10 ms·

Google's True Moonshot

168 points by scdoshi 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago
Google no longer seems relevant to anything much apart from what it’s already doing well… YouTube, search, android, maps.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Waymo?
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Way too early IMO. Think about something like Google Fiber. It looked extremely promising, but the inability (or lack of desire) to expand it left it as mostly irrelevant. With Waymo they also have some major issues to work out as they're bleeding billions while charging as much, if not more, as human driven cars charge. It might end up getting worked out in the future and turned into something neat, or it might just eventually find itself on the ever-growing scrap-heap.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      aghem, Stadia, aghem
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > it’s already doing well > search many people disagree..
  - geodel 3y ago
    It needs to be at least many hundred million disagree to matter.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      > hundred million this is about how many people now going to ChatGPT while were going to Google year ago for similar searches
      - huytersd 3y ago
        At least in my experience, ChatGPT uses Bing a whole lot. I wonder what the stats for Bing usage are now compared to Google since ChatGPT has been out for a while.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Can you provide some context about why this is relevant to the article, which posits that Google is uniquely positioned to win the AI space and hence the future of computing? The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services that leverage Google’s infrastructure to provide the same capabilities to businesses. Moreover, it’s a world where Google is truly integrated: the company already makes the chips, in both its phones and its data centers, it makes the models, and it does it all with the largest collection of data in the world.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    Because Google has burned it’s good will by cancelling so many projects. Yet another new Google project is simply met with “ok, but when will it be canceled”.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    But it doesn't seem to be true - there's more of a moat around search than AI it seems, and the recent trend is people replacing the Google search app on their phones with Perplexity.ai. You currently still need search too, for AI's to access data newer than their training set, but I wonder how that's going to evolve over time ... Could see AI's being updated increasingly frequently and tapping direct into news sources (not via search) for news/sports/etc.
  - frankgrimesjr 3y ago
    I don't know enough about the AI space to comment on it specifically. But this distinctly reminds me about articles around about the time of the first iPhone release which posited that Microsoft was in a unique position to ultimately win the smartphone market. After all it was dominant on the desktop and Windows Mobile already had a decent (albeit not dominant) marketshare in smartphones at the time.
    - kccqzy 3y ago
      The theory wasn't wrong and still isn't wrong. The problem is in the execution.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Chrome, gmail, google docs/sheets, google meet, google drive, cloud, pixel, chrome book, nest, fiber, waymo
fumar 3y ago
The lengthy post boils down to this quote " Google could build the AI to win it all" but it is not guaranteed. I appreciate the context as someone who hasn't kept a close eye on Google's AI efforts, but Ben doesn't cover why Google has a right to win outside of search data. Interestingly, there is no mention of AWS and Amazon's wider efforts to create AI tools. There is hype around chat bots but what is the likelihood chat functionality is the premier AI gateway in the near future? Edit: I thought about the topic more while wrapping up my work work. I am on the periphery of AI at one of the large US tech companies and we've placed AI bets along many of our existing products. Every day I run into this – "I manage xyz product, we plan to add AI to help with XYZ in 2024" or we added this chat functionality for "manual job to be done." I don't claim to have insight into the future on which of these solutions will be successful for their intended clients. The pattern I see is that AI can be quickly (relative) integrated or coupled onto existing software services. Is that the secret to AI? It will permeate through our digital lives either in small or big ways – but critically it isn't one AI to rule them all. AI micro services will act like intermediaries between humans and some end service. It is like chocolate. Why not pair chocolate with [enter any food stuff]? You could hit a home run like chocolate with peanut butter or chocolate chip cookies. Now we have chocolate everywhere including drinks, but chocolate isn't required for a tasty result. And importantly chocolate isn't always a standalone dish – it can be though.
- carlineng 3y ago
  The argument is more than that -- namely that in addition to having sophisticated AI, Google also controls the OS (Android) and hardware (Pixel). Being able to integrate best-in-class AI at every level of the stack is a tremendous advantage. OpenAI can't do this because they don't control the OS, and will always need to go through an app. Apple can play since they control OS and hardware, but at the moment they appear pretty far behind in the AI aspect.
  - ghayes 3y ago
    Is anyone really that far behind on AI given that the newest open-source models are closing in on GPT4?
nkingsy 3y ago
I was under the impression that the data google has isn’t too valuable for ai training, as quality is so important. If textbook quality data is needed, then we are basically limited by the current best LLM’s ability to create synthetic textbooks. Or perhaps this is a path Microsoft is trying (and presumably openai) due to a lack of good non-synthetic data.
- gs17 3y ago
  Google Books would probably be useful, although I don't know if they're able to take advantage of it.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
The one part of this thesis that I pretty strongly disagree with is the idea that people would prefer to have long, meandering voice conversations with an AI, compared to text. Just look at anyone under the age of 25 (35 maybe?) They can easily have long, meandering conversations with actual humans using voice, yet I see them go for text 9 times out of ten. As someone on the backside of middle age, I often find it pretty baffling. I like the succinctness of text when I need to send a quick update or ask a short question, but I normally always call someone for an in-depth conversation. But I'll see my nieces text back and forth with friends for literally hours, sometimes getting emotionally worked up, and I'm thinking "OMG, just pick up the phone to your ear and just talk to them." But I think the reason people prefer texting is the same reason most people still prefer typing, despite tech that, these days, could easily transcribe with great accuracy. At least for me, typing frees up my brain to actually move faster. When typing, I can think about the next phrase or sentence. When talking, I find it much more difficult to "think ahead", so to speak. So I'm really skeptical that voice interfaces will be "the wave of the future". Sure, I use OK Google a lot, but basically for the same sets of commands as everyone else (What's the weather? Set my alarm. What's next on my calendar? Etc. etc.) Occasionally I'll ask it "search-like" questions. Perhaps I suffer from a dearth of imagination, but I just have a hard time believing long voice conversations with a machine are something most folks would want.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Not all people experience thought the same way. Some people (like me) find it no problem to compose a sentence in advance while speaking some previous words. The speaking doesn't conflict with the composition. Some people can count, do math, or keep time silently in their head while reading. Other people can't do that because their thoughts and language processing are linked differently somehow. For me, I prefer to dictate to my Android phone in contexts where most people choose to type, such as in a short message. It's faster than typing on-screen, and the way I think I am able to compose ahead in a way I can't do while typing. The dictation is so good these days that there are relatively few mistakes and ambiguities to correct, and the UIs for doing so have become easier.
- cortesoft 3y ago
rob74 3y ago
> Yes, Android has its advantages to iOS, but they aren’t particularly meaningful to most people, and even for those that care — like me — they are not large enough to give up on iOS’s overall superior user experience. That's not the real question though - the real question is whether people find iOS compelling enough to pay a premium for using it and put up with the ecosystem lock-in. And the user experience is only superior when you're used to it, as a longtime Android user I regularly get frustrated when having to use an iOS device...
- acdha 3y ago
  > the real question is whether people find iOS compelling enough to pay a premium for using it and put up with the ecosystem lock-in It’s only paying a premium at the lowest end of the market - if you’re buying a Pixel, you’re paying as much or even more than someone buying an equivalent iPhone. The ecosystem switching cost is real but given how most Android users I know complain about app developers favoring iOS, I’m not sure how substantial that is.
smeagull 3y ago
Does anyone know if it is actually possible to completely disable the voice assistant on Android? I've changed every setting I can, and no matter what, if I plug in headphones, it'll prompt me if the connection goes loose.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Aside: excruciating one hundred paragraphs about stuff he said previously, recently, or in another lifetime, before getting to the actual topic and title subject of the article. Geez. I don't need articles to be transcripts of podcast-esque rambling. Get on with it!
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  This is a very common pattern (and criticism) of stratechery.
  - transitus 3y ago
    This pattern of writing isn't necessarily a criticism; it can also be beneficial. Visit infrequently (thus saving time to use for other worthwhile activities), and you'll receive a summary of his thoughts over a decade, all in a well-organized and smoothly flowing text. Additionally, if you prefer to skip the historical recap and setting, you can simply start reading from the end.
  - h4vot 3y ago
    I've allways found it valid and helpful background
_the_inflator 3y ago
We should consider the fact that AI ain’t a company, it is a feature, the same as highly intelligent people per se don’t earn tons of money. Paradoxically we are in a phase of technological stagnation. Cloud movement was/is maybe the latest paradigm shift for a couple of years to decades to come. AI will accelerate features and won’t mark a product category itself, same as gifted people are capable of outperforming others in intellectual fields, but don’t necessarily need to. The mundane stuff like generating text is what is AI paradoxically needed for. (Imagine that, that humanity’s greatest gift is now outsourced.) This is what makes AI so hard to grasp. We know what it is, but it is hard to applying it in concrete business contexts. “OK Google analyze my company with 100.000 workers” won’t happen soon. Society needs to take care of possible side effects first.
- atoav 3y ago
  Oh I am pretty certain someone™ will put the whole personal record into an LLM on someone elses computer (aka the cloud) and ask who needs to be fired and come up with a reason. Then they will fire them. Then the reason will turn out to be bullshit. On the other side, there will be a ton of cowards who will say the computer told them to do X, where X is the thing they wanted to do all along. And the neat part is that you don't even need to ask a computer for that, you just pretend you did. And in the end if Xbturns out to be a shit choice, you can use the famous software error-excuse and be off the hook immediately, because apparently liability ends there automatically or something.
terryf 3y ago
Is it possible that google will build the next great AI? Of course. But right now they really really seem to be failing at it. Maybe the core tech in gemini is great. But it's nowhere. Just as an anecdote, I tried to actually pay google for an AI product they claimed to have launched - the image generation, Imagen 2. And apparently, I can't. Even after tens of e-mails and a call with an account manager, the response is "uh, follow us on twitter and explain why you are good at building AI tools". Jeez, buying a service is not supposed to be like a job interview. It's supposed to be like buying the same service from OpenAI - enter credit card details and go. So, the issue with google is that they took the wrong approach - build it in-house at a big company. What a big company has, are lawyers. Very good ones. The job of lawyers is to avoid risk. And they are great at it. However, building these sort of cutting edge services requires taking risk. And you can't really do that at a large company. This is why Microsoft is winning - they realized that investing into a startup that has no lawyers and is willing to take risk is the right path to quickly getting to the result. This is also why dalle3 and chatgpt4 are available for everyone today. And Geimini ultra isn't.
- danielovichdk 3y ago
  I would love to know if this really is Conways Law exposing poor reaction and innovation reactions.
- qp11 3y ago
  Microsoft isn't any better. Competition in this space is dead. Who ever is capable of posing a threat to both these obese rentier parasites will be targeted and obliterated given the cash mountain ranges at their disposal. Quality is not possible when competition is an illusion.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The only way competition in this space can be described as "dead" with all the free-license models bouncing about is that there's only one model (or company with models) that's actually worth paying for. That would be the one that MS invested in. Well, for now at least. At some point one of those free models will best it.
roughly 3y ago
What's always frustrated me about Google is that I would pay a substantial amount of money on an ongoing basis for the capabilities they could provide, but I'm absolutely not willing to pay what they're asking and what they're asking is tanking their products. Google as a products and services company - Google with Apple's business model - is something I would've been a happy customer of for the last decade or two easily. Google as an ads company is an entity I go to great efforts to remove from my life.
- jessekv 3y ago
  I was thinking something similar earlier. I am huge fan of youtube and the incredible content and creators on the platform. If it was not owned by Google, I would probably happily pay 50 bucks a month for an ad-free and tracking-free experience. But instead I've mostly left the platform. I don't want the company with eyes all over the internet to also know exactly what I watch and when. It's creepy to have a single company know exactly what you did/read/watched for most of your waking hours.
- paganel 3y ago
  There's also the very, very big (and very hidden) opportunity cost of always incurring the danger of having your Google account getting nuked by Google itself, with almost no possibility of recourse, for some small payment inconsistency related to any of their products, no matter how big or small. That's why I personally would never pay Google other than for very basic and needed stuff like GMail, I wouldn't want my email account nuked and my life momentarily turned upside down because of some payment misunderstandings related to their streaming service, let's say.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I think that’s the same problem: once they did the acquisition with DoubleClick, everything solidified into “we don’t have to do customer service, our customers are advertisers” at the same time they were trying to push everyone to turn more substantial parts of their lives than search over to them.
cyclecount 3y ago
> Google sells its own phones which could be configured to have a conversation UI by default (or with Google’s Pixel Buds). This removes the friction of opening an app and setting a mode. Google also has a fleet of home devices already designed for voice interaction. Google has massive amounts of infrastructure all over the globe, with the lowest latency and fastest response. This undergirds search today, but it could undergird a new generative AI assistant tomorrow. Google has access to gobs of data specifically tied to human vocal communication, thanks to YouTube in particular. In short, the Gemini demo may have been faked, but Google is by far the company best positioned to make it real. How does he square any of that with the rest of the preceding article? Google having a technical advantage on paper and still fumbling the ball is their M.O. for a decade. Their ecosystem of devices, even just sticking to the Google-branded hardware, are inconsistent crap. Take a simple, first part app like Google Calendar and look at how sloppily and poorly it works across Pixel phones, Android Wear devices (including the Pixel Watch) and Home devices. Google sucks at building polished, consumer products. Google is by far the best company positioned for AI assistants? Is this guy forgetting about Apple, the company that has a much stronger hardware ecosystem and that will demonstrate this in the coming months with a huge hardware launch that only they could do, leveraging a huge base of iOS apps, AirPod users, etc. Apple is building a network of personal hardware devices with a weak but well-integrated personal assistant. In 1-2 years, Siri will get a massive improvement based on recent advances in LLMs and it will be 80% as good as Google’s then probably thrice rebranded AI, but it will be 300% more polished and install automatically on hardware people actually like to use.
- rezonant 3y ago
  > Their ecosystem of devices, even just sticking to the Google-branded hardware, are inconsistent crap. Take a simple, first part app like Google Calendar and look at how sloppily and poorly it works across Pixel phones, Android Wear devices (including the Pixel Watch) and Home devices. Google sucks at building polished, consumer products. Uh, I think you're living in another universe. I have all of those products and I have no issues with the Calendar experience. What use case do you think works poorly exactly?
jvdvegt 3y ago
For anybody else expecting Google to start shooting stuff at the moon: don't bother reading, it's just about more AI.
- intrasight 3y ago
  True, but today the term "moonshot" can only be about AI.
hoseja 3y ago
Is the phrase "OK Google" very hard to pronounce for anyone else? Specifically the G after the Kay.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- solardev 3y ago
  You can say "Hey Google" instead, like "Hey Google, what have you guys been doing this whole last decade?", to which it'll answer, "Okay, playing guy music from last decade on kitchen speaker".
hakdbha 3y ago
[dead]
simon_000666 3y ago
In summary. At some point an ai assistant will replace 80% of the functionality/apps offered by iOS & android - it will finally become the new OS (as we all knew from watching her). This is bad for Google as google’s main feature is search. Ai assistants will replace search and kill the main revenue stream which is ad clicks. Google’s secret plan is to eventually canabilize it’s pixel phone with an ‘agent first’ device to try to beat Apple, MS & OpenAI with a horizontal offering that is significantly better than the fragmented world of ChatGPT &iOS & azure. But it’s worth remembering and I think the article fails to point this out. Agents will still ‘recommend’ things, you ask them to book you a flight - they still have to recommend a couple of options out of many - the agents need to decide and ultimately that decision is the same as choosing who to place at the top of the search results page - whoever wins the agent wars will win a significant proportion of Google search revenue as referral fees AND a significant proportion of IOS App Store revenue. It really is winner takes all.
Rastonbury 3y ago
Instead of turning Pixels with Assistants into iPhone killers and becoming Apple, author should have looked straight at Microsoft Copilot and how a paradigm shifting LLM in G Workspace could kill Office. The Pixel is still only sold in 21 countries, scaling to Apple level would be brutal. Also that idea Google will build such a magically superior AI to every else is a bold claim. Can it make a competitive one? Yes. Can it make one so good that it makes every other AI obselete and everyone trade their iPhone for Pixel? I think that's unlikely given the level of competition
netcan 3y ago
Good read. > Google’s collection of moonshots — from Waymo to Google Fiber to Nest to Project Wing to Verily to Project Loon (and the list goes on) — have mostly been science projects .... ...a car service rather far afield from Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information ...What if “I’m Feeling Lucky” were not a whimsical button on a spartan home page, but the default way of interacting with all of the world’s information? What if an AI Assistant were so good, and so natural So... I think we should distinguish between "moonshot" and "silver bullet." One is a big, difficult goal that can be a approached with lots of determination, resources and such. The other is a future breakthrough that just fixes everything. Google has always struggled making (great) technology and concepts into products, and products into businesses. The biggest miss, IMO, was cloud. Msft & Amzn relative successes highlight where google isn't strategically strong. Waymo might be the biggest investment (probably >$100bn risked). Cloud is the large business category that actually exists. Google should have been here, considering where everyone was circa 2008. Google had the tech, the concepts, even the products. It wasn't effective at making that a great business. The "OK Google" assistant story tell objectively, because no one else has done a great job with voice interfaces either. That said I think it demonstrate the difficulty of going "concept to products." IMO, the problem with voice assistant has been a problem of imagination. Voice is a UI paradigm. What are the key use cases, where this new UI paradigm is powerful? They never invented it. Anyway... I think the strategic logic is flawed... if that is indeed the strategic logic It's "singularity thinking." An expectation that version N+2 makes version N=1 obsolete. He who attains the GPTn, owns driving, personal computing, etc. >The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services So this is what I mean. A "moonshot" would be defining these and going after them with real big intent. Not one that considers everything side effects of some big breakthrough that makes all linear approaches irrelevant. Voice UIs, even self driving, whatever wing's mission is.... these aren't impossible ideas even with current science & computing power. They're just hard. Requiring imagination. Risk. Vision. Strategy. Drones are a method. Delivery is the task. Human-like drivers are a method. Transport is the task. Voice recognition. LLMs. These are methods. Not tasks. If you're doing silver bullet, it's nice to avoid defining the task. If you're doing moonshots, you want to be brutalist in defining the task.
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
I dunno, man, I can’t be arsed to trust Google to not scrap their thing a few years in anymore. They will make something remotely nice, half ass the final 20% of it, leave it to rot, complain that there have been only X billion dollars of profits and not Y, and kill it off. How they are not sunsetting Search yet, I cannot fathom.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
People act as if there are two companies (Google and Apple) and two business models (ads and selling devices). In fact Google is perfectly capable of charging a subscription in a context where ads don't make sense, like Drive, or even as an alternative, like Youtube Premium. Many people would pay a subscription for an assistant that's actually good, and of course having such an assistant integrated with email and calendar would be extremely valuable.
- acdha 3y ago
  Google does have non-ad revenue but it doesn’t seem to be enough to affect the culture: Drive customers get the same level of support as ad-supported search users. I’d like that to change but having used GCP I’m not sure that can happen before they have a better CEO.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    How does Drive customer support compare to Dropbox?
    - SXX 3y ago
      Imagine you lose access to your account, with what company do you think have better chances recovering it? Now imagine you get some very bad data loss bug affecting just your company account. What chances are there you will ever have your problem looked at by Google? I totally believe it's 0% unless you get to HN frontpage. It's not like Dropbox have best support ever, but I totally believe that getting a living human to look at your problem would be so much easier with them. With Google it's just impossible.
rdsubhas 3y ago
Big companies drag themselves down – not because they can't innovate – but because they can't go "all in" into innovations which compete against their real cash cow. An AI assistant fundamentally hits at Google's gut: Search ad revenue. Yeah, Google can make dozens of AI demos. Are they truly ready to put Gemini as the default interaction model, pitting it against their search? Can they give super accurate answers to questions, without the potential of 3 sponsored results on top, in such a way that it would make their search obsolete? Shareholders "wish" to see competitive demos, to not be left behind, etc. But are shareholders & market ready for a 10% balance sheet revenue drop that comes with making an AI assistant a go-to product instead of search? AI in Google could end up getting crippled, not by design, but by the environment and "thou shalt not touch search revenue" constraints under which it operates in. It would be interesting if Alphabet (and Alphabet's moonshots) totally distances itself from Google instead of being an internal structure sharing the same tickers, and treat Gemini as an all-out cannibalistic competitor to Google.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "Are they truly ready to put Gemini as the default interaction model, pitting it against their search?" Probably not, since they have not figured out, how to integrate the ads into the AI.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Their ad revenue is a local optimum. They could reach new highs with alternate business models but only at the cost of short term reduction in revenue from ads. And this is of course risky. So, they keep on dancing around the topic without ever committing to anything. An additional problem they have is that running AI at scale is super expensive. Even for Google. Add to that legal risks, pressure from regulators in different countries, privacy concerns, copyright issues, etc. and you get a whole lot of risk and friction. Add to that the usual organizational infighting and politics and you pretty much have a company incapable of doing anything.
  - Mattasher 3y ago
    > They could reach new highs with alternate business models but only at the cost of short term reduction in revenue from ads. Yes. Long term, if you control peoples attention and their flow of information, you will almost certainly figure out a way to control their pocketbooks.
ur-whale 3y ago
Undertaking that kind of focused, bold, visionary attack would first and foremost require to have a CEO with the same kind of attributes:bold, focused and visionary. Unfortunately, ball-less wonder milquetoast Sundar has none of the above attributes. He was hired 10 years ago not to rock the boat, but to stay the course, a strategy that requires a CEO with all the exact opposite attributes: meek, boring, visionless and all over the place.
nojvek 3y ago
> After all, if a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its advertisers for user attention. Google Assistant has the exact same problem: where do the ads go? This is Google / Alphabet's biggest problem. Unlike Microsoft that has Enterprise, Gaming, Cloud and multiple other 10B+ businesses that don't rely on ads, Google has only cloud. And Google Cloud is a distant third where they actively sabotage their own success by not caring about customers. 90% of Google revenue comes from ads. From Search, youtube, Adsense e.t.c If they build an AI that gives exactly what the user wants without ads, Google's stakeholders would fire the CEO the next day. My perception is that Google is in AI race to be relevant and capture the talent, but they don't want to actively put AI anywhere near their products that would eat into their ad revenue. Google Brain/Deepmind produces great research, they have the most number of published papers, by a big margin, but Google is not the place if you want to work on productionizing AI. Top AI Researchers probably make the most money being at the big tech labs - DeepMind / Open AI / Meta FAIR. I've heard comp being into the 10s of millions per year.

168 points by scdoshi 3y ago

Google no longer seems relevant to anything much apart from what it’s already doing well… YouTube, search, android, maps.

tnecniv 3y ago
Waymo?
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Way too early IMO. Think about something like Google Fiber. It looked extremely promising, but the inability (or lack of desire) to expand it left it as mostly irrelevant. With Waymo they also have some major issues to work out as they're bleeding billions while charging as much, if not more, as human driven cars charge. It might end up getting worked out in the future and turned into something neat, or it might just eventually find itself on the ever-growing scrap-heap.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    aghem, Stadia, aghem
riku_iki 3y ago
> it’s already doing well > search many people disagree..
- geodel 3y ago
  It needs to be at least many hundred million disagree to matter.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > hundred million this is about how many people now going to ChatGPT while were going to Google year ago for similar searches
    - huytersd 3y ago
      At least in my experience, ChatGPT uses Bing a whole lot. I wonder what the stats for Bing usage are now compared to Google since ChatGPT has been out for a while.
resolutebat 3y ago
Can you provide some context about why this is relevant to the article, which posits that Google is uniquely positioned to win the AI space and hence the future of computing? The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services that leverage Google’s infrastructure to provide the same capabilities to businesses. Moreover, it’s a world where Google is truly integrated: the company already makes the chips, in both its phones and its data centers, it makes the models, and it does it all with the largest collection of data in the world.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  Because Google has burned it’s good will by cancelling so many projects. Yet another new Google project is simply met with “ok, but when will it be canceled”.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  But it doesn't seem to be true - there's more of a moat around search than AI it seems, and the recent trend is people replacing the Google search app on their phones with Perplexity.ai. You currently still need search too, for AI's to access data newer than their training set, but I wonder how that's going to evolve over time ... Could see AI's being updated increasingly frequently and tapping direct into news sources (not via search) for news/sports/etc.
- frankgrimesjr 3y ago
  I don't know enough about the AI space to comment on it specifically. But this distinctly reminds me about articles around about the time of the first iPhone release which posited that Microsoft was in a unique position to ultimately win the smartphone market. After all it was dominant on the desktop and Windows Mobile already had a decent (albeit not dominant) marketshare in smartphones at the time.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    The theory wasn't wrong and still isn't wrong. The problem is in the execution.
huytersd 3y ago
Chrome, gmail, google docs/sheets, google meet, google drive, cloud, pixel, chrome book, nest, fiber, waymo

fumar 3y ago

The lengthy post boils down to this quote " Google could build the AI to win it all" but it is not guaranteed. I appreciate the context as someone who hasn't kept a close eye on Google's AI efforts, but Ben doesn't cover why Google has a right to win outside of search data. Interestingly, there is no mention of AWS and Amazon's wider efforts to create AI tools. There is hype around chat bots but what is the likelihood chat functionality is the premier AI gateway in the near future? Edit: I thought about the topic more while wrapping up my work work. I am on the periphery of AI at one of the large US tech companies and we've placed AI bets along many of our existing products. Every day I run into this – "I manage xyz product, we plan to add AI to help with XYZ in 2024" or we added this chat functionality for "manual job to be done." I don't claim to have insight into the future on which of these solutions will be successful for their intended clients. The pattern I see is that AI can be quickly (relative) integrated or coupled onto existing software services. Is that the secret to AI? It will permeate through our digital lives either in small or big ways – but critically it isn't one AI to rule them all. AI micro services will act like intermediaries between humans and some end service. It is like chocolate. Why not pair chocolate with [enter any food stuff]? You could hit a home run like chocolate with peanut butter or chocolate chip cookies. Now we have chocolate everywhere including drinks, but chocolate isn't required for a tasty result. And importantly chocolate isn't always a standalone dish – it can be though.

carlineng 3y ago
The argument is more than that -- namely that in addition to having sophisticated AI, Google also controls the OS (Android) and hardware (Pixel). Being able to integrate best-in-class AI at every level of the stack is a tremendous advantage. OpenAI can't do this because they don't control the OS, and will always need to go through an app. Apple can play since they control OS and hardware, but at the moment they appear pretty far behind in the AI aspect.
- ghayes 3y ago
  Is anyone really that far behind on AI given that the newest open-source models are closing in on GPT4?

nkingsy 3y ago

I was under the impression that the data google has isn’t too valuable for ai training, as quality is so important. If textbook quality data is needed, then we are basically limited by the current best LLM’s ability to create synthetic textbooks. Or perhaps this is a path Microsoft is trying (and presumably openai) due to a lack of good non-synthetic data.

gs17 3y ago
Google Books would probably be useful, although I don't know if they're able to take advantage of it.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

The one part of this thesis that I pretty strongly disagree with is the idea that people would prefer to have long, meandering voice conversations with an AI, compared to text. Just look at anyone under the age of 25 (35 maybe?) They can easily have long, meandering conversations with actual humans using voice, yet I see them go for text 9 times out of ten. As someone on the backside of middle age, I often find it pretty baffling. I like the succinctness of text when I need to send a quick update or ask a short question, but I normally always call someone for an in-depth conversation. But I'll see my nieces text back and forth with friends for literally hours, sometimes getting emotionally worked up, and I'm thinking "OMG, just pick up the phone to your ear and just talk to them." But I think the reason people prefer texting is the same reason most people still prefer typing, despite tech that, these days, could easily transcribe with great accuracy. At least for me, typing frees up my brain to actually move faster. When typing, I can think about the next phrase or sentence. When talking, I find it much more difficult to "think ahead", so to speak. So I'm really skeptical that voice interfaces will be "the wave of the future". Sure, I use OK Google a lot, but basically for the same sets of commands as everyone else (What's the weather? Set my alarm. What's next on my calendar? Etc. etc.) Occasionally I'll ask it "search-like" questions. Perhaps I suffer from a dearth of imagination, but I just have a hard time believing long voice conversations with a machine are something most folks would want.

jeffbee 3y ago
Not all people experience thought the same way. Some people (like me) find it no problem to compose a sentence in advance while speaking some previous words. The speaking doesn't conflict with the composition. Some people can count, do math, or keep time silently in their head while reading. Other people can't do that because their thoughts and language processing are linked differently somehow. For me, I prefer to dictate to my Android phone in contexts where most people choose to type, such as in a short message. It's faster than typing on-screen, and the way I think I am able to compose ahead in a way I can't do while typing. The dictation is so good these days that there are relatively few mistakes and ambiguities to correct, and the UIs for doing so have become easier.
cortesoft 3y ago

rob74 3y ago

> Yes, Android has its advantages to iOS, but they aren’t particularly meaningful to most people, and even for those that care — like me — they are not large enough to give up on iOS’s overall superior user experience. That's not the real question though - the real question is whether people find iOS compelling enough to pay a premium for using it and put up with the ecosystem lock-in. And the user experience is only superior when you're used to it, as a longtime Android user I regularly get frustrated when having to use an iOS device...

acdha 3y ago
> the real question is whether people find iOS compelling enough to pay a premium for using it and put up with the ecosystem lock-in It’s only paying a premium at the lowest end of the market - if you’re buying a Pixel, you’re paying as much or even more than someone buying an equivalent iPhone. The ecosystem switching cost is real but given how most Android users I know complain about app developers favoring iOS, I’m not sure how substantial that is.

smeagull 3y ago

Does anyone know if it is actually possible to completely disable the voice assistant on Android? I've changed every setting I can, and no matter what, if I plug in headphones, it'll prompt me if the connection goes loose.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Aside: excruciating one hundred paragraphs about stuff he said previously, recently, or in another lifetime, before getting to the actual topic and title subject of the article. Geez. I don't need articles to be transcripts of podcast-esque rambling. Get on with it!

noitpmeder 3y ago
This is a very common pattern (and criticism) of stratechery.
- transitus 3y ago
  This pattern of writing isn't necessarily a criticism; it can also be beneficial. Visit infrequently (thus saving time to use for other worthwhile activities), and you'll receive a summary of his thoughts over a decade, all in a well-organized and smoothly flowing text. Additionally, if you prefer to skip the historical recap and setting, you can simply start reading from the end.
- h4vot 3y ago
  I've allways found it valid and helpful background

_the_inflator 3y ago

We should consider the fact that AI ain’t a company, it is a feature, the same as highly intelligent people per se don’t earn tons of money. Paradoxically we are in a phase of technological stagnation. Cloud movement was/is maybe the latest paradigm shift for a couple of years to decades to come. AI will accelerate features and won’t mark a product category itself, same as gifted people are capable of outperforming others in intellectual fields, but don’t necessarily need to. The mundane stuff like generating text is what is AI paradoxically needed for. (Imagine that, that humanity’s greatest gift is now outsourced.) This is what makes AI so hard to grasp. We know what it is, but it is hard to applying it in concrete business contexts. “OK Google analyze my company with 100.000 workers” won’t happen soon. Society needs to take care of possible side effects first.

atoav 3y ago
Oh I am pretty certain someone™ will put the whole personal record into an LLM on someone elses computer (aka the cloud) and ask who needs to be fired and come up with a reason. Then they will fire them. Then the reason will turn out to be bullshit. On the other side, there will be a ton of cowards who will say the computer told them to do X, where X is the thing they wanted to do all along. And the neat part is that you don't even need to ask a computer for that, you just pretend you did. And in the end if Xbturns out to be a shit choice, you can use the famous software error-excuse and be off the hook immediately, because apparently liability ends there automatically or something.

terryf 3y ago

Is it possible that google will build the next great AI? Of course. But right now they really really seem to be failing at it. Maybe the core tech in gemini is great. But it's nowhere. Just as an anecdote, I tried to actually pay google for an AI product they claimed to have launched - the image generation, Imagen 2. And apparently, I can't. Even after tens of e-mails and a call with an account manager, the response is "uh, follow us on twitter and explain why you are good at building AI tools". Jeez, buying a service is not supposed to be like a job interview. It's supposed to be like buying the same service from OpenAI - enter credit card details and go. So, the issue with google is that they took the wrong approach - build it in-house at a big company. What a big company has, are lawyers. Very good ones. The job of lawyers is to avoid risk. And they are great at it. However, building these sort of cutting edge services requires taking risk. And you can't really do that at a large company. This is why Microsoft is winning - they realized that investing into a startup that has no lawyers and is willing to take risk is the right path to quickly getting to the result. This is also why dalle3 and chatgpt4 are available for everyone today. And Geimini ultra isn't.

danielovichdk 3y ago
I would love to know if this really is Conways Law exposing poor reaction and innovation reactions.
qp11 3y ago
Microsoft isn't any better. Competition in this space is dead. Who ever is capable of posing a threat to both these obese rentier parasites will be targeted and obliterated given the cash mountain ranges at their disposal. Quality is not possible when competition is an illusion.
- ben_w 3y ago
  The only way competition in this space can be described as "dead" with all the free-license models bouncing about is that there's only one model (or company with models) that's actually worth paying for. That would be the one that MS invested in. Well, for now at least. At some point one of those free models will best it.

roughly 3y ago

What's always frustrated me about Google is that I would pay a substantial amount of money on an ongoing basis for the capabilities they could provide, but I'm absolutely not willing to pay what they're asking and what they're asking is tanking their products. Google as a products and services company - Google with Apple's business model - is something I would've been a happy customer of for the last decade or two easily. Google as an ads company is an entity I go to great efforts to remove from my life.

jessekv 3y ago
I was thinking something similar earlier. I am huge fan of youtube and the incredible content and creators on the platform. If it was not owned by Google, I would probably happily pay 50 bucks a month for an ad-free and tracking-free experience. But instead I've mostly left the platform. I don't want the company with eyes all over the internet to also know exactly what I watch and when. It's creepy to have a single company know exactly what you did/read/watched for most of your waking hours.
paganel 3y ago
There's also the very, very big (and very hidden) opportunity cost of always incurring the danger of having your Google account getting nuked by Google itself, with almost no possibility of recourse, for some small payment inconsistency related to any of their products, no matter how big or small. That's why I personally would never pay Google other than for very basic and needed stuff like GMail, I wouldn't want my email account nuked and my life momentarily turned upside down because of some payment misunderstandings related to their streaming service, let's say.
- acdha 3y ago
  I think that’s the same problem: once they did the acquisition with DoubleClick, everything solidified into “we don’t have to do customer service, our customers are advertisers” at the same time they were trying to push everyone to turn more substantial parts of their lives than search over to them.

cyclecount 3y ago

> Google sells its own phones which could be configured to have a conversation UI by default (or with Google’s Pixel Buds). This removes the friction of opening an app and setting a mode. Google also has a fleet of home devices already designed for voice interaction. Google has massive amounts of infrastructure all over the globe, with the lowest latency and fastest response. This undergirds search today, but it could undergird a new generative AI assistant tomorrow. Google has access to gobs of data specifically tied to human vocal communication, thanks to YouTube in particular. In short, the Gemini demo may have been faked, but Google is by far the company best positioned to make it real. How does he square any of that with the rest of the preceding article? Google having a technical advantage on paper and still fumbling the ball is their M.O. for a decade. Their ecosystem of devices, even just sticking to the Google-branded hardware, are inconsistent crap. Take a simple, first part app like Google Calendar and look at how sloppily and poorly it works across Pixel phones, Android Wear devices (including the Pixel Watch) and Home devices. Google sucks at building polished, consumer products. Google is by far the best company positioned for AI assistants? Is this guy forgetting about Apple, the company that has a much stronger hardware ecosystem and that will demonstrate this in the coming months with a huge hardware launch that only they could do, leveraging a huge base of iOS apps, AirPod users, etc. Apple is building a network of personal hardware devices with a weak but well-integrated personal assistant. In 1-2 years, Siri will get a massive improvement based on recent advances in LLMs and it will be 80% as good as Google’s then probably thrice rebranded AI, but it will be 300% more polished and install automatically on hardware people actually like to use.

rezonant 3y ago
> Their ecosystem of devices, even just sticking to the Google-branded hardware, are inconsistent crap. Take a simple, first part app like Google Calendar and look at how sloppily and poorly it works across Pixel phones, Android Wear devices (including the Pixel Watch) and Home devices. Google sucks at building polished, consumer products. Uh, I think you're living in another universe. I have all of those products and I have no issues with the Calendar experience. What use case do you think works poorly exactly?

jvdvegt 3y ago

For anybody else expecting Google to start shooting stuff at the moon: don't bother reading, it's just about more AI.

intrasight 3y ago
True, but today the term "moonshot" can only be about AI.

hoseja 3y ago

Is the phrase "OK Google" very hard to pronounce for anyone else? Specifically the G after the Kay.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
solardev 3y ago
You can say "Hey Google" instead, like "Hey Google, what have you guys been doing this whole last decade?", to which it'll answer, "Okay, playing guy music from last decade on kitchen speaker".

hakdbha 3y ago

[dead]

simon_000666 3y ago

In summary. At some point an ai assistant will replace 80% of the functionality/apps offered by iOS & android - it will finally become the new OS (as we all knew from watching her). This is bad for Google as google’s main feature is search. Ai assistants will replace search and kill the main revenue stream which is ad clicks. Google’s secret plan is to eventually canabilize it’s pixel phone with an ‘agent first’ device to try to beat Apple, MS & OpenAI with a horizontal offering that is significantly better than the fragmented world of ChatGPT &iOS & azure. But it’s worth remembering and I think the article fails to point this out. Agents will still ‘recommend’ things, you ask them to book you a flight - they still have to recommend a couple of options out of many - the agents need to decide and ultimately that decision is the same as choosing who to place at the top of the search results page - whoever wins the agent wars will win a significant proportion of Google search revenue as referral fees AND a significant proportion of IOS App Store revenue. It really is winner takes all.

Rastonbury 3y ago

Instead of turning Pixels with Assistants into iPhone killers and becoming Apple, author should have looked straight at Microsoft Copilot and how a paradigm shifting LLM in G Workspace could kill Office. The Pixel is still only sold in 21 countries, scaling to Apple level would be brutal. Also that idea Google will build such a magically superior AI to every else is a bold claim. Can it make a competitive one? Yes. Can it make one so good that it makes every other AI obselete and everyone trade their iPhone for Pixel? I think that's unlikely given the level of competition

netcan 3y ago

Good read. > Google’s collection of moonshots — from Waymo to Google Fiber to Nest to Project Wing to Verily to Project Loon (and the list goes on) — have mostly been science projects .... ...a car service rather far afield from Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information ...What if “I’m Feeling Lucky” were not a whimsical button on a spartan home page, but the default way of interacting with all of the world’s information? What if an AI Assistant were so good, and so natural So... I think we should distinguish between "moonshot" and "silver bullet." One is a big, difficult goal that can be a approached with lots of determination, resources and such. The other is a future breakthrough that just fixes everything. Google has always struggled making (great) technology and concepts into products, and products into businesses. The biggest miss, IMO, was cloud. Msft & Amzn relative successes highlight where google isn't strategically strong. Waymo might be the biggest investment (probably >$100bn risked). Cloud is the large business category that actually exists. Google should have been here, considering where everyone was circa 2008. Google had the tech, the concepts, even the products. It wasn't effective at making that a great business. The "OK Google" assistant story tell objectively, because no one else has done a great job with voice interfaces either. That said I think it demonstrate the difficulty of going "concept to products." IMO, the problem with voice assistant has been a problem of imagination. Voice is a UI paradigm. What are the key use cases, where this new UI paradigm is powerful? They never invented it. Anyway... I think the strategic logic is flawed... if that is indeed the strategic logic It's "singularity thinking." An expectation that version N+2 makes version N=1 obsolete. He who attains the GPTn, owns driving, personal computing, etc. >The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services So this is what I mean. A "moonshot" would be defining these and going after them with real big intent. Not one that considers everything side effects of some big breakthrough that makes all linear approaches irrelevant. Voice UIs, even self driving, whatever wing's mission is.... these aren't impossible ideas even with current science & computing power. They're just hard. Requiring imagination. Risk. Vision. Strategy. Drones are a method. Delivery is the task. Human-like drivers are a method. Transport is the task. Voice recognition. LLMs. These are methods. Not tasks. If you're doing silver bullet, it's nice to avoid defining the task. If you're doing moonshots, you want to be brutalist in defining the task.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

I dunno, man, I can’t be arsed to trust Google to not scrap their thing a few years in anymore. They will make something remotely nice, half ass the final 20% of it, leave it to rot, complain that there have been only X billion dollars of profits and not Y, and kill it off. How they are not sunsetting Search yet, I cannot fathom.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

People act as if there are two companies (Google and Apple) and two business models (ads and selling devices). In fact Google is perfectly capable of charging a subscription in a context where ads don't make sense, like Drive, or even as an alternative, like Youtube Premium. Many people would pay a subscription for an assistant that's actually good, and of course having such an assistant integrated with email and calendar would be extremely valuable.

acdha 3y ago
Google does have non-ad revenue but it doesn’t seem to be enough to affect the culture: Drive customers get the same level of support as ad-supported search users. I’d like that to change but having used GCP I’m not sure that can happen before they have a better CEO.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  How does Drive customer support compare to Dropbox?
  - SXX 3y ago
    Imagine you lose access to your account, with what company do you think have better chances recovering it? Now imagine you get some very bad data loss bug affecting just your company account. What chances are there you will ever have your problem looked at by Google? I totally believe it's 0% unless you get to HN frontpage. It's not like Dropbox have best support ever, but I totally believe that getting a living human to look at your problem would be so much easier with them. With Google it's just impossible.

rdsubhas 3y ago

Big companies drag themselves down – not because they can't innovate – but because they can't go "all in" into innovations which compete against their real cash cow. An AI assistant fundamentally hits at Google's gut: Search ad revenue. Yeah, Google can make dozens of AI demos. Are they truly ready to put Gemini as the default interaction model, pitting it against their search? Can they give super accurate answers to questions, without the potential of 3 sponsored results on top, in such a way that it would make their search obsolete? Shareholders "wish" to see competitive demos, to not be left behind, etc. But are shareholders & market ready for a 10% balance sheet revenue drop that comes with making an AI assistant a go-to product instead of search? AI in Google could end up getting crippled, not by design, but by the environment and "thou shalt not touch search revenue" constraints under which it operates in. It would be interesting if Alphabet (and Alphabet's moonshots) totally distances itself from Google instead of being an internal structure sharing the same tickers, and treat Gemini as an all-out cannibalistic competitor to Google.

hutzlibu 3y ago
"Are they truly ready to put Gemini as the default interaction model, pitting it against their search?" Probably not, since they have not figured out, how to integrate the ads into the AI.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Their ad revenue is a local optimum. They could reach new highs with alternate business models but only at the cost of short term reduction in revenue from ads. And this is of course risky. So, they keep on dancing around the topic without ever committing to anything. An additional problem they have is that running AI at scale is super expensive. Even for Google. Add to that legal risks, pressure from regulators in different countries, privacy concerns, copyright issues, etc. and you get a whole lot of risk and friction. Add to that the usual organizational infighting and politics and you pretty much have a company incapable of doing anything.
- Mattasher 3y ago
  > They could reach new highs with alternate business models but only at the cost of short term reduction in revenue from ads. Yes. Long term, if you control peoples attention and their flow of information, you will almost certainly figure out a way to control their pocketbooks.

ur-whale 3y ago

Undertaking that kind of focused, bold, visionary attack would first and foremost require to have a CEO with the same kind of attributes:bold, focused and visionary. Unfortunately, ball-less wonder milquetoast Sundar has none of the above attributes. He was hired 10 years ago not to rock the boat, but to stay the course, a strategy that requires a CEO with all the exact opposite attributes: meek, boring, visionless and all over the place.

nojvek 3y ago

> After all, if a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its advertisers for user attention. Google Assistant has the exact same problem: where do the ads go? This is Google / Alphabet's biggest problem. Unlike Microsoft that has Enterprise, Gaming, Cloud and multiple other 10B+ businesses that don't rely on ads, Google has only cloud. And Google Cloud is a distant third where they actively sabotage their own success by not caring about customers. 90% of Google revenue comes from ads. From Search, youtube, Adsense e.t.c If they build an AI that gives exactly what the user wants without ads, Google's stakeholders would fire the CEO the next day. My perception is that Google is in AI race to be relevant and capture the talent, but they don't want to actively put AI anywhere near their products that would eat into their ad revenue. Google Brain/Deepmind produces great research, they have the most number of published papers, by a big margin, but Google is not the place if you want to work on productionizing AI. Top AI Researchers probably make the most money being at the big tech labs - DeepMind / Open AI / Meta FAIR. I've heard comp being into the 10s of millions per year.