During Hinton’s summer internship, one project ran into a cap Google had placed on available computing power. So the researchers told Jeff Dean, and he ordered up another $2 million worth. He had built the Google infrastructure, and that meant he could use it as he saw fit. “He created a kind of canopy where the Brain team could operate, and we didn’t have to worry about anything else,” Hinton says. “If you needed something, you asked Jeff and he got it.” What was odd about Dean, Hinton thought, was that unlike most people so intelligent and so powerful, he wasn’t driven by ego. He was always
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