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Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI. It's really quite embarrassing, particularly in the contex

Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI. It's really quite embarrassing, particularly in the context of the fact that Google was the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade. As a Alphabet shareholder, I won't be sad to see Sundar go.

faeriechangling 4y ago
Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though? Who would replace him that could get the job done where Sundar failed? I think it's easier said than done to stay the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade even if your leadership is above-average. Still Sundar is mediocre at best, and I certainly think Google's shareholders should be looking for a new person to run the place. It's not just AI, Google's entire portfolio has weakened.
- johnthescott 4y ago
  jeff dean, would have my vote? https://research.google/people/jeff/ https://research.google/people/jeff/
  - hcrisp 4y ago
    That's who I thought of, but how can he go from leading the AI department which is behind to leading the company with AI ahead of the competition?
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Half the people on here have as much or more vision
- bobsil1 4y ago
  Has no CS background, studied material sci → consulting → Google PM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > no CS background Now do Tim Cook.
    - iamerroragent 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
        A computer hardware fashion company.
        iamerroragent 4y ago
        It's styling and accessories brand. Doesn't mean Tim Cook hasn't been successful at his job and what Apple has required of him. They just don't really make technology for people that want to understand and have real ownership of their computer and software.
    - bobsil1 4y ago
      Also lagging in ML, good point
- sheepscreek 4y ago
  He’s not a bad CEO. Just not an innovative one. I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing, leave alone the rest of Alphabet (which Sundar is also the CEO of). I often think of his time at Google as Ballmer’s time at Microsoft. Not unsuccessful, business grew manifold. But not pushing the bar. Nothing to keep the competitors on their toes. Like Apple did with Apple Silicon. I heard this somewhere: you have leaders for peacetime, and leaders for wartime. They are seldom the same people.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing Not sure I agree. It's easy to be captain of a ship when you're on a familiar route and there aren't any icebergs to dodge. Just let the crew get on with doing what they always do. It's only when you have to dodge icebergs that you need to start making difficult decisions under pressure and coordinating subordinates.
- Aunche 4y ago
  I don't think Sundar is bad per se. Rather, he is doing what most Googlers are doing which is resting and vesting off of that sweet ad money. It's unlikely that GPT is as monetizable as ads, so it's possible that he still loses even if he wins the AI race. As for a better alternative I think that the Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is highly underated. She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
  - rvnx 4y ago
    Susan is really really great and she also dodged other issues (like the elections influence one), though lately (it's quite recent) she has resigned and doesn't want to have an active role anymore as far as I know.
  - KeplerBoy 4y ago
    imo bing chat (and similar gpt based systems) will be much better at placing ads than any conventional search engine ever was. After all there you only get presented a handful of links at most and the chatbot can hype up the sponsored link.
  - caskstrength 4y ago
    > She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok). How did Youtube Shorts protect anything?! They failed to compete with TikTok but keep antagonizing loyal Youtube users with these unremovable crap.
  - robswc 4y ago
    I can't say I agree. I think YouTube could have stood its ground or maneuvered much better. Perhaps the best "decision" to point to is the removing of dislikes. Does nothing but degrade user experience. Claims it was done to "avoid cyber bullying" or something to that effect but that's ridiculous. Now I have to waste a lot of time reading through comments to know if there's something seriously wrong with the "How To" I'm about to watch.
- super256 4y ago
  > Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though? I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but losing. Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same amount (from 69% to 60%) [1]. Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want. Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's making me sad regardless. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobile-operating-systems-germany/?locale=en https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobi...
  - soiler 4y ago
    > Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want. The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.
    - koyote 4y ago
      Which clock change are you referring to? I don't think I've ever heard anything about this.
      - soiler 4y ago
        android changed the lock screen clock from HH:MM to HH MM it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.
  - martinald 4y ago
    It honestly feels that Android has been EOLed over the past couple of years. I haven't noticed any changes to it whatsoever.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  ChatGPT-4 right ?
this_user 4y ago
It seems to be more complacency on the part of the Google. They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new. When was the last time they launched a major new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? It has been a while. Too many of their resources seem to be focused inwards on hypothetical questions like AI ethics that keep them from actually building things.
- o8o8o8o 4y ago
  I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    > I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the end they didn't.
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      That’s the point isn’t it? Google has trashed their image within tech circles so much that that a product like Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling prophecy if everybody believes Google won’t commit. MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
      - aleph_minus_one 4y ago
        > If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia? There was Google Code, a service that was similar to GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers&oldid=1132401784 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers...).
m3kw9 4y ago
Was surprised developing AGI wasn’t one of their moonshots based on their own AI expertise
- dimal 4y ago
  How do you sell ads on an AGI product? Since they made their original mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") subservient to their ads business, they didn't have an incentive to build it. It's the old innovator's dilemma. AI makes their business model obsolete, so they couldn't imagine how to build it.
  - HlessClaudesman 4y ago
    You cannot get someone to build what their carrier / status depends on not being built. Bard seems hobbled because Google can't conceive of anyone not referring back to Google Search as the ultimate arbiter of truth.
  - throw_a_grenade 4y ago
    How? By product placement. Steer the answers towards certain solutions. Ad people will be bidding on keywords it prompts. It's yet to be seen how much different that will be from normal keywords in search.
    - dimal 4y ago
      I think it's trickier than that. People wouldn't trust the answers. At least with ads, you can see that it's an ad. And it seems like there would be liability issues to having your AI saying "Use X product because..." vs passively displaying an ad. And since LLMs are non-deterministic, you'd have the risk that it says something that the advertiser wouldn't want. Advertisers would probably be scared of that. I think OpenAI's plugins look like a better fit. Just tell the model what you want and it interacts with services directly. I assume OpenAI is getting a cut of that?
  - michaelt 4y ago
    Make an AGI powerful enough that if you tell it to book you a holiday or buy you a bicycle it finds something better than you'd have got yourself, and at a better price too.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI. Have they thought about introducing more leetcode questions? /s
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I don't think that's one area in which the two companies differ
m3kw9 4y ago
I think OpenAI just executed with perfection, also their focus on AI was a big competitive advantage vs Google who have 50 different things
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  Also not cancelling things left and right would probably be a better strategy for Google. People used to love them, but complete disregard for their users and impassionate product shutdowns have completely destroyed trust. I wouldn't ever consider building my workflow on anything Google, maybe with the exception of Gmail/Android and whatever they can their office suite now [0]. [0]: I've lost track of their rebrandings.
  - valdiorn 4y ago
    I have a need for running GPU capable notebooks as part of a processing pipeline. I want a cloud solution, and noticed that Colab Pro is basically the ideal solution for what I need. Absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make it a critical path if my process, though, because that's exactly the sort of product Google might just shut down with a week's notice because it didn't make enough money that quarter.
- leeoniya 4y ago
  > Google who have 50 different things their bread and butter is search ads, which means they should have second-to-none search quality. but they don't. google knows more about me than my wife, yet fails to give me even remotely relevant ads except for things i have already searched for and usually already purchased or decided against. it's truly remarkable how terrible it is, and has been for decades.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  OpenAI's product is AI, all else is in service to that. Google's product is ads, with all else--including AI--in service to that.
heisenbit 4y ago
Outmaneuvered? They crammed ads into every possible space and the content out. Amazon take note!
nunez 4y ago
I agree. How could the company that is working on Google Brain and DeepMind slip up THIS badly on their own home turf?
echelon 4y ago
> As a Alphabet shareholder I wouldn't be long GOOG. They've got a long way to fall, and it's unclear if they can turn it around.
nailer 4y ago
Sundar is Google's Ballmer. Was considered successful at the time, but actually presided over a period of growth that looked a lot flatter than their company's rivals. In retrospect, both leaders look complacent.

faeriechangling 4y ago

Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though? Who would replace him that could get the job done where Sundar failed? I think it's easier said than done to stay the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade even if your leadership is above-average. Still Sundar is mediocre at best, and I certainly think Google's shareholders should be looking for a new person to run the place. It's not just AI, Google's entire portfolio has weakened.

johnthescott 4y ago
jeff dean, would have my vote? https://research.google/people/jeff/ https://research.google/people/jeff/
- hcrisp 4y ago
  That's who I thought of, but how can he go from leading the AI department which is behind to leading the company with AI ahead of the competition?
ipaddr 4y ago
Half the people on here have as much or more vision
bobsil1 4y ago
Has no CS background, studied material sci → consulting → Google PM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > no CS background Now do Tim Cook.
  - iamerroragent 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
      A computer hardware fashion company.
      - iamerroragent 4y ago
        It's styling and accessories brand. Doesn't mean Tim Cook hasn't been successful at his job and what Apple has required of him. They just don't really make technology for people that want to understand and have real ownership of their computer and software.
  - bobsil1 4y ago
    Also lagging in ML, good point
sheepscreek 4y ago
He’s not a bad CEO. Just not an innovative one. I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing, leave alone the rest of Alphabet (which Sundar is also the CEO of). I often think of his time at Google as Ballmer’s time at Microsoft. Not unsuccessful, business grew manifold. But not pushing the bar. Nothing to keep the competitors on their toes. Like Apple did with Apple Silicon. I heard this somewhere: you have leaders for peacetime, and leaders for wartime. They are seldom the same people.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing Not sure I agree. It's easy to be captain of a ship when you're on a familiar route and there aren't any icebergs to dodge. Just let the crew get on with doing what they always do. It's only when you have to dodge icebergs that you need to start making difficult decisions under pressure and coordinating subordinates.
Aunche 4y ago
I don't think Sundar is bad per se. Rather, he is doing what most Googlers are doing which is resting and vesting off of that sweet ad money. It's unlikely that GPT is as monetizable as ads, so it's possible that he still loses even if he wins the AI race. As for a better alternative I think that the Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is highly underated. She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
- rvnx 4y ago
  Susan is really really great and she also dodged other issues (like the elections influence one), though lately (it's quite recent) she has resigned and doesn't want to have an active role anymore as far as I know.
- KeplerBoy 4y ago
  imo bing chat (and similar gpt based systems) will be much better at placing ads than any conventional search engine ever was. After all there you only get presented a handful of links at most and the chatbot can hype up the sponsored link.
- caskstrength 4y ago
  > She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok). How did Youtube Shorts protect anything?! They failed to compete with TikTok but keep antagonizing loyal Youtube users with these unremovable crap.
- robswc 4y ago
  I can't say I agree. I think YouTube could have stood its ground or maneuvered much better. Perhaps the best "decision" to point to is the removing of dislikes. Does nothing but degrade user experience. Claims it was done to "avoid cyber bullying" or something to that effect but that's ridiculous. Now I have to waste a lot of time reading through comments to know if there's something seriously wrong with the "How To" I'm about to watch.
super256 4y ago
> Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though? I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but losing. Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same amount (from 69% to 60%) [1]. Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want. Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's making me sad regardless. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobile-operating-systems-germany/?locale=en https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobi...
- soiler 4y ago
  > Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want. The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.
  - koyote 4y ago
    Which clock change are you referring to? I don't think I've ever heard anything about this.
    - soiler 4y ago
      android changed the lock screen clock from HH:MM to HH MM it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.
- martinald 4y ago
  It honestly feels that Android has been EOLed over the past couple of years. I haven't noticed any changes to it whatsoever.
ChatGTP 4y ago
ChatGPT-4 right ?

this_user 4y ago

It seems to be more complacency on the part of the Google. They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new. When was the last time they launched a major new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? It has been a while. Too many of their resources seem to be focused inwards on hypothetical questions like AI ethics that keep them from actually building things.

o8o8o8o 4y ago
I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  > I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the end they didn't.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    That’s the point isn’t it? Google has trashed their image within tech circles so much that that a product like Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling prophecy if everybody believes Google won’t commit. MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
    - aleph_minus_one 4y ago
      > If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia? There was Google Code, a service that was similar to GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers&oldid=1132401784 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers...).

m3kw9 4y ago

Was surprised developing AGI wasn’t one of their moonshots based on their own AI expertise

dimal 4y ago
How do you sell ads on an AGI product? Since they made their original mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") subservient to their ads business, they didn't have an incentive to build it. It's the old innovator's dilemma. AI makes their business model obsolete, so they couldn't imagine how to build it.
- HlessClaudesman 4y ago
  You cannot get someone to build what their carrier / status depends on not being built. Bard seems hobbled because Google can't conceive of anyone not referring back to Google Search as the ultimate arbiter of truth.
- throw_a_grenade 4y ago
  How? By product placement. Steer the answers towards certain solutions. Ad people will be bidding on keywords it prompts. It's yet to be seen how much different that will be from normal keywords in search.
  - dimal 4y ago
    I think it's trickier than that. People wouldn't trust the answers. At least with ads, you can see that it's an ad. And it seems like there would be liability issues to having your AI saying "Use X product because..." vs passively displaying an ad. And since LLMs are non-deterministic, you'd have the risk that it says something that the advertiser wouldn't want. Advertisers would probably be scared of that. I think OpenAI's plugins look like a better fit. Just tell the model what you want and it interacts with services directly. I assume OpenAI is getting a cut of that?
- michaelt 4y ago
  Make an AGI powerful enough that if you tell it to book you a holiday or buy you a bicycle it finds something better than you'd have got yourself, and at a better price too.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI. Have they thought about introducing more leetcode questions? /s

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I don't think that's one area in which the two companies differ

m3kw9 4y ago

I think OpenAI just executed with perfection, also their focus on AI was a big competitive advantage vs Google who have 50 different things

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Also not cancelling things left and right would probably be a better strategy for Google. People used to love them, but complete disregard for their users and impassionate product shutdowns have completely destroyed trust. I wouldn't ever consider building my workflow on anything Google, maybe with the exception of Gmail/Android and whatever they can their office suite now [0]. [0]: I've lost track of their rebrandings.
- valdiorn 4y ago
  I have a need for running GPU capable notebooks as part of a processing pipeline. I want a cloud solution, and noticed that Colab Pro is basically the ideal solution for what I need. Absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make it a critical path if my process, though, because that's exactly the sort of product Google might just shut down with a week's notice because it didn't make enough money that quarter.
leeoniya 4y ago
> Google who have 50 different things their bread and butter is search ads, which means they should have second-to-none search quality. but they don't. google knows more about me than my wife, yet fails to give me even remotely relevant ads except for things i have already searched for and usually already purchased or decided against. it's truly remarkable how terrible it is, and has been for decades.
pwinnski 4y ago
OpenAI's product is AI, all else is in service to that. Google's product is ads, with all else--including AI--in service to that.

heisenbit 4y ago

Outmaneuvered? They crammed ads into every possible space and the content out. Amazon take note!

nunez 4y ago

I agree. How could the company that is working on Google Brain and DeepMind slip up THIS badly on their own home turf?

echelon 4y ago

> As a Alphabet shareholder I wouldn't be long GOOG. They've got a long way to fall, and it's unclear if they can turn it around.

nailer 4y ago

Sundar is Google's Ballmer. Was considered successful at the time, but actually presided over a period of growth that looked a lot flatter than their company's rivals. In retrospect, both leaders look complacent.