Peter Norvig Leaves Google To Join Stanford AI Unit (stanford.edu) 15
Artificial intelligence expert Peter Norvig is joining the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI this fall as a Distinguished Education Fellow, with the task of developing tools and materials to explain the key concepts of artificial intelligence. From a blog post: Norvig helped launch and build AI at organizations considered innovators in the field: As Google's director of research, he oversaw the tech giant's search algorithms and built the teams that focused on machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. At NASA Ames, his team created autonomous software that was the first to command a spacecraft, and served as a precursor to the current Mars rovers. Norvig is also a well-known name in AI education. He co-wrote Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, an introductory textbook used by some 1,500 universities worldwide, and he's taught hundreds of thousands of students through his courses on online education platform Udacity. In this interview, he discusses his move to Stanford, building a human-focused AI curriculum, and broadening access to education. When asked why he's leaving Google, Norvig said: "Throughout my career I've gone back and forth between the major top-level domains: .edu, .com, and .gov. After 20 years with one company and after 18 months stuck working from home, I thought it was a good time to try something new, and to concentrate on education."
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Good (Score:3)
Lots of experts are passionate about their field. The freedom academia and non-profits offer can be perfect for them.
The trick is generally getting the real world experience and bringing that back into these environments. I think that's the success of stories like this.
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One would hope at least a few people have enough common sense to realize “I have more than enough”.
Alternatively, maybe he just wanted the freedom to study some specific area Google didn’t see as a productive line of research.
In any case, let’s see where he’s at 5-6 years from now before deciding this is a win for education.
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Maybe chalk this one up to the 'great resignation'. He's likely got enough money to be comfortable, more than comfortable for the rest of his life. So the question then becomes "How Do You Want To Live" (respects to Peter Singer) . And from friends and associates, wide swaths of Google are not all that fun to work at. It's a huge bureaucracy, with associated office politics, weird allocations of talent and resources. Better than many, but not Willy wonkas chocolcate factory anymore. Everything is cycl
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For most people money is a tool, a means to an end, not the ultimate goal.
Have you heard about the FI/RE movement? You want to retire early, so you can actually spend time doing things you love.
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FIRE, we'll see how many actually follow through. Having been frugal long enough to save some money myself, I'm finding it's hard to part with the savings and spend it on anything, and that includes giving up a nice income from a job that isn't objectively so bad after all. I mean sure it's a burden, but was it really holding me back from being absorbe
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Just wait till the rotation takes him to .gov. World will never be the same again.
Norvig is an old AI guy (Score:1)
His approach doesn't fit with the new kids which use neural networks. He's one of those guys who does AI with search algorithms.
Re: Norvig is an old AI guy (Score:2)
Search algorithms don't generally handle garbage input as "well" as neural networks. That's why NNs are hip with kids these days.
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Then again, if look at the state of education, you don't actually need more than mediocre javascript skills to make huge improvements there.
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Norvig is a great researcher and has been around for a long time. But he isn't some stodgy old fart that is clueless. Norvig is well versed in neural networks and statistical methods. Norvig and Sebastian Thrun started Udacity to try and teach people about ML and neural networks.
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You joke, but this is an essential fact to keep in mind when learning about AI that is too often forgotten.
You should send an email to Ray Kurzweil. He could use the help.