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AFAIK Google is in the middle of massive infrastructure investment in hardware which is of similar performance to Nvidia, but they will own the whole stack. The

• jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  > Why are more people not excited by what is happening at Google? What am I missing? I'd love contra-indicators. I'm not plugged in to this community nearly as muc has I am the rest of tech. But the general scuttlebutt I got was that access to TPU4 was quite competitive. It didn't seem to be like a cloud resource where you could just go use it: it took work and effort and time and many other people could butt in line ahead of you all the time to get TPUv4. Apologies for relaying hearsay, but if this is far better tech, it feels like Google is going to have to solve the scale-out concerns exponentially harder if TPUv5e is to actually* have an effect on most practitioners. It's my hope that these negative concerns were overstated; it's my hope that the situation is better. Does anyone have any idea what we could look at to suss how much of a concern this is? I think you've also casually stumbled into another issue. To quote you: > but they will own the whole stack. This feels like the typical slant against Google, and I think often this is a disservice. I personally attribute much better to Google. To me, Google has been one of the few companies that still has some of the intertwingularity in their ethos, that still has some Cluetrain Manifesto blood in their veins where they grok that the way to be a winning player is to bring a ton of selfless. But we keep seeing spin that makes Google look egocentric & self-biased & self-dealing, in so many ways. Any bad Google anywhere outshadows the rest of the good Google; Google is a massive goliath powered by the vastest ad market on the planet, but where-as most companies constantly focus on mining value of their ecosystem & imho Google is one of the rare few companies that groks that the existential stakes of creating open healthy accessible ecosystems. Imho they have almost never stacked the deck to be overlords (fuck you very very much MV3, you self-dealing app-store owners how casually rescind so many dimensions of freedom so easily for yourselves) but instead espoused a multi-polar world, one made up of many independent empowered factions. If anything, I think much of the scorn laid at Chrome's feet, for example, actually reflects on the rest of the world's inability to be as good, to serve as even remotely adequate patrons to the web: governments everywhere should be funding web development, web specs, web standards. There's just so few players & that's not Google's fault. The bread & butter of open information society is all too moldy & stale in most areas, too few players. Still, I've seen Google persist, try. I find it admirable. I see this in many ways, but the faults & criticisms are always such drastic lightning rods for anger. No anger here yet, but: there's hardly a better example of Google trying to play well than today's Keras 3.0 announcement. 'Hello, we are Google, we've optimized the ever loving hell out of our existing machine learning platform to target a whole bunch of other environments, make them 2D-grid data & model parallel across a variety of frameworks targeting by far the widest range of hardwares. And so now, if you target Keras, any of these other platforms will work intercompatibly very well.' Once again, Google steps in the ring to carry water for the world, to make practioner's lives much easier. Sure, this enables TPUv5e to be easily targetted, via a variety of different code-styles; that is self interested. But it also enables a degree of portability out of TPU & across systems that seems magical, that is extremely late bound, that permits permits permits. I'm harping on just a small bit you said, apologies, but in contrast to your 'own the whole stack', it feels like Google is the only player trying to make sure no one owns the stack, and it seems like they're doing great at it. TPUv5e happens to be one option these actions bolster. https://keras.io/keras_3/ https://keras.io/keras_3/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38446353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38446353
• mianos 3y ago
  To the end user, everything at Google has become shit or not changed at all. I am sure GCS is great but most people don't use it. What they do see is search becoming more ads than content and search not even including any relevant search terms in "here are your 1000000 results". I actually go to yandex and bing if I want to search for a specific search term. Let's not talk about friends losing all access to their accounts, forever. I switched a whole firm off GCS when their troubleshooting by 'senior' techs was just copy and pasted boilerplate too many times. The way I set things up was cloud agnostic at the time. Not something that is possible at scale. Can anyone else be trusted? Probably not. Can you trust someone on the crack-pipe full of advertising dollars?
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  My guess is that google ran the numbers and isn’t willing to lose money like openai is, so they have been slower to develop things as cool as openai, leading to a perception that they can’t do it. Hence the lack of excitement. But I think that’s unlikely, and once it’s not money-losing, google will be right there. Which, as you say, they might have an edge on due to hardware.