3 ms·

I was privy to the details of this. Sundar blocked the NEMA team from presenting at I/O with its gpt3 level product in the form of a character. Sundar was afra

I was privy to the details of this. Sundar blocked the NEMA team from presenting at I/O with its gpt3 level product in the form of a character. Sundar was afraid of the technology and how it would be received and tried to ice it.

jimbob45 3y ago
How is that not immediate grounds for his termination? The board should be canned too for allowing such an obvious charlatan to continue ruining the company.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  Two judgements were made to my knowledge: 1) Google enjoyed significant market status at the time and a leap forward like seemingly semi conscious AI in 2019 would be seen as terrifying. Consumer sentiment would go from positive to “Google is winning to hard and making Frankensteins monster” 2) it didn’t weave well into googles current product offering and in fact disrupted it in ways that would confuse the user. It was not yet productized but would already make the Google assistant (which at the time was rapidly expanding) look stupid. A fictional character companion was not clearly a good path. All this being said, I integrated the early tech into my product division and even I couldn’t fully grasp what it would become. Then was canned right at the moment it became clear what we could do. Eric Schmidt was the only leader at Google who recognized nascent tech at Google and effectively fast tracked it. When my team made breakthroughs in word to vec which created the suggestion chip in chat/email he immediately took me to the board to demo and said this was the future. (This ironically wound a long path to contribute later to transformer tech) Sundar often ignored such things and would put on a McKensey face projecting everyone just was far dumber than him and his important problems.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    The first time I met with Eric Schmidt he asked what I did (harvest idle cycles to do scientific calculations), and then we talked about how Google was slowly getting into cloud. I remember him saying "I've tried to convince the board that the cloud is the future of growth for google, but they aren't interested" (this was before GCS and GCE launched). The second time I met him I presented my project (Google Cloud Genomics) to the board of the Broad Institute, of which he was a member (IIRC the chair) and he was excited that Google was using cloud to help biology.
    - eitally 3y ago
      The irony, of course, with that, is that then Google/Alphabet like Microsoft eat its lunch in the space by poorly supporting The Broad and allowing Verily to sign a $150m deal with Azure. Quite a few of the folks who were working on HCLS products in Cloud (were you one of them?) subsequently departed for Verily.
      - dekhn 3y ago
        I worked on the predecessor of HCLS and was pushed out before any Azure deal (and would never have moved to verily). I had set up a relationship between Google Research, the Broad, and Cloud (to apply large-scale Google ML technology in genomics) and all that went away when other folks took it in different strategic direction. The Broad is still a google cloud customer and verily seems to support all three clouds now, but I'm not aware of the details. The whole thing seemed really strange and unbusinesslike.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    This is a good illustration of why the common sentiment that "capitalism drives innovation" is ... not exactly accurate.

jimbob45 3y ago

How is that not immediate grounds for his termination? The board should be canned too for allowing such an obvious charlatan to continue ruining the company.

tsunamifury 3y ago
Two judgements were made to my knowledge: 1) Google enjoyed significant market status at the time and a leap forward like seemingly semi conscious AI in 2019 would be seen as terrifying. Consumer sentiment would go from positive to “Google is winning to hard and making Frankensteins monster” 2) it didn’t weave well into googles current product offering and in fact disrupted it in ways that would confuse the user. It was not yet productized but would already make the Google assistant (which at the time was rapidly expanding) look stupid. A fictional character companion was not clearly a good path. All this being said, I integrated the early tech into my product division and even I couldn’t fully grasp what it would become. Then was canned right at the moment it became clear what we could do. Eric Schmidt was the only leader at Google who recognized nascent tech at Google and effectively fast tracked it. When my team made breakthroughs in word to vec which created the suggestion chip in chat/email he immediately took me to the board to demo and said this was the future. (This ironically wound a long path to contribute later to transformer tech) Sundar often ignored such things and would put on a McKensey face projecting everyone just was far dumber than him and his important problems.
- dekhn 3y ago
  The first time I met with Eric Schmidt he asked what I did (harvest idle cycles to do scientific calculations), and then we talked about how Google was slowly getting into cloud. I remember him saying "I've tried to convince the board that the cloud is the future of growth for google, but they aren't interested" (this was before GCS and GCE launched). The second time I met him I presented my project (Google Cloud Genomics) to the board of the Broad Institute, of which he was a member (IIRC the chair) and he was excited that Google was using cloud to help biology.
  - eitally 3y ago
    The irony, of course, with that, is that then Google/Alphabet like Microsoft eat its lunch in the space by poorly supporting The Broad and allowing Verily to sign a $150m deal with Azure. Quite a few of the folks who were working on HCLS products in Cloud (were you one of them?) subsequently departed for Verily.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      I worked on the predecessor of HCLS and was pushed out before any Azure deal (and would never have moved to verily). I had set up a relationship between Google Research, the Broad, and Cloud (to apply large-scale Google ML technology in genomics) and all that went away when other folks took it in different strategic direction. The Broad is still a google cloud customer and verily seems to support all three clouds now, but I'm not aware of the details. The whole thing seemed really strange and unbusinesslike.
- int_19h 3y ago
  This is a good illustration of why the common sentiment that "capitalism drives innovation" is ... not exactly accurate.