
Jeff Dean on Large-Scale Deep Learning at Google - charlieegan3
http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large-scale-deep-learning-at-google.html
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hartator
It seems to work fine for me, a link to the actual talk on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY)

Jeff Dean - Chuck Norris for us nerds - fact as a bonus: "The rate at which
Jeff Dean produces code jumped by a factor of 40 in late 2000 when he upgraded
his keyboard to USB2.0."

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return0
Tangentially, watching the pace of papers coming out in machine learning is
insane. It's so fast, people may literally cite powerpoint slides when the
paper doesnt exist yet. The culture of openness seems to have fostered this
insane pace. Contrasting that with the reclusive culture of life sciences
explains why there is slow progress there.

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hackuser
If someone with technical expertise wanted to keep up on this field, but it
wasn't their profession - i.e., they don't need to know every detail and don't
have time to read a lot - what would be a good source?

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p1esk
Follow Yann Lecun's posts on Facebook.

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milesward
If you like this talk, come see him talk about what's even beyond that at GCP
Next:
[https://cloudplatformonline.com/NEXT2016.html](https://cloudplatformonline.com/NEXT2016.html)

Disclaimer: I will be there freaking out because I work at Google on Cloud and
Jeff Dean is rad.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> If you’re not considering how to use deep neural nets to solve your data
understanding problems, you almost certainly should be. This line is taken
directly from the talk

And this is exactly why Google's hype of their tech is getting dangerous for
everyone else, who is not Google. Because they advocate, nay, they preach,
that everyone should abandon what they're doing and do what Google tells them
works. And, oh, look, we just released those nice, free tools you can use to
do it like we do!

Which is insane. Google is a corporate entity. It has financial interests. The
purpose of its existence is to sell you its stuff, it doesn't give a dime if
you'll solve your problems or not.

This piece of advice is like Bayer, back in the day, selling its Aspirin as
the cure of all ills: "If you're not considering how to take Aspirin to solve
your health problems, you almost certainly should be".

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dekhn
Although Google is a corp and has financial interests, I think it's in
Google's interest to share these ideas in workable form with the world. It can
(and I hope it will) contribute a lot to improving a number of things that are
wrong with the world.

When I was an academic scientist in the mid 2000s, I ended up with more data
than I could deal with, and none of the computing systems in academia at the
time dealt well with that (they were tuned for HPC/supercomputers). The
bigtable, mapreduce, and GFS papers were huge to me, because they provided a
nicer framework for data processing. Although Google made those tools for
Search and Ads (and profited greatly from them) they also published them, and
Doug Cutting and others incorporated them into Hadoop. A similar thing is
happening now, but Google got better at releasing their codes as open source,
which reduces the time between publication of a good idea, and replication of
that work by others outside the corp.

(eventually, I went to google to get direct access to its infrastructure;
built Exacycle, gave away an enormous amount of free computing time that cost
Google rather than profiting it, the leadership _loved_ it even though it cost
money, and I even managed to get Googler to apply machine learning to academic
problems I cared about).

So I don't think Google solely acts in its own short term financial interests.

Also, aspirin has turned out to be amazing at solving a wide range of health
problems, so I think bayer was probably right (if not for the right reasons)
on that one.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> So I don't think Google solely acts in its own short term financial
interests.

I think what your experience shows is that on the one hand individuals within
Google (or any big corp) can and do align their own personal interest with
that of the corp and on the other hand that the corp can benefit the community
as long as it is making profit and serving its own purposes. Nothing
surprising there.

As to releasing its tools, here's my Thought for the Day: There's no such
thing as a free lunch and the only people who pretend there is are the ones
who want to steal your lunch money. Google releases its tools when it is in
the interest of Google to do so, not when it's in the interest of anyone else.
Yes, they're doing better now than in the past in open-sourcing stuff and I
can't know what's on their mind. But I can tell that it doesn't hurt them to
get people adopting their tech even as Google itself develops it further and
further to something that can only be used by a corp with Google's resources.
In short, I'm pretty sure that their friendly offer of, frex, TensorFlow is
just some trick to get people roped in to their technology, in the same way
that other corps have tried to do before- except that they also made you pay
for the privilege.

^

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dekhn
Did you really say that making TensorFlow open source is a trick to get people
roped into Google technology?

That doesn't make any sense to me.

Another big point I think you missed is those individuals within Google
influence the decisions about what gets open sourced. We have an entire team
that facilitates taking Google-written code and opensourcing it.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
OK, with the hindsight of a good night's sleep I admit that the bit about
giving away TensorFlow does sound a bit tinfoil-hats on.

Let me rephrase that then: I can't possibly hope to know why Google is giving
away free stuff. I can certainly know that they don't do it out of the
kindness of their hearts though.

That said, I am indeed very concerned that Google is trying to shape, not only
the market, but the science also, to suit its own interests. That could be
really bad for everyone, including Google; if research stagnates, they too
will find themselves unable to deliver on their big promises about ever
speeding progress.

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return0
He gave a similar talk at stanford a few days later:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7YkPWpwFD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7YkPWpwFD4)

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yeukhon
Nice. Forbbiden. Did we manage to crash the site? highscalability.com supposed
to be pretty high-volume site.

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toddh
Sorry about this. It means Squarespace has black listed your IP for some
reason. Unfortunately I can't do anything about it. If you can try from
another address it will probably work.

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yeukhon
Wow :-) I am working from corp office. But thanks!

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goc
I am very interested in AI that can teach itself(sounds too great). Where can
I learn up about such AI(related concepts and the whole 9 yards) to start
reading papers in the field? I am just looking for comprehensive
sources(preferably textbooks).

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knn
AI by Russell and Norvig. Machine learning by Murphy, Elements of Statistical
Learning by Hastie et al. Just a few good ones out of many!

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gnahckire
AI by Russell and Norvig is one of my favorite textbooks of all time.

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sounds
I wish I had more than one upvote for this article. Read the article. If you
have the time, just watch the video.

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unexistance
you need to understand the data before it can be made to good 'use'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11272473](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11272473)

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giardini
From the article

 _"...it seems like an excellent time to gloss Jeff’s talk..."_

"gloss" a talk? WTF?

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npalli
To gloss is to annotate some text (or talk)[1], the word glossary comes from
that. That meaning is overshadowed by the more modern association with
shininess but the annotation meaning seems appropriate here.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss_(annotation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss_\(annotation\))

