wrong model of abstraction to deal with as with the founders long gone there is no intrinsically stable mapping between “Google” and “ai talent”.

This isn’t PageRank where the founder invented the original tech. Sundar going on 60 minutes saying vapid nonsense like “ai is fire” is the furthest extent of his abilities. There is nobody in power at google who is capable of leading in this moment.

Do you have any prior knowledge of these teams? They weren't working against each other. One group focused on research and the other focused on products.

Is it bad that I can't tell which one was focused on products? It seems like neither of them was.

Why should you? Neither were public facing.

> Neither were public facing

Which sort of illustrates the point...

Not to be snarky but do you realize that what you have stated is the definition of working against each other? Research teams are about getting to the paper and a deeper understanding, product teams are about getting something out the door that helps you capture value whether you understand it or not. Engineering research teams are notorious for being both ungovernable and spending so much time "understanding" their ideas that they miss the market window. The canonical book on the subject for me was "Fumbling the Future" which talked about Xerox PARC, I worked in Sun Labs ("where good ideas go to die"), hired people out of Microsoft's BARC (Bay Area Research Center), and worked in IBM's Watson group which pulled a bunch of people out of research to "make a product out of AI".

It is a really hard problem to "commercialize" imagination or innovation. Two very different mindsets between "doing product" and "doing research." DOW Chemical did a pretty good job of it, but they have always been more "components of the solution" rather than the full solution.

It wasn't engineering research, it was pure computer science. They published papers, attended conferences, etc. The other team, whom I personally interacted with more were engaged in solution design. They would have a goal (e.g. alpha go) and architect a solution for that specific problem. The two teams were somewhat orthogonal from what I recall.

Yeah, absolutely lining him up to be the scapegoat. His chance for success seems severely compromised and his mission was always to invent AGI, not create some kind of lowly ad-search product. The party sounds over for him and I bet he will be out and off to the next research think-tank soon.

Don't worry, they will sunset it in 3 years, like every other project.

File under: A. Lincoln, team of rivals

This sounds like poor, unsubstantiated gossip and drama from TMZ. Sounds like you have an axe to grind.

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