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> Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?” Waymo, Brain, and Chronicle
by ke88y 3y ago
> Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?”
Waymo, Brain, and Chronicle
- rand1239 3y agoDo any of them generate profit?
- julianlam 3y agoI haven't heard of the latter two, and Waymo is currently in development/testing and is not nearly as ubiquitous as it seems to be in the States.
- tehlike 3y agoBrain is everything you know of today in GenAI space, and many more internally used products and technologies.
- sparrc 3y agoHow much of that was actually generated directly from "Google X"? Seems to me that most of it came out of DeepMind, which was just a run-of-the-mill big company buys innovative startup type of acquisition.
- ke88y 3y agoBrain and DeepMind were separate orgs until very very recently. Google's GenAI stuff was mostly out of Brain and its RL stuff was mostly out of DeepMind.
- foooorsyth 3y ago>Brain is everything you know of today in GenAI space I know ChatGPT, Midjourney, StableDiffusion, Adobe Firefly, And GitHub Co-Pilot in this space. Where’s Google? Let me guess: Brain’s research led to those products? Even if that were the case, Google still failed to market and capitalize. Are they running an open research lab for the greater good? Or are they still interested in launching market-leading products?
- ke88y 3y agoUnlike the original moonshot, which was famously first-order revenue-positive ;)
- prepend 3y agoYes, it was. It was a political program to gain reputation against the Soviets and phenomenally successful in that I think the US was happy with its ROI.
- ke88y 3y agoReputation isn't revenue. You could say the same thing about Brain or Waymo.
- bostonpete 3y agoThe USG isn't setting out to make money on major ventures. Publicly traded companies are.
- tehlike 3y agoSure, google didn't capitalize on their tech before others did. But google is a fast follower. Let's wait and see. Also - did you miss "many other internally used tools/infra" part - if they can feed ads infra and increase revenue by a meager 1%, that's more than enough to make up for all others combined in revenue generated.
- prepend 3y agoHas google landed anything from AI yet? Bard just launched and it may be a $100B product in a few years, but now it’s still playing catch-up to OpenAI (that started without any moonshot and “only” with $1B in its first major seed round [0]). [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/openai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/openai
- valval 3y agoAll SOTA generative models are built on Google Brain’s research.
- giobox 3y agoI can't speak to the other two, but it's laughable to suggest in 2023 Waymo has "landed" - where is the contribution to Google's bottom line? Where can I buy or use Waymo tech outside of some very restricted demo neighborhoods? What is the likelihood this changes in the next few years? I'd be far more prepared to argue Waymo is presently another poster child for a failing Google x project.
- ke88y 3y ago> outside of some very restricted demo neighborhoods Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro. If Waymo services your home address -- and it services a lot of residential area -- then you can probably get anywhere you'd want to go around Phoenix in a driverless taxi. > What is the likelihood this changes in the next few years? I have no insider info, but I'd expect SF and LA County to roll out in the next few years and significant coverage of major metros by the end of next decade. Sorry driverless cars aren't happening fast enough for you, but they are happening.
- giobox 3y ago> Sorry driverless cars aren't happening fast enough for you, but they are happening. Don't know why you are saying sorry to me either. They are happening of course, but to say its "landed" at Waymo is hilarious to me. > Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro. Precisely - highly restricted demo neighborhoods. This USA is a massive country. You've also conveniently skipped addressing the current lack of any profit for Google what-so-ever too - a core component of most people's definition of a new line of business being a success. You can't even point to meaningful user growth given the tiny percentage of the country it operates in.
- ke88y 3y ago> Precisely - highly restricted demo neighborhoods. This USA is a massive country. 1. IDK why anyone would spend the money to do driverless everywhere in the USA. You can get to 30% of the population and by far the most profitable taxi markets by going one metro at a time. Even just the major metros in the sunbelt would print insane amounts of money. 2. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the time to go from one metro to N metros in not N*(lifetime of waymo). Ie, the hard part is done. The product has made it to market, at least in the sunbelt, and the poo-poo attitude about being able to go anywhere in the Phoenix metro without a driver is a pretty amazing dismissal.
- sf_rob 3y agoEven though it came out of X, I don't see how Chronicle could reasonably be considered a moonshot for Google. A cloud-based SecOps suite that emphasizes integration with Google Cloud/GSuite seems like a fairly obvious vertical expansion. That said, I don't know much about SecOps.
- ke88y 3y agoI'd argue that the OG Moonshot was less of a metaphorical moonshot than most of the X projects. Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon, and I think we were way further away from a science and tech perspective than we were from the moon in the early 60s.
- prepend 3y ago> Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon I don’t think that’s fair in the sense that going to the moon was absurdly difficult in 1962. It’s hard to compare things so different, but going to the moon only seems easier now, 60 years later. At the time of the moonshot it was one of the most difficult things humanity ever attempted.
- beepbopboopp 3y agoWaymo was acquired externally.