[Mistri]

People often make fun of Google/Alphabet for their graveyard of failed initiatives/products. While some of it might be warranted, projects like this—that strive to solve a large, global issue through somewhat charitable actions—are generous and have only increased my respect for the Google/Alphabet/X team. I hope they don't get flamed for this, and hopefully some of their research and donation funds can live on and solve the issue that Loon originally intended to one day.

[ogre_codes]

I think the days of Google Moonshots are coming to a close. In general Google hasn't been very good at shooting for the moon. They've lost their leadership and vision and all that's left is a giant advertising behemoth.

Did any of their moonshots really hit the mark or even come close?

[ptero]

I think the main problem is they lost the edge on execution. Traditional "vision" is not strictly needed for moonshot projects; the vision for moonshots is provided by a small team working on their idea. But should the technology start panning out, the company needs to focus aggressively on finding a commercial home for this technology.

And this is where I think google (and many big companies) fail. Technologically, Loons worked. I did not believe it when I read about those, but looking at the trajectories in public ADS-B data (those balloons self-advertise) it is clear that they move as designed, doing 2D positioning using only vertical control and can stay afloat for months. Wow! Mission accomplished. But commercially, nothing happened.

I do not know if it was because business types were not sold on it and did not build a commercial case; did the technical team simply live in their own bubble not talking to the outside; something else? But a 10-year "moonshot" project that pans out technologically and fails commercially indicates that the right hand ("internal VC") does not know or care what the left hand (techies) is doing, which is the problem at the company. My 2c.

[rasz]

> did not build a commercial case

Selling stolen technology you tried to patent from under the company you suckered into believing into buyout, and then having those patents stripped by the Judge might have something to do with it.

[dualthro]

Have a source on any context or additional information about this? Otherwise I have no idea what you are talking about

[rasz]

https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...

https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...

[thu2111]

Well, their target market is very poor people, which is not normally a great segment to expect to be early adopters of expensive new technoogies. Also they're competing against Starlink, which is basically the same concept but in space, which is probably impossible given that LEO is well understood and Musk can launch tons of long-lived satellites quite cheap.

[ptero]

All good points. I am just saying that moonshot projects are supposed to be "very high risk, high reward" projects -- unlikely to work, but if they do would provide big benefits. Your points argue that this is a "high risk, no reward" project, which is not the way to run a 10-year moonshot.

Occasionally starting moonshots as "high risk, uncertain reward" is OK for a short time, but if there is no clear reward on success after a year or two it might be continued as a PR or a charity, but not a moonshot. My 2c.

[antupis]

Brain is doing great and Waymo probably at least hits close.

[wutbrodo]

Huh, I used to work next to the Brain team, didn't realize that they started out as Google X.

Per their wiki article:

> Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X

even assuming that Waymo has zero expected future profitability.

[jeffbee]

It's kinda weird to think of brain as an X project. DistBelief was developed out in the open in the main source code repo by people you think of as googlers, like Jeff. So what makes it "X"?

[Judgmentality]

A need to justify X's existence?

[jeffbee]

Or Jeff just wanted it that way.

My own personal image of X was that if you had to drive to some old Air Force base to see it, it was X. Since brain was software, it doesn’t fit the model.

[Cthulhu_]

Waymo may / will earn them some money, either they sell it to a crazy big investor, or they license the technology out to a company backed by a crazy big investor.

[derangedHorse]

Or they can expand their existing Uber-like operation to other states and countries and make money by dominating the ride sharing space

[swyx]

alright I'm gonna ask the naive question: how exactly does Brain make money? is it offered as an independent product? or is it's incremental contribution to the rest of Google that high? what even is Brain, to Google devs?

[jeffbee]

To me it's an umbrella for all of the projects that fell out of an initial realization (by Jeff Dean and his circle) that Google's infrastructure was large enough to put into practice a class of older ML ideas that had spent years being thought infeasible. They developed the means of training huge models, then useful models that resulted from that, and follow-on project like TPUs.

[dr_dshiv]

Wing?

[ForHackernews]

Is Brain doing great? From a few things people have said, it sounded like Brain was struggling so Google bought Deep Mind instead. All of the really cutting edge AI stuff has come out of Deep Mind, not Brain.

[calebkaiser]

Just to clarify here, Deep Mind in no way replaces Brain. The AI space, like any other space, isn't a single unified landscape. There are areas where Deep Mind is a true standard setter--particularly deep reinforcement learning (AlphaGo, for example)--and areas where Brain has been one of the standard setters--natural language processing springs to mind, where Brain has historically pushed the field forward with projects like word2vec, BERT, and the Transformer architecture generally.

Brain is also a much more general organization. They do things like develop Tensorflow, which is one of two most popular ML frameworks in the world (and until recently was far and away the most popular), and TPUs, which are ML-dedicated ASICs that have a huge impact on training and inference.

Both orgs are world class and historically important, and they certainly overlap, but they aren't replacements for one another.

[querez]

I strongly disagree. Without a shadow of a doubt, the most successful/important AI model of recent times is the Transformer (from Brain). As another example, the fastest accelerators, TPUs, are from Brain. If you only look at "amount of output" and use # publications at e.g. NeurIPS as proxy, Brain vastly outperforms Deepmind. Deepmind really exceeds at flashy and showy PR releases like AlphaStar, not so much at laying the groundwork for AI breakthroughs. (Though of course AlphaFold or AlphaGo were great).

[summerlight]

Brain is not a pure research group. It builds infrastructures/platforms for machine learning related tasks and its research part is relatively small compared to the entire organization.

[ridaj]

They've talked about it in some cases. See https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-b...

[Aperocky]

That's what moonshots are though, there is a high statistical possibility that 0/100 makes it.

[swirepe]

We put a man on the moon though? I thought a moonshot was hard but doable.

[stickfigure]

The internet says: "The Apollo program's total cost was about $25.4 billion, about $152 billion in today's dollars."

That's about Google's entire revenue for 2020. I don't think even Google could put a man on the moon at those rates. Literal moonshots are expensive.

[scottLobster]

That's the total cost over the decade+ the program was in existence. Divide by 10 and it becomes roughly 10% of Google's revenue.

So it wouldn't be insubstantial, but they could fund a similar effort if they really wanted to. Shareholders would have a thing or two to say about that though, which is why Elon Musk is keeping SpaceX private.

[xyzzyz]

Sending 2nd rocket to the moon was much cheaper than the first one, so you can’t just divide by 10.

[walrus01]

At the peak of Apollo program spending in 1966, Dreier says, NASA accounted for roughly 4.4% of the federal budget — 6.6% of discretionary spending — more than the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-how-much...

as a percentage of the yearly federal budget, it's not that extreme.

I believe the DoD budget (entirely non-NASA) is presently running around 700 billion a year.

some very quick searching tells me the total federal budget is something like 3500 billion a year. 4.4% of that would be 154bn a year.

[Aeolun]

I think SpaceX could put a man on the moon for much less? We’re currently at a few billion to put a whole horde of them on Mars I believe.

[sgt101]

We don't have the technology to get a person to Mars or to land them when they get there. We probably have the technology to build a spaceship that they could die in on the way there - but that's the closest that we realistically have.

[ForHackernews]

> We’re currently at a few billion to put a whole horde of them on Mars I believe.

Uh... don't count your Mars shots before they're hatched. Even getting robot probes to Mars is very very hard. Only about half of Mars missions have been successful. In fact, since the fall of the Soviet Union only one organisation has succeeded in putting working probes on the Martian surface: NASA/JPL.

I don't think it's impossible that SpaceX will get there, but certainly not soon and not for "a few billion". If they succeed at all, it will require drawing on years on investment and expertise by NASA.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/historical-l...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53589767

[ves]

I don’t think anyone was alleging that google should be literally landing people on the moon, so invoking the economics of moon landings specifically is hardly relevant.

[ekianjo]

> The internet says: "The Apollo program's total cost was about $25.4 billion, about $152 billion in today's dollars."

And SpaceX will soon have the capability to do it with zillion times less. Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can.

[qayxc]

> Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can.

More like "if the hard groundwork has been done 60 years ago". It's not as if SpaceX had to quite literally invent the orbital rocket.

So after 60 years of manned spaceflight, 9 manned lunar missions, and 30 years of flying reusable crewed vehicles with a space station that has been permanently crewed since 1998 someone better do it MUCH more cheaply.

The culprit isn't just "space is hard" - it's decades of cost-plus contracts and heavy government involvement that kept costs high and results low.

[snoshy]

A public funding source can provide that kind of support for a decade, but even for the likes of Google that's a stretch.

I prefer to think of a moonshot as longer than a longshot, whatever that might be worth.

It sure is sad though, coming from the acquisition before Google X that had just so many great players throughout.

[dTal]

Not really; a moonshot is a huge investment to advance the state of the art in something where we know it's possible. It's not a wild shot in the dark.

No Saturn V rocket ever failed.

[wbl]

Three men lost their lives in a fire in a capsule.

[dTal]

Well if we're nitpicking, that was the payload, not the Saturn V booster...

But unfortunate though that was, it didn't represent a fundamental uncertainty in the achievability of the goal - simply a fatal engineering mistake, which was immediately rectified.

[Aperocky]

The point is, how do you know your path is to the Saturn V and not the Soviet N-1? In the case of Google Moonshots, nobody even know if they're going to use a rocket.

[dTal]

I'm sure the N-1 would have worked as well, if the project had been funded (in both time and money) properly. The Soviet failure to reach the moon was a project management failure, rather than the failure of a blind risk to pay off.

[Mistri]

Waymo seems like it's nearing its final stages. I have high hopes!

[ogre_codes]

I think it's generous to say it's in its final stages. They haven't even left Phoenix have they? And even in Phoenix, it's still largely a beta project in a few predefined areas.

It certainly seems like Google's most likely moon shot to take off. But considering only a few thousand people have used it, it's not exactly a big success.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Waymo, like any and all software, will never be “complete” - but I assume you’re referring to Waymo being ready for it’s first “real” release somehow - but we still don’t know how exactly Waymo will be integrated into cars or which automakers will go with them.

That point of mine now has me wondering what Waymo will look like in 10-20 years’ time when autonomous vehicles become both ubiquitous and un-cool because it’s nothing new anymore (just like how Facebook is un-cool today). Will Waymo’s maintainers be adding new features that benefit the consumer, or will there be pressure to “monetise” it from every angle? And to what extent will brand-conscious automakers go to hide the fact they’re using Waymo, e.g. will they insist on rebranding it - not just for themselves, but between their own sub-brands (e.g. Ford vs Lincoln, or VW and Audi)?

[runawaybottle]

Google has absolutely no choice but to make Waymo succeed with Apple and Tesla taking the space seriously.

It’s not a moonshot, it’s an absolute necessity.

[DEADBEEFC0FFEE]

Only if that the market you want to win in. Where's the synergy between Waymo and online ads?

[runawaybottle]

What are you gonna stare at in during robotaxi ride? How about some ads?

[refulgentis]

_The_ moonshot, Waymo. People are sleeping on that you can hop in a perfectly safe robotaxi today, the ride along videos are stunning.

[anchpop]

A robotaxi without a human driver! For some reason Waymo seems way ahead of everyone else in self-driving

[ra7]

As an outsider, the reason why Waymo is way ahead is clear. Extremely talented team, access to Google infrastructure and expertise, deep pockets and a culture of prioritizing safety over everything.

[solarkraft]

Maybe they are, but their service is super constrained and retains human supervision - just remote controlled.

[aetherson]

The actual thing that self driving cars get you is "not paying for a taxi driver."

If one remote operator can supervise 10 mostly autonomous vehicles, you've gotten 90% of the economic value of full autonomy.

[Judgmentality]

This ignores the cost of sending data wirelessly over cellular networks so remote operators can see the vehicle, the cost of maintaining the software and hardware on the vehicle itself, the cost of maintaining the vehicle fleet, the cost of creating and operating a consumer-facing support system (!!! for Google), the cost of dealing with the enormous amounts of data those vehicles create (even for Google this is not trivial), the cost of maintaining the special HD maps necessary for the vehicles, not to mention the sunk cost of billions spent developing it.

That's not to say you shouldn't dream big (it's a moonshot after all). But there are plenty of reasons to think it won't be viable even if they can solve the technical challenges, and that much still isn't even clear yet.

[ra7]

They can't be remote controlled i.e. remote operators can't steer the car. They can only "answer questions" apparently.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/e8bfse/way...

[rorykoehler]

I don’t understand people saying full self driving is decades away. We have it always albeit in a very restricted geo fence.

[throwawayzRUU6f]

Barring some radical breakthrough, progress usually follow an asymptote. Waymo has reached their asymptote after perfecting their autonomous driving for over 10 years, and is still not confident enough to launch it even in their spherical-cow geofence.

The real world is full of edge cases - cameras fogging up, proximity sensors confused by ice buildup, thick fog limiting visibility, sun low on the horizon blinding the cameras, badly marked construction sites, black ice, line markers under snow, potholes, slush, contradictory traffic signs, deep puddles, worn out ruts, suicidal wildlife, road debris, etc. etc.

[teacpde]

The full self driving product that people expect isn’t a beta product that’s only available in a special region. To be accessible as running water, decades away is probably accurate estimation.

[rorykoehler]

In the mean time we can all drive around in our self driving cars while we wait for them to become a reality? It doesn't make any sense. Either they exist, albeit in a limited form, or they don't. Does it get you from a to b in most normal daily use cases? If yes, then it counts.

[ZephyrBlu]

I would apply the 90/90 rule here [0]. It looks ready, but I don't think their safety is up to scratch yet and I'm almost certain the cars aren't safe in adverse conditions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

[tim333]

Depends how you define things but their work with Deepmind ('Our long term aim is to solve intelligence') is interesting. I'm glad we get breakthroughs in protein folding rather than just ads.

[Dig1t]

They bought Deepmind though, they didn’t dream it up as a moonshot. Plus you can argue that keeping the talent at Deepmind accessible to Googlers contributes to the development of Google’s internal models, which does mostly contribute to their bottom line.

[dehrmann]

Never mind shooting for the moon; they were very late to a cloud game that they should have owned because they were too busy shooting for the moon.

[trhway]

they missed cloud not because they were too busy. They thought of their internal cloud infrastructure as a competitive advantage to be kept to themselves. Very similar to the Intel's thinking of their own fabs which has brought Intel to the current failure.

Wrt. moonshots - one need to have huge political capital inside the company to carry the high risk of large investment. I.e. one has to be Jobs or Musk. Even Yang failed. How Nadella succeeded it is kind of a miracle. It looks like there are no people of that caliber at Google these days, and without it you have a CFO touting "investing for long term" which in CFO mind obviously means investment like buying real estate and not a technology moonshot.

[ForHackernews]

Arguably, all there ever was was a giant advertising behemoth and everything else is window-dressing to disguise that fact and recruit talent.

[AlwaysRock]

Moonshots are just that. Most will not work out and a few will be incredible successful.

[bergstromm466]

> all that's left is a giant advertising behemoth

Was there really ever anything more?

[ogre_codes]

I think so. I used to be a big fan of Google, they made a great search engine, gmail was ahead of the competitors. Even the moonshots were pretty cool/ interesting. Not sure when things went really sideways.

[WanderPanda]

Android was probably a moonshot at some point?!

[fakedang]

Android was an acquisition

[tornato7]

Google primary way of innovating these days is just buying promising startups. See: Android, Nest, DeepMind, Firebase, FitBit

[hooande]

While this could be considered a noble effort, I wish Alphabet would have tried harder. Google has enormous resources and talent. It seems like they dedicated relatively little to aggressively making Loon happen.

When the US took a moon shot, we actually made it to the dann moon. It was very expensive and risky and lives were lost. But we committed ourselves and accomplished the goal no matter what it took.

I hope that these Alphabet projects aren't just pr / recruiting investments disguised as big ideas about the future.

[jpm_sd]

I worked on Loon for about 3 years. We had a team of over 200 people and launched thousands of balloons. Resource constraints were never the issue. In fact I think the lack of constraints contributed to some bad engineering decisions.

The technology worked. It was, in fact, totally possible to build solar-powered, balloon-borne LTE base stations that provided internet access directly to handheld phones.

But in the end, it was just a fundamentally flawed idea. Satellites don't pop and fall out of the sky. Balloons do, frequently.

[LittlePeter]

Was 9 years really needed to come to the conclusion that

> But in the end, it was just a fundamentally flawed idea. Satellites don't pop and fall out of the sky. Balloons do, frequently.

[miohtama]

Is there any way to use the created IP somewhere else? Make it open source and let the developing nations try themselves?

[jpm_sd]

There's no point. Cell towers work just fine.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-loon/alphabet-sh...

>>>

Rich DeVaul, a founder of the project who is no longer with Alphabet, said surging demand for mobile connectivity made towers cost-effective in more of the world than he had estimated a decade ago, diminishing the need for Loon. “The problem got solved faster than we thought,” he said in an interview.

[wp381640]

Since Ruth Porat came in they've really trimmed any expenditure that doesn't add straight to the bottom line

It's really hard to be a public company and to take big risks like this. The Apollo Program never would have worked as a startup or public company.

I personally had hoped they told analysts that taking large bets for often no financial outcome is just who Alphabet are - but they folded to the Wall St pressure

[nickff]

I am a staunch supporter of the space program, but... the Apollo program also got cut before it had achieved its objectives, and probably never would have made it to the moon at all if Kennedy had lived.

[Uke]

Also, the external pressures to be the first on the moon instead of the USSR we're quite high.

[nickff]

Kennedy was looking to either cancel Apollo (due to skyrocketing costs), or try to get USSR onboard for it (which probably would have caused it to stall). In addition to that, Apollo was extremely unpopular for the entirety of its existence, save for a brief period in the middle of 1969.

The space program's history is very different from what most people imagine it to have been.

[losvedir]

I don't think this is a fair characterization of the situation, but my knowledge is mostly based on one book, Reaching for the Moon, a Short History of the Space Race[0], that I recently read.

You're right that Kennedy was ambivalent about it, and that working with the USSR was floated, but ultimately he did decide to go ahead with it. And there were people opposed, but "extremely unpopular" doesn't sound right. Like, I think the majority of the population was broadly in favor.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030023046X/

[enos_feedler]

They do often tell analysts this. I have heard Ruth say countless times that they invest for the long term. This usually buys lots of time but ultimately it does need to show financial outcome. It would be strange to not expect this.

[enos_feedler]

I googled “ruth invest for long term” and sure enough here is a video:

https://youtu.be/UYoSyLqv9rM

She does say this quite a bit!

[rasz]

>charitable actions

I just choked on my Tea. Did you perhaps miss the fact they stole Loon technology from a company they were in talks of acquiring? got sued, lost, and finally quietly settled?

https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...

https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...

[londons_explore]

Loon was a clear failure on the inside around year 3. That's when the rate of innovation dropped dramatically and key figures left. Google's main failing was continuing to fund it for a further 6 years with only mediocre progress.

[darawk]

It's depressing that you both have to worry about being flamed for expressing that view, and that those fears appear to be completely justified based on the responses you're getting. It's quite clear that Google's moonshots are largely about doing good for the world, and building exciting technologies to make the world a better place. And we should be commending them for it. Technology has consistently made the world better, and its been mediated by people and companies with an ethos of innovation, and a maybe slightly naive desire to pursue those goals even when they don't completely make financial sense.

[anhner]

they're so generous, they didn't even finish the project!

[ulfw]

If it's so generous, why is it being cancelled like almost every other non-search product?

[ffggvv]

the problem is it doesn’t actually solve problems or improve lives in any real way. if they wanted to do that they’d give people mosquito nets and teach them how to read

it’s just corporate PR so people can fawn over them like your post and want to work there or use their products

[mjfl]

I mean some of their projects are a little... loony.

[goatinaboat]

that strive to solve a large, global issue through somewhat charitable actions

Capturing eyeballs and mindshare before anyone else can is hardly charitable. It was 100% for the benefit of themselves, and everyone knows it. Facebook have tried the same scam.

[treelovinhippie]

So they extracted the PR value just long enough for people to think of them as "charitable", and then they bailed.