A pair of DeepMind scientists talking with investors about forming an AI startup
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In order to have a fighting chance Google needs to spin off their AI efforts and issue stock independent of $GOOG.
Now that I think about it, it seems this might be precisely what's occurring. It's possible the approach involves the Scientists "independently" seeking funding, resulting in their Director being sidelined, while the upper echelons of leadership have the opportunity to invest in the start-up. The same leadership that initiated the oppertunity.
Anyway, all hypothetical but this is what I'd do.
Normally i wouldn't say this would work but if they marketed it as "British Innovation in the A(G)I age" it could become an election point
Google has all the top talent and was caught flat footed by smaller, nimbler organizations.
If you're familiar with the political infighting between Brain, Deepmind, and subteams within Brain, you'd know there was a lot of room for improvement.
Also Google would benefit from being able to use and build off more open source stuff. Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo.
Macro cultural trends at Google didn't help either. Stuff like not incentivizing work with longer term payoffs, and too many layers of middle management.
> Only that the tech became production-ready and the rest of the world took notice, and these researchers and engineers decided that they no longer needed Google's money since there was so much available from everyone else.
All that said this is very true and probably unavoidable.
My perception at that time (autumn 2017) was that Tensorflow had the biggest unforced fumble in the modern history in artificial intelligence, not having the vision to make an API aiming the researchers.
They made the almost impossible and took down Theano and Torch in less than 2 years and fueled with a lot of money from Google got the ecosystem for at least 2 years.
I think they thought like “hey, we won’t the comercial ecosystem, so it’s over; academics and research will follow; even this inflexible and cranky API. If they complain, push Keras to them all”.
What happened in reality was, at the time that Facebook made an absolutely wise decision to lift Torch and unite research and a better UX, it just twisted the situation that for me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen?
By being blinded by all that sweet ad revenue, meaning everyone's yearly performance review turns out stellar no matter what they do, because so is the company's bottom line.
They also lost the frontend framework mindshare with facebook with Angular vs React.
As a developer i hardly use anything build by Google. On the other hand Microsoft and Facebook have more tools that developer generally like.
Travel budgets are also non-existent now.
All in all, it's still a good job. But it is significantly worse that before, and the trajectory does not seem great.
I feel like openAI has made more significant impact touching users' lives than google brain ever did. Even if it's building on google's work.
To put it simply, Google is not that attractive anymore. They are the IBM of our generation.
deepmind was kinda independent for many years burning billions of dollars. Now they put them on payroll as other employees.
Europeans don't take so well to "haha this quarter was bad guess we will lay off 15% of the office"
There is a very, VERY good reason that these are Europeans going from an american company with an office (formerly HQ) in London to a potential European Startup.
If you want to boil it down, this is about power, and Power shall NOT eternally flow from California.
Firstly, "European" is not a country nor a nationality with a single culture for such broad generalization, as you're trying to make it be. Individuals value different things differently indifferent from where they come from. There's Europeans who would trade vacation and security for more money and impact, and there's Americans who would trade money and impact for more vacation and security. Nationality plays no part in this, only personal choice.
Secondly, how sure are you that all of DeepMind's employees stem from the old continent in order to make such broad generalizations? AFAIK they have members from all over the globe, not just Europe.
>Power shall NOT eternally flow from California.
Please. Don't. I get enough loud-mouth, nationalistic, fist-in-the-air propaganda from the politicians in the mainstream media, it has no place on HN.
I doubt it. Once money dries up a start up has to close up shop no matter where it is located.
This is almost —thought not quite yet— peak useless AI-startup non-news.
edit to add: the source for this is "people familiar with the matter"
Also, notice how many big names in the AI field have funny accents and non-American names. Maybe startups go to the USA to become Unicorns but a lot is happening in Europe, especially in talent.
I recall listening to Mistral CEO, who also happens to be French, explaining that UK, France and Poland are very good at training mathematicians and as a result they happen to have access to a good talent pool in EU. He also said that many people don't want to go to the US because of the food, safety and other aspect that make EU nice place to be at.
It was a British contractor who created the web; the TCP/IP protocol was invented in the USA. Not saying the English-speaking countries have a monopoly on innovation, but the VC ecosystems and the idea-to-market fast track that exists in the US does not exist in the EU, yet. A lot would need to change for that to become a threat to the US.
On your other point, funny accents and non-American names can be found in all scientific and technology fields, but generally more often in the US than the EU, because that country was actually build by immigrants whereas the EU is very much set in the old ways and prefers locals.
- capital: continuous access to capital without turning a profit for decades is very hard outside US.
- talent: no doubt EU has a lot of talent in tech, but most of them want to come to US for better pay. And the funnel of talent from Universities, both international and domestic, is hard because a lot of them in EU are playing catch-up to their American counterparts.
- culture: there’s so much to be desired in terms of culture when it comes to working in EU. The long hours, the flagrant risk taking, high pay, openness to different philosophies/ways of doing things etc. are all aspects that are missing, but are generally needed for startups to succeed. (The openness to different perspectives was especially one of the things that drove me to US. My German colleagues would often shoot down ideas by saying “this is not <insert your country here>, in Germany we have standards”. Ironically those standards couldn’t get anything shipped ever.)
There’s of course more stringent regulations, but those tend to be everywhere.
Not to mention that little known Trump era tax change regarding software engineering expenses.
For all its virtues and faults 'Europe' tends to value people quite well, both culturally and legalistically.
On a serious note, they should leave Google. That company is on a steady decline, as seen in their products.