> during my year where I led the Google LM effort and I was one of the brain leads, you know, it became really clear why. At the time, there was a thing called the Brain Credit Marketplace. Everyone's assigned a credit. So if you have a credit, you get to buy end chips according to supply and demand. So if you want to go do a giant job, you had to convince like 19 or 20 of your colleagues not to do work
wat
Can anyone confirm this? Surely you can just bill all the expenses to your project and get it signed off by someone instead of collecting credits from individuals, right?
Marketplaces for resources are great. I was questioning the use of per-person credits as opposed to per-project credits. The former seems ridiculous, especially if everyone gets the same amount
The evidence indicates that the TPU marketplace caused a ton of friction and hampered Google Brain’s ability to innovate. They got merged with Deepmind after all.
Google’s golden years / Bell Labs years came from plumbing ads monopoly proceeds into blue sky projects. Contrast with Bytedance / Tiktok, which ruthlessly out-competed Facebook etc in the marketplace for attention. Googlers don’t want to actually build a good product and compete for users, they just want what suffices to feed their personal nerdy interests.
wat
Can anyone confirm this? Surely you can just bill all the expenses to your project and get it signed off by someone instead of collecting credits from individuals, right?