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> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use Gemini or

> I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years. They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use Gemini or ChatGPT, that was pretty impressive. Also, Waymo is crazy impressive. If you're considering Alphabet as a whole (which there's no reason not to, it's all under the same stock ticker). Those are two industry-changing things, so I think Google's doing OK.

deleted 2y ago
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deanCommie 2y ago
A perfect example that illustrates the problem. The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not. Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity) But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it. They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > They had a goldmine and they wasted it. What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley. Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
  - mountainriver 2y ago
    No they weren’t nearly as invested in it which is why OpenAI won and Gemini still isn’t great. They had a massive lead which they squandered
  - deanCommie 2y ago
    In the LLM space, there is a definitive 1st (OpenAI), a definitive 2nd (Anthropic), and then there's "everyone else". Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category. Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not). But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket. When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
Transformer is research, which could is just function of hiring good folks and spending money, not any business goal. And Waymo came out in 2009, one of the last product where google had some long term goal and they actually stuck with it instead of discontinuing it. If you look into 2005-2009, there were products like Chrome, Waymo, Youtube, GCP, Google docs and lot more that were very ambitious. After 2009 I can't name any one product on that realm.
- treis 2y ago
  Has anyone come up with a product like that recently? It seems like the Web is basically the same as it was in 2010.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    Figma is something that definitely comes to mind. And somewhat notion and retool.
  - immibis 2y ago
    The web is way more centralized than in 2010.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  If you're going to completely ignore the entire category of "research", then I don't know what to tell you. Because the whole subject here is what impressive things Google has done. How can you possibly exclude anything that derives from their research? And no, Waymo didn't "come out in 2009". It still hasn't come out except in three limited areas, but it's shown astonishing success where it has. So again, if you're only going to count the year a project was started, and not the decades of work it takes to build a world-changing business... I don't know what to tell you. Except just... talk about moving the goalposts. Geez. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single company on earth that you're going to find impressive enough.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    It's not at all moving the goalposts. You can at least see transformer is not an ambitious project for Google. It's just few researcher getting paid well doing good research. Google put lot more resources in say Alphago. What was argued was not whether Google created impressive things. I was clear what I meant was Google hasn't started anything to their product suite. Adding to the product suite is more challenging than research project for the company, and it was where Google thrived and which led to success of Google.
hulitu 2y ago
> They invented the technology behind LLM's. ? Microprocessors ? Neural networks ?
- tomjakubowski 2y ago
  transformer architecture https://research.google/blog/transformer-a-novel-neural-network-architecture-for-language-understanding/ https://research.google/blog/transformer-a-novel-neural-netw...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deanCommie 2y ago

A perfect example that illustrates the problem. The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not. Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity) But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it. They had a goldmine and they wasted it.

crazygringo 2y ago
> They had a goldmine and they wasted it. What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley. Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
- mountainriver 2y ago
  No they weren’t nearly as invested in it which is why OpenAI won and Gemini still isn’t great. They had a massive lead which they squandered
- deanCommie 2y ago
  In the LLM space, there is a definitive 1st (OpenAI), a definitive 2nd (Anthropic), and then there's "everyone else". Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category. Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not). But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket. When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.

YetAnotherNick 2y ago

Transformer is research, which could is just function of hiring good folks and spending money, not any business goal. And Waymo came out in 2009, one of the last product where google had some long term goal and they actually stuck with it instead of discontinuing it. If you look into 2005-2009, there were products like Chrome, Waymo, Youtube, GCP, Google docs and lot more that were very ambitious. After 2009 I can't name any one product on that realm.

treis 2y ago
Has anyone come up with a product like that recently? It seems like the Web is basically the same as it was in 2010.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  Figma is something that definitely comes to mind. And somewhat notion and retool.
- immibis 2y ago
  The web is way more centralized than in 2010.
crazygringo 2y ago
If you're going to completely ignore the entire category of "research", then I don't know what to tell you. Because the whole subject here is what impressive things Google has done. How can you possibly exclude anything that derives from their research? And no, Waymo didn't "come out in 2009". It still hasn't come out except in three limited areas, but it's shown astonishing success where it has. So again, if you're only going to count the year a project was started, and not the decades of work it takes to build a world-changing business... I don't know what to tell you. Except just... talk about moving the goalposts. Geez. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single company on earth that you're going to find impressive enough.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  It's not at all moving the goalposts. You can at least see transformer is not an ambitious project for Google. It's just few researcher getting paid well doing good research. Google put lot more resources in say Alphago. What was argued was not whether Google created impressive things. I was clear what I meant was Google hasn't started anything to their product suite. Adding to the product suite is more challenging than research project for the company, and it was where Google thrived and which led to success of Google.

hulitu 2y ago

> They invented the technology behind LLM's. ? Microprocessors ? Neural networks ?

tomjakubowski 2y ago
transformer architecture https://research.google/blog/transformer-a-novel-neural-network-architecture-for-language-understanding/ https://research.google/blog/transformer-a-novel-neural-netw...