This is Google's constant struggle in the AI space. They can hire the best talent and give them exorbitant salaries, but by virtue of already being a $2T company their stock price is simply not going to make a 100x jump no matter what they produce. Even if an AI researcher at the company doesn't care about power or independence or anything of that sort, just from a financial perspective it makes a lot more sense for them to join a startup or found their own. Just look at how many of the authors of all the seminal AI papers from Google Brain are still at the company. If you are a top mind in the AI space why would you want to share the spoils of your work equally with 200K other Google employees?
In order to have a fighting chance Google needs to spin off their AI efforts and issue stock independent of $GOOG.
Your moneyview is partially correct but this is also a very, VERY deep cultural mindset
Europeans don't take so well to "haha this quarter was bad guess we will lay off 15% of the office"
There is a very, VERY good reason that these are Europeans going from an american company with an office (formerly HQ) in London to a potential European Startup.
If you want to boil it down, this is about power, and Power shall NOT eternally flow from California.
Firstly, "European" is not a country nor a nationality with a single culture for such broad generalization, as you're trying to make it be. Individuals value different things differently indifferent from where they come from. There's Europeans who would trade vacation and security for more money and impact, and there's Americans who would trade money and impact for more vacation and security. Nationality plays no part in this, only personal choice.
Secondly, how sure are you that all of DeepMind's employees stem from the old continent in order to make such broad generalizations? AFAIK they have members from all over the globe, not just Europe.
>Power shall NOT eternally flow from California.
Please. Don't. I get enough loud-mouth, nationalistic, fist-in-the-air propaganda from the politicians in the mainstream media, it has no place on HN.
I don't think that's google's problem. Smart talented people are usually more concerned with things like pace of work, culture, freedom to do what they want to do, impact, etc. Working in a large company is absolutely stifling.
Google has all the top talent and was caught flat footed by smaller, nimbler organizations.
Google Brain clearly had the culture over the last decade and a half that resulted in basically 100% of the AI breakthroughs we are seeing today, and all the top minds in the field had no problem working there. What changed in the span of a couple years? Only that the tech became production-ready and the rest of the world took notice, and these researchers and engineers decided that they no longer needed Google's money since there was so much available from everywhere else. This is what directly led to the founding of OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Adept and probably hundreds of other small to mid sized AI startups. There isn't really anything in terms of cultural or organization changes that Google could have done to prevent this.
> There isn't really anything in terms of cultural or organization changes that Google could have done to prevent this.
If you're familiar with the political infighting between Brain, Deepmind, and subteams within Brain, you'd know there was a lot of room for improvement.
Also Google would benefit from being able to use and build off more open source stuff. Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo.
Macro cultural trends at Google didn't help either. Stuff like not incentivizing work with longer term payoffs, and too many layers of middle management.
> Only that the tech became production-ready and the rest of the world took notice, and these researchers and engineers decided that they no longer needed Google's money since there was so much available from everyone else.
All that said this is very true and probably unavoidable.
> Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo
My perception at that time (autumn 2017) was that Tensorflow had the biggest unforced fumble in the modern history in artificial intelligence, not having the vision to make an API aiming the researchers.
They made the almost impossible and took down Theano and Torch in less than 2 years and fueled with a lot of money from Google got the ecosystem for at least 2 years.
I think they thought like “hey, we won’t the comercial ecosystem, so it’s over; academics and research will follow; even this inflexible and cranky API. If they complain, push Keras to them all”.
What happened in reality was, at the time that Facebook made an absolutely wise decision to lift Torch and unite research and a better UX, it just twisted the situation that for me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen?
> me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen?
By being blinded by all that sweet ad revenue, meaning everyone's yearly performance review turns out stellar no matter what they do, because so is the company's bottom line.
Additionally, there were (and still are) many factions and subteams across Brain, Google Research, and Deepmind that now make up today's "Google Deepmind"
There have been significant changes in culture and (at least perceived) job stability in the past two years specifically. See the significant layoffs in early 2023 and the surprising and completely unnecessary layoffs that just happened a week ago. Transparency about decision-making is now basically non-existent. The literal only communication from the CEO was that there will be more layoffs.
Travel budgets are also non-existent now.
All in all, it's still a good job. But it is significantly worse that before, and the trajectory does not seem great.
Brain is more like a research lab, not a consumer products division. I think it's clear that Google had a lot of fundamental and brainpower, but no vision with how to use it other than pure research.
I feel like openAI has made more significant impact touching users' lives than google brain ever did. Even if it's building on google's work.
Now that I think about it, it seems this might be precisely what's occurring. It's possible the approach involves the Scientists "independently" seeking funding, resulting in their Director being sidelined, while the upper echelons of leadership have the opportunity to invest in the start-up. The same leadership that initiated the oppertunity.
The EU is not exactly the place where tech unicorns come from. Could it be France's gamble on becoming an independent AI power, just like they did with advanced weapons and nuclear energy?
The struggle in EU can be boiled down to 3 things:
- capital: continuous access to capital without turning a profit for decades is very hard outside US.
- talent: no doubt EU has a lot of talent in tech, but most of them want to come to US for better pay. And the funnel of talent from Universities, both international and domestic, is hard because a lot of them in EU are playing catch-up to their American counterparts.
- culture: there’s so much to be desired in terms of culture when it comes to working in EU. The long hours, the flagrant risk taking, high pay, openness to different philosophies/ways of doing things etc. are all aspects that are missing, but are generally needed for startups to succeed. (The openness to different perspectives was especially one of the things that drove me to US. My German colleagues would often shoot down ideas by saying “this is not <insert your country here>, in Germany we have standards”. Ironically those standards couldn’t get anything shipped ever.)
There’s of course more stringent regulations, but those tend to be everywhere.
Nothing to do with talent, it’s always about money and government red tape. The US simply is the best place with potential money. Europe is poor in comparison
SNAP, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Spotify, Tesla, Etsy, Zoom, Twilio, Dropbox and the list goes on. I don't have the source handy, but if I remember this right, around the time Uber was having it's IPO, there was this stat that out of the top 50 Unicorns, 3 were profitable. Rest all were operating in a net loss, most of them for around or more than a decade.
Just because it's not happening in the Anglo-sphere doesn't mean its not happening. France always has been a tech giant, both in traditional hard tech and computer technology. They had something like the web before the web for example.
Also, notice how many big names in the AI field have funny accents and non-American names. Maybe startups go to the USA to become Unicorns but a lot is happening in Europe, especially in talent.
I recall listening to Mistral CEO, who also happens to be French, explaining that UK, France and Poland are very good at training mathematicians and as a result they happen to have access to a good talent pool in EU. He also said that many people don't want to go to the US because of the food, safety and other aspect that make EU nice place to be at.
Oh, yes, the world hit that was Minitel. I remember it well.
It was a British contractor who created the web; the TCP/IP protocol was invented in the USA. Not saying the English-speaking countries have a monopoly on innovation, but the VC ecosystems and the idea-to-market fast track that exists in the US does not exist in the EU, yet. A lot would need to change for that to become a threat to the US.
On your other point, funny accents and non-American names can be found in all scientific and technology fields, but generally more often in the US than the EU, because that country was actually build by immigrants whereas the EU is very much set in the old ways and prefers locals.
curious of a take given that TCP/IP is american but the british(you?) often claim HTTP as your own (despite it arguably being a pan-european CERN project).
It's funny, a lot of people think that EU lives off on cheese and museum tickets revenue. Combined with fetish for giant corporations(aka unicorns), it creates a very strange narrative.
Prior to Brexit the go to place for tech in Europe was London, UK. Likely Google would have expanded their offices there, and probably move them where everyone else is. From _the_ place to be London is now the place to avoid. 80% of the brightest people I know have left the UK. What we are left with is with those that need at least two more like them to get a job done.
The UK still gets more tech investment than France and Germany combined, and I wouldn't surprise me if London got more than either of them. Like, Brexit was stupid and harmful but London still dominated European tech.
