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Comment by tziki | Hacker News Reader

Not talking specifically about this one, but to me it seems DeepMind is producing more higher quality research and breakthroughs than other parts of Google. I wonder why that is, it's not like other parts of Google are lacking in talented ML researchers.

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Well... DeepMind is focused on very abstract research and publication. There aren't many projects of this scale operating with these goals.

Waymo's goals, for example, probably focus less on abstract research and publication. They exist to build a thing and make it a business eventually. Whatever AI research they do exists to support that. Waymo are really big, so that can still be a lot.

Most AI projects google have are probably smaller, and/or less publication focused. Also newer. Deepmind is >10 years old.

Google bought Deepmind when they already had impressively successful results. Once the bought the company, they started to apply stuff from Alphago to anything they could think of with Google level access to computing resources. Within a few years they started having successes in some of these areas. This is basically a project coming to fruition.

I think the project has a very "make it more general" orientation and their approach yields a "hey look, it works for this now" success story at regular intervals.

Start to worry when intervals hit the ohm frequency and deep thought pops into existence asking for a sandwich .

Afaik it’s run completely independently from London, by the original founder. Distance from the mothership + founder in charge + separate goals = independence and results

There seem to be less PR about those, but the rest of Google is doing a lot: https://research.google/pubs/

Agreed, few things are as flashy as protein folding :)

Wow, I really feel like this is an example of how quickly people adapt to and become accustomed to novel technology. DeepMind is legendary of course but the output of Google Brain is also just bananas. I can point my mobile phone camera at a Russian newspaper and get it translated into my language. That’s practical! The speech recognition on android, the Pixel camera, smart reply/compose in gmail, many other practical applications. And, brain team publishes constantly. Dozens of papers every year.

not like other parts of Google are lacking in talented ML researchers.

I wonder if Google has split it's AI research so that they funnel all their more fundamental research from different departments into DeepMind and make them the 'face' of publicity friendly easy to understand AI research results.

Or it could be that all their top AI talent gravitate towards DeepMind, and the people that work there simply are the best AI talent that Google has.

From experience DeepMind is the #1 goal for any AI/ML person anywhere in Europe. I know people don’t necessarily want to be googlers, but Deepmind ? Yes. If you’re brilliant in the field where else would you work? OpenAI is now completely different from where it started.

It’s also heavily based in London and I know they absorb basically all the top Europe folks who want to stay close to home. Not everyone wants to go to the US.

Demis is also a bit of a legend and I know DeepMind people teach/recruit at UCL his old university. I assume they do so everywhere in the UK but London is an easy talent pool to make and recruit talent for them. So they have a full integrated vertical stack for talent.

I think Deepmind has a different PR team, they seem to put a lot more effort into publicizing their discoveries.

But plenty of big results from people working directly for Google & FB.

Have you noticed how phones/home devices can actually understand you accurately now? Didn't used to be that way a few years ago, etc, etc.

Have you noticed how Google Translate is actually getting quite good now?

Deepmind can pick whatever problem they want and use enormous effort to solve it.

Other teams at Google must solve problem that Google has... which can be harder.

It’s not “talent” it’s management. ML researchers outside Deepmind are delivering for Google products like ads and Assistant, not working on macro prediction models for fun.

BERT?

Maybe because it was an acquisition, so they had already built up a talent pool?

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