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Interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on Google's Enterprise AI Strategy

46 points by kjhughes 3y ago

gentleman11 3y ago
1. Train an ai on everyone’s data 2. Try to replace everyone, and their companies too, but do it quietly 3. Try to sell ai tools to make those companies dependent on you, until your super ai can replace them completely
mvdtnz 3y ago
Let's see the products. I'm so tired of hearing Google talk a big game about AI without delivering.
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  a) I think they have in a lot of ways, that are maybe not super flashy. Vertex AI offers more API/functionality/product than anyone else, by a mile. I think in a year or two this might be more important than the quality of model (not that the model won't have to be good, but all of them will be good enough to solve most peoples business problems) b) Gemini 1.5 Pro public preview with 1 mio tokens is out now (including API access). Has anyone benchmarked it?
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    > not that the model won't have to be good, but all of them will be good enough to solve most peoples business problems In a year or two? Mate I think you need to step back from the AI hype for a moment. We're not even close.
    - dudus 3y ago
      Having tried all 3 (Gemini, chatgpt and Claude) I'll agree with GP that 1-2 years seems conservative if anything. I don't think AI will be won on the model but the tooling. Google is arguably ahead. The models I'd say it's a toss. But it doesn't matter as before the year is up all of them will release new versions one-uping each other. It's a race to the bottom. They either collude on price or most will go bankrupt. Edit:typo
    - jstummbillig 3y ago
      When I write that tooling will be more important in the future, I am not making any crazy claims about the future of AI. My claim is: It does not require much more AI than we currently have to solve most business problems. But it will take better tooling. I don't think AGI is even remotely required to solve most peoples business problems. Better tooling is. Maybe we also have different ideas about how mundane most peoples business problems are.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    #1) That's absolutely, harrowingly, shockingly, untrue. They're just rolling out system messages! I actively integrate with Mistral, OpenAI, Gemini AI API, Vertex AI API, and Anthropic's API and Google's are the weakest. #2) It's Gemini 1.0 with a 1M context. It's not very good, it works like OpenAI long context for me (pulls out salient text, but it doesn't seem to be 'reasoning' over all of it)
- gentleman11 3y ago
  It’s almost like they hire exclusively for your ability to leetcode rather than trying to hire people who can produce software Maybe the ai teams were too busy keeping up to date with their tree reversals to read those textbooks on their nights off
- xadhominemx 3y ago
  Gemini is just as good if not better than GPT-4?
  - belter 3y ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... :-))
    - xadhominemx 3y ago
      You can use the product yourself or check one of the many benchmarking papers
      - ein0p 3y ago
        Benchmarking papers are borderline useless. Goodhart’s law is a thing when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. That’s why I keep coming back to GPT4. It has the most “magic” and “mind reading ability”. Try to quantify that.
icpmacdo 3y ago
Spending time trying out Google's new AI products you can see the astonishing amounts of enormous bloat around every single service it offers Sergey shouldn't be pair programming right now he should be doing the hard work with Sundar of bringing some semblance of coherence to their offerings but it seems like the organizational dynamics are too challenging for them at this scale.
- bigcat12345678 3y ago
  > you can see the astonishing amounts of enormous bloat In its category, hyperscaler public cloud, GC appears consistently leaner compared to AWS Azure I understand your frustration, but you need to realize that if you are paying nothing and you are complaining, then you are simply criticizing someone who are not serving you. Like criticizing Biden being a bad president from a Chinese citizen. This type of criticism carries negligible amount of potency and relevancy.
  - davidf18 3y ago
    [dead]
VHRanger 3y ago
I don't see any discussion of their deprecation strategy. What's killing GCP is not that they don't have the latest toys, it's that *NO ONE TRUSTS THEM ANYMORE* [1]. Why would you build anything on GCP when there's no guarantee the GCP thing you're using won't be the next Stadia in 18 months? Otherwise, you'll just use them like you'd use DigitalOcean, in which case they'd be commodified. For the CEO not to be laser focused on this issue shows they're entirely missing the point. 1. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
- gentleman11 3y ago
  I actually heard somebody say gcp was going to be shuttered, didn’t verify, and just assumed it wasn’t going to be around for long. Now I assume what I read was nonsense, but it’s worth noting how non-suspicious of it I was when I read it
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    The @killedbygoogle account is funny and also a complete menace sometimes. I wish they'd drop the sarcastic tweets, they've won thoroughly, no need to be an infohazard
- baidifnaoxi 3y ago
  Not to mention they were out in their Paris availability zone for a month last year.
- theevilsharpie 3y ago
  Google Cloud DOES have a deprecation "strategy". They publish it in Google Cloud Terms of Service.[1] In short, any service that is listed as "Generally Available" (i.e., not alpha/beta) is guaranteed to have at least 12 months of notice prior to deprecation. And services that are in alpha/beta are clearly marked as such in the documentation and UI, and require explicit steps to use via the command-line or API. Additionally, if you literally Google "Google Cloud Deprecation strategy", a statement on Google Cloud's deprecation policy and links to the Terms of Service and Google Cloud's service lifecycle is the very first result.[2] I've been a user of Google Cloud for a long time, and the company I'm with has a yearly GCP bill in the millions. While Google Cloud does have its frustrations (e.g., their various price hikes, and the architecture of their network infrastructure that makes them more vulnerable to cross-region outages), Google Cloud being "deprecated" is not a thing that I worry about. Can this tired meme please die already? [1] https://cloud.google.com/terms#:~:text=(d)%C2%A0Discontinuation%20of%20Services https://cloud.google.com/terms#:~:text=(d)%C2%A0Discontinuat... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+Cloud+Deprecation+strategy https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+Cloud+Deprecation+str...
nextworddev 3y ago
This might be an unpopular take but Google is fast regaining LLM platform dominance that OpenAI / MSFT took away for a year. GPT-5 release needs to blow people's mind for MSFT to rejuvenate the Azure AI conversations because momentum is shifting again to GCP. P.S. Many customers aren't very happy with AWS Bedrock but they should be ok as long as Anthropic & Mistral doesn't get annihilated by Gemini / GPT-5 in the next year.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Only recent news is keynote demoware yesterday and a model release that is 5 _requests per minute_ and was released 2 days ago. Gemini Ultra still doesn't exist, and needs 32-shot CoT to beat GPT-4 from March 2023 5-shot. Impossible for it to be fast regaining LLM platform dominance, for those reasons, and Google had no LLM platform before OpenAI/MSFT.
- lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Annihiliated, sure. They can coexist. This isn't an olympic swimming competition.
blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
I am honestly not sure how any business can take Google’s AI products seriously given the long history of products being shut down and the recent issues with Gemini. I know someone is going to claim that Google Cloud is different from the rest of Google and doesn’t deprecate things in a hurry, but that’s not really reassuring. Enthusiasts adopt useful products at work because they’ve had a great experience personally using those products. The reverse is also true. If they’ve had a bad experience with a brand personally, they’re less likely to trust that same brand professionally. With AI specifically, there are other bigger issues. Most businesses that could be a customer of Google’s enterprise AI products serve customers from all parts of the political spectrum and from all backgrounds. If you’re a large company you probably also have customers in other countries that have very different values from someone living in the Bay Area. Google’s culture is known to be heavily influenced by the politics of its employees and that came out in Gemini. Which company wants their own products or their own customers to be subject to the potentially offensive political whims of Bay Area Google employees by depending on Google’s enterprise AI? There are better choices out there that are safer bets, that don’t come with Google’s biases. It’s not just that Gemini isn’t sufficiently better than any other platform to stand out, but that it is demonstrably worse due to this issue. If Google wants to change this perception, its leaders need to show backbone, shut down the overly political culture and make it neutral with respect to the political spectrum and operate with a totally different mindset. They need to do this across all products, both for consumers and enterprises. They will never earn the trust of the world unless they do this in an obvious and visible way. PS: The “open-washing” in this interview is laughable in how flagrant it is. The only actually open approach is to be open source. For AI, that means having open source training code, open training data sets, total transparency on how training data is pre-processed, etc. If a third party cannot reproduce the weights, it isn’t open.

46 points by kjhughes 3y ago

1. Train an ai on everyone’s data 2. Try to replace everyone, and their companies too, but do it quietly 3. Try to sell ai tools to make those companies dependent on you, until your super ai can replace them completely

mvdtnz 3y ago

Let's see the products. I'm so tired of hearing Google talk a big game about AI without delivering.

jstummbillig 3y ago
a) I think they have in a lot of ways, that are maybe not super flashy. Vertex AI offers more API/functionality/product than anyone else, by a mile. I think in a year or two this might be more important than the quality of model (not that the model won't have to be good, but all of them will be good enough to solve most peoples business problems) b) Gemini 1.5 Pro public preview with 1 mio tokens is out now (including API access). Has anyone benchmarked it?
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  > not that the model won't have to be good, but all of them will be good enough to solve most peoples business problems In a year or two? Mate I think you need to step back from the AI hype for a moment. We're not even close.
  - dudus 3y ago
    Having tried all 3 (Gemini, chatgpt and Claude) I'll agree with GP that 1-2 years seems conservative if anything. I don't think AI will be won on the model but the tooling. Google is arguably ahead. The models I'd say it's a toss. But it doesn't matter as before the year is up all of them will release new versions one-uping each other. It's a race to the bottom. They either collude on price or most will go bankrupt. Edit:typo
  - jstummbillig 3y ago
    When I write that tooling will be more important in the future, I am not making any crazy claims about the future of AI. My claim is: It does not require much more AI than we currently have to solve most business problems. But it will take better tooling. I don't think AGI is even remotely required to solve most peoples business problems. Better tooling is. Maybe we also have different ideas about how mundane most peoples business problems are.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  #1) That's absolutely, harrowingly, shockingly, untrue. They're just rolling out system messages! I actively integrate with Mistral, OpenAI, Gemini AI API, Vertex AI API, and Anthropic's API and Google's are the weakest. #2) It's Gemini 1.0 with a 1M context. It's not very good, it works like OpenAI long context for me (pulls out salient text, but it doesn't seem to be 'reasoning' over all of it)
gentleman11 3y ago
It’s almost like they hire exclusively for your ability to leetcode rather than trying to hire people who can produce software Maybe the ai teams were too busy keeping up to date with their tree reversals to read those textbooks on their nights off
xadhominemx 3y ago
Gemini is just as good if not better than GPT-4?
- belter 3y ago
  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... :-))
  - xadhominemx 3y ago
    You can use the product yourself or check one of the many benchmarking papers
    - ein0p 3y ago
      Benchmarking papers are borderline useless. Goodhart’s law is a thing when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. That’s why I keep coming back to GPT4. It has the most “magic” and “mind reading ability”. Try to quantify that.

icpmacdo 3y ago

Spending time trying out Google's new AI products you can see the astonishing amounts of enormous bloat around every single service it offers Sergey shouldn't be pair programming right now he should be doing the hard work with Sundar of bringing some semblance of coherence to their offerings but it seems like the organizational dynamics are too challenging for them at this scale.

bigcat12345678 3y ago
> you can see the astonishing amounts of enormous bloat In its category, hyperscaler public cloud, GC appears consistently leaner compared to AWS Azure I understand your frustration, but you need to realize that if you are paying nothing and you are complaining, then you are simply criticizing someone who are not serving you. Like criticizing Biden being a bad president from a Chinese citizen. This type of criticism carries negligible amount of potency and relevancy.
- davidf18 3y ago
  [dead]

VHRanger 3y ago

I don't see any discussion of their deprecation strategy. What's killing GCP is not that they don't have the latest toys, it's that *NO ONE TRUSTS THEM ANYMORE* [1]. Why would you build anything on GCP when there's no guarantee the GCP thing you're using won't be the next Stadia in 18 months? Otherwise, you'll just use them like you'd use DigitalOcean, in which case they'd be commodified. For the CEO not to be laser focused on this issue shows they're entirely missing the point. 1. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

gentleman11 3y ago
I actually heard somebody say gcp was going to be shuttered, didn’t verify, and just assumed it wasn’t going to be around for long. Now I assume what I read was nonsense, but it’s worth noting how non-suspicious of it I was when I read it
- refulgentis 3y ago
  The @killedbygoogle account is funny and also a complete menace sometimes. I wish they'd drop the sarcastic tweets, they've won thoroughly, no need to be an infohazard
baidifnaoxi 3y ago
Not to mention they were out in their Paris availability zone for a month last year.
theevilsharpie 3y ago
Google Cloud DOES have a deprecation "strategy". They publish it in Google Cloud Terms of Service.[1] In short, any service that is listed as "Generally Available" (i.e., not alpha/beta) is guaranteed to have at least 12 months of notice prior to deprecation. And services that are in alpha/beta are clearly marked as such in the documentation and UI, and require explicit steps to use via the command-line or API. Additionally, if you literally Google "Google Cloud Deprecation strategy", a statement on Google Cloud's deprecation policy and links to the Terms of Service and Google Cloud's service lifecycle is the very first result.[2] I've been a user of Google Cloud for a long time, and the company I'm with has a yearly GCP bill in the millions. While Google Cloud does have its frustrations (e.g., their various price hikes, and the architecture of their network infrastructure that makes them more vulnerable to cross-region outages), Google Cloud being "deprecated" is not a thing that I worry about. Can this tired meme please die already? [1] https://cloud.google.com/terms#:~:text=(d)%C2%A0Discontinuation%20of%20Services https://cloud.google.com/terms#:~:text=(d)%C2%A0Discontinuat... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+Cloud+Deprecation+strategy https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+Cloud+Deprecation+str...

nextworddev 3y ago

This might be an unpopular take but Google is fast regaining LLM platform dominance that OpenAI / MSFT took away for a year. GPT-5 release needs to blow people's mind for MSFT to rejuvenate the Azure AI conversations because momentum is shifting again to GCP. P.S. Many customers aren't very happy with AWS Bedrock but they should be ok as long as Anthropic & Mistral doesn't get annihilated by Gemini / GPT-5 in the next year.

refulgentis 3y ago
Only recent news is keynote demoware yesterday and a model release that is 5 _requests per minute_ and was released 2 days ago. Gemini Ultra still doesn't exist, and needs 32-shot CoT to beat GPT-4 from March 2023 5-shot. Impossible for it to be fast regaining LLM platform dominance, for those reasons, and Google had no LLM platform before OpenAI/MSFT.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Annihiliated, sure. They can coexist. This isn't an olympic swimming competition.

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago

I am honestly not sure how any business can take Google’s AI products seriously given the long history of products being shut down and the recent issues with Gemini. I know someone is going to claim that Google Cloud is different from the rest of Google and doesn’t deprecate things in a hurry, but that’s not really reassuring. Enthusiasts adopt useful products at work because they’ve had a great experience personally using those products. The reverse is also true. If they’ve had a bad experience with a brand personally, they’re less likely to trust that same brand professionally. With AI specifically, there are other bigger issues. Most businesses that could be a customer of Google’s enterprise AI products serve customers from all parts of the political spectrum and from all backgrounds. If you’re a large company you probably also have customers in other countries that have very different values from someone living in the Bay Area. Google’s culture is known to be heavily influenced by the politics of its employees and that came out in Gemini. Which company wants their own products or their own customers to be subject to the potentially offensive political whims of Bay Area Google employees by depending on Google’s enterprise AI? There are better choices out there that are safer bets, that don’t come with Google’s biases. It’s not just that Gemini isn’t sufficiently better than any other platform to stand out, but that it is demonstrably worse due to this issue. If Google wants to change this perception, its leaders need to show backbone, shut down the overly political culture and make it neutral with respect to the political spectrum and operate with a totally different mindset. They need to do this across all products, both for consumers and enterprises. They will never earn the trust of the world unless they do this in an obvious and visible way. PS: The “open-washing” in this interview is laughable in how flagrant it is. The only actually open approach is to be open source. For AI, that means having open source training code, open training data sets, total transparency on how training data is pre-processed, etc. If a third party cannot reproduce the weights, it isn’t open.