
Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow - BIackSwan
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/23/google-x-founder-sebastian-thrun-has-left-his-role-as-google-vp-and-fellow/
======
sounds
Thrun's role as Google VP has been mostly moot for several years now.

Those close to Thrun have made no secret of the fact he's focused on Udacity
and thus, whether he would like to work at Google or not, he can only do so
much.

------
strongai
Ironically, if he has left to concentrate on Udacity, my own belief is that he
is a poor teacher. Of course it depends on which pedagogical teat you are
sucking from, but my experience of Thrun's delivered Udacity courses is poor.
Many of his video segments seem to involve him slavishly following his
'script', occasionally hissing out encouraging phrases such as 'Isn't this
great!'. He hasn't sequenced a series of logical teaching moments in which the
concepts flow nicely. It's as if he's decided his first draft is good enough.
Just my opinion of course.

~~~
ryangallen
Udacity has done what any good start-up should and launched a solid MVP and
iterated on it, delivering free, in-demand courses in a short amount of time.
No, the materials and scripts have not always perfect but they are still more
valuable than many college courses I've taken. If he is in fact leaving to
focus energy on Udacity, isn't that a positive move in regards to your
critiques?

~~~
strongai
Yes, you make a good point. My opinion - and that's all that it is - is that
his (many) abilities lie in the Google [x] direction, not as a poster boy for
MOOCs.

~~~
bertil
I've recorded my self and many others teaching: there is only terrible
teachers, and people who survive the humiliation of seeing themselves try more
than twenty times. I would never let anyone watch any of their first five
takes first.

------
IBM
Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other
R&D lab that tech companies have had?

~~~
julianpye
My former boss (CTO of Panasonic) once told me that the only way to do real
R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge
R&D. Everyone else was doing just product development.

Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky
R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.

~~~
shas3
> Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky
> R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.

That is quite wrong, really. There are many industrial research labs that are
pursuing 'bluesky' research, in pretty much all sectors, including computer
science, EE, chemistry, pharmacology, etc. Just to name a few, Mitisubishi
Electric Research Labs (MERL), IBM Almaden/New York/Zurich, Microsoft
Research, traditional pharma companies, traditional chemicals/materials
companies, GE Global Research, etc. all have 'blueskies' agendas to varying
extents.

~~~
julianpye
Just because there are research labs, it doesn't mean that they are doing
truly free blue-sky research. Lots of the labs you mention have very
antiquated IPR focus, especially Mitsubishi and IBM. And as an example,
Almaden still feels closer to the lair of a a James Bond enemy in the 60s than
a free spirited R&D lab.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
If IBM's Watson does not count as "free blue-sky" AI research, I don't know
what else counts.

[http://youtu.be/P18EdAKuC1U?t=2m20s](http://youtu.be/P18EdAKuC1U?t=2m20s)

[https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=an+acco...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=an+account+of+the+principalities+of+wallachia+and+moldavia+inspired+this+author's+famous+novel&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gws_rd=ssl)

Funnily, Google completes my phrase "an account of the principalities of
wallachia and moldavia inspired this author's famous novel" but is completely
clueless.

As the other poster said, Google seems to be winning the advertising game
(after all that is how they make $).

~~~
sqrt17
IBM's Watson is about the level of research that Google or Microsoft do in
their regular research labs - i.e., it definitely has a longer-term scope, and
it's reasonable to expect that investments in this area will pay off in the
next 10-15 years rather than 2-3 years as with normal product development.

It is not blue-sky research, though: it's pretty clear what the value
proposition is, who the (potential) customers are, etc.; IBM just put on the
publicity upfront with their "winning Jeopardy!" grand challenge to put
themselves on the map in a space that is currently dominated by small boutique
companies and a very limited numbers of bigger players such as Thomson-Reuters
and (partly) Nuance.

Which means that IBM will have an easier time selling to existing enterprise
customers who want to get in on this "big data" thing using text analytics
(and, frankly, it's also good advertising for their existing data analytics
business).

~~~
cscurmudgeon
"It is not blue-sky research,"

As someone who dwells in AI/Machine Learning for a living, let me tell you:
Watson is the most extreme blue sky research out there. It happens to have a
customer base that intersects with IBM's current base. Why should this be a
diminishing factor?

Google's blue sky research is also ultimately for customers. IBM is good at
actually selling its research as products. No company does anything for truly
altruistic reasons. If so, Google would be spending billions of particle
accelerators.

[http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/info/news_ibm_help_cern.ht...](http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/info/news_ibm_help_cern.html)

~~~
esrauch
> Watson is the most extreme blue sky research out there

Do you mean it is the most blue sky research being done in the field of AI by
large companies? Even if it was closest to blue sky research being done in
machine learning by large tech companies, that really doesn't automatically
mean that it is blue sky research.

> It happens to have a customer base that intersects with IBM's current base

The definition of blue sky research is "research without any clear path to a
product". It isn't diminishing the importance of research to say that it is
blue sky (in fact many people would argue the opposite). Watson was already
being touted for an actual product launch by the time that it was on Jeopardy.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
What would an example be from, say, Google?

~~~
esrauch
I don't know that Google has too much blue sky research itself. I guess maybe
something that Kurzweil is up to, have they released anything about him?

I guess probably anything that Hinton was hired for which is more fundamental
neural network research, maybe the cat recognizing neural network research
they did on youtube video?

------
Animats
I wonder what he'll do next. Udacity isn't a research problem; it's a
marketing and quality control problem. "Massively Online" courses have turned
out to be something of a dud, anyway.

~~~
ericd
The people I've seen calling MOOCs a dud seem to have had the expectation that
they'd see completion rates somewhere near traditional courses, which is
laughable when you consider the differences in structure, demographics, and
buy in. Even despite the high dropout rates, I think they end up teaching more
students than the comparable class session at a university.

I took a grad class to completion on Coursera, and I think it was great - I
learned quite a lot, it was free, and the quality of instruction was
excellent, rivaling that of my non-lab university courses.

That said, how to effectively teach an online course is very much an unsolved
problem. It's not nearly as cut and dry as you suggest. As of now, they've
mostly just moved the lectures to online video, put up some online quizzes,
and some forums. It's promising, but it's a naive implementation still.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Is how to effectively teach an online course the problem to focus on?

It's interesting to note that if MOOCs turn out to be a dud, yet people are
learning effectively from MOOCs, then it's proof that people pay for a college
degree, not for education. In other words, prestige seems to be the issue, not
education.

~~~
kenferry
> yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs

Statistically speaking, they aren't, that's the problem. Completion rates with
Coursera are ~5%. Some argue that many people don't _want_ to finish the
courses, but this views the product as something fixed. For any other kind of
business, is "people sign up but then don't value it enough to continue" an
excuse for lack of retention?

~~~
pekk
Retention is not a goal. For example, if you are just trying to make money,
then you don't really care if all your content is consumed as long as people
still pay their subscriptions or whatever.

Of course, the reason completion rates are so bad with MOOCs is free access.
If you force people to filter themselves out unless they are willing to pay a
lot, you will see more normal "completion rates" expressed as a percentage of
those who paid a lot.

It would be perverse to argue, however, that MOOCs should be pay-only for this
reason. It's a confusion about the meaning of completion rate as a performance
metric for MOOCs.

~~~
kenferry
There are plenty of free in-person classes in the world (I'm sure you can sign
up for a dance class, for example), and an in-person class that had a 5%
completion rate would be a disaster.

I'm not sure what you're arguing. You think people are learning well from
MOOCs in their current form? You might note Thrun's own thoughts on the
subject: [http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-
thrun-u...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-
climb)

"We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time,
I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We
have a lousy product,"

~~~
sillysaurus3
_You think people are learning well from MOOCs in their current form?_

Yes. I am, for example.

Online classes aren't physical classes. Physical classes don't have 5%
retention rates because people have to show up for them, so they're more
likely to go next time. Being in a group makes people want to continue being
in it. But with online classes, there's no such hook, and so people skip out.

Also, it seems mistaken for stats on retention rates to include everyone who
originally signed up. They should measure the retention rate for people who
made it halfway through the course. I'd bet that they'll see a much higher
rate, because if someone hasn't left halfway through the course, they're
unlikely to leave just because they suddenly feel like it. And if that's true,
then it's evidence that people in that situation take MOOCs as seriously as
their normal classes.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, the one I completed, I was completely locked in by ~halfway through, due
to the already-invested time.

