Could I believe an older man might resent the success of two younger women, and seek to undermine their work with baseless criticism? Yes.
Could I believe that two AI researchers overhype or even fabricate their results and that the company which had proudly published those results would not want to hear valid criticism of it? Also yes.
I don't know which side to believe here. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot in the Wired article to help me. But, I suppose the fact that Google is struggling to deal with such contentious personnel issues is a story in itself, albeit not a very surprising one.
1) Google terminated this guy "with cause" and then said so publicly. Google definitely does not do that lightly.
2) The TPU team used this method to help make TPUs. This is a flagship product, with billions of dollars on the line. There's just no way Google would sacrifice the quality of TPU to help a couple AI researchers look good.
My high-level take-away is that Google seems like a cesspool of non-stop drama.
Does anyone there keep work business to technical work only without getting overwrought with emotion? Has Google's hiring practices resulted in a population where neuro-atypical folks are overrepresented, and rational discussion is impossible? In other words people who may be technically excellent but have zero emotional intelligence.
This is also why I think blending activism with work is a terrible idea. People forget how to act professionally.
There are 'difficult' people at every job, but Google seems to be on another level... way too many stories about people freaking out over trivial nonsense like message board posts.
It also seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon. I could not picture a company in Germany or Scandinavia staffed with such immaturity.
I worked at Google for 12 years. I will admit I had a hard time separating my personal emotions and thought-space from my technical work and discussions with coworkers. eventually, I left because I realized that I was truly suffering, mentally (even though many interactions I had with coworkers were excellent, and enjoyed talking to them both technically and personally).
My worst interactions at Google were with Google Research. So were my best- things changed signficantly for the worse as Google Research transitioned (from Alfred Spector to John Gianndrea to Jeff Dean). It's not an org I woudl want to be associated with in the future, for reputational reasons.
This work is actually legit, and it's really just insane the amount of chaos this one jerk was able to cause. This is not some snowflakes who can't handle criticism. This guy actively destroyed business value left and right.
What's really surprising is how long it took the company to fire this guy.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 27.6 ms ] threadCould I believe that two AI researchers overhype or even fabricate their results and that the company which had proudly published those results would not want to hear valid criticism of it? Also yes.
I don't know which side to believe here. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot in the Wired article to help me. But, I suppose the fact that Google is struggling to deal with such contentious personnel issues is a story in itself, albeit not a very surprising one.
1) Google terminated this guy "with cause" and then said so publicly. Google definitely does not do that lightly.
2) The TPU team used this method to help make TPUs. This is a flagship product, with billions of dollars on the line. There's just no way Google would sacrifice the quality of TPU to help a couple AI researchers look good.
Sometimes people are just jerks. PG's essay on haters seems relevant here: http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
Does anyone there keep work business to technical work only without getting overwrought with emotion? Has Google's hiring practices resulted in a population where neuro-atypical folks are overrepresented, and rational discussion is impossible? In other words people who may be technically excellent but have zero emotional intelligence.
This is also why I think blending activism with work is a terrible idea. People forget how to act professionally.
There are 'difficult' people at every job, but Google seems to be on another level... way too many stories about people freaking out over trivial nonsense like message board posts.
It also seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon. I could not picture a company in Germany or Scandinavia staffed with such immaturity.
My worst interactions at Google were with Google Research. So were my best- things changed signficantly for the worse as Google Research transitioned (from Alfred Spector to John Gianndrea to Jeff Dean). It's not an org I woudl want to be associated with in the future, for reputational reasons.
This work is actually legit, and it's really just insane the amount of chaos this one jerk was able to cause. This is not some snowflakes who can't handle criticism. This guy actively destroyed business value left and right.
What's really surprising is how long it took the company to fire this guy.
https://twitter.com/sguada/status/1521680121412808704
https://twitter.com/sguada/status/1521587406385807361
Tweets by other people who know the researchers:
https://twitter.com/_beenkim/status/1521626239596785664
https://twitter.com/ch402/status/1521631660155965441
https://twitter.com/JacobSteinhardt/status/15215993379432898...
(There was a bit of a twitter-storm when a related NYT article came out earlier)