Google acquires AIMatter, maker of the Fabby computer vision app | Hacker News Reader

Google acquires AIMatter, maker of the Fabby computer vision app

techcrunch.com

71 pointscoloneltcb12 comments

Good for them - machine learning is all the rage these days, but actually turning it into a viable business on your own seems incredibly hard - both getting data to work on, doing something genuinely useful/valuable with it AND somehow monetizing that is a tall order for a startup (ML generally seems much more suitable as an improvement to an existing product IMO). So my impression is that getting acqui-hired by one of the big players is one of the best outcomes for a team like this - you get a nice signing bonus and get to work at one of the few companies with the scale and access to data to actually make viable products with machine learning.

machine learning is all the rage these days, but actually turning it into a viable business on your own seems incredibly hard - both getting data to work on, doing something genuinely useful/valuable with it AND somehow monetizing that is a tall order for a startup

Not if you are in manufacturing. (edit: or finance)

"from what we understand most of AIMatter’s employees will come onboard to Google"

For some reason that i can't fully articulate, and if you want to pedant me on this with a more specific framing then go ahead, but this is very impressive to me and points to the value of the AIMatter team. If 10-30% of people that make it to Google onsites are then approved, what are the odds of finding a group of people who would all pass the process? Quite low and points the value of the team

I don't know anyone involved in this but based on the data given this is really just an acqui-hire so it's expected that they do that. They just buy the tech to be on the safe-side and will just store the source code somewhere and never use it again. Google hopes to get something out of the talent in the company but is likely very clueless and will waste their time in the end. They will filter bad people out but you'll still get slimmed down version of a normal interview with more flexible standards. So a much higher percentage of the interviewees will make it through the process.

I really don't get why we have these 'failures' always in the news and spin them as a successful exit (it's really just run out of money or have no hope of getting anywhere and that's why we want to sell). I went through it myself and you'll likely get some nice title at a nice company and a great stock packages but otherwise it's wasted time besides looking nice in your CV. For the company itself it just means it was a failure (could still mean nice tech but they would have went nowhere).

It sounds like you sure know a lot about a thing that was announced hours ago, including what will happen in the future. Please share any sources!

I would agree with this. To imply (as below) that there is some lowered interview bar as part of an acquisition, or other factors, would be, well, un-Googley. Also untrue.

Congrats to us on what looks to be an acquisition of a lot of bright and creative new coworkers.

(Disclosure: I work at Google. I also know nothing about this specific acquisition but will sure mess around with this app tonight.)

I'm willing to bet there is a good chance that if all of those employees went through standard Google hiring channels, not a single one would make it through in their first try.

For a company that takes pride in hiring engineers who more often than not fail the hiring process at least once before eventually getting hired, it's a bit far fetched to assume that Google would not do anything un-Googley and would still end up hiring a non-zero fraction of a company they just acquired based purely on that company's outward success in their favorite arenas (mobile, app-downloads, capital-raising, AI, etc) that have nothing to do with technical performance in 45-minute chunks of time.

As someone who failed the process more than once and has read about and is familiar with the process and the arguments surrounding it on both sides, feed me the mantra that Google is coveted enough to afford to fail smart people in interviews (a common response to the potentially false positive rejections). But don't insult my intelligence by claiming that if Google liked and acquired a successful startup, there was absolutely zero change in the interview process before 10%-30% of the staff was hired.

Do they serve Koolaid at Google by chance?

Yeh exactly, they can all pat eachother on the backs about passing the google interview, about joining the elitle club, while modertating youtube comments from there many in-house cafe's.

Why dont tech companies just cut to the chase and start dorms? That way these kids will never have to leave uni, or catch a bus to work again!

You joke but there was a time in my life where I would have loved to live in a Google dorm.

Isn't working at a key role in an acquired (= successful) startup the ultimate job interview?

My thought was always that job interviews are only the second best option, as opposed to simply working with someone. So the startup does all the filtering for Google.

smart move for them. belarussian engineers are likely 5 times as cheap as google engineers. they can do this, pay premium because of the aquisition and still be better off than if they had hired a bunch of people.

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