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Comment by GreedClarifies | Hacker News Reader

"this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy."

I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google.

Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research paper game and into the product game.

Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward. Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment between the company's goals and those of the employees.

Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine, but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't that wealthy.

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>DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line.

DeepMind has researched and developed features that exist in many Google products today, e.g. Wavenet: https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/waven...

LOL, if you look at the amount of money Google has poured into Google and how much they got back for their investment, it's laughable.

Things like the Wavenet "contributions" are just Demis paying lip service to the fact that once in a while Google was nudging them to produce something, anything really that was actually useful.

Google putting the extreme amounts of easy dollars they have into things that aren't instantly profitable is very much what the founders said they'd do though

In 2021 Deepmind generated $2bln in revenue.

This was paid by Google for unspecified research services. But the way it’s accounted for it’s likely that it was based on some legitimate contribution. It is unlikely it would be structured this way if it was just corporate support.

DeepMind has public financial filings and you can go read the exact language they use to describe the revenue they generate.

Sounds like corporate funny money to me, not real revenue.

If it was, it probably wouldn’t be accounted for in taxable fashion as it is today.

DeepMind is profitable and paying tax on that profit. It’s public information that you can see in its UK regulatory filings.

Fair point. I didn't realize it was taxable as I am used to only profits being taxed and assumed Deepmind is run at a loss.

It's like bragging about earning a good salary and then it turns out that you work for your dad.

> DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google.

You could say the same about OpenAI and Microsoft, they drained money for years until about 6 months ago when suddenly the partnership started to pay back big style.

OpenAI is still massively unprofitable and MSFT is (rightly IMO) going to invest way more money in them so it’s definitely still a drain. A modest drain relative to MSFTs overall resources

At least the path to profitablity is super clear though: selling GPT-4 access. What's the path to profitablity on AlphaGo or whatever?

As much as I'd love an OpenAI-style API from Google, I'm not expecting that. It will probably be "profitable" to them in the unseen backend making Search, Google Assistant, etc better. I've been playing with Bard a lot and it's pretty good, but OpenAI's API offering just makes them so much more useful to me since I can use whatever app I want (or even write my own) to consume the product, and it's easy for me to see the value for my dime.

The main strategy for Microsoft is slightly different IMO - It's to use GPT-4 to make their products even better.

"Papers have little/no impact on perf" - this is a ridiculous and false claim. Almost every single advancement in any field has come from academia. Sure, it may not be recognized as such by the general public because they aren't experts in the area - but the fact remains that academia is pretty much the only way to progress as a society. Companies just take what academia gives them and make products out of it for their own profit (not to completely trivialize that - it still comes with it's own set of challenges), but the private sector is completely misaligned with making real progress towards hard problems. Deepmind is one of the examples that continues to show this despite being a 'corporate entity' in that the large advancements seen are out of their employment (i.e. giving their excess of capital) of professors at universities who focus on their research.

> Almost every single advancement in any field has come from Academia

This sounds like you need far more evidence. If you say academia as the institution where you share papers, sure but then that’s just a sharing mechanism. Almost like saying all advancements came out of Internet because arxiv is where research is shared.

If you want to say professors and Universities have been heralding AI advancement, that has not been true for at least 10 years possibly more. Moment industry started getting into Academia, Academia couldn’t compete and died out. Even Transformers the founding paper of the modern GPT architectures came out of Google Research. In Vision, ResNet, MaskRCNN to Segment Anything came out of Meta / MIcrosoft. The last great academic invention might have been dropout and even that involved Apple. After that I fail to see Academia coming up with a single invention in ML that the rest of the community instantly adopted because of how good it was.

Huh? None of this is true for a lot of core recent work. A very obvious example is transformers, which did not come out of academic research (or DeepMind for that matter) at all.

I feel like google crossed some point about a decade ago where they stopped making innovative stuff and started focusing on squeezing revenue out of everything else. A bit like when Carly turned HP into a printing/ink racket. Both the decline of google maps and the inability of google to filter out noise from their search results are strong indicators of this for me. Scrambling to field a competing product to maintain relevancy in this emerging market would be consistent with this assessment as well. The old google would have fielded the product first because it was useful, but the current google seems to do it because they don't want to lose revenue.

I'd say that point was a bit less than a decade ago - Aug 10, 2015.

In case anyone missed that: https://twitter.com/broadstreetlag/status/630852540897316864

I don't know if said bureaucracy is a blessing or a curse given Google's track record in product management. If pressed I would bet towards the curse option.

Different people excel at different types of work (particularly where deep experience is the most significant contributor to performance). Tasking academic researchers with building product is the pathway to hell.

The existing, top-performing product teams at Google should be taking that research and building products around it. If Google has any top-performing product teams left, that is...

Yeah, Google needs to make sure that their research doesn’t go the way of Xerox PARC.

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