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Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation
- trident1000 6y agoGoogle has had no serious innovation in 20 years. Issue the dividend already and stop calling yourself a technology growth company.
- SamReidHughes 6y agoAutomatic translation, alpha go, google maps UI, ...
- trident1000 6y agoalpha go was acquired if Im not mistaken. Sure on the others.
- anoncareer0212 6y agoNo and no, unless you're picking a very unusual way of attributing things
- trident1000 6y agoIt was developed by DeepMind Technologies which was later acquired by Google.
- anoncareer0212 6y agoTemporal order is reversed, significantly
- trident1000 6y agoNo not reversed. This is public information.
- anoncareer0212 6y agoExactly - development began in 2014, it was acquired in 2014, games against Sodol were March 2016. (I'm somewhat cheating here, so it's unfair, but I gotta tell you it's a real headscratcher having a stranger explain this to me while they're not checking wikipedia)
- trident1000 6y agoAlpha Go was already launched when Google acquired it. Youre a moron. I dont know what elese to say.
- dang 6y agoSwipes like that will get you banned on HN. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Your comment would be fine with just the first sentence.
- lobotryas 6y agoWe’re talking about paradigm shifts and not just incremental innovation (both are important, but there is a huge difference).
- anticensor 6y agoParadigm shift can also happen incrementally. Not every revolution is sudden.
- tolbish 6y agoGoogle Fi has been a godsend compared to the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and TMobile.
- scarface74 6y agoAnd then just like so many other Google initiatives, they got bored abandoned it and in some cases left damaged roads in their wake. https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-saying-i-told-you-so-about-buried-cables/ https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-say... https://www.wdrb.com/news/business/louisville-to-fix-google-fiber-street-damage-in-highlands-area-by-next-summer-councilman-says/article_0ed2ab7e-a974-11e9-b734-afc5e2d0502a.html https://www.wdrb.com/news/business/louisville-to-fix-google-... In the meantime AT&T has been rolling out gigabit up/down for the past 5 years. I got AT&T four years ago and the price has been $70/month no extra fees.
- jen20 6y agoGoogle Fi is not Google Fiber - it’s probably the least overtly scumbag-y of the US cellphone networks. That said, I switched away from it today after a few years of OK service because they don’t support Apple Watches.
- scarface74 6y agoMy bad. I’m looking at their plans. https://fi.google.com/about/plans/ https://fi.google.com/about/plans/ They look worse than T-mobile. https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans Unlimited 3G hot spot and $20/month for tablets with unlimited data can’t be beat.
- swiley 6y agogoogle docs as an application of distributed data structures is IMO pretty innovative. I'm not a fan of google but they've done a handful of things since the turn of the millennium.
- jeffbee 6y agoAlso an acquisition, FWIW.
- SquareWheel 6y agoSo was DOS. That doesn't mean Microsoft doesn't get credit for Windows.
- ma2rten 6y agoYou gotta be kidding. It's hard to find a company that innovated more in the last 20 years: MapReduce, Spanner, Protocol Buffers, Gmail, Go Lang, Android, Chrome, Microservices, Borg, Tensorflow, TPUs, Google Maps, Google Street View, Google Docs, Google Translate, Dremel, Duplex, Chromebooks, ChromeCast, Daydream, mobile first development, BeyondCorp, V8, Kubernetes, LevelDB... Those are just some of things I can think of from the top of my head and doesn't include the machine learning research that google and deepmind are doing.
- switch11 6y agoYeah, Google innovation stopped the minute Eric Schmidt was not on the board of Apple and couldn't steal Apple's ideas any more What gives Eric @#$#$#$ Schmidt any credibility to talk about Innovation?
- moneytide1 6y agoI saw a "Just Have A Think" YouTube channel video recently describing the 1MV HVDC line being built across China. It is part of Belt&Road infrastructure project and will allow them to distribute excess loads to different time zones without skin effect losses of an AC line. This is a part of their COVID stimulus injection. When American $1.2k per citizen landed in accounts, I remember checking local Walmarts in the weeks that followed and I noticed all the TVs were gone. With such a system, China could even launch excess solar as far as Germany in their afternoon peak sun angle when German duck curve morning peak begins?
- makomk 6y agoAs far as I can tell, the reason other countries haven't built anything like this is that it doesn't make sense from a grid engineering perspective, and the main benefit of building such a high-voltage high-capacity line is the propaganda one of being able to claim it's world leading. The big problem is that the grid needs to have enough redundancy to stay up if a single generator or transmission line fails, so the big high-capacity single transmission lines that China builds can't actually be used at close to their nominal capacity. It probably wouldn't even work as a propaganda stunt in countries with a free press; if the Trump administration built something like this, I just know the NYT headlines would be about how it was a useless Trumpian folly and showed the perils of his disdain for experts.
- ponker 6y agoAnd those TVs created a lot of Chinese jobs.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoI am always curious what people think about the following subject: Do you believe patents promote innovation or hamper it? Certainly some business models are dependent on patents and intellectual property restrictions, but do you think it actually promotes innovation? My own observation has been that with the 3D printer for example, innovation was stagnant for the 20 years that they were under patent. Once the patents expired, innovation in the space boomed and the price of a decent 3D printer dropped by 100x. So with the US so patent-heavy, are we actually making things more expensive and crippling innovation? What would it do to the price of your washing machine if it was open source hardware? Prusa Research has seemingly had good competitive success even with all open source products and many clones, so I feel like the economics can work. Would we be better off if we learned the economics of open source hardware and pushed the industry in that direction? Have any economists taken this question seriously? This blog post on innovation from Bunnie Huang talks about the real on the ground experience of innovation without IP restrictions here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 Libertarians make a good case against intellectual property restrictions too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A
- lobotryas 6y agoThe answer is on who you expect to innovate more: big corps that can afford to file, defend, and acquire patents or individual makers? America will win only when we can support both use cases.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoCan you elaborate on what you mean when you say "America will win"? What do you mean win? Open source hardware is really good at making things low cost, because whoever can offer the best value (low cost, reasonably quality) will succeed. So what if we did that with big stuff like MRI machines and semiconductor fabricating equipment and robotics? Wouldn't that make all that stuff cheap, thereby making us better off? Like health care and car repairs and manufacturing would all be cheaper, and we can use that to thrive.
- zerop 6y agoDoes innovation always depend on state funding spent on RnD?
- Shivetya 6y agoIf you follow the article around you realize this isn't about money invested but simply based on how many scientific articles are being published [0] and not dollars invested even though they toss in one Chinese based companies number. Personally I do not find article count a good number to base the claim on. Percentage of GPD might not be a good reference either but then again I am not 100% sure a dollar for dollar comparison works well in all cases. [0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/top-ten-countries-leading-scientific-publications-in-the-world/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/top-ten-countries-lea...
- lobotryas 6y agoExactly. The funny thing is that many Chinese science articles have been found to be completely fake. Quantity over quality. Doesn’t mean we can relax, but nothing about China can be judged by Western standards.
- exolymph 6y agoBasically all trend "reporting" is some Goodhart's law nonsense like this.
- searchableguy 6y agoThere was also this article linked about federal decrease in R&D spending: https://itif.org/publications/2018/12/14/dwindling-federal-support-rd-recipe-economic-and-strategic-decline https://itif.org/publications/2018/12/14/dwindling-federal-s... Can someone link me historical total R&D spending data for US? I found https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf which states: > The United States became a global leader in R&D in the 20th century, funding as much as 69% of annual global R&D in the period following World War II. 1 Figure 1 shows the growth in total U.S. R&D expenditures from 1953 to 2018 in current dollars. 2 U.S. R&D in 2018 was 112 times higher than it was in 1953 in current dollars, and more than 15 times higher in constant dollars.3 By sector, business-funded R&D grew the most during this period. However, faster growth in total R&D spending of other nations reduced the U.S. share of global R&D to approximately 27.7% in 2017.
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- didibus 6y ago> "America does not have enough people with those skills." Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think. Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore, in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed. What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts". There's also just the quality and access to education seems it's getting worse and worse. I don't know, but it frustrates me that the truth is the US doesn't have the know how that its companies require anymore, and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.
- nichos 6y agoThere's a lot of "follow your heart", "live your dreams" stuff going on around there. I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time.
- ekianjo 6y ago> I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time. That's not what kids want to hear these days. They want life to be easy, and a big government ready to issue a wide safety net for them if they make bad choices in life. Perpetual childhood.
- ausbah 6y agoolder generations always think younger generations are completely rotten for some reason
- ekianjo 6y agoWell I know me and my peers were not asking for that when we were 20. Culture changes.
- untog 6y agoGive me a break. “Kids these days” have their eyes wide open. Just a few decades ago you used to have access to an affordable college education with good jobs on graduation. With a modest level of saving you’d have enough for the deposit on a house within a few years. None of that is true now. It’s drilled into high school kids that they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything. Then when they graduate they discover an awful jobs market. As for buying a house... better wait for a relative to die and hope they were generous to you in the will because there’s no other way you’re ever going to make that deposit. The idea that young people today and spoiled and rely on handouts is a nonsensical meme.
- softwaredoug 6y agoWhy do we persist in this old fashioned notion that Nation States are the axis on which “innovation” turns? The brainpower, resources, and motivation for innovating increasingly lie with huge multinational tech companies, not nation states. And they largely don’t care where you live - if you’re smart they want to hire you (unlike nation states with their Byzantine immigration policies)
- ausbah 6y agolarge amounts of funding for innovation and education still come from governments
- ultramundane8 6y agoI think laws are extremely far-reaching. Imagine you're a group of like-minded people in power in the world's most powerful country right now. What's to stop you from dismantling a company? Or in other terms, do you think that laws are slower than the cost of innovation? You're right to quote "innovation" here, because it seems nebulous. But the only reason it seems so is because it is difficult. To "innovate" independently of national boundaries, a company must have infrastructure, talent, and capital (at the least) that can pick up and move. I'm aware of capital mobility, but at some point "the buck stops." In the case of innovation, real results need to come from real people. You can't business and finance it away to some remote island. Edit: Changed something like "imagine you're a group of GOP officials" to "imagine you're a group of like-minded people in power in the world's most powerful country right now." My thoughts aren't meant to be political, so interpret the latter however.
- Qwertious 6y agoCorporations only put money into things they can monetize. Anything that works best as commons will be neglected like it's OpenSSL.
- fullshark 6y agoCause Schmidt’s new venture is to ask the government for money, and his sales pitch is “US is falling behind China in R&D, you need to spend more money.”
- diegoholiveira 6y agoThat's not a US problem. It's a western problem.
- ddmma 6y agoEx-Google China boss, Kay Fu Lee in AI Powers explained how China made their innovative environmental based on better wilder clones that are just focused on making billions, starting locally now globally aka TikTok
- hevad 6y agoThiel on google not innovating https://youtu.be/2Q26XIKtwXQ https://youtu.be/2Q26XIKtwXQ
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adamnemecek 6y agoThe problem starts with culture. In high school, people want to be athletes and pop singers or idk actors. Social skills are over valued. Also the way science is taught in the US discourages exploration and encourages "draw indide the circle". Not to method how hostile academia is.
- visarga 6y agoMaybe it's a similar kind of trend where women in western countries prefer non-STEM related fields on average as they have access to an abundance of more attractive possibilities. It's a sign of social progress, as twisted as it seems. Math is hard, people avoid it when they feel they can.
- unishark 6y agoNot sure what you mean by this. I'd say the US way of teaching in STEM prioritizes solving problems, which is an excellent way to do it, and exactly what an entrepreneur or researcher most needs from school. School systems in other countries are far worse about this, basing school on rote practice and memorization. Though also class projects strike me as a good way to encourage exploration and creativity, and seems to be something emphasized much more in the US versus other countries in my experience.
- sorval 6y agoMost of the difference between a Sr engineer vs Staff/Sr staff/Mgr is all social skills. Its not just what you get done, but how you get it done and how you leverage other people that matters. Social skills are absolutely vital to climb the engineering career ladder.
- ma2rten 6y agoI am not sure what he is talking about. I work on AI/Machine Learning and I can't think of any major paper that came out of China.
- wombatmobile 6y agoPapers are one metric. In the case of ML, as with other technologies such as web infrastructure, there comes a point where the state of research plateaus for a while and the main progress is in commercial implementations. So, for example, autonomous vehicle technology now is more a matter of implementations than theory. This is where China has an advantage over the US by virtue of the willingness of its government to make large scale infrastructure investments. The US once led in such endeavours e.g. Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that paid for 90 percent of the cost of construction of Interstate Highways. Now, in the government domain, the leader is China. China intends for self-driving cars to propel smart megacity https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-intends-for-self-driving-cars-to-propel-smart-megacity https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-intends-for-self-drivi...
- visarga 6y agoThat doesn't matter so much because they can apply all the SOTA results just as well as the rest of us, and maybe better because they have fewer ethical concerns.
- rustrealist 6y agoUS has two main disadvantages: 1. It's leaning progressive (unlike China, people aren't disenchanted with Marxism) 2. Less smart population on average (with huge burden of the certain minorities who cannot contribute to innovation)
- spencerflem 6y agoDude the problem with america is definitely not "certain minorities"
- dang 6y agoWould you please stop creating accounts to troll HN? If you keep doing it we will ban your main account as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lgleason 6y ago"This high skills immigration is crucial to American competitiveness, global competitiveness, building these new companies and so forth," he said. "America does not have enough people with those skills." Translation -- US software engineer salaries are still too high for his liking, so he wants to dilute the market with more to lower the overall cost.
- dayjobpork 6y agoBingo It really annoys me when they bitch about not being able to bring in skilled workers from overseas because they can't find skilled people here... Hey, maybe they should fucking train someone! Usually when a tech boss is complaining about not having skilled staff locally it's code for "... I want to find someone cheaper overseas". It's like seeing a job ad that wants a wizard at everything but has terrible pay, they just want to import a cheaper worker.
- weyland108 6y agoOr they don’t really care where a skilled worker comes from... we should be able to higher and attract best and brightest across the world. Current immigration system is not setup for that.
- TimWillebrands 6y agoWhy do you feel that smart people from all over the world should serve the American economy?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago"Innovation."
- abnskH 6y agoI agree that it's about cheaper workers. On the other hand, the percentage of persons who are willing to be trained in the software industry is low. The millenials and later go straight for politics and dethroning anyone who was there longer than 5 years. It shows in the Rube Goldberg BS they are producing.
- dfee 6y agoEric Schmidt is a household name around here. Doesn’t mean I give a damn about what he thinks. > Dr Schmidt, who is currently the Chair of the US Department of Defense's innovation board, said he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now. “Invest in my next project now, before it’s too late!” is what I read it as. Edit: let me clarify. Innovation isn't zero-sum. I believe America is the most fascinating experiment – balancing (albeit imperfectly) innovation with ethics. There's a lot of innovation that can happen – and at a cost that's too great. For example, North Korea has demonstrated an ability to develop nuclear weapons (deep technical advancement), and China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people (broad technical advancement). But, the ethical costs are too great. I don't want to celebrate cultures of innovation that do this – foreign or domestic. Sure, let's always have an eye on increasing our investments against R&D – fundamental and more broadly. But I'm no apologist for falling behind when the truth is that that view of innovation is a zero-sum game where we lose our humanity in the process.
- throwaway743 6y ago^ Look into NSCAI, a DoD think tank he's on the board of. Specifically, their plans for competing against China in essentially an AI arms race
- thewarrior 6y agoThe United States balances innovation with ethics ? The people of Hiroshima or the victims of agent orange might have something to say about that.
- michannne 6y agoHow about we look at that quote with a bit of nuance?
- alxlaz 6y agoI think that quote could use a bit of nuance itself (albeit, yeah, maybe bringing up Hiroshima like that does set off Godwin's Law alarm). China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people and, yes, given the current state of AI research, that can give them an edge, and I am, too, of the opinion that it's better to not have this edge than to develop it at such an expense in human lives and well-being. So where is the scientific answer to that? Is there any serious additional research effort, and more industrial effort, going into models that are less reliant on training data, for example? What industries are trying to become less dependent on massive data collection, and on massively data-driven models? You can still get heaps of money with a product that can be aptly described as "it does linear regression with sugar on top and it'll tell you great things if you throw more than 100GB of tables at it". Selling an analytics SaaS that sucks up data from every imaginable data source to tell you things about your Google Analytics graphs is still a pretty profitable business. On the other hand, serious researchers in academia, and a lot of talented engineers, are struggling to get funding for topics that do not have the magic words "machine learning", "data-driven", and "AI" in them, and they mostly go ignored because everything can be solved with enough data.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sorval 6y agoGoogle plus, google glass, google health, google reader, meebo, picasa, google express. The list is long. "dropped the ball on innovation," indeed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- monadic2 6y agoAhh yes because you think Eric Schmidt, you definitely think "now this is what the future should look like".
- tomcam 6y agoA reminder that Google's revenues come almost completely from ad technology that they bought (from Doubleclick, IIRC). Google has stuck its fingers into hundreds of pies since then, to its credit, and has found that innovation is difficult, unpredictable, and expensive.
- throw_m239339 6y agoSearch, Maps, Ads and Android are Google's most successful product. Android was bought at well.
- nix23 6y agoSearch and Streetview is the only true Google-Product, everything else was copied or a buy from others.
- jkaplowitz 6y agoGmail started as an internal 20% project too, I think. The key elements of GCP were also developed in-house. But yeah, a lot of their good stuff started as an acquisition. (Disclosure: I was a Googler for a few years, joining through an adtech-related acquisition, and a Google intern one summer several years before that. But I haven't worked for Google in over five years.)
- nix23 6y agoBut Gmail was just Email with a counting Storage timer (which was really exiting at times where 30MB was a normal Free-mail quota). And GCP...well nothing new after Heroku and Amazon. It just feels that google is always two steps behind from new inventions, then they try to half heartily implement it, or buy another corporation. Google should sell itself for free to Elon (Joke...but also not really)
- robk 6y agoThe serious android work was done well after acquisition
- natmaka 6y agoThose directly involved in innovation, especially scientists and technicians, are more and more traveling, changing employers and above all communicating, in all relevant meaning of this term here, therefore by 'publishing' as well as by leaving information circulate informally among peers. A high proportion of scientists go through major US universities. This imbues them with certain ideas and creates social (IRL) networks where 'information ought to be free'. Those who then work elsewhere (let's say 'return to China') just cannot completely drop them, and some even broadcast those ideas and associated behaviors. Moreover the US supremacy on software provides them with increasing means to effectively spy on research conducted in all countries. Consequently, the US ability to benefit from innovation payed for by other nations keeps growing. In a way it is similar to the 80's "Strategic Defense Initiative" against the USSR ('let them dissipate resources'), with the added bonus of being able to rack a fair part of the benefits up.
- nix23 6y agoFunny that he says that, Google is probably the lamest most un-visionary Corp ever...ok maybe second after Facebook. From a Product standpoint they invented Streetview that's it.
- aembleton 6y agoDidn't they invent Bigtable?
- nix23 6y agoYour are right, that was really the only invention i could think of, but since it's not a customer product i didn't listen it (with Customer product i mean Gmail/Maps etc). Gosh imagine that, even a former online Bookseller (amazon) is more innovative than google.
- pritovido 6y agoGive me a break. I have been living in China and this man has no idea about what he is talking about. He is talking about pre-bubble China. People are comparing the official numbers of Governments on the West, like Covid expansion, economy growth, investment on R&D and so on with the Chinese's. But the Chinese numbers are just a lie. You just can not trust whatever numbers the Chinese give you. You can not trust any government in the West either but those governments have a democracy, journalists that can expose the truth or reality,competition and super super important, rule of Law. In the West you can expose what your government does bad by law. It is not perfect but orders of magnitude better than on China. For example journalists or scientists can investigate covid traceability, in China it is just officially forbidden. Belgium has one of the biggest official numbers on coronavirus deaths just because they lie less than other Governments like Spain that have actually bigger real numbers. And Chinese numbers are in another league. You just can not compare the numbers given by democratic governments with those of totalitarian regimes, because on paper they are fantastic, but in reality they are not true. In China everything is controlled by the CCP, including (specially) the statistics. People that have never lived there just can not comprehend how amazing are the structures that we have in the West(that took centuries to develop). We take those structures for granted and believe other countries have those and are playing with the same rules as we do, but they do not. China has lots of problems today, floods and covid had created havoc in the economy, much more than in the West. It is not easy to feed the enormous population they have. But you don't know about it because giving bad news about China is just forbidden. In fact China had censored Western articles about China(Do you want face masks? We are sorry but until you remove that and that person that criticizes China on your media you will not have face masks.) The population is growing older fast, they have less women than men because they abort girls and they can not do anything about that because abortion there is super easy. When the economy was booming everything was great. People lived a tough life but expected their children to life much better. When the bubble burst is completely different. The US has much brighter future than China. I say that as a European. People on USA have kids and they have much more resources because of the small population density.
- emsy 6y agoTangential, since this article is about the US and China. But if the US has dropped the ball, then Europe (or the EU specifically) didn't even bother to go to the game. The only thing we're innovative at is coming up with regulations. And I say this as someone who thinks the US tech sector should be under much heavier regulatory scrutiny.
- raverbashing 6y agoI kinda agree with you. But the issue I see is that innovation is a bit like herding cats. You can't really push for it. And even in the US, most of it is located on 2 cities. And of course, being on SV it is much easier to get you a check for 10Mi dollars for a worse idea than 1Mi or even 100k in Europe I don't see China's "innovation" as being much that (maybe except in AI and maybe ByteDance is a new thing, still) but more scaling up known solutions (ecommerce, fb on steroids in the form of wechat, etc) and market protection.
- bllguo 6y agogetting things to work at scale is nontrivial. I would expect hn of all places to understand that and other industries they have a lead in include drones, solar technology, EV (arguable).. considering the unparalled hardware ecosystem in Shenzhen/the PRD, I expect more and more industries will be getting added to the list
- raverbashing 6y ago> getting things to work at scale is nontrivial Agreed, non-trivial but also not rocket science (at least not now - I guess it's easier today than at the beginnings of twitter and fb for example) and throwing money at the problem usually helps. Agree on the other industries, and maybe their innovation is building things more cheaply than other places (externalities aside)
- tpetry 6y agoThere‘s not enough funding and risk money in europe to play the game with the big ones. Europe is sadly completely risk averse. You only get big money if it is sure you succeed.
- throwaway4good 6y agoIt is the old military industrial complex thing again, isn't it? Drumming up a scary vision of global war against China using flying AI-killer robots in outer space while your companies are siphoning billions of dollars out of defense budgets and you get your competition (Huawei, TikTok etc.) banned on national security grounds. Innovation comes from a functioning global market place of "ideas". It is a 1+1=3 game, not a zero-sum one. Drop the new cold war and get back to doing business.
- sprash 6y agoIf you deal with unequal trade "partners" like China that grossly disregard any intellectual property, don't care about labor security and environmental standards and as a result have a massive trade surplus not based on innovation but mostly based on cheap labor you have to draw a line at some point. The biggest "ball" that was dropped on innovation in the US was to allow companies to outsource their manufacturing to mainland china.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wombatmobile 6y agoChina has rapidly become a global leader in automation. From 2018 to 2020, a sales increase between 15 and 20 percent on average per year is possible for industrial robots. Annual sales volume has currently reached the highest level ever recorded for a single country: Within a year, sales in China surged by 27 percent to 87,000 units (2016). https://ifr.org/news/robots-china-breaks-historic-records-in-automation https://ifr.org/news/robots-china-breaks-historic-records-in...
- lazyjones 6y agoIs this to be interpreted as a political message in light of the upcoming elections? It certainly doesn't sound very insightful and he should know better. China has perfected the schooling system and employee discipline, this gives them a considerable advantage. US schools and colleges are a politicized mess, kids are distracted by "diversity" and other decadent but useless ideas. Perhaps it's hard to see through the eyes of someone who hired only from top universities (though they are messed up too), but I don't believe his statement was actually honest.
- jokull 6y agoThe book Doing Capitalism (2nd edition) does a good job of explaining the innovation process at this national interest level, and how it proceeds down to the private sector where it adapts to business models. Highly recommended.
- justcomments12 6y agoGoogle search is controlled by large (Chinese) botnets. Given that Google has >= 90% of the search market, the ball seems dropped right there. For instance, a botnet includes thousands of sites including xxxcommitted, pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc edit: thanks for down vote Xi
- robjan 6y agoSpammers linking to your site doesn't prove that Google is operated by a Chinese botnet
- phreeza 6y agoCitation needed.
- justcomments12 6y agoEffects of botnet in practice: https://imgur.com/mfFRgVj https://imgur.com/mfFRgVj Citations: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/36048251?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/36048251?hl=en https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/fuf3gz/got_hundreds_of_backlinks_from_non_existing_sites/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/fuf3gz/got_hundreds_of... https://old.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/f798iu/getting_spammed_with_websites_that_dont_even_exist/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/f798iu/getting_spammed... https://old.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/ecokzw/i_am_getting_backlinks_from_apparently_dead/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/ecokzw/i_am_getting_ba...
- phreeza 6y agoOf course there are link farms etc, but that doesn't mean the "Google search is controlled by large (Chinese) botnets". That's like saying email is controlled by spammers. There are countermeasures.
- justcomments12 6y agoThese countermeasures are ineffective against such vast botnets. Disavow tool doesn't really work
- uniqueid 6y agoIt might help if researchers had a search engine that returned results for the actual search terms they requested.
- gigatexal 6y agoXenophobia and nationalism sure don't help. We used to import the smartest most capable people from all across the world to develop and market their inventions and ideas and maybe even become rich in the process. Now, not so much.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoIt’s like you asked yourself “how can I change the subject and make this post about how much I personally hate Donald Trump”. You redditors are absolute trash. You need to go back.
- fastball 6y agoEh, I'm actually not sure it's that simple. Something tells me the modern left (which generally isn't seen as xenophobic or nationalistic) would not take very kindly to the importation of Nazi rocket scientists in [current year].
- EmilioMartinez 6y agoThe process you describe nostalgically is called braindrain on the third world, and if it's wavering it's due to changing economic and geopolitical landscapes. The process itself created an outflow of scientific and technological knowledge, which paired with industrial outsourcing strenghtened even America's geopolitical rivals. Actual xenophobic and nationalistic attitudes might have protected American hegemony, but you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
- 6y ago
- m0zg 6y agoEric Schmidt is an overrated dumbass. The US is still a powerhouse of innovation and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Ripping off IP from US companies who outsource to China does not count as "innovation". Allowing this to happen on a massive scale is the sole reason why "China was able to catch up" so quickly. AI is an interesting one. On the one hand, paper output from China (as opposed to just Chinese authors who live in the US) has grown tremendously over the past decade, and there are even some truly great papers. On the other hand, there's a huge gaping moat between the stuff you find on Arxiv and GitHub and a practical, working AI-based system like a self-driving car or a robot. This moat is typically a trade secret - you won't find any hint of it in the papers. Moreover, it's often also very engineering-heavy, meaning researchers alone are not able to bridge this gap, and it takes a ton of time and money to do so. On top of that there's also the data moat, though to be fair, China is better positioned in this regard due to the abundance of inexpensive labeling workforce. Be that as it may, though, I haven't seen a ton of academic datasets coming from there in my field. Maybe they're keeping them for themselves. Maybe they just don't have them - there's no way to know. And finally, there's the people moat. An established AI researcher who can also write code worth a damn can pull down a cool million dollars a year in the US today. As a direct consequence, most of them are already here, and will remain here unless incentives catch up. Will China get a tactical win here and there? Sure. Will the US remain at the distant forefront of real, hard-ass, capital-intensive progress? No doubt in my mind.
- baybal2 6y agoI believe people like you have very poor realisation of the gravity such statement carry. China been the factory of the world for the last 25 years. It has more than six to seven fold per-capita employment rate in technical professions than USA, and more than four times the population. With all that given, it hard to fathom what a nation needs to do for 25 years to not to become proficient in technology when circumstances are so favourable. Saying the opposite is not pretentious, it's stupid. I myself spent much of my career working in OEM manufacturing, and been involved in setting up manufacturing enterprises in USA, Canada, and China. The difference in real world skill level in between workers in China, and America is stunning. Putting it shortly, US recent engineering grads fare barely better than Chinese highschoolers at line work. Hiring manufacturing specialists in US is a futile endeavour. I can hire a specialist to program any major brand of chipshooters in a few days in Guangdong, in America, it took us 10 weeks to find somebody who was just capable of passing the interview test.
- amai 6y agoNot the 'US' people and government are to blame for this. It is more that the big tech monopolies in the US certainly lead to less innovation.
- harryf 6y agoYeah this could be titled “Ex-CEO of D-o-D incubated monopoly, that actively stifled innovation through products they later cancelled and anti-competitive search practices complains about lack of innovation” Not saying that’s the whole picture but there’s certainly some “pot calling the kettle” going on here. Edit: Perhaps a real issue would be looking at how big-tech lobbies government and its impact on innovation
- temptemptemp111 6y agoHahahaha he must mean "As the Ex-Google boss, I dropped the ball on innovation"!
- notwatching 6y agoSchmidt has the typical perspective of someone who knows nothing about China. For ease, I've singled out this one point: > For example, Chinese telecoms infrastructure giant Huawei spends as much as $20bn (£15.6bn) on research and development - one of the highest budgets in the world. Any member of Chinese society knows that budgets like this are announced to look impressive, and that the money itself goes through so many layers that siphon off 20% that when the project(s) are finally delivered, it was done on a shoestring and the deliverable looks like a rough approximation of what was in the scope. Just don't look under the hood. Then there are all the other grand initiatives where the money is quietly put into the stock market and again the deliverable is a "driverless car" etc. that in reality doesn't work. Obviously, there's a lot more nuance than this, but if I went around refuting all these "China experts", I'd have no time for anything else. The point is: don't believe the hype. Just because a lot of low-hanging tech fruit is highly visible and China has a lack of ethical and legal oversight does not mean the country is innovative. The US I can't comment on.
- solstice 6y agoTo be fair, Schmidt's larger point seemed to be about how bad the US has been doing and he used China as a counter example to illustrate that. If his counter example turns out to be exaggerated that doesn't change the fact that US r&d spending is lower than before Sputnik. (I have no idea whether his numbers are right.) Your point to not believe the hype is a very good one though.
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoIf the only companies that can realistically harness the value of academic research are the top 5 tech companies, then Schmidt is essentially advocating billions of dollars of government-backed R&D for them. Would Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant be where they are today without prior work? Who else has benefitted? Maybe companies such as OpenAI are the answer to this problem?
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoMain focus is on IT, and sure maybe the US dropped the ball somewhere there, but the US is far beyond the leading biotech innovator in the world. This is harder to oust because of the regulatory standard (maybe a little eroded now, but not much) to sell products in the US market.
- hvasilev 6y agoWhen innovation in the world of bits is no longer sufficient and mass innovation in the physical world is required, what is the western world going to do? Knowledge is not something permanent and mass production was centralized in China decades ago. Nobody around you remembers how to build real things, unlike your competition in China. They call the shots now... "Almighty Chinese gods, can you please design, prototype and mass produce this device for me. I would like to use it as a platform and run my crappy code on it so I can compete with your own people".
- sjg007 6y agoNot true at all.
- tigerbelt 6y agoIs the beta path
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoYou've heard a very exaggerated version of the narrative. Manufacturing output is only twice as high in China as in the US; certainly a large disparity, but hardly consistent with the idea that the Western world has stopped building real things.
- jtdev 6y agoThe Eric Schmidt who presided over the largest web marketing company in the world? The company that spent its innovation capital refining new and interesting ways to sell more shit to people?
- bogwog 6y agoAnyone else find it ironic that Google is the subject of one of the biggest anti-trust cases in recent history, and now Schmidt is blaming the US for not innovating enough? Maybe if so much of the tech industry's wealth and resources weren't pooled together into a handful of massive monopolists who have nearly complete control over whether any competitor lives or dies, the US (and really, the entire world) would have more opportunity to innovate.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoGoogle definitely could of created a research laboratory. Wasnt it not long ago that companies would invest a lot more money on research? That was why we got so many impressive projects out of Bell Labs and I am sure other companies. Its a shame that horse race ended. Whats worse is Google wants all their software to be as intangible as possible by forcing it all on their servers. Google hasnt had many desktop apps you can use without their servers involved in a long time. I dont consider Chrome a desktop app since it is their own OS and the new IE based on its hostility on the web to build up a Google Monopoly.
- bepvte 6y agohttps://research.google/ https://research.google/
- smt88 6y agoGoogle and Microsoft do a lot of interesting research. Waymo is a good example. I'm not sure what Apple does. My issue with big tech is not lack of innovation or research, but rather that it's all private. We're driving people out orgs that share their research with the world and into ones that lock it away.
- jupp0r 6y agoThis. At least from my understanding Bell Labs and PARC published papers continuously (I’ve read many over the years, not sure how much got published vs not).
- 6y ago
- aww_dang 6y agoAllowing skilled workers or students to immigrate is one thing. Turning a blind eye to CCP/PLA espionage and IP theft is another. It is misleading and illogical to conflate the two. Given that Schmidt is an intelligent person capable of parsing logic, is it fair to ask if he has ulterior motives here?
- eternalban 6y agoErich Schmidt and BBC are dog whistling. What the Western elites envy, the "dropped ball" and "innovation", is the CCP's "AI" assisted total grip on the Chinese society. It is true: CCP is free of ethical and moral considerations that we have been told for generations are 'foundational' to Western civilization, and thus has been free to "innovate" and materialize Big Brother with Chinese Characteristics. We could be having an honest debate about the merits of (apparently now legacy) moral and ethical guidelines that supposedly shaped our society, and whether these foundational principles are in fact a "hinderance" to "innovation" and "progress". Two centuries of exceptional development in the West seem to indicate otherwise, but apparently the control freaks behind "Alphabet" are not convinced.
- huffmsa 6y agoMaybe Google should stop buying and mothballing smaller companies.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoI have one sentence that could change that for you and correct US trajectory: all software is prior art.
- specialist 6y agoLate to this thread, sorry. I have two tangental questions. #1 In general terms, what's China's commitment (investment) in higher ed? Compared to the USA and other economies? USA's tuition, loans, student debt is always good for an argument on HN. Almost no one mentions that the USA decided to privatize higher ed some decades back. So I was wondering if China and others made the same mistake. #2 How does current China think about growing inequity? One persons's story in "American Factory" resonated with me. Glass furnace technician Hong We https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10930334/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10930334/ works his ass off, making huge personal sacrifices, to further enrich Fuyao Glass America owner Jeff Daochuan Liu. Shown is gob standard corporate team building meetings where Fuyao uses economic nationalism to motivate their underpaid staff. What is Hong We's future? When will the feel goods not be enough? When will Hong We demand to be paid fairly? I assume Labor in China will follow the American trajectory. With all that political and cultural strive that entails. But I'm keen to hear what others think. Edit: I think Cao Dewang is the founder and owner, not Jeff Daochuan Liu. I regret the error.
- R0b0t1 6y agoThe problem with making higher ed only a public service is you run into rationing. If all positions have to be government funded there tends to be fewer positions. There are plenty of people on HN who likely would not have made the cut in a EU country.
- specialist 6y agoSupply in the USA hasn't kept pace with demand. How would you remedy that?
- R0b0t1 6y agoUnsure. Controlling university spend on administrative positions is attractive. It would be similar to mandating expenditures on claims for insurance companies. Access to education seems higher in the US as-is though it is still in perfect. I am one of the people the US system left behind. Not sure how to get back to school.
- crazygringo 6y ago> And that's one of the key reasons why China has been able to catch up... he thinks the US is still ahead of China in tech innovation, for now. But that the gap is narrowing fast. Which is awesome. Because framing it as "ahead" or a "gap" is completely backwards. Innovation isn't a competition or zero-sum game. Innovation coming out of China benefits the world, just like innovation coming out of the US does. What matters is the total. How about we be thankful that there are now so many more scientists the world over contributing to research and knowledge? How amazing is that for the human race? Now, if there's an article that actually proves US innovation is slowing compared to itself in the past somehow, that actually measures total results rather than government-funded inputs (e.g. including private funding and taking impact/effectiveness into account, not just # of papers published)... then I'd be very interested in that. But this article isn't that. This article is just cheap nationalism. Ugh.
- aikinai 6y agoWhatever you're position happens to be, you can't pretend like we're all in this innovating together for the betterment of humankind. China and the US have very different ideologies and are opposing forces in global geopolitics. There are a lot of people, both inside the US and outside, that would prefer to see the US continue to be the most innovative country, so Schmidt's perspective is relevant and informative, not just cheap nationalism.
- crazygringo 6y agoBut what do ideologies/forces have to do with it? The article uses published scientific papers as an example. That's open. That's research results the US is getting for free, from China. Which is awesome! The only way I can interpret your comment as making sense is if we were talking solely about military innovation -- innovation in China's navies, in its air force, in its missiles, or even its ability to hack and disrupt foreign networks. But Schmidt clearly isn't talking about that, he's talking about basic scientific and engineering research. I don't disagree there are people who see it as a competition and want to see the US "win", but that is cheap nationalism to me. Because the fact is, the more research that gets done, the more everybody wins. Even if it's not the intention, why don't you think that research is, indeed, ultimately resulting in the betterment of humankind? Isn't that what progress is? Here's another way to think about it: producing research is like producing anything else, like iPhones. The world is better off because China has the manufacturing capacity to churn out iPhones cheaper and better than anyone else. Which benefits us all. Because it's not a competition -- it's progress.
- tgtweak 6y agoPretty rich coming from a guy who's rule saw one of the most profitable companies in the US sit on 50bn cash instead of investing it into innovation.
- d3ntb3ev1l 6y agoI remember when Eric was CEO of Novell. When he left Sun someone high up sent an email with the slight joke “short Novell” in it. Eric is smart, no doubt but Google’s success was him getting out of the way and letting him just talk to stroke his own ego Now he has the government backing him to stroke his massive ego Does anyone really think Eric does anything for “America’a” interest or your interest?
- nullappeal 6y agoha! 8 years ago - Peter Thiel: Google has $50B, doesn't innovate. Source: https://youtu.be/2Q26XIKtwXQ https://youtu.be/2Q26XIKtwXQ
- pontus 6y agoAs an employee of Google, it's sad to see it turn into a conventional company. Sure we take certain risks here and there, but by and large we're optimizing for the next quarter's PnL / growth. We would much rather invest in growing our ad revenue by x% than to start a new team doing something novel. Whenever a new idea comes up that's a bit outside the predictable path of OKRs, it's almost scoffed at, and you're implicitly told not to be silly. There's very little left of the "nothing is impossible" attitude. Google is still a fantastic company to work at as far as compensation and benefits, but it won't be for long (maybe 10 more years?)
- srtjstjsj 6y agoThe fact that "conventional company" was redefined because everyone started to be more like Google (as an operation, not privacy/advertising issues), is a great thing. Google isn't a startup and there's no reason why it should be or why that would be good. "Innovation" isn't valuable if it isn't scaled up.
- einpoklum 6y ago> Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation ... yes, by: * Letting capital become concentrated to an incredible level, especially in the tech sector. * Degrading public education through under-funding, privatization (and perhaps problematic pedagogical approaches). * Allowing infrastructure and welfare services to degrade, contributing to many people being saddled with "life overhead" that inhibits their disposition and availability to innovate technologically. * Encouraging US residents, in particular students, to become saddled with large amounts of debt. and I could go on. Now, it's true that federal and state investment in research has dropped, but Schmidt seems to be focused on getting what amounts to indirect government subsidy for R&D.
- heimatau 6y agoIs no one going to talk about the hypocrisy? Eric Schmidt isn't a beacon of sensible innovation pushing America forward. Peter Thiel called him out eight years ago [1] and I strongly encourage you to watch the 4 min clip. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q26XIKtwXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q26XIKtwXQ
- JJMcJ 6y agoGoogle a company that scoops up PhDs and has them figure out which ads to show based on the last thing you looked at is a mighty engine of innovation.