People from Google have argued that's exactly why they're failing.
Personally, as someone who worked at a company that was up over 500% during the pandemic, shipped absolutely nothing during that spike, and then deflated below their pre-pandemic pricing, I saw the foley in hiring smart people first hand.
It's not enough to hire the smartest people, and in fact it can be a competitive disadvantage. The smartest people often want their piece of the product to reflect their ingenuity no matter how ancillary it is to the core mission. Unfortunately that often precludes the kind of agility that businesses need to stay competitive.
OpenAI managed to poach Googlers by simply not having fiefdoms built by smart people™. I imagine if Google had built GPT-4, it wouldn't be having downtime today. Because it wouldn't be public. And it might never be public because it doesn't scale for Google scale yet, and the ethicists want their say, and we need to integrate it into Borg and the front end hasn't passed through enough layers of design and...
I think they just got lazy and entitled. Maybe ChatGPT will be the scare they need. It feels bad though; they almost don’t deserve the energy this fight will give them.
Personally, as someone who worked at a company that was up over 500% during the pandemic, shipped absolutely nothing during that spike, and then deflated below their pre-pandemic pricing, I saw the foley in hiring smart people first hand.
It's not enough to hire the smartest people, and in fact it can be a competitive disadvantage. The smartest people often want their piece of the product to reflect their ingenuity no matter how ancillary it is to the core mission. Unfortunately that often precludes the kind of agility that businesses need to stay competitive.
OpenAI managed to poach Googlers by simply not having fiefdoms built by smart people™. I imagine if Google had built GPT-4, it wouldn't be having downtime today. Because it wouldn't be public. And it might never be public because it doesn't scale for Google scale yet, and the ethicists want their say, and we need to integrate it into Borg and the front end hasn't passed through enough layers of design and...