Google is an AI first company
Google's future is strictly tied to its AI products
All AI is written with Python.
Google lays off all Python team.
Segmentation fault
Google's future is strictly tied to its AI products
All AI is written with Python.
Google lays off all Python team.
Segmentation fault
They've been trying to focus on AI, but with moves like this, their position in AI will likely end up matching their position in Cloud vs AWS/Azure.
Only high-level is written in python, low level is Cuda that is a form of C.
Also, you would think the first to replace workers with AI would be the AI companies like Google.
Edit: I guess I'm not sure on whether large training runs count as prod or not. They're certainly expensive and mission critical.
I don't directly develop the models, I played with some for fuzzing [1] and I'm working on security for them [2]. And, before joining GOSST, I was leading the OSS DevInfra team in TF. I still have the most number of commits made by a human [3] even after 2 days of leaving the team, though I see the next person only needs 4 more :)
[1]: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/08/ai-powered-fuzzing-b... [2]: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/10/increasing-transpare... [3]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors
Good luck!
To that end, focus heavily on whatever exists in the vertex of what you're good at (which did you like and excel at of those things you did?) and a growth area (example: Python, C++ and the multitudinous ways they continue to be used together in AI etc).
So you have to look at what existing leverage you have and build upon that foundation. It will be very difficult to get a role without getting some hands on experience back first, so where I'd start is, could you step down to become IC at your current job? I'd be more interested to evaluate a candidate doing Python/Kotlin that wants to move into something adjacent than someone in management who just wants to be a dev again.
For example, collecting Stackoverflow posts about GCP products, and distributing the needed subsets of them among vendors and employees in tech support to potentially answer, comment, edit, vote on, re-tag, &c, used to be all Python (and the "scale" was a few hundred or thousands of posts and people at a time -- ridiculously small "by Google `production` standards", and perfectly adequate for the much-higher-programmer-productivity Python has always afforded... I know, because I did the vast majority of that coding, including maintenance, ongoing monitoring of performance, and VERY occasional optimizations if and when monitoring showed them to be desirable).
That was the core of my job for my last several years at Google -- I won't even list the many other NON-prototyping tasks I did in previous years (decades, almost), the vast majority of them in Python. And -- the majority of my performance reviews during those 18+ years were rated "exceeds expectations", so it seems that world-class Python skill (which clearly was crucial to me getting a hiring offer back in 2004, though, alas, visa issues delayed my start to early 2005) were extremely useful for at least some of us Google engineers.
Alex
Type error on line 3: “Python” is not a valid type for “all AI”.
It's unfortunate that we'll likely never know what was the actual reason they decided that the old team was... overpaid? overstaffed? overly something else?
Saving money on workforce isn't the most sound business decision. After all, workforce is what generates the revenues. If you buy cheaper workforce, you should be getting ready to also lose some revenue due to quality drop... well, in large brush strokes. Maybe, in some situations the product was overpriced and making it cheaper by lowering the quality does make financial sense... Hard to tell.
Having a well-maintained Python tooling is essential for _any_ company who does AI. While smaller companies can get away with open source solutions, for bigger companies it is unavoidable to have teams dedicated to maintaining and supporting Python tooling.
This announcement is troubling, and may indicate one of the two: 1) Google is in dire situation, and there is no more fat to cut, so they are starting to cut muscle. 2) Google management is clueless and cannot discriminate between fat and muscle.
Google is an ad first company
FTFY
Next comes YELLING-LOUDLY-TO-COME-DOWN-TO-THE-LOCAL-CAR-DEALERSHIP-FOR-NO-MONEY-DOWN-OFFERS phase of advertisements, which type are also routinely and nearly uniformly ignored.
Is Google using JS for the backend ad serving / AI?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#AI_winter_of_the_199...
> Many researchers in AI in the mid 2000s deliberately called their work by other names, such as informatics, machine learning, analytics, knowledge-based systems, business rules management, cognitive systems, intelligent systems, intelligent agents or computational intelligence, to indicate that their work emphasizes particular tools or is directed at a particular sub-problem. Although this may be partly because they consider their field to be fundamentally different from AI, it is also true that the new names help to procure funding by avoiding the stigma of false promises attached to the name "artificial intelligence".[49][50]
The problem with Tech layoffs is not that they weren't doing important work, it is that there were large teams to do what essentially can be done by two-person teams.
You're mistaking their intent, they are actually okay with less work being done. It's a desire to simply hit the reset button and see how much money they can save, and how much they need to build up the team again. They know it harms productivity but maybe something cheaper will come out of it. They are gambling.