
Why Andrew Ng left Google and joined Baidu - thousandx
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/30/andrew-ng-baidu/
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oniTony
Somewhat misleading, as Andrew Ng had left Google in 2012 to co-found and run
Coursera. Baidu got him back into AI/ML. More details on his own blog post
from 3 months ago — [http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-
message...](http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message-from-
co-founder-andrew-ng)

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ChuckMcM
I found this an interesting quote:

    
    
       > “Frankly, Kai just made decisions, and it just happened 
       > without a lot of committee meetings,” Ng said. “The 
       > ability of individuals in the company to make decisions 
       > like that and move infrastructure quickly is something 
       > I really appreciate about this company.”
    

That was, initially, one of the more interesting things about Google. You
wanted to start a project and could get resources to run it in the various
data centers relatively easily. If a guy like Ng was frustrated inside of
Google by 'committee meetings' keeping him from getting things done quickly,
then that says something about the current state of affairs there.

~~~
ProAm
It's what happens when companies get big. Same thing happened at Microsoft.

~~~
opendais
Ya, but one can hope they'd think in terms of quotas [e.g. You have XXXX of
machine time and/or a $$$ budget of XXXXX to test ideas] rather than require
committee meetings.

~~~
nostrademons
They require the committee meetings to set the quotas.

Quotas suffer from the standard budgeting problem: everybody inflates their
needs and hoards resources so that if they need extra in the future, they
don't have to go through the budgeting process again. As a result, when a new
project comes along that's not just an off-shoot of an existing high-priority
project, they find that they're starved out of quota. They don't have an
existing quota because the project previously didn't exist, and then when they
go to get some, they find that all machines are currently allocated because
everybody else overbid to secure room for expansion.

Google was rolling out a fix for this process when I left them, but I'm not
sure if I can share the details on it.

~~~
narrator
I know some bigger companies like HP make sure every department bills every
other department in order to make sure that you don't get problems like you
would in any centrally planned economy without a price mechanism.

~~~
Scuds
Microsoft works in a similar way, so it's easy to hire vendors.

But if you don't have enough internal customers, you might have budget
shortfalls, so guess what happens for vendors.

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mark_l_watson
I very much enjoyed Andrew Ng's machine learning class, so much so that I was
sad when the class ended. I wish him great success at Baidu.

A little off topic, but: Corporations no longer are loyal to employees (unless
they are at the top of their field). Some countries now seem much more
interested in the interests of corporations than people. Therefore, I think
that it is very smart for individuals to more consider themselves as 'citizens
of the world' and be very open to working for whoever pays them the most,
provides the best infrastructure, etc.

~~~
mhurron
> Corporations no longer are loyal to employees

It has been that way since at least the mid 90's. I am amazed at the number of
people who still think they need to show where they work any kind of loyalty.

~~~
mwfunk
Corporations are legal entities and don't have qualities like "loyalty", so it
doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize them. The people that work at
corporations, including managers and executives, certainly can have those
sorts of qualities. Whether or not they do is another story, and that's going
to vary widely from one organization to the next. Loyalty is something that's
given to and accepted from people, not legal entities. I have absolutely felt
degrees of loyalty to some employers and a lack of it to others.

~~~
johnward
Loyalty from a corporate perspective means things like pensions, health care,
not laying off 20k people every fall, etc. Like the days that you could work
for GE your entire life and actually retire. There was a mutual loyalty. The
company took care of you and you therefore took care of the company. Now
someone could offer me a couple thousand dollars extra in pay and I'd be gone
in a heart beat. Don't forget that legal entity is made of people who decide
how that legal entity will function.

Also if corporations can't show loyalty, a human quality, then how can they be
people?

~~~
mwfunk
I don't think they are people, but the US legal system disagrees with me of
late. :(

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leothekim
FTFA:

[Ng said:] “The ability of individuals in the company to make decisions like
that and move infrastructure quickly is something I really appreciate about
this company.”

That might sound like a kind deference to Ng’s new employer, but he was
alluding to a clear advantage Baidu has over Google.

“He ordered 1,000 GPUs [graphics processing units] and got them within 24
hours,” Adam Gibson, co-founder of deep-learning startup Skymind, told
VentureBeat. “At Google, it would have taken him weeks or months to get that.”

Weeks or months? I wouldn't expect Google to get them in 24 hours, but has it
really gotten that bureaucratic there?

~~~
mwfunk
That doesn't sound like a fundamental difference between Baidu and Google so
much as it sounds like he has a lot more authority within Baidu. A lack of red
tape is not inherently a good thing- if we read some other story about some
other Baidu employee who asked for and received 1000 GPUs within 24 hours for
a project that ended up being completely pointless, that story would be about
wastefulness and lack of oversight at Baidu, not about how refreshingly free
of bureaucracy it is.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with any of the points here- there are just
many different ways of looking at these data points.

~~~
leothekim
Good point. Though, my impression of Andrew Ng's tenure at Google was that he
was running a high visibility deep learning project[1] that was attracting
some big names, and one would think he'd have had some authority to get
hardware provisioned sooner rather than later. Certainly his level of
authority is much greater within Baidu now than it was at Google.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/2013/05/neuro-artificial-
intelligence/a...](http://www.wired.com/2013/05/neuro-artificial-
intelligence/all/)

~~~
jtmcmc
Google has a LOT of highly famous AI/ML/DL researchers like Hinton, Kurzweil
and Norvig to name some off the top of my head. Ng is certainly very highly
regarded but he was one of many there. It seems like at Baidu he's top dog.

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djvu9
Do you guys know that reportedly 30+% or even a half of Baidu's revenue comes
from false advertisements by private hospitals and medical institutes mostly
owned by companies from PuTian, a city in south China? It is literally bloody
dirty money. If you can read Chinese, here is some news report:
[http://finance.china.com.cn/industry/medicine/yygc/20140721/...](http://finance.china.com.cn/industry/medicine/yygc/20140721/2553637.shtml)

~~~
ASneakyFox
So about the same as googles ad business? Not shocking to me.

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ryenus
Baidu as a search provider did lots of immoral things, that's why these days
it's so difficult to use Google because of GFW/censoship, and why Baidu is so
dominant in China.

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noname123
Can we just state the obvious? Chinese AI peeps left because they want to go
back to China. This isn't an unusual trend, as an Chinese American, all of my
cousins who came to study here abroad in US have plans to go back to China,
unlike my parents' generation who came here for a PhD and stayed.

And even amongst my parents' generation, my uncles who have gotten PhD and
tenure at US universities and left for universities in China. The reason being
that they can get paid for just as much as in US, for lower living cost, a
more compatible culture and in Beijing or Shanghai for better standards of
living (yes before the critics jump in with air pollution, human rights issue
etc., a good US wage in China could afford you a full-time personal assistant
and/or nanny to do your laundry, take care of your kids, clean and cook good
Chinese food and you can live in a nicer part of the city with better
infrastructure than most of US lol; and you could still come out with lower
cost of living).

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w1ntermute
> Chinese AI peeps left because they want to go back to China. This isn't an
> unusual trend, as an Chinese American

Ng is Singaporean (born in the UK), not Chinese. He has no connection to the
PRC apart from his ethnicity. He may not even speak Mandarin.

> Beijing or Shanghai...lower cost of living

You've gotta be kidding me. I know people who specifically won't return
because it's too expensive to live in Beijing or Shanghai.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Isn't Andrew Ng working in Silicon Valley? It is difficult to recruit in
Beijing these days given the air quality, cost of living isn't low but not
that bad either.

