Product Design. AI at Slack. Ex-Google AI. Tintinophile. Opinions my own. RTs not endorsements.
Bay Area
Joined April 2007
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Visited the Royal Botanical Gardens this weekend & loved Ken Kelleher's sculpture exhibit. The only distraction was the AI-written descriptions that had all the hallmarks of AI-slopism. The definition of 'craft' is now expanding to include editing slop out of AI.
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You are generous and cruel, brave yet arrogant, inspiring and totally insane. You export our greatest dreams and strangest nightmares. I’ve called a lot of places home, but somehow this is the only place that felt like one. Happy birthday, America.
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At any time in any Toronto supermarket when you pick up a pack of berries, the chances of it being moldy is greater than 50/50. 90/10 if it’s organic.
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Every time I show my 6-year-old a picture or video the first thing out of his mouth is: “Is this AI?” I wonder how deeply this generation will internalize a ‘Trust Nothing’ mantra, and what second order effects that‘ll have.
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I know wokeism is dead, but the swing back to celebrating creepy predators is making me dizzy. What’s next? Cosby biopic?
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When the first Travel Ban was announced, I saw Sergei Brin at SFO, where many Iranians Googlers had gathered to protest. Yesterday at the Met Gala, he wore a Lion and Sun Iran map/flag pin. Thank you Sergei for your continued solidarity. A better-looking pin is on its way :)
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Pendar retweeted
Humans vote with their feet. There are an estimated 500,000 diaspora Iranians who call the United Arab Emirates home. There are virtually no Emiratis living in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The greatest admirers of revolutionary dictatorships are those who don't live under them.
When I was at Translate my nightmare was having this kind of Arabic script rendering errors show up in marketing collateral. It’s hard to overstate how embarrassing it is to make a mistake like this when you are the worlds leading language translation app
Google Translate is turning 20! 🎉. There are 20 fun facts and tips in the thread below.
Translate is one of my favorite Google products because it brings us all closer together!
I've been involved with a couple of things over the years. The first was our deployment of the initial system in 2006, which provided a huge leap forward in quality because it used a much larger 5-gram language model trained on trillions of words of text (indeed, probably the first trillion token language model training in the world: paper has some nice heads showing scaling-law-like quality improvement from scaling to more data/compute).
See "Large Language Models in Machine Translation", Thorsten Brants, Ashok C. Popat, Peng Xu, Franz J. Och and Jeffrey Dean, aclanthology.org/D07-1090/
The second major collaboration was in 2016 when we moved Translate over from a statistical machine translation approach to using deep neural networks. This approach relied on two key innovations. The first was Google's work on Sequence-to-Sequence models (arxiv.org/abs/1409.3215). The second was our development of TPUs, custom cups that improved the performance of inference for deep neural networks by 30-80X over existing CPUs and GPUs of the day (and reduced latency by 15-30X). This made launching compute-intensive language model services like Translate feasible for hundreds of millions of users. See "In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit", Norman P. Jouppi et al. arxiv.org/abs/1704.04760
GNMT paper:
"Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation", Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, Jeff Klingner, Apurva Shah, Melvin Johnson, Xiaobing Liu, Łukasz Kaiser, Stephan Gouws, Yoshikiyo Kato, Taku Kudo, Hideto Kazawa, Keith Stevens, George Kurian, Nishant Patil, Wei Wang, Cliff Young, Jason Smith, Jason Riesa, Alex Rudnick, Oriol Vinyals, Greg Corrado, Macduff Hughes, and Jeffrey Dean, arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144
Most recently, we have advanced Translate further using Gemini models.
Each of these advances relied on research that have major quality leaps over the existing status quo translation approaches, bringing better quality and connectedness to all of our Translate users! 🎉
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But now that you don’t need native speakers to check for these things, a good rule of thumb is checking with an LLM to double check your images every time you use words in languages you don’t understand.
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Brilliant! Meanwhile @AirCanada’s biggest innovation is extorting an extra penalty fee if you bring a carry-on to the gate on a basic fare, and forcing a hold on your card!
The entire row is alllllll yours.
Welcome to United Relax Row, three adjacent United Economy seats with adjustable leg rests that can each be raised or lowered to create a cozy lie-flat space for stretching out...
You'll also get a mattress pad, blanket and two pillows. If you’re traveling with kids, a plushie too! United Relax Row will be available starting next year on more than 200 of our 787s and 777s, each with up to 12 of these brand-new rows.
united.com/Elevated
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Pendar retweeted
The world is beginning to grasp the reality of Iranian people being held hostage by the Islamic Regime. Even sports teams participating in events held in free countries are surrounded by regime minders and security agents whose sole job is to monitor and restrict the players activities.
This story is absolutely insane.
Senior Iranian regime propagandists threatened to have members of the Iranian women’s football team killed because they didn’t sing the national anthem at a game in Australia this week.
The women were then basically held under armed guard in Australia by Iranian officials to prevent them escaping - they were even seen making SOS signals on their team bus.
The Australian government inexplicably dragged their feet on saving them right up until the last possible moment.
Five girls just escaped and claimed asylum. The rest face a flight home tomorrow to almost certain persecution.
This is the same Australian government which wants to import literal ISIS members from Syrian prison camps - they’ve spent the past month trying to get ISIS brides back on planes to Australia.
But they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to protect 5 women fleeing Islamist persecution
RT @legomahi: In 2016, pollsters missed a crucial variable: the "shy Trump voter." Because expressing support carried heavy social friction…
