The point is, ads engineering is about 10% of Google's engineering workforce. The 90% remaining are producing products like organic search, YouTube, maps, shopping, picasa, gmail, deepmind, Google brain, voice recognition that actually works, self driving, automatic translations and captions etc. Google produces the maximum amount of published research by far.
How do you think these free products get paid for? By the 10% of engineering that does ads. The engineers optimizing ads are actually getting everything else in the company funded, including revenue less Deepmind, which would have folded years ago unless it was purchased by Big Tech.
Sure give credit to the government and educational system, but what is the point of denigrating ads engineers who are funding all of these while also optimizing ads results so that they are relevant to users. Would you rather have them work on cancer research? Do you really think cancer research is desperate for machine learning engineers to help them out?
Or would something like DeepMind, Google brain, automated medical report analysis, smart search of medical archives help them better?
Edit: as an aside, its presumptuous to say that the best minds of our generation are ML and systems engineers. ML engineers are good at math, programming and optimizing models. This doesn't automatically make them great biologists, oncologists, physicists or even mathematicians.
I could imagine an alternative universe where big companies would pay fair taxes to UK and then those taxes would have paid more research into protein folding.
I don't have an issue with a honest ad, what I have an issue is on team of people focusing on manipulating others to watch more videos, or stay more on a page, or write a giant comment so they can place more ads(or similar with shitty video games). Money from this evil operations are dirty. You could have won this money in a better way in a better world, we should strive for that better world and at least we can do is give the credit properly.
How do you think these free products get paid for? By the 10% of engineering that does ads. The engineers optimizing ads are actually getting everything else in the company funded, including revenue less Deepmind, which would have folded years ago unless it was purchased by Big Tech.
Sure give credit to the government and educational system, but what is the point of denigrating ads engineers who are funding all of these while also optimizing ads results so that they are relevant to users. Would you rather have them work on cancer research? Do you really think cancer research is desperate for machine learning engineers to help them out?
Or would something like DeepMind, Google brain, automated medical report analysis, smart search of medical archives help them better?
Edit: as an aside, its presumptuous to say that the best minds of our generation are ML and systems engineers. ML engineers are good at math, programming and optimizing models. This doesn't automatically make them great biologists, oncologists, physicists or even mathematicians.