Former Google DeepMind engineer behind Simular says other AI agents are doing it wrong

When Ang Li, co-founder of agent software biz Simular, started working at Google DeepMind in 2017, software engineers at the search giant were skeptical about the usefulness of machine learning, or artificial intelligence (AI) as it has come to be called.

As Li explained to The Register in an interview, the production team between 2017 and 2019 would often say, "machine learning never works in production."

"That is kind of interesting because we have lots of papers also hyping AI," he said.

At one point, Li said, the Google Ads team asked the DeepMind crew to apply its AlphaGo system – the one that conquered the game Go – to improve Google's ad revenue.

"I think some people tried it, but it actually dropped the revenue," said Li. "That's the funny part because the real world system is very complex."

Machine learning methods are based on statistics, said Li, and ...