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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

At this point in time, why wouldn't we give at least benefit of the doubt to Jeff Dean immediately? His track record is second to none, and he's still going strong. Has something happened that cast a shadow on him? Sometimes it is the messenger that brings in the weight.

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Looks like he aligned himself with the wrong folks here. He is a system builder at heart but not an expert in chip design or EDA. And also not really an ML researcher. Some would say he got taken for a ride by a young charismatic grifter and is now in too deep to back out. His focus on this project didn’t help with his case at Google. They moved all the important stuff away from him and gave it to Demis last year and left him with an honorary title. Quite sad really for someone of his accomplishments.

I mean Jeff Dean is probably more ML researcher than probably 90% of the ML researchers out there. Sure, he may not be working on state of the art stuff himself; but he's too up the chain to do that.

That's an appeal to authority, and not an effective one. Jeff Dean doesn't have a good track record in chip design.

What are you even talking about? Jeff had a hand in TPU, which is so successful that all other AI companies are trying to clone this project and spin up their own efforts to make custom AI chips.

By what measure are TPUs “successful”? Where is your data coming from?

They're the only non-nvidia accelerator used to train state of the art large language models at scale?

AWS Trainium does as well: https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/trainium/

Please specify what you mean by "had a hand in TPU" and where else he had his hand. Thank you

I don't think he got taken for a ride. Rather, he also wanted to believe that AlphaChip would be as revolutionary as it claimed to be and chose to ignore Chaterjee's reservations. Understandable, given all the AlphaX models coming out around that timeframe.

Not a ML researcher, too? He was working on neural networks in 1990. Last year he was under Research and now reports directly to Sundar. What do you know that we don't?

> Some would say he got taken for a ride by a young charismatic grifter and is now in too deep to back out.

Was the TPU physical design team also taken in? And also MediaTek? And also TF-Agents, which publicly said they re-produced the AlphaChip method and results exactly?

What did the TPU physical design team say about this publicly? Can you also point to a statement from MediaTek? (I've seen a quote in Google blog, but was unable to confirm it). Who in the TF-agents team has serious physical design background?

Are you really suggesting that the TPU team does not stand behind the graphs in Google's own blog post? And that MediaTek does not stand behind their quoted statement?

How would I know either way?

Someone mentioned here before that Google folks have been using "hyperbolae". So, if MediaTek can clarify how they are using AlphaChip, everyone wins.

That made sense when Jeff Dean gave talks in 2020, 2021, and 2022. He is now responding to skepticism from the EDA community by unscholarly personal attacks and vague references to "many companies" using the work. He is beyond benefit of the doubt, and into the realm of probable cause.

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