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Commercially viable for Google boils down to can they attribute ads behaviors to it or not. Then there’s a second tier of things that just make those wheels tu
by bevekspldnw 2mo ago
Commercially viable for Google boils down to can they attribute ads behaviors to it or not.
Then there’s a second tier of things that just make those wheels turn and if they do or don’t make ads revenue is nominally immaterial.
The teams doing this stuff at Google are purely for show, none of this makes it into any real products.
There’s the narrow exception of stuff like gboard, that does use privacy preserving ML/fed learning, but this stuff isn’t in the same zone.
I find it a bit embarrassing when Google publishes this stuff to be honest.
- luckydata 2mo agoYou are very wrong about all of this btw.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bevekspldnw 2mo agoYou literally don’t know who I am or the roles I had. So unless you can tell me how many steps you were from Kent Walker and what you worked on I’m gonna bet a hell of a lot I know more than you. Edit to clarify my prior point: some of the technology makes it into the product, but the putative data protections do not. Why? Because there is always a work around, and ads legal will approve it every time.
- bitpush 2mo ago> You literally don’t know who I am or the roles I had. I'm now curious. Who are you?
- bevekspldnw 2mo agoSaying that would make it unable for me to use HN as certain companies monitor my social media comments.
- luckydata 2mo agoand you don't know who I am. I might have been closer to that work than you would know.
- Melatonic 2mo agoI'm Ron Burgundy ?
- Chris2048 2mo agoWhy don't you say what they are wrong about then?
- luckydata 2mo agoevery single word. this is a project to enable private AI use cases which is a very real concern for a lot of enterprise customers dealing with highly sensitive data (think about healthcare and police work for example) and has nothing to do in any way shape or form with ads. The guy probably used to work or still works at Google but doesn't mean he understands what he's talking about.
- bevekspldnw 2mo agoThe work I’m guessing yes you are aware, but not the legal side of how they allow ads to circumvent the dog and pony show you put your life into. Thats the embarrassing part, you know “don’t be evil” went out the window years ago, yet still think you’re making a difference with your little bit shifting games. As if the moment the work you do bumped against against revenue it would hold.
- luckydata 2mo agowhen I worked at google I was known to be a very effective "legal whisperer". I spent more time in legal reviews in the last decade than you'll ever spend in the entirety of your life as I was working on infrastructure dealing with tons of PII working across the globe. I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about here.
- trucks-refinish 2mo agoyeah and I'm a Navy seal with over 300 confirmed kills etc.
- WarmWash 2mo agoGoogle is too internally split up to have a single cohesive "maximize ad revenue" mission, especially now that cloud is the new golden goose and the future of search/advertising is hazy. If cloud can sell compute to enterprise that can only use FHE, then they will not give a fuck if the ad goons are disgruntled about it.
- luckydata 2mo agoyou are 100% correct, this product is to enable things like healthcare and generally AI subscription stuff that otherwise people wouldn't touch because of sensitivity to disclosing sensitive data.
- bevekspldnw 2mo agoYou have the CEO and the VPs who have final call when there are disputes below. Ads doesn’t care until something affects them, GCP doesn’t.
- antonvs 2mo agoGiven that Google has a single unit that does $76 billion in annual revenue, $100 billion projected, without ads, raises questions about how relevant your knowledge is.
- bevekspldnw 2mo agoI should have bracketed out GCP as a theoretical application for this. I was referring to the Google consumer extended universe.
- surajrmal 2mo agoWhich is also learning how to monetize their offering via cloud instead of ads. So again your expertise here is questionable.
- bevekspldnw 2mo agoQuestion away, not bothered.
- fragmede 2mo agoThe distance between Kent Walker and Thomas Kurian is what you should be asking.
- sumeno 2mo agoAds does not have access to GCP data and there is no way legal would approve one
- bitpush 2mo agoAutonomous driving was all show until Waymo happened AI research was all show until transformers happened. Quantum research is all show until .. and now this. Part of changing the world involves imagining a changed-world.
- asdfman123 2mo agoGCP exists, friend. Right now industries are locked out of AI tools due to privacy laws. If Google Cloud can offer FHE-powered tools, a hospital can run Google’s AI diagnostic models on encrypted brain scans without violating privacy laws. FHE effectively removes the primary regulatory barrier keeping enterprise customers off the cloud.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoAt that kind of amount of waste putting 2U server with some GPUs in hospital would be cheaper
- asdfman123 2mo agoMaking things 10x more expensive to reduce legal liability is what hospitals are all about
- anonym29 2mo agoWe're not talking about 10x though, that's off by two orders of magnitude. This isn't a $200 bag of saline water, it's a $20,000 bag of saline water.
- alpaca9 2mo agoSometimes I feel like 75% of their engineers are working on stuff that is purely for show. If their product doesn't generate enough profit very short term they stop it immediately. They have hunderds of cancelled projects, and those are only the ones which have existed. I wonder how many things they made internally and killed before ever showing it publicly.