>More interesting would be if they said (off-the-cuff) "Our sole top-level goal is to deliver the world's most advanced, safe, and responsible AI. We actually r

>More interesting would be if they said (off-the-cuff) "Our sole top-level goal is to deliver the world's most advanced, safe, and responsible AI. We actually really, really mean it. To that end, adtech is now a subgoal in support of short-term funding the AI goal, adtech will disappear in 4-8 years, and until then will be staffed at minimal sustaining level. Information services and devices are solely to provide data and user access points for the AI work. Cloud services are refocused on AI-based solutions. We don't need 70% of our current employees, and we need to replace some of that freed headcount with different kinds of thinking. And we need to get the remaining and new people to be motivated by the mission, despite 20 years of hiring and incentives that would naturally lead most to focus on career rather than mission." >Probably neither they nor any other huge company could pull off a serious goal focus like that, and they'd basically throw away a cash cow machine that could've been milked much longer. But it would still be interesting. Yeah, that's interesting, I had almost the same exact sequence of thoughts myself. If _I_ were running google, I'd probably be tempted to bet the farm on the AI aspect, just as you say. But at Google scale, there's an almost crippling responsibility to not kill the cash cow, since you're talking about throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars. If we're being honest, that would probably be a unilaterally bad idea for the health of the company. Still, Google is so disassociated and somnambulant right now. There's got to be a lot of daylight between "complete, laser focus on AI" and what we're getting now. Evidently the current goal is "just keep durdling with whatever we seem to already be doing".