Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow

http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/23/google-x-founder-sebastian-thrun-has-left-his-role-as-google-vp-and-fellow/

by BIackSwan • 12 years ago

115 60 12 years ago

IBM• 12 years ago

Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?

magicalist• 12 years ago

Google Brain apparently came out of there, so I'd say definitely not. The other projects have always been longer term, and it seems silly to ask why self-driving cars aren't done yet when it was never expected for them to be done yet.

psbp• 12 years ago

Well, at least three of its products are being used in the real world (Glass, Loon, Self-driving cars) and at least one is actually being sold (Glass), so yes.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

So you are saying it share's PARC's affinity for inventing things that were both difficult to manufacture and not economically viable? (Only half joking there)

I think it interesting that Sebastian left, he's a smart guy and I think he understood what he could do wielding Google X as a tool, that he left means he figured he could do get more of what he wanted to do outside the confines of Google X than he could with it. That makes for a really interesting thought exercise. And that brings us back to PARC, which discovered that the people who left PARC had a bigger impact outside of the lab than in it. The reasons for that were many but mostly they consisted of Xerox not actually being a 'research' company so much as it was a 'copier' company. What does that say about Google X?

gress• 12 years ago

Glass is a botched PR stunt, not world-changing research. So this underscores the GP's point.

stonogo• 12 years ago

I think you typed "yes" where you meant "no." Tech company R&D gave us things like the transistor and lasers (both from AT&T) and Mandelbrot fractals and hard drives and the entire concept of a relational database (all from IBM).

PARC in specific gave us Ethernet, which I think is safe to describe as "being used in the real world."

Google has a long way to go; so far, all of its real contributions have been in software, and all of their hardware R&D has seen very little "real world" deployment. Otherwise it's very much just a well-marketed implementation of traditional corporate R&D.

ThisIBereave• 12 years ago

Do you mean PARC circa 1970s?

krschultz• 12 years ago

You say that like it is a bad thing.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

Probably not, but isn't that enough these days when so few companies do any sort of long-term bluesky R&D?

julianpye2• 12 years ago

My former boss (CTO of Panasonic) once told me that the only way to do real R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge R&D. Everyone else was doing just product development.

Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.

cbhl• 12 years ago

What about Microsoft Research?

turnip1979• 12 years ago

I heard an old timer describe it well ... true research needs to be altruistic. Today, I think this can only be done through govt sponsorship. In places like Canada, my impression is that even the stewards who dole out govt funding have forgotten what true research means. They dole out money for commercializing innovation, which is not research by definition. From what I've heard from other scientists, the US is doing a better job. They are focusing their research dollars on 'promising' areas. This isn't as bluesky but at least it is research.

tdaltonc• 12 years ago

only way to do real R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge R&D

This idea is from Joseph Schumpeter. The same guy who coined the phrase "creative destruction."

mindcrime• 12 years ago

Everyone else is just doing product development.

I believe IBM still does quite a bit of fundamental research as well.

shas32• 12 years ago

Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.

That is quite wrong, really. There are many industrial research labs that are pursuing 'bluesky' research, in pretty much all sectors, including computer science, EE, chemistry, pharmacology, etc. Just to name a few, Mitisubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), IBM Almaden/New York/Zurich, Microsoft Research, traditional pharma companies, traditional chemicals/materials companies, GE Global Research, etc. all have 'blueskies' agendas to varying extents.

stephenmm• 12 years ago

Oracle's Labs division does a mix of fundamental research and very long term product development. One way to tell how much fundamental research a company is doing is to see how much partnering they do with universities and DAPRA, although not all companies may advertise much about these partnerships.

simonebrunozzi• 12 years ago

Sergey Brin, in my view, represents part of the problem here. Too powerful to be told that he's not delivering much.

yuhong• 12 years ago

I still remember this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3134609

ballooney• 12 years ago

I recently had to sit through a presentation by an X-er in which was played a very smug GoogleX video that spliced an annoying amount of apollo- and shuttle-era space exploration footage to pump up what was essentially floating cell towers (Loon). I found it quite disrespectful to the apollo engineers, and grasping of Google PR, to try and equate what they're doing to landing on the moon. It went quite beyond the bounds of what is reasonable with a straight face, for my tastes.

strongai2• 12 years ago

Ironically, if he has left to concentrate on Udacity, my own belief is that he is a poor teacher. Of course it depends on which pedagogical teat you are sucking from, but my experience of Thrun's delivered Udacity courses is poor. Many of his video segments seem to involve him slavishly following his 'script', occasionally hissing out encouraging phrases such as 'Isn't this great!'. He hasn't sequenced a series of logical teaching moments in which the concepts flow nicely. It's as if he's decided his first draft is good enough. Just my opinion of course.

ryangallen• 12 years ago

Udacity has done what any good start-up should and launched a solid MVP and iterated on it, delivering free, in-demand courses in a short amount of time. No, the materials and scripts have not always perfect but they are still more valuable than many college courses I've taken. If he is in fact leaving to focus energy on Udacity, isn't that a positive move in regards to your critiques?

strongai2• 12 years ago

Yes, you make a good point. My opinion - and that's all that it is - is that his (many) abilities lie in the Google [x] direction, not as a poster boy for MOOCs.

dsuth3• 12 years ago

One doesn't have to be a good teacher to make a good, free, online University. But one does need at least some content to get started ;)

adamconroy• 12 years ago

Weird. My opinion is that he is a fantastic teacher. I did his Stanford AI course online and it was by far the best learning experience I have had.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

Isaac Newton famously had to give three lectures to students at Oxford in order to maintain his status as a professor. His first was so dense and impenetrable that the final two were given to utterly empty rooms. Apparently that did not alter his teaching style at all.

One does not have to be a good teacher to have something worth learning from.

That said I did one of his first courses and found it simple to follow and better in the bite sized format than traditional lectures.

sounds• 12 years ago

Thrun's role as Google VP has been mostly moot for several years now.

Those close to Thrun have made no secret of the fact he's focused on Udacity and thus, whether he would like to work at Google or not, he can only do so much.

Animats2• 12 years ago

I wonder what he'll do next. Udacity isn't a research problem; it's a marketing and quality control problem. "Massively Online" courses have turned out to be something of a dud, anyway.

ericd4• 12 years ago

The people I've seen calling MOOCs a dud seem to have had the expectation that they'd see completion rates somewhere near traditional courses, which is laughable when you consider the differences in structure, demographics, and buy in. Even despite the high dropout rates, I think they end up teaching more students than the comparable class session at a university.

I took a grad class to completion on Coursera, and I think it was great - I learned quite a lot, it was free, and the quality of instruction was excellent, rivaling that of my non-lab university courses.

That said, how to effectively teach an online course is very much an unsolved problem. It's not nearly as cut and dry as you suggest. As of now, they've mostly just moved the lectures to online video, put up some online quizzes, and some forums. It's promising, but it's a naive implementation still.

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

Is how to effectively teach an online course the problem to focus on?

It's interesting to note that if MOOCs turn out to be a dud, yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs, then it's proof that people pay for a college degree, not for education. In other words, prestige seems to be the issue, not education.

Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow

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