It's actually quite interesting to see how Google will handle this. If you had made the same statement a few years ago, your colleagues would have legitimately formed a protest with letters and walkouts until the company fired you. The protesters would use extreme hyperboles such as claiming that they fear for their physical safety, they have anxiety going to the office now, or that he can't be trusted as a scientist because science "proves" he's wrong. While society as a whole has learnt to become more accepting of different viewpoints, I find it difficult to believe that Google's debate culture has progressed at the same pace. This wasn't always the case though. Back in the day, Google had a very healthy debate culture. We had a huge number of active email lists, TGIF was a place where you could ask Larry and Sergey hard questions, and even in tough moments, things didn't get leaked. All of this changed between 2016 and 2018 where the very worst patterns of cancel culture were embraced by a small but vocal and politically active group of Googlers. One important instrument in that change was Memegen which turned from one of the happiest places on the internet into a tool for amplifying their voices and frankly disparaging the company and its leaders. All of a sudden, any means of achieving a political goal were fair: leaking TGIF, talking to Gizmodo, live tweeting leadership Q&A. Think of all the things that happened in that timeframe and that got cancelled into oblivion: Project maven, Damore, project dragonfly. The protesters won. Google embraced their viewpoints and worked hard to suppress dissent. The thing that personally hurt me was that we went from a culture of extreme trust and honesty, to one where leaders became unable to answer any questions in a public forum. All we got was corp speak. It was around that time when Larry and Sergey stopped doing TGIF. I have obviously never talked to them but at least in my mind this newly formed political activism was an important factor in their decisions to retract. Long story short: let's see if this culture still exists at Google or if it has changed.

No. Google should take the @brian_armstrong route and ban political speech or initiatives within the company or in the name of the company.

Agreed with many points here, and awaiting how this story will turn out. While I cannot pinpoint to an exact timeline, such as 2016-18, I did witness Google's culture going downhill throughout the years. Not only did Google leaders introduce the cancel culture, but they eventually grew to fear being cancelled. Nobody on the "wrong" side dared to speak up during Gebru's incident, Damore's incident, the CO2 footage incident, and many other incidents, only in the fear of being cancelled. Let's see if they choose to cancel the person who literally saved their Gemini series.

Ozempic exists because scientists studied Gila monster saliva. The exact kind of basic research this Administration would have cut without hesitation. Breakthroughs like this happen only if we choose to fund science even if the outcome is impossible to see at the start.

Discover DeepOCR: a fully open-source reproduction of DeepSeek-OCR, complete with training & evaluation code! #DeepLearning #OCR

HOT TAKE: Reality is, you can't actually work in top-quality ML research labs without a PhD. Top research labs still look for people with PhDs and excellence in maths, stats, PyTorch, neural networks, and CUDA kernels. In India, quality ML research labs are virtually nonexistent. Most good research labs are in the US/UK and China. Implementing papers and working on T4 Colab is cool, but you won't cross the threshold to become a researcher. 99% of ML people belong to the applied side, which has better practical perks: - MNCs or SF startups - You can switch and get promoted every 1.5 years - You can move to product management or CTO - All you need is hands-on experience and not many research papers - Cashflow is best I really respect people who code research papers, but how long will you wait for your breakthrough? In 3 months, research evolves, and you're following it without actually building anything. Stop following blindly! The world's best research labs pick only from top universities, not because you've implemented papers and posted on X! Either go for a PhD outside India or stick to the applied ML side. The job market is saturated and will remain so because we're evolving post-COVID. On the other hand, no startup or research lab thinks about you. You must focus on your growth and money first, then look for impact.

Mapping LLMs with Sparse Autoencoders pair.withgoogle.com/explorab… An interactive introduction to Sparse Autoencoders and their use cases with Nada Hussein, @shivamravalxai, Jimbo Wilson, Ari Alberich, @NeelNanda5, @iislucas, and @Nithum

⚖️ Amazon has sued Perplexity alleging that Perplexity’s Comet browser runs an AI shopping agent that logs into Amazon with a user’s credentials, places orders, and browses while pretending to be a human, which Amazon says is a prohibited, covert automated access. Amazon’s core claim is that Comet disguises bot traffic as normal clicks, so Amazon’s systems cannot apply its bot rules, audit trails, or safeguards that normally kick in for automation. Amazon also says this automation enters private account areas, touches carts and checkout, and therefore creates security and fraud risk, because any script mistake or prompt misuse could buy the wrong item, ship to the wrong address, or expose sensitive data. Amazon argues the agent breaks site terms and bypasses controls that govern third-party tools, instead of using approved interfaces or clearly identifying itself as an automated agent. Amazon further claims the bot degrades the personalized shopping experience, because recommendations, pricing tests, and ranking are tuned for human behavior, not for rapid scripted requests. Amazon also says it told Perplexity to stop but the agent kept operating, which strengthens Amazon’s position that this is knowing unauthorized access. Perplexity’s defense is that the agent helps users comparison-shop and checkout on their behalf, with credentials stored locally, and that users should be free to pick their assistant even if Amazon dislikes the competitive impact. So the fight is about who controls the logged-in session, whether a browser-based AI can act as the user inside Amazon, and whether it must self-identify as a bot instead of masquerading as a person. --- theguardian .com/technology/2025/nov/05/amazon-perplexity-ai-lawsuit