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Has anyone met Googlers that are confident in the company's AI strategy? Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to seems to have serious concerns but that might just
by serjester 2y ago
Has anyone met Googlers that are confident in the company's AI strategy? Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to seems to have serious concerns but that might just be a small sample size.
- MisterPea 2y agoThey're in a tough spot where the CEO does just enough to stay, but they need someone better. They lagged in AI, but the new Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible. They built an incredible tool in NotebookLM but failed to market it
- serjester 2y agoAgreed. Sundar seems like a peacetime CEO that got pulled into war and seems like he's struggling. But with Larry and Sergei having all voting control it seems unlikely he'll get fired.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jmcgough 2y agoI thought Stadia was incredibly well-engineered, had good performance playing modern games with a Thinkpad. But none of my friends had any idea what Stadia was, the ad campaign was atrocious. Time and time again, Google builds great products and then shelves them a year or two later.
- MoonGhost 2y agoGoogle is not alone. Intel halfheartedly develops GPUs. It doesn't work without strategy.
- the_clarence 2y agoOnly works if you have a very stable internet connection
- solardev 2y agoThen take a look at how Nvidia markets a similar product (GeForce Now). It not only works way better (much better GPU) but also is growing by leaps and bounds every year and adding hundreds of games. And it uses your existing steam library for cross saves and cross plays. It was around before Stadia and survived long after Stadia. Google has a bunch of amazing engineers and finance people but apparently they just can't productize anything.
- basch 2y agoI’d say give it time. NotebooksLM probably gets rereleased with a new name. Simultaneous iOS release, giant press storm. Not attempting to do so is a mistake. But yes, absolutely need new leadership. Nest/Pixel/etc are such a wasted opportunity tight now. The software layer is so disconnected between each component. As a dumb example im pretty sure you still can’t talk out of a hub max or tv remote into a nest cam, but can through the home app. The “it works in one place, but not another” prevents so much usability discovery for normal people.
- the_clarence 2y agoI tried using notebookLLM many many times and it's just not good. On the other hand I'm writing proofs using chatgpt and they look really good.
- summerlight 2y agoMany have pretty serious concerns about its direction, speed and product strategies, but I guess most of them also agree that there has been some progress and the situation has improved. I think that not many people think that Google will surely return to its dominant position on AI research again, but they may keep being relevant in the competition.
- tootie 2y agoIs anyone confident in what a winning strategy might even be? The market keeps getting more crowded and yet AI is still only creating incremental value for company's that adopt it. It's not clear to me that this is going to be quite as much of a sea change in how businesses run as people like Altman have been pitching. Nor do any of the top 10 AI companies have any kind of moat. The fact that Elon Musk can found a competitor out of spite and have a plausible competitor in 6 months with a multi-billion dollar value actually just dilutes the perceived value any of the market leaders. OpenAI is still riding the high of being first and having the ChatGPT brand be so strong. Google doesn't need to win on all the benchmarks, they just need to embed themselves in enough enterprises and they have a huge leg up in that regard.
- stormfather 2y agoI think the winning strategy is making a small model that's good enough to embed in search, etc, at no cost. Google has the best small models. But whoever wins this will be whoever makes a more efficient computing substrate for LLM inference, like running a transformer with lenses or something like that. Winning strategy there is acquisition.
- kridsdale1 2y agoMaybe the substrate will be flesh.
- tootie 2y agoYou lost me. Lenses? Are you being fanciful or is this a thing?
- Workaccount2 2y agoI think google will end up winning enterprise, and the fact that Apple didn't sign a sole partnership with OpenAI, but kept Gemini in the mix lends a lot of credence to this. Google is the only "classic" org in the SOTA model space, and the only one in the whole race who doesn't have to kiss the ground Jensen Huang walks on. They are big enough to be able to "pay you back" if they colossally fuck up, and the chances of them going belly up are pretty slim. They also have the cheapest models to boot. From a business standpoint, Google is the safest play on many levels, even if their models are just good enough.
- meta_ai_x 2y agoGooglers who aren't working for Deepmind are mostly Leetcode monkeys who have absolutely no clue about business strategy, marketing, distribution, branding, margins
- kridsdale1 2y agoThis isn’t true at all. Quite a bias displaying username you have though.
- alecco 2y agoMaybe a lot, sure. But at least the top 10% are elite at their craft. DeepMind, Google Brain, the TPU people, the datacenter people, etc. Sadly, Pichai is firing Core teams in USA and moving them to India.
- asadm 2y agoI am, I was VERY skeptic initially but now it's clear Google will win.
- danesparza 2y agoWait. What? By what measure? There is a very solid chance that Google will simply cancel the project. I'm looking at you, Google. I'm still bitter about Google Reader.
- claytonjy 2y agoSuggesting they’ll cancel gemini makes about as much sense as suggesting they’ll cancel gmail.
- rs186 2y agoSorry, your comment isn't particularly helpful or convincing.
- weatherlite 2y agoHave you met any OpenAI employee who is confident in the company's AI strategy? There is very little moat here for anyone.
- alecco 2y agoThe board and Pichai should go. They had the best researchers at Deepmind and Google Brain, sitting on the best pile of data of any tech company (web, Google Books, YouTube, ...), having the leading custom hardware (TPUs), and top tier datacenter engineering. And they put idiots in charge with ridiculous quota systems. They bled a lot of key people for nothing. And spent 2.7 bn to get one guy back. TWO POINT SEVEN BILLION FOR JUST ONE GUY. And Alphabet didn't even buy his company, they just got a non-exclusive arrangement. It's beyond incompetent. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-paid-2-7-billion-123053014.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-paid-2-7-billion-12305...
- redlock 2y agoNoam Shazeer is not any guy. And I would bet the latest jump in Gemini capability is a result of him coming back.
- alecco 2y agoOn one hand, Pichai paid 2.7bn to get 1 guy back. On the other hand, Pichai laid off 200 Core devs and "relocated roles" to India and Mexico [1]. The duality of Pichai-style management. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core-workers-moves-jobs-to-india-mexico.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
- llm_nerd 2y agoGoogle has turned it around quite exceptionally. A lot of my professional work has turned back to Google products, and 2.5 Pro is absolutely exceptional. It is absolutely a benchmark model. Google did seem asleep at the wheel, and then when they did come out with some products they were so incredibly afraid of Gizmodo soliciting an image or text output that was socially unacceptable, paralyzing them with fear (and leading to some incredible stupidity). But their pace now is rapid.