12 ms·

His explanation for Google losing to OpenAI on GenAI: "Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than

His explanation for Google losing to OpenAI on GenAI: "Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning." What a tremendous lack of self-awareness. Let's put aside all the leadership issues, all the politics, all the complacency, all the bureaucracy, and blame people for working from home. (Not saying there aren't folks at Google who are just cruising, etc... but that's a fraction of the problem compared to the leadership issues)

mathieuh 2y ago
Sometimes these CEOs and "leaders" make mask-off comments and it just demonstrates the gulf between how they and normal people think. It can be quite frightening sometimes to imagine that these kinds of people are the people who wield power in our world, these people who share such little in common with you
lawgimenez 2y ago
Was he the one who’s having an affair with his business partner or something? And with a bunch of legal troubles.
- yellow_lead 2y ago
  > While Mr. Schmidt was chief executive of Google, he had an extramarital relationship with Marcy Simon, a public relations executive. A decade after they split, things are still messy. John Carreyrou sifted through hundreds of pages of court filings for this article [1]. Yep, he is a great leader! :) /s [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/technology/eric-schmidt-affair.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/technology/eric-schmidt-a...
  - eddiewithzato 2y ago
    he spent so much time at work they became family!
  - dimator 2y ago
    what a shallow ad-hominem. during his tenure he was extremely well liked and growth was booming. why would his spousal relationships make him a bad leader? do you look to your managers for moral leadership?
    - Blot2882 2y ago
      > extremely well liked By who? By what metric? That is a much shallower claim. I would wager the guy blaming their middling AI development on "work life balance" was not well liked.
      - borski 2y ago
        Even if that’s true, it misses the entire point of the parent comment. His marital issues, infidelity, that one time he made out under a bridge when he was 14… none of it matters to this discussion as anything other than tabloid-fodder.
        Blot2882 2y ago
        > Even if that’s true If it's true? It's a quote from the talk itself. > it misses the entire point of the parent comment Not really. I would say cheating on your wife with your PR executive is extremely bad for morale and an all around leadership failing. Just because sex is involved doesn't make it tabloid fodder. I can't just punch a coworker and call it "my personal life." More importantly, you're ignoring the part of the comment that said he was extremely well liked, which was the baseless claim I responded to. You can say that's not the point of the comment, but that's just because acknowledging it weakens the argument.
        borski 2y ago
        > If it's true? It's a quote from the talk itself. Sorry, didn't mean to be unclear - my "even if that's true" was referring to the assertion that Schmidt wasn't well-liked, not your quote.
        meiraleal 2y ago
  - passion__desire 2y ago
    Bill Burr summarizes the whole situation with successful men. Someone should write a manual for men on how to handle success. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUrMSK8XWFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUrMSK8XWFc
- derivagral 2y ago
  Not just one I guess? https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-some-strange-ideas-about-his-female-employees-according-to-a-new-book https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...
sfblah 2y ago
Isn't the parsimonious explanation just that Google knows GenAI puts a ton of ad revenue at risk and therefore didn't want it to get commercialized?
tgma 2y ago
I think the reporting of his quote overemphasizes on "work from home" piece of his sentence as that fits right into a continuous obsession/bike sheds. Whether "work from home" is the cause or not, I think he is absolutely right on the latter part of his sentence, that contrary to startups, almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win. If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly. "Work" from home is just one way that nobody-cares attitude is manifesting itself. [BTW, that attitude is by no means exclusive to ICs; definitely leadership has it as well, perhaps more so.]
- BossingAround 2y ago
  > almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career. If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that. If I'm the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview. So you're absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.
  - fooker 2y ago
    > do I get $10M bonus? Seems like you might want to consider the finance industry. If you make something important 5% faster, you bet you are getting a few years worth of salary as bonus.
    - roncesvalles 2y ago
      The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.
      - 2y ago
erie 2y ago
Eric Schmidt is scary, Julian Assange spoke of him :' in June 2011 when Assange was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, Schmidt and "an entourage of US State Department alumni including a top former adviser to Hillary Clinton" visited for several hours and "locked horns" with the Wikileaks founder. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-western countries to American companies and markets'. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/julian-assange-book-clash-google-eric-schmidt https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/julian-assange...
pzo 2y ago
Considering that in Meta I heard (from friends) it is/was easier to work remotely and even easier to get into (they are less leetcode oriented) I would expect the problem with Google loosing is somewhere else. Google was loosing on many fronts for a while: - dart lost to typescript on web - angular lost to react - tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper [0] - IMHO flutter will loose with react-native or kotlin compose multiplatform - compare github insights for details Meta on the other hand kickstarted open source Llama community. In this situation it's hard to bet on Gemmini or Gemma as 3rd party developer considering google projects kill records. The only project they were really to bet on and invest for the long run without getting tired early on was Chrome and Android. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=/g/11bwp1s2k3,/g/11gd3905v1&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
- websap 2y ago
  Meta is the most leetcode heavy interviews for SWEs, they expect you to solve 2 leet code questions in every coding round.
  - fer 2y ago
    Unsure Meta now, but FB was indeed absurdly leetcodish 10 years back.
    - mk67 2y ago
      Same when I interviewed ~1-2 years ago.
- chii 2y ago
  > Google was loosing on many fronts i believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures. It's the same reason why google products die when they don't reach mega-success (thus products getting killed off in spades recently). Nobody wants to be doing maintenance on projects started by somebody else - so as soon as the lead visionary leaves for better pastures, that project gets languished, and whoever takes over it cannot use it to generate promotion worthy impact.
piyuv 2y ago
If there are still people cruising after all these layoffs in the last 2 years, it’s again a leadership issue.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  Not really. When I lived and worked in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s, we used to joke that Yahoo! is where you go to retire. I think Google is starting to become that. It's just the nature of older very large corporations, I suppose. There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.
  - tonyhart7 2y ago
    funny because back then if you ex yahoo that means you got some above average engineering skills
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      That was the case for Google 10 years ago. Nowadays being an ex-googler gives one a not so bright aura
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > Not really. What is not really about piyuv’s comment? > There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers. And that is where the leadership issue lies. Either because they can’t identify them, or can’t motivate them, or can’t fire them. Who is responsible for doing that? I don’t think it is the janitors. It is the leadership, very much.
- picklebarrel 2y ago
  Absolutely true. The layoffs appear to have been 100% random. Lots of loafers and do-nothing types on my friend's team who did not get laid off, but other people who consistently do great work did get laid off. There's no incentive to excel. Either you'll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work. Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there's not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.
JodieBenitez 2y ago
> going home early and working from home was more important than winning Well... count me in !
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Yeah, that sounds like winning ...lol
aurareturn 2y ago
[flagged]
- jamesjamesdupre 2y ago
  This is all very true for a small startup and some kinds of skunk works projects.. Many companies Google's size don't allow you to work that way in general, and in some sense don't benefit from it because gaps caused by no need to write things down are too hard to fix later and more critical to them than not shipping at all. If I had to guess, Google's problem is probably that they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication. It is neither good for speed nor good for documentation as a consequence.
  - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    > ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication Was this only to avoid the cost and annoyance of legal discovery, or was there some other reason? It seems obviously bad.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    > they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication What would that be? They do everything on Signal?
    - klooney 2y ago
      They aggressively delete logs from their internal chat server to avoid discovery
      - adastra22 2y ago
        That seems like an extraordinarily bad long-term strategy.
- duke_sam 2y ago
  You are assuming the business is entirely located in one city or at least region which is rarely the case beyond a certain size. It would also be an argument against function specific offices or locations (eg a NYC sales office) which has been a characteristic of companies for a very long time.
xyse53 2y ago
> all the politics, all the complacency, all the bureaucracy, and blame people for working from home. IMO this came first and is a driver for people stepping back and defending their boundaries with Google. Most of the eng I know just cared about their work (some driven by the ladder, for sure). Google made it difficult and put a bad taste in people's mouths about "work[ing] like hell". Meanwhile, on the startup side that I've seen, people work a lot but in much more harmonious way.
ksdfH 2y ago
Real explanation: Google turned into a company of activists who spend 50% of their time with politics. Additionally, part of the company are second class citizens (exercise for the reader). OpenAI had many Europeans like Sutskever who presumably were still allowed to focus on work.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I know many people at Google, none of whom I would call an “activist”. They all describe Google as overly bureaucratic. They just happen to be sitting on a money printer internet monopoly.
curt15 2y ago
What about all the resources spent on building and razing messaging apps?
rcarmo 2y ago
Eric kind of dated himself with that one. That is old-school thinking that resonates with CEOs because they too are struggling to keep up with the times, but is completely tone-deaf as far as keeping engineers happy and productive is concerned.
nialv7 2y ago
Pretty sure when Google was leading the industry (more than a decade ago now?), people was attributing the success to exactly the same thing - good work environment, work life balance, etc.
- twoodfin 2y ago
  My recollection of the vibe at the time was, “Google does everything it can to maximize the amount of effective employee time dedicated to Google.”
Moldoteck 2y ago
poor nvidia. Their wfh policy for lots of positions is certainly dumping their stocks to the ground... oh wait...
jonathanlydall 2y ago
He's trying to walk back on this claim: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/eric-schmidt-walks-back-claim-google-is-behind-on-ai-because-of-remote-work/ar-AA1oO2my https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/eric-schmidt-walks...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
I mean it might be causing some of Googles problems but the AI stuff is very obviously because their teams are academia-brained as in they have the mind virus that the work is making papers and getting citations not shipping products into the real world and making money. Google had a decade headstart on several AI unicorns tech and did nothing but write a paper and say "No you can't see the code, no you can't use the model, oh maybe here's a video of it working or at best a Google Labs project that shows a small fraction of its potential in a gimmicky way only available in the US and that stops working after a few months". Google will forever be playing catchup from now, where they had such a massive headstart.
gadders 2y ago
I would have thought all the internal political activism would be a factor as well.
philjohn 2y ago
What's even funnier is that I've heard from someone working at OpenAI is that (at least in their office) they are hybrid, working from the office 3 days a week. From talking to people who've worked/work at Google it sounds like a lot of the issues stem from too few employees dogfooding their products (especially hardware), and huge inertia to get anything off the ground/make large changes. Add to that the lack of cohesive product direction (constantly deprecating and replacing messaging products as the main example) and you get Google.
tim333 2y ago
>Google losing to OpenAI on GenAI My take is more Google having like a 80-90% share in search and browsers and email and phone os and online advertising probably wasn't too worried about dominating everything and perhaps a little worried about being criticized as a monopoly. Hence them open sourcing the transformers model and instead working on protein folding and the like. Now they have competition in GenAI they can take it seriously without looking like monopolists there.
ryandrake 2y ago
> Google losing to OpenAI on GenAI I don't know why we keep thinking about "GenAI" as a product. It's an enabling technology that may (or may not) be appropriate for building actual products. We should be asking "Is our company winning in Search, or in Shopping, or in Chat, or in Developer Tools?" Not "Is our company winning in GenAI?" This is like saying "Is our company winning in Python use?" It makes no sense.
Dowwie 2y ago
It's not lack of self-awareness. It's the opposite. It's a lack of awareness of the environment beyond himself-- a failure to appraise organizations on salient features.

mathieuh 2y ago

Sometimes these CEOs and "leaders" make mask-off comments and it just demonstrates the gulf between how they and normal people think. It can be quite frightening sometimes to imagine that these kinds of people are the people who wield power in our world, these people who share such little in common with you

lawgimenez 2y ago

Was he the one who’s having an affair with his business partner or something? And with a bunch of legal troubles.

yellow_lead 2y ago
> While Mr. Schmidt was chief executive of Google, he had an extramarital relationship with Marcy Simon, a public relations executive. A decade after they split, things are still messy. John Carreyrou sifted through hundreds of pages of court filings for this article [1]. Yep, he is a great leader! :) /s [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/technology/eric-schmidt-affair.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/technology/eric-schmidt-a...
- eddiewithzato 2y ago
  he spent so much time at work they became family!
- dimator 2y ago
  what a shallow ad-hominem. during his tenure he was extremely well liked and growth was booming. why would his spousal relationships make him a bad leader? do you look to your managers for moral leadership?
  - Blot2882 2y ago
    > extremely well liked By who? By what metric? That is a much shallower claim. I would wager the guy blaming their middling AI development on "work life balance" was not well liked.
    - borski 2y ago
      Even if that’s true, it misses the entire point of the parent comment. His marital issues, infidelity, that one time he made out under a bridge when he was 14… none of it matters to this discussion as anything other than tabloid-fodder.
      - Blot2882 2y ago
        > Even if that’s true If it's true? It's a quote from the talk itself. > it misses the entire point of the parent comment Not really. I would say cheating on your wife with your PR executive is extremely bad for morale and an all around leadership failing. Just because sex is involved doesn't make it tabloid fodder. I can't just punch a coworker and call it "my personal life." More importantly, you're ignoring the part of the comment that said he was extremely well liked, which was the baseless claim I responded to. You can say that's not the point of the comment, but that's just because acknowledging it weakens the argument.
        borski 2y ago
        > If it's true? It's a quote from the talk itself. Sorry, didn't mean to be unclear - my "even if that's true" was referring to the assertion that Schmidt wasn't well-liked, not your quote.
      - meiraleal 2y ago
- passion__desire 2y ago
  Bill Burr summarizes the whole situation with successful men. Someone should write a manual for men on how to handle success. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUrMSK8XWFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUrMSK8XWFc
derivagral 2y ago
Not just one I guess? https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-some-strange-ideas-about-his-female-employees-according-to-a-new-book https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...

sfblah 2y ago

Isn't the parsimonious explanation just that Google knows GenAI puts a ton of ad revenue at risk and therefore didn't want it to get commercialized?

tgma 2y ago

I think the reporting of his quote overemphasizes on "work from home" piece of his sentence as that fits right into a continuous obsession/bike sheds. Whether "work from home" is the cause or not, I think he is absolutely right on the latter part of his sentence, that contrary to startups, almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win. If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly. "Work" from home is just one way that nobody-cares attitude is manifesting itself. [BTW, that attitude is by no means exclusive to ICs; definitely leadership has it as well, perhaps more so.]

BossingAround 2y ago
> almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career. If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that. If I'm the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview. So you're absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.
- fooker 2y ago
  > do I get $10M bonus? Seems like you might want to consider the finance industry. If you make something important 5% faster, you bet you are getting a few years worth of salary as bonus.
  - roncesvalles 2y ago
    The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.
    - 2y ago

erie 2y ago

Eric Schmidt is scary, Julian Assange spoke of him :' in June 2011 when Assange was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, Schmidt and "an entourage of US State Department alumni including a top former adviser to Hillary Clinton" visited for several hours and "locked horns" with the Wikileaks founder. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-western countries to American companies and markets'. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/julian-assange-book-clash-google-eric-schmidt https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/julian-assange...

pzo 2y ago

Considering that in Meta I heard (from friends) it is/was easier to work remotely and even easier to get into (they are less leetcode oriented) I would expect the problem with Google loosing is somewhere else. Google was loosing on many fronts for a while: - dart lost to typescript on web - angular lost to react - tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper [0] - IMHO flutter will loose with react-native or kotlin compose multiplatform - compare github insights for details Meta on the other hand kickstarted open source Llama community. In this situation it's hard to bet on Gemmini or Gemma as 3rd party developer considering google projects kill records. The only project they were really to bet on and invest for the long run without getting tired early on was Chrome and Android. [0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=/g/11bwp1s2k3,/g/11gd3905v1&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

websap 2y ago
Meta is the most leetcode heavy interviews for SWEs, they expect you to solve 2 leet code questions in every coding round.
- fer 2y ago
  Unsure Meta now, but FB was indeed absurdly leetcodish 10 years back.
  - mk67 2y ago
    Same when I interviewed ~1-2 years ago.
chii 2y ago
> Google was loosing on many fronts i believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures. It's the same reason why google products die when they don't reach mega-success (thus products getting killed off in spades recently). Nobody wants to be doing maintenance on projects started by somebody else - so as soon as the lead visionary leaves for better pastures, that project gets languished, and whoever takes over it cannot use it to generate promotion worthy impact.

piyuv 2y ago

If there are still people cruising after all these layoffs in the last 2 years, it’s again a leadership issue.

aurareturn 2y ago
Not really. When I lived and worked in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s, we used to joke that Yahoo! is where you go to retire. I think Google is starting to become that. It's just the nature of older very large corporations, I suppose. There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  funny because back then if you ex yahoo that means you got some above average engineering skills
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    That was the case for Google 10 years ago. Nowadays being an ex-googler gives one a not so bright aura
- krisoft 2y ago
  > Not really. What is not really about piyuv’s comment? > There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers. And that is where the leadership issue lies. Either because they can’t identify them, or can’t motivate them, or can’t fire them. Who is responsible for doing that? I don’t think it is the janitors. It is the leadership, very much.
picklebarrel 2y ago
Absolutely true. The layoffs appear to have been 100% random. Lots of loafers and do-nothing types on my friend's team who did not get laid off, but other people who consistently do great work did get laid off. There's no incentive to excel. Either you'll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work. Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there's not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.

JodieBenitez 2y ago

> going home early and working from home was more important than winning Well... count me in !

datavirtue 2y ago
Yeah, that sounds like winning ...lol

aurareturn 2y ago

[flagged]

jamesjamesdupre 2y ago
This is all very true for a small startup and some kinds of skunk works projects.. Many companies Google's size don't allow you to work that way in general, and in some sense don't benefit from it because gaps caused by no need to write things down are too hard to fix later and more critical to them than not shipping at all. If I had to guess, Google's problem is probably that they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication. It is neither good for speed nor good for documentation as a consequence.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  > ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication Was this only to avoid the cost and annoyance of legal discovery, or was there some other reason? It seems obviously bad.
- adastra22 2y ago
  > they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication What would that be? They do everything on Signal?
  - klooney 2y ago
    They aggressively delete logs from their internal chat server to avoid discovery
    - adastra22 2y ago
      That seems like an extraordinarily bad long-term strategy.
duke_sam 2y ago
You are assuming the business is entirely located in one city or at least region which is rarely the case beyond a certain size. It would also be an argument against function specific offices or locations (eg a NYC sales office) which has been a characteristic of companies for a very long time.

xyse53 2y ago

> all the politics, all the complacency, all the bureaucracy, and blame people for working from home. IMO this came first and is a driver for people stepping back and defending their boundaries with Google. Most of the eng I know just cared about their work (some driven by the ladder, for sure). Google made it difficult and put a bad taste in people's mouths about "work[ing] like hell". Meanwhile, on the startup side that I've seen, people work a lot but in much more harmonious way.

ksdfH 2y ago

Real explanation: Google turned into a company of activists who spend 50% of their time with politics. Additionally, part of the company are second class citizens (exercise for the reader). OpenAI had many Europeans like Sutskever who presumably were still allowed to focus on work.

janalsncm 2y ago
I know many people at Google, none of whom I would call an “activist”. They all describe Google as overly bureaucratic. They just happen to be sitting on a money printer internet monopoly.

curt15 2y ago

What about all the resources spent on building and razing messaging apps?

rcarmo 2y ago

Eric kind of dated himself with that one. That is old-school thinking that resonates with CEOs because they too are struggling to keep up with the times, but is completely tone-deaf as far as keeping engineers happy and productive is concerned.

nialv7 2y ago

Pretty sure when Google was leading the industry (more than a decade ago now?), people was attributing the success to exactly the same thing - good work environment, work life balance, etc.

twoodfin 2y ago
My recollection of the vibe at the time was, “Google does everything it can to maximize the amount of effective employee time dedicated to Google.”

Moldoteck 2y ago

poor nvidia. Their wfh policy for lots of positions is certainly dumping their stocks to the ground... oh wait...

jonathanlydall 2y ago

He's trying to walk back on this claim: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/eric-schmidt-walks-back-claim-google-is-behind-on-ai-because-of-remote-work/ar-AA1oO2my https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/eric-schmidt-walks...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

I mean it might be causing some of Googles problems but the AI stuff is very obviously because their teams are academia-brained as in they have the mind virus that the work is making papers and getting citations not shipping products into the real world and making money. Google had a decade headstart on several AI unicorns tech and did nothing but write a paper and say "No you can't see the code, no you can't use the model, oh maybe here's a video of it working or at best a Google Labs project that shows a small fraction of its potential in a gimmicky way only available in the US and that stops working after a few months". Google will forever be playing catchup from now, where they had such a massive headstart.

gadders 2y ago

I would have thought all the internal political activism would be a factor as well.

philjohn 2y ago

What's even funnier is that I've heard from someone working at OpenAI is that (at least in their office) they are hybrid, working from the office 3 days a week. From talking to people who've worked/work at Google it sounds like a lot of the issues stem from too few employees dogfooding their products (especially hardware), and huge inertia to get anything off the ground/make large changes. Add to that the lack of cohesive product direction (constantly deprecating and replacing messaging products as the main example) and you get Google.

tim333 2y ago

>Google losing to OpenAI on GenAI My take is more Google having like a 80-90% share in search and browsers and email and phone os and online advertising probably wasn't too worried about dominating everything and perhaps a little worried about being criticized as a monopoly. Hence them open sourcing the transformers model and instead working on protein folding and the like. Now they have competition in GenAI they can take it seriously without looking like monopolists there.

ryandrake 2y ago

> Google losing to OpenAI on GenAI I don't know why we keep thinking about "GenAI" as a product. It's an enabling technology that may (or may not) be appropriate for building actual products. We should be asking "Is our company winning in Search, or in Shopping, or in Chat, or in Developer Tools?" Not "Is our company winning in GenAI?" This is like saying "Is our company winning in Python use?" It makes no sense.

Dowwie 2y ago

It's not lack of self-awareness. It's the opposite. It's a lack of awareness of the environment beyond himself-- a failure to appraise organizations on salient features.