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DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more
by paxys 3mo ago
DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
- underlipton 3mo agoCan you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?
- janalsncm 3mo agoWhat would that even look like? Paid search engines exist and they are niche products.
- yodsanklai 3mo ago> put the effort into keeping Search profitable The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.
- mattstir 3mo agoIf they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely useful part of search at that point (widgets like the dictionary) was the final nail in the coffin for me at least.
- zbentley 3mo agoNo, even if Google search of old still existed, LLM Q&A would still be trouncing it. This is because people don’t like to click/follow links, they don’t like to read, and they don’t like to have to comparatively evaluate multiple pieces of information.
- phoghed 3mo agoLmao then they’d be completely irrelevant instead of mostly
- aurareturn 3mo agokeeping Search profitable without enshittifying it I don't think Google had much to do with it. It has way more to do with the internet concentrating into major communities where all the content is private. Even Reddit content is going this way. Most FB and Instagram content are private. All of Discord is unreachable by crawlers. Prior to this, just about everything on the web was open for crawlers since content wanted to be found.
- underlipton 3mo agoGoogle caused this by pushing people towards "brands" rather than individual pages. Those platforms only exposed the data necessary for SEO and Google refused to punish them for it.
- aurareturn 3mo agoDid Google cause Facebook?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- atdt 3mo agoWe don't know exactly what Google's leadership was thinking, nor how the AI race will shape up in the coming months and years. Calling it a "failure" seems presumptuous and premature. But supposing your read is correct: what made this outcome predictable, in your view? How do you avoid being the Xerox to the Microsofts and Apples of AI?