Mountain View!

I have arrived in Mountain View, CA for my summer internship. This is my second one so far in the US, after the wonderful time at GE Aerospace in upstate New York.

Life has been somewhat settled. I live in an airbnb. I intended to live here for the whole summer, but the room is worse than I expected, so I am looking for a new place. Three months is short if you are used to having year-long leases, but it is long enough to motivate me to care about it. If I have to move every 2 weeks, but with better quality per dollar ratio than this one, I am willing to do it.

I work as a PhD intern at Youtube Languages team of Google. This team is surprisingly fitting to my research topic of vision-language reasoning. They work on audio/image/video processing and translation. Their most important product is the autodubbing pipeline for Youtube videos, which translates the sound in videos between languages. Not just translating, they want to make the video emotion-preserving (with Expressive Speech) and natural (with Lip Sync). I work on improving Lip Sync. Given how user-facing this is, I am undeniably excited.

The day-to-day routine at Google can be best described as well-cared and well-equipped.

• Care:
  • Eat: On this 150-building campus, all floors have a “microkitchen” with snacks and drinks, all of which are low in sugar, which is surprising to see in a place in the US. There are about 20 restaurants with free buffet-style food to all employees for all 3 meals a day, during weekdays.
  • Exercise: There are gyms, a bowling place, sport fields, etc. They are usually widely available.
  • Relaxation: The campus is just beautiful, with lots of trees and flowers. I have seen at least 10 different flower species on campus. They are not just visually pleasing but also olfactorily so. They have massages, nap spaces, cooking classes, etc.
  • Transportation: The signature colorful Google bikes are available all around campus. They also run a company bus system in the city, provide on-demand ride-share service, and lend ebikes for free to employees.
• Equip:
  • They provide high-speed and easy to use cloud virtual machines for software development.
  • They maintain a battle-tested humongous ecosystem for programming
  • Might be nothing to many people, but they have really good pens and notebooks. A lot of them. Free to take. I want to be so creative given all of that stuff.
  • Workspaces are abundant. I can work anywhere in one of those 150 buildings. Moreover, I can work from any Google office in the world, as one Google badge gives me access to them all. And the meeting rooms are never glitchy – they make sure the online meeting technologies work as they are meant to.

But perhaps, the thing that I can benefit the most is the people here. All of the so-called Google engineers are working on hundreds of products across the ecosystem. They possess technical soundness, good communication and presentation skills, while at the same time staying on top of trends in agentic engineering. By having a proper project directly related to Youtube platform, I get to collaborate with those engineers on a daily basis, solving real and challenging problems. And people in my team seem to be very respectful of each other, even to interns like me.

Working here is great so far. However, one thing I don’t like about Google is that it is very easy to take all of those great things for granted. I don’t have any of these privileges at UT Dallas (which, by the way, has the 25th most active NLP research program in the US). How to enjoy free food, while staying aware that that food is not free? How to enjoy a healthy and well-established working environment while staying ready for the outside world that is full of hostile people that you need to work with? Given all of these benefits in return for our labor, how do we view ourselves and the value of our intellectual capabilities?