Leaving Google Brain
When I first saw Eric Jang’s “leaving Google brain” blogpost, it was hard to imagine that one day I would be writing mine.
After about 3.3 years of being at Google Brain and Research, I’ve decided to part ways and move on to my next adventure.
In my own eyes, this indeed feels like graduation. After all, I have learned a lot from Google, from my wonderful colleagues, mentors, managers etc.
My close friends have all recently departed with brief tweets or posts, but I thought I should make a detailed post that expresses my thoughts to the fullest. This post, for most part, will be focused on gratitude towards Google and how much I enjoyed/appreciated my time at Google.
Google will always be special to me because this was where I learned to perform truly excellent research. I recall the time when I first joined when I was so star-struck when I saw authors of so many famous and impactful papers within such close vicinity. It was a big sensory boost to me on that was highly motivational and inspiring. Till today, I am grateful that I got to work and learn with so many of them, at least before most of them left.
I learned so much.
From a broader perspective, I learned the importance of doing research that matters and how to drive research towards the goal of making concrete impact. At university, we were only taught that we have to get that N conference paper acceptances (to graduate or whatever). At Google, things have to land and they have to make actual impact.
The biggest teaching here for me was about how to own the research innovation process in an end-to-end fashion, i.e., from idea, to publication/patent, to production and finally to serve users. To a large extent, I think this process has made me a much better researcher.
If I had to characterise my growth, I think that my whole research journey can be considered more “smooth” than “emergent”. I am of the opinion that my own research gradually improved linearly over time as I got better and better, and also as I immersed more of myself into Google culture. It was like a process of diffusion. Till today I believe the research environment matters so much. If there is interest, I will write a more detailed blog post of this topic someday.
Everyone says “the people” are the biggest perk of being at Google. I can’t agree more. I am eternally grateful to all my close collaborators and mentors who had played a monumental role in my growth as a researcher and as a person.
From the deepest depths of my heart, I thank both my current manager (Quoc Le) and my ex-manager (Don Metzler) for the chance to work together and for all the times they had helped look out for me - not only as a report but also as a person. I also thank senior folks like Ed Chi, Denny Zhou and Slav Petrov for supporting me throughout this journey. Lastly, I thank Andrew Tomkins who took a bet on me and hired me into Google.
I also thank my closest friends/collaborators (Mostafa Dehghani, Vinh Tran, Jason Wei, Hyung Won, Steven Zheng, Siamak Shakeri) for all the fun times we had hanging out, sharing hot takes, learning from each other, writing papers together and discussing research. All of you guys made my time at Google superb and amazing!
What’s next?
That’ll have to wait for another time! Remember, this post is about gratitude and sharing my best/fav moments at Google. I can leave a hint that it’ll involve something cool, amazing and epic and we’re also looking for people to come join us in our adventure. So reach out at yitay.llm@gmail.com if you want to work together with us (and me)!
Appendix
Outside the main text of this post, you may find the following supplementary material interesting.
My time at Google offices
Did I mention I spent most of my time at Google as the “lone researcher in the Singapore office”? Many people did not know but I joined the MTV campus in 2019 as a fresh PhD graduate but moved back to Singapore later. I was pretty much alone in the Singapore APAC office for most part.
I had my own desk setup, and had people I knew (not co-workers), but mainly worked alone. I came to the office for food, massages and just seeing real people. Did I mention the food is WAY better than the MTV campus? Here is some proof (I also happen to have peer review from Jason Wei lol):
The only one time I managed to wake up for breakfast at the Singapore office. It was delicious!
Here are some other snippets of my time at the Singapore office. My desk, some food, Jason Wei's visit, TGIF. It’s a great office space truly.
Throughout my tenure as a Googler, I only visited two other offices (3 in total) during my time at Google: The MTV campus where I was once based, the Singapore office where I spent my last year at and the Amsterdam office where I visited Mostafa for two weeks! All the offices were pretty great. Coffee in Amsterdam was the best!
Here’s us being hosted by the great Mastofo!
Eating lunch with the Brain Amsterdam team.
Yes I gave a talk at AI at the loft at this beautiful place in Amsterdam! It was an amazing two weeks with Mostafa and Samira.
I mentioned I started work at the MTV campus. So here are some of my noogler moments:
I liked the MTV campus quite a lot as well!
The only conference I attended
I only got to travel once during my time at Google because most of my time was during covid. That was NeurIPS in november, just couple of months ago.
And I took the chance to drop by the MTV office to meet my friends/team.
Had an amazing two weeks at NeurIPS and then at MTV. I’m truly glad that I’m leaving with these memories.
My throughput at Google
Just for my own curiosity, I was interested in figuring out my research throughput at Google. I think I wrote a total of ~45 papers over 3 years, with ~16 of them being leads (first, or co-first etc). I might have missed some. In terms of practical impact, I probably contributed to about ~20 product launches (I lost count after awhile) during my time there. But numbers are just numbers.
I also somehow got 11 spot bonuses, 3 more than the 8 peer bonuses that i’ve gotten which is odd because peer bonuses are way easier to get (and of much lower value).
My fav papers that I led (and are of imo, the highest quality) are UL2, U-PaLM & DSI. I also quite enjoyed working on Synthesizer, Charformer & Long Range Arena which I thought were pretty neat! My efficient transformer survey was probably the first time I’ve gotten so much attention on social media and that really inspired me to work harder.
Final Words
I really enjoyed my time at Google (Research + Brain). I will be eternally grateful for the experiences, friendships and all the fun stuff I got to experience. The 3.3 years in Google had been amazing and wonderful.
A fun fact is that I’m 33 years old this year, I spent ~3.3 years doing my PhD and another ~3.3 years at Google. It’s time to see what we achieve in another 3.3 years. 🔥🔥🔥
Acknowledgements
Big thanks and shout out to people who provided feedback on the post: Jason Wei, Vinh Tran, Mostafa Dehghani, Hyung Won Chung, Mahesh Sathiamoorthy, Siamak Shakeri, Don Metzler, Doyen Sahoo, Dani Yogatama, Mikel Artexe.
