6 ms·

I've been out of Google for a year now so I can share this story: I created the AI suggestion chip at Google, which combined with an internal project called Ja

I've been out of Google for a year now so I can share this story: I created the AI suggestion chip at Google, which combined with an internal project called Jane, became the Google Assistant. At the time Sundar was desperate for a narrative to counter Alexa in front of investors and wanted a HUGE I/O announcement, so off we sprinted. But I went to the executives at the time in charge and said look, this really isn't going to be an assistant if it doesn't have the APIs into services that users need to accomplish actual tasks. Sharing some information and changing the music isn't what a butler does, a butler anticipates your needs and executes on them -- and we can't do that until we have the APIs to anticipate and execute. I was, of course, ignored, because in my naiveness at the time and I didn't realize it didn't matter what the assistant DID, it mattered what the narrative to investors was about its potential. So 2017 I/O Sundar announces the assistant and it looks great inside Allo, and it's a great demo -- mission accomplished. Now 6 years+ later, it's a stagnant, overspent team across the space -- because why? Because it can't do anything for users. All these years and billions later it still can't do anything important -- it has no user journey. And it took me equally as long to realize, that still doesn't matter. FAANG has gotten so large that the stock bump that comes from narrative outpaces actual revenue from working products. It makes for a crazy world... because ironically Google ALSO invented the truly disruptive transformer technology behind the LLM and when we tried to launch that with MINA, Sundar blocked it! Too disruptive, no narrative, too scary... I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up...

entangledqubit 3y ago
I'd imagine that if an assistant was really implemented well, it would bypass all those search ads...
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Is that a problem? Having an in with the butler is of plenty of value and could easily be sold.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    I kept selling them on this opportunity. The market of APIs front run by intelligence will be even more valuable than ads. So I built their Business Messaging program to try to get access to those apis. What took me too long to discover is that an API market of 100% confirmed conversions will be worthy less than an intent market with a 10% or 1% chance. Because you can show more ads across the intent market that aggregates to more revenue than a 100% confirmed transaction being auctioned off. (Specifically because an ad can’t go for more than the cost of the transaction of course, but multiple ads can) TLDR. Google became the same as the newspaper ads they disrupted. Making more money off the failure of their ads to convert than their successful ones.
ryandrake 3y ago
This is what bothers me about all of this "investment" into AI now. Is it the same thing? Just purely CEO performance art to mollify stupid and uncreative Investment Banking analysts so they can fill in the cell in their spreadsheet that makes stock price go up? "Yes. Mister Johnson at Goldman, we, also have an AI strategy for 2024, very similar to BigCoXyz who you also model..." It seems that companies don't have to do anything anymore--they just have to spin a story for Wall Street and make sure they lap it up.
- mjr00 3y ago
  Of course it is! Just like every company needed a "blockchain strategy" in 2018, every company now needs an "AI strategy". Because just like blockchain, the companies that use AI will crush those who don't... right? (for what it's worth, I do think LLMs are useful for certain tasks, but it's ridiculous that every company is pivoting to be an "AI company" for no real reason...)
- fwungy 3y ago
  "It's got electrolytes"
- hifromLA 3y ago
  Once the dust settles we will realize yes LLMs have some applications. But no they don’t need to be integrated into everything.
nemo44x 3y ago
> I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up... Sundar is an awful CEO, that's the lesson. That's the problem there. He exhibits no leadership abilities or vision. He's extremely weak. He's essentially the anti-Jobs.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  He's very thoughtful, though. He got where he is by being diplomatic and not stepping on anyone's toes. No surprise he would continue behaving that way in the job.
  - bmurphy1976 3y ago
    Good at keeping the lights on but not so good at pushing the business forward.
    - hhnjkda728288 3y ago
      With all due respect, push the business forward where? Google already won everything. They are on top right now. The irrational thing here is to get the size of Google and then try to promise investors growth when you should be promising dividends. The only place for Google to go is to stagnate or to go down. "Growth" is just going to get them a more serious antitrust action. That goes for Amazon as well imo. They are another company that won about as much as anyone can but has refused to move past the startup mentality and irrational promises of growth. It's going to get them both burned. Microsoft is the only company that has really handled this well but that's probably got something to do with them getting in antitrust trouble back in the day, when they were behaving much more like a Google or an Amazon.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        I was about to give up on MSFT and sell back in the aughts. But then Nadella took over, and boy am I glad I didn't sell. A friend of mine who worked at Microsoft in the 90s told me that Gates lamented in a meeting that nobody was coming up with new ideas on how to leverage their expertise and make money. If only they knew !!!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
solardev 3y ago
For what it's worth, all I ever wanted it to do was to be able to reliably turn off lights and play the right music. Nearly a decade later, when I say "turn off the music", it'll pause Netflix on the TV I'm actively watching (and talking to it through) while the speaker in the other room keeps playing music. Or if you ask it turn off the light, the whole house goes dark. I don't need it to read minds, but it sure would've been nice for it to understand the difference between a TV, a music speaker, and a light bulb. I don't know how Google works (or doesn't, apparently), but I often wished they just sat down with a few interns and manually went through the top 100 most used commands and made manual command chains for them. The assistants are annoying not because they're not AGI enough, but because they can't reliably do the simple tasks that we actually want to offload to them...
- parl_match 3y ago
  I used to use alexa for home control. Over the past 5 years or so, it got progressively smarter and more capable - and worse! It was incredibly annoying. Now I just use a locally hosted smarthome solution.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    My Alexa recently lost knowledge of most rooms, it can't work most lights anymore. A few months prior it suddenly refused to work with "livingroom", apparently some new device of that name appeared after a automatic device scan, but would not react or be removable. In the end I renamed it "main room" which worked until the recent snafu. The only, only good thing about Alexa is the low latency. But if most things just don't work right, what good is it.
  - nunez 3y ago
    I felt this one personally. We have a ton of devices connected to Alexa and HomeKit via Home Assistant. We mostly interact with Alexa through our Sonos system. I want to throw Alexa out the goddamn window every other week, especially when I ask it to turn off a very specific room, and it responds "which device?" Despite parsing my query perfectly.
dragontamer 3y ago
> I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up... Its like they always say: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Its good that you recognize the problem. Welcome to the other side. That just makes you more intelligent and ready for the next event. If you know what is moral and just, and if you have the capabilities to see the future thanks to your experience... you now know how to handle these events in the future. For now, support the rise of interest rates and ignore the cries of the SV elite to have the Fed cut rates back down. We all know that crappy projects make less sense when money costs 5.25% / year rather than the 0%/year it cost throughout the 2010s decade. Beyond that? Hard to say. Depends where things go.
eschneider 3y ago
That's the hardest lesson to learn. :/
throwaway9191aa 3y ago
Almost 25 years ago I worked at a little startup. I started to build a network management system using ..... tcl/tk some open source HP Openview, what was the name? Anyway, I had a neat display showing live nodes as green. I was redirected to enhance that display with graphs and charts and linking the nodes, we bought a TV to display it on... long story short, it was more important to show this awesome graphic tool to potential investors then to know whether our systems were actually down. Some things never change.
- thelazydogsback 3y ago
  I think it was from the movie industry - just something in the background shot with lots of blinking lights and occasional beeps was known as an EBG, or "electronic bullshit grinder". They do tend to impress investors as well as audiences.
- kaustyap 3y ago
  Was it MIMIC simulator by any chance?
- rasz 3y ago
  Most Thinking Machines CM-1/CM-2 were sold to just sit there and blink away.
commandlinefan 3y ago
> I don't know the lesson to be learned here That it's the people who say the "right" things that win at life, not the people who study hard and try to make an actual difference. Maya Angelou said it best - she was trying to be inspirational, but it's actually depressing as hell for anybody who thought hard work would get them ahead: "People will forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel".
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > anybody who thought hard work would get them ahead That's another manifestation of the Labor Theory of Value, where what something is worth is proportional to the amount of labor that went into it. This is false. Value is only tangentially related to the labor input. Just because you work hard creating a song doesn't mean people will like the song and pay $$ for it. Working smart is what matters. By that I mean working at creating things people want.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  This has been my lifelong struggle. People prefer to feel better, and that’s just reality. So how can I fuse good real things with good real feelings.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  Two comments: 1) Saying the “right” things does not work in the long run because people want results. Also, if the “right” things are not true, they will notice, and there are usually consequences. 2) I think May Angelou is right that people remember how you make them feel. I also think they remember people’s actions and statements. A good example of this is Google itself. People eventually figured out that the “do no evil” moto was bullshit. They also figured out that when Google said something, you should be skeptical because of Google’s track record of canceling products.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    Haha “long run”. So funny.
no_circuit 3y ago
Some people may be misguided when reading the "AI suggestion chip" term. I think what you mean by AI suggestion chip is actually the combination of the frontend and backend to display a suggestion chip/button [2] in the UI of Google Search that performs an action that is executed by what is considered the Google Assistant. It is not a silicon-based physical hardware AI chip. IMO what dooms assistants is the competition on who owns the top of the funnel and how that limits what APIs software/hardware services that are exposed to third parties from hardware from LG, Samsung, Sony, etc. The Google Assistant or Alexa is useless controlling the TV if it is only allowed to turn it on or off. I couldn't care at all about the Samsung assistant universe if all I had from them is a TV, but I do want to control it with Alexa or Google. Maybe Matter[1] will matter in the long run, but is a little late for the momentum/size the assistant teams in any company had years ago to build these things out. [1] https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ [2] https://m3.material.io/components/chips/overview https://m3.material.io/components/chips/overview
WalterBright 3y ago
It's not that unusual for the inventor of a technology to not know how to make use of it. Microsoft didn't invent the PC, but they knew how to make money off of it. Lotus didn't invent the spreadsheet, but they knew how to make money off of it. Apple didn't invent the cell phone, but they knew how to make money off of it. Boeing didn't invent the jet airliner, but they knew how to make money off of it.
saos 3y ago
It's like we are at the mercy of billionaire investors
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  like?

entangledqubit 3y ago

I'd imagine that if an assistant was really implemented well, it would bypass all those search ads...

MattGaiser 3y ago
Is that a problem? Having an in with the butler is of plenty of value and could easily be sold.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  I kept selling them on this opportunity. The market of APIs front run by intelligence will be even more valuable than ads. So I built their Business Messaging program to try to get access to those apis. What took me too long to discover is that an API market of 100% confirmed conversions will be worthy less than an intent market with a 10% or 1% chance. Because you can show more ads across the intent market that aggregates to more revenue than a 100% confirmed transaction being auctioned off. (Specifically because an ad can’t go for more than the cost of the transaction of course, but multiple ads can) TLDR. Google became the same as the newspaper ads they disrupted. Making more money off the failure of their ads to convert than their successful ones.

ryandrake 3y ago

This is what bothers me about all of this "investment" into AI now. Is it the same thing? Just purely CEO performance art to mollify stupid and uncreative Investment Banking analysts so they can fill in the cell in their spreadsheet that makes stock price go up? "Yes. Mister Johnson at Goldman, we, also have an AI strategy for 2024, very similar to BigCoXyz who you also model..." It seems that companies don't have to do anything anymore--they just have to spin a story for Wall Street and make sure they lap it up.

mjr00 3y ago
Of course it is! Just like every company needed a "blockchain strategy" in 2018, every company now needs an "AI strategy". Because just like blockchain, the companies that use AI will crush those who don't... right? (for what it's worth, I do think LLMs are useful for certain tasks, but it's ridiculous that every company is pivoting to be an "AI company" for no real reason...)
fwungy 3y ago
"It's got electrolytes"
hifromLA 3y ago
Once the dust settles we will realize yes LLMs have some applications. But no they don’t need to be integrated into everything.

nemo44x 3y ago

> I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up... Sundar is an awful CEO, that's the lesson. That's the problem there. He exhibits no leadership abilities or vision. He's extremely weak. He's essentially the anti-Jobs.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
He's very thoughtful, though. He got where he is by being diplomatic and not stepping on anyone's toes. No surprise he would continue behaving that way in the job.
- bmurphy1976 3y ago
  Good at keeping the lights on but not so good at pushing the business forward.
  - hhnjkda728288 3y ago
    With all due respect, push the business forward where? Google already won everything. They are on top right now. The irrational thing here is to get the size of Google and then try to promise investors growth when you should be promising dividends. The only place for Google to go is to stagnate or to go down. "Growth" is just going to get them a more serious antitrust action. That goes for Amazon as well imo. They are another company that won about as much as anyone can but has refused to move past the startup mentality and irrational promises of growth. It's going to get them both burned. Microsoft is the only company that has really handled this well but that's probably got something to do with them getting in antitrust trouble back in the day, when they were behaving much more like a Google or an Amazon.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      I was about to give up on MSFT and sell back in the aughts. But then Nadella took over, and boy am I glad I didn't sell. A friend of mine who worked at Microsoft in the 90s told me that Gates lamented in a meeting that nobody was coming up with new ideas on how to leverage their expertise and make money. If only they knew !!!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

solardev 3y ago

For what it's worth, all I ever wanted it to do was to be able to reliably turn off lights and play the right music. Nearly a decade later, when I say "turn off the music", it'll pause Netflix on the TV I'm actively watching (and talking to it through) while the speaker in the other room keeps playing music. Or if you ask it turn off the light, the whole house goes dark. I don't need it to read minds, but it sure would've been nice for it to understand the difference between a TV, a music speaker, and a light bulb. I don't know how Google works (or doesn't, apparently), but I often wished they just sat down with a few interns and manually went through the top 100 most used commands and made manual command chains for them. The assistants are annoying not because they're not AGI enough, but because they can't reliably do the simple tasks that we actually want to offload to them...

parl_match 3y ago
I used to use alexa for home control. Over the past 5 years or so, it got progressively smarter and more capable - and worse! It was incredibly annoying. Now I just use a locally hosted smarthome solution.
- danielbln 3y ago
  My Alexa recently lost knowledge of most rooms, it can't work most lights anymore. A few months prior it suddenly refused to work with "livingroom", apparently some new device of that name appeared after a automatic device scan, but would not react or be removable. In the end I renamed it "main room" which worked until the recent snafu. The only, only good thing about Alexa is the low latency. But if most things just don't work right, what good is it.
- nunez 3y ago
  I felt this one personally. We have a ton of devices connected to Alexa and HomeKit via Home Assistant. We mostly interact with Alexa through our Sonos system. I want to throw Alexa out the goddamn window every other week, especially when I ask it to turn off a very specific room, and it responds "which device?" Despite parsing my query perfectly.

dragontamer 3y ago

> I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up... Its like they always say: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Its good that you recognize the problem. Welcome to the other side. That just makes you more intelligent and ready for the next event. If you know what is moral and just, and if you have the capabilities to see the future thanks to your experience... you now know how to handle these events in the future. For now, support the rise of interest rates and ignore the cries of the SV elite to have the Fed cut rates back down. We all know that crappy projects make less sense when money costs 5.25% / year rather than the 0%/year it cost throughout the 2010s decade. Beyond that? Hard to say. Depends where things go.

eschneider 3y ago

That's the hardest lesson to learn. :/

throwaway9191aa 3y ago

Almost 25 years ago I worked at a little startup. I started to build a network management system using ..... tcl/tk some open source HP Openview, what was the name? Anyway, I had a neat display showing live nodes as green. I was redirected to enhance that display with graphs and charts and linking the nodes, we bought a TV to display it on... long story short, it was more important to show this awesome graphic tool to potential investors then to know whether our systems were actually down. Some things never change.

thelazydogsback 3y ago
I think it was from the movie industry - just something in the background shot with lots of blinking lights and occasional beeps was known as an EBG, or "electronic bullshit grinder". They do tend to impress investors as well as audiences.
kaustyap 3y ago
Was it MIMIC simulator by any chance?
rasz 3y ago
Most Thinking Machines CM-1/CM-2 were sold to just sit there and blink away.

commandlinefan 3y ago

> I don't know the lesson to be learned here That it's the people who say the "right" things that win at life, not the people who study hard and try to make an actual difference. Maya Angelou said it best - she was trying to be inspirational, but it's actually depressing as hell for anybody who thought hard work would get them ahead: "People will forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel".

WalterBright 3y ago
> anybody who thought hard work would get them ahead That's another manifestation of the Labor Theory of Value, where what something is worth is proportional to the amount of labor that went into it. This is false. Value is only tangentially related to the labor input. Just because you work hard creating a song doesn't mean people will like the song and pay $$ for it. Working smart is what matters. By that I mean working at creating things people want.
tsunamifury 3y ago
This has been my lifelong struggle. People prefer to feel better, and that’s just reality. So how can I fuse good real things with good real feelings.
StressedDev 3y ago
Two comments: 1) Saying the “right” things does not work in the long run because people want results. Also, if the “right” things are not true, they will notice, and there are usually consequences. 2) I think May Angelou is right that people remember how you make them feel. I also think they remember people’s actions and statements. A good example of this is Google itself. People eventually figured out that the “do no evil” moto was bullshit. They also figured out that when Google said something, you should be skeptical because of Google’s track record of canceling products.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  Haha “long run”. So funny.

no_circuit 3y ago

Some people may be misguided when reading the "AI suggestion chip" term. I think what you mean by AI suggestion chip is actually the combination of the frontend and backend to display a suggestion chip/button [2] in the UI of Google Search that performs an action that is executed by what is considered the Google Assistant. It is not a silicon-based physical hardware AI chip. IMO what dooms assistants is the competition on who owns the top of the funnel and how that limits what APIs software/hardware services that are exposed to third parties from hardware from LG, Samsung, Sony, etc. The Google Assistant or Alexa is useless controlling the TV if it is only allowed to turn it on or off. I couldn't care at all about the Samsung assistant universe if all I had from them is a TV, but I do want to control it with Alexa or Google. Maybe Matter[1] will matter in the long run, but is a little late for the momentum/size the assistant teams in any company had years ago to build these things out. [1] https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/ [2] https://m3.material.io/components/chips/overview https://m3.material.io/components/chips/overview

WalterBright 3y ago

It's not that unusual for the inventor of a technology to not know how to make use of it. Microsoft didn't invent the PC, but they knew how to make money off of it. Lotus didn't invent the spreadsheet, but they knew how to make money off of it. Apple didn't invent the cell phone, but they knew how to make money off of it. Boeing didn't invent the jet airliner, but they knew how to make money off of it.

saos 3y ago

It's like we are at the mercy of billionaire investors

tsunamifury 3y ago
like?