Sergey Brin Is Back in the Trenches at Google (wsj.com) 41
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is back at work. The multibillionaire has been visiting the tech giant's Mountain View, Calif., offices in recent months generally three to four days a week, working alongside researchers as they push to develop the company's next large artificial-intelligence system. WSJ: Brin participated in meetings about AI at Google's offices late last year, but the frequency and intensity of his involvement has picked up, said people familiar with the matter. His new stance is a notable change from the relatively hands-off approach he adopted after stepping down from an executive role at parent company Alphabet in 2019.
He has worked closely with a group of researchers building Google's long-awaited AI model Gemini. They have discussed technical matters such as "loss curves," a way of measuring an AI program's performance over time, and Brin has convened weekly discussions of new AI research with Google employees. He also has intervened in personnel matters, such as the hiring of sought-after researchers, the people said. Brin's increased presence at Google reflects the pivotal moment in AI and his longstanding interest in the technology, which Google pioneered but was slower than rivals to turn into new products, said current and former employees.
He has worked closely with a group of researchers building Google's long-awaited AI model Gemini. They have discussed technical matters such as "loss curves," a way of measuring an AI program's performance over time, and Brin has convened weekly discussions of new AI research with Google employees. He also has intervened in personnel matters, such as the hiring of sought-after researchers, the people said. Brin's increased presence at Google reflects the pivotal moment in AI and his longstanding interest in the technology, which Google pioneered but was slower than rivals to turn into new products, said current and former employees.
It is probably good for Google (Score:4, Interesting)
There is this trend where these companies get rich, and they get conservative for investors, and any creativity comes from purchased startups. But if the original people are tied to the first explosions of wealth, why not keep them around? Maybe some big institutions being wild like startups would be good for America.
Because the founders are harmful (Score:1)
Nothing Bill Gates has done since about 1995 has been useful for Microsoft. Why would you expect Sergey Brin to be useful to Google, 25 years after the initial innovation?
He is sensing the correct thing - that the company is not doing well and about to become second tier, despite what it owns. But whether he can possibly help is questionable, and probably the reverse.
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He's not that bad because the share price is 3x where it was in 2015 when he took over. That outperforms the median shares on the stock market and outperforms S&P by a lot as well.
wow that's genius thinking (Score:3, Informative)
So sacrificing the long-term values of the company for short-term profitability makes him a good CEO? They should have him move over to Disney next.
Google search now fills THE ENTIRE SCREEN with ads when you search for shit. It used to be that Google kept the ads to the top and right and would say internally that they knew that if they added one more ad slot they'd make $X million more (where X was a large number) but they didn't want to destroy the user experience.
On top of that, by failing to invest in se
Re: wow that's genius thinking (Score:2)
This. The thing about the original guys is they feel freer to pursue crazy vision, less to lose. Not saying these intermediary guys are idiots, but there is a different way you play when you have a lot to lose. However, the stakes are so high now in terms of risks and what is possible, even the big forces should go crazy. Does anyone really think with this AI stuff anyone will care screens pasted with ads in 20 years? No! You have got to stay crazy or you will fall off the tech dragon. That simple.
To quote a dummies guide (Score:2)
Now I will say it outright: Anyone who says Google is being selfish by blocking third-party cookies by default is an idiot. It is not just Internet Explorer which took pioneering steps to respect user privacy either. Safari also restricted what third-party cookies could be used for pretty early
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Whereas Steve Jobs made important contributions throughout his Apple career. Bezos isn't exactly holding back Amazon. Sometimes you need somebody with the reputation and power of a company founder to shake things up.
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Useful for Microsoft? You sure about that? Because Microsoft the value of a MSFT share has grown 50 to 60x from where it was in 1995. Somebody the hell made it happen. Somebody grew their money 50 to 60x over the nearly 28 year since then. That's almost a 20% investment growth per year. There aren't a lot of stocks that you could have invested in to get a 20% per year return over that period of time. It's definitely more than the median performance, and it's DOUBLE the growth rate of the S&P index.
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Nothing Bill Gates has done since about 1995 has been useful for Microsoft. Why would you expect Sergey Brin to be useful to Google, 25 years after the initial innovation?
It sounded like he did fairly well when he stepped down as CEO and became Chief Software Architect in 2000, and that marks the point when Microsoft software quality really started improving. Whatever else he was it sounds like Bill Gates had very strong technical skills, and having someone like that in a senior technical position with a lot of influence was good for the company.
He is sensing the correct thing - that the company is not doing well and about to become second tier, despite what it owns. But whether he can possibly help is questionable, and probably the reverse.
Even at Google I suspect there's a tendency for management to fill up with political types or even technical folks who came up thro
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Because the track record here is awful?
Twitter: Jack Dorsey comes back, finds the worst possible person to run it and hands it over to him, encouraging both Musk and the board to make it happen.
Reddit? u/spez comes back. It's all downhill from there.
Being in at the beginning doesn't mean you were a genius, it means you had some good ideas at the time, but more importantly had the contacts to get that idea taken seriously and financed.
Plus: Brin is doing exactly what he shouldn't be doing - buying i
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Google is in a unique position to stop the visible parts of the internet becoming filled with AI-generated spam. I've spent some time with ChatGPT, and I'm confident I could detect AI-generated text to a high degree of accuracy. If I can do it, Google can write an algorithm that can do it too.
Once Google starts heavily downgrading AI content in its search results, who will want to use it as content on their websites?
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Re: It is probably good for Google (Score:2)
The web becoming less trustworthy is a policy issue. If the major hardware players worked on authenticating unaltered (or predictably altered, like crops and filters) media and typing, you could get to the point where it does not matter. Who cares what robots come up with, provided we know what is real. But instead, the policies are calling for watermarked deepfakes, control of AI tech. This will ensure every shadowy controller of the tech comes across as legitimate. The threat here is this bad policy, it n
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Because the vast majority of start-up ideas don't go anywhere, and you never even hear about them.
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They could at least have labs free from bureaucracy like a little Skunk Works or Google X, but these seem rare as well. Google seems to cancel anything with promise.
Loss curves (Score:2)
technical matters such as "loss curves," a way of measuring an AI program's performance over time
Hmm, this summary or article may be misinterpreting that term. A loss curve is the model's training performance as a function of training batches processed. But calling it "performance over time" isn't technically wrong, but most will take it to mean how Bard is performing across model versions or architecture revisions.
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Since when do you expect journalists to be correct about ANYTHING technical?
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eh (Score:3)
I've got to say, if I were worth $90 billion dollars you wouldn't find me at work, you'd find me on my private pleasure island in the South Pacific.
Google stock (Score:1)
I'm sure a fair bit of that is still in Google stock.
Re: Google stock (Score:2)
Like that fucking matters
Re:eh (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's a computer scientist, and likely enjoys what he does. He now has the privilege of doing it as a hobby instead of as a job.
If I had $90 billion I'd still want to spend a chunk of my time hacking away at computers... possibly in between trips to my south pacific island.
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Yes, a supercomputer ... and an island base built under a volcano. A giant laser would be a nice project for a Slashdotter, perhaps a friendly security team with uniforms to keep everything safe.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Someone's been playing waaaaay too much Evil Genius.
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I don't have 90 billions, but I have enough to say with some conviction that I could easily enjoy my life 'til I croak without working another single day in my life. And still I go to work.
Because I enjoy doing it. I get to toy with machines I couldn't dream of having access to. And it's not even that the machines themselves are so terribly expensive (ok, some of them are... I mean, IBM doesn't exactly give their crap away), but it's the stuff that's on them. And I get to play with them.
I can only imagine i
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1. He's not doing "real work". .. but after a while it gets boring.
2. A private island gets boring really fast. It's nice for some time, especially if you've been living in stress
3. If you live in the USA, the only reason even YOU work is for better mental state and living conditions -- "Maslow's hierarchy of needs - Physiological" are taken care of. Guaranteed that there's someone living in Africa, looking at your life wondering why you care about anything. To people living on $2 a day (10% of humans), Ame
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Beach life gets boring after a while. A private pleasure island in the South Pacific sounds great from a distance but after a year of it you will have had your fill. If you are a person who's really interested in technology, you are going to get a lot of kicks out of innovation.
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I'm pretty sure one of the necessary (but not sufficient!) properties of a $90 billion dollar guy is that he just won't do that.
A 2 billion dollar guy, maybe.
I mean Elon Musk could easily indulge in obscene levels of whatever luxury and deviance this world has to offer, for the rest of his live and that of his extended family.
That doesn't seem to drive him particularly.
Page Rank (Score:2)
BRING BACK PAGE RANK!
Larry Page also should be there (Score:1)