> Now that's lazy thinking. No one accused Google or Verizon or of not having "many people" that do serious research.

By assuming that every single person who joins Google is somehow being used to optimize ad clicks, the implication is that they are abandoning whatever serious intellectual research they could have otherwise been doing.

> There's no trick in the book they do not use to make you click on ads or sign for their services.

This doesn't counter my point. The fact that their ad click team is actually doing its job doesn't mean anything about the greater motivation of the company.

"he has a family and his future to worry about. After all these years he deserves to make a lot of money money and not have to worry about money anymore."

exactly.

Academic salaries are low compared to salaries in the private sector, when equated for things like years of training, status in one's field, etc. Here are some facts:

- Google clearly has a self-interest in being a leader in machine learning technologies

- Geoff Hinton is a world recognized leader in this very field

- Google appears not JUST to be interested in selling ads ... but as many posts have said, they seem to have the ability to run in-house R & D in a somewhat more open way than most companies in the private sector

Here is some speculation:

- faced with the chance of working at Google on the very same topics one is already working on, but receiving ... 10x? 50x? even 100x? the salary, wouldn't you do it?

- think of it this way: if Geoff Hinton's google pay is a "mere" 5 million per year, then all he has to do is work under these terms for TWO YEARS and he will have made 67 YEARS of $150,000 per year salary (probably a median senior academic salary in canada)

let's stop criticizing and start getting excited about what's coming down the pipe

- and hope that google makes it all publicly available, and not just secret sauce

I agree, but on the other hand I'm impressed that google services are so tolerant of ad blockers. I've never even seen a single ad on youtube for example - although they could easily "trick" the ad blockers, or even worse, block the content when ad blocking is detected. Then again, this might all change if a large enough fraction of users start using adblock...