Thread by @ch402

So, now that I haven’t been at Google Brain for a few months and don’t have any constraints on what I can say…

I’d like to talk about how awesome Google Brain is.

I had the privilege of spending five years at Brain, as it grew from ~30 people to ~500 people.

I never felt pressured to stop doing basic research.

I consistently saw Brain leadership behave in highly principled ways, even in private.

On basic research:

I never felt pressured to work on anything other than what seemed most important to me. Brain even supported me founding an academic journal! (distill.pub)

This was true even as an intern.

On ethical behavior:

At one point, I was privy to a decision making process where it would have been easy to allow something morally dubious to happen and unlikely to be known. Brain leadership (in particular @JeffDean) instantly intervened.

Brain isn’t perfect.

Google can be bureaucratic. God help candidates because it will take divine intervention for them to not get dropped.

There was occasional conflict. More rarely, I saw someone act badly.

But for an org that size? Brain seems to be doing pretty darn well.

I think Brain is in the 99th percentile of possible work environments.

I’m looking forward to helping @OpenAI give them some friendly competition for the 99.9th percentile. :)

I'm sure there are other people who've had different experiences, especially as Brain got larger. And organizations definitely change over time -- I can't speak to what Brain is like now, or will be like in a year.

But I'm very grateful for my time at Brain.