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Comment by manux | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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!

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?

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 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.

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