Review: Genius Makers

 Genius Makers is a biography/chronicle of Geoff Hinton and a number of his students, starting from Hinton's entry into the AI field until the night him and two other students won the Turing award.

The book is well written but spotty, with too many characters towards the end of the book showing up and being given barely enough time for you to fully comprehend what's happening. I thoroughly enjoyed to story about how Geoff Hinton, driven by his wife's dislike of living in the USA when Ronald Reagan was president, ended up at the University of Toronto:

At the height of the revival in neural network research, Hinton left Carnegie Mellon for a professorship at the University of Toronto. A few years after this move, as he struggled to find new funding for his research, he wondered if he had made the right decision. “I should have gone to Berkeley,” he told his wife. “Berkeley?” his wife said. “I would have gone to Berkeley.” “But you said you wouldn’t live in the U.S.” “That’s not the U.S. It’s California.” (kindle loc 751)

I left Google at 2010, which was when Google started gobbling up AI talent (including Hinton and his students) at a rapid pace and integrating it into many areas of the company. Google at that time also left China because the Chinese government hacked Google (true story --- I know the people behind the detection). Despite that, Google still thought it could come back into China after Deep Mind became the #1 go player in the world, with Eric Schmidt giving a patronizing talk about Chinese AI:

 China’s tech giants had already embraced deep learning. Andrew Ng had been building labs at Baidu for years, and, like Google, he was erecting a vast network of specialized machines to feed new experiments. Similar work was brewing at Tencent. In any case, even if it did need Google’s help, China was unwilling to take it. The government, after all, had blacked out the match in Wuzhen. It did not take long for Schmidt to realize just how naïve his message had been. “I knew when I gave the speech that the Chinese were coming. I did not understand at the time how totally effective some of their programs would be,” he says. “I honestly just didn’t understand. I think most Americans wouldn’t understand. I’m not going to misunderstand in the future.” (kindle loc 3109)

What was real obvious to outside observers (i.e., anyone with an ounce of common sense) was that the Chinese government would never let a Western company have any significant market share in the country. That Western companies one after another fell into the trap and did a ton of technology transfers to China for free at their own expense just tells you how short-sighted and badly run most Western companies are.

Another thing that comes through in this book was how one top executive (Andrew Ng, Qin Lu) after another with ties to China actually moved back to China or took top jobs at Chinese companies and helped with that technology transfer. Of course, much of this happened before the current cold war between the USA and China, but it's still pretty amazing to watch.

A lot of people I knew from my Google (or even pre-Google) days show up in this book (e.g., Jeff Dean). The depictions are sort of accurate so I do find most of the book believable. The book was written in 2021, so pre-dated the era when ChatGPT took the world by storm. Nevertheless, for an understanding of the history of neural networks and deep learning, this is a book well worth your time.