[jppittma]

Idk. This makes me super nervous. Look at what the bell breakup did for innovation in software. The transistor was literally invented there before it was broken up. Likewise, I think it's probable that if Google is broken up, you'll not see anything as innovative as the transformer models, GFS, or Spanner anymore. I think quality of life for employees will likely go down, as it did when bell labs was broken up.

[passwordoops]

Different time. Bell was one of the last great break ups and occurred just before the modern pro-Big Business, ultra-financialized era kicked off in earnest. If Bell weren't broken up, Bell labs would have been shut down or severely trimmed regardless as the execs diverted the R&D spend to stock buybacks or other inefficient use of funds that benefits the shareholders over all else (e.g. Boeing).

I think a better parallel is the late-20s early-30s Robber Baron breakups. There's been much ink and elections spilled over how that anti-trust era contributed directly to the proliferation of post-war innovation (e.g. https://bookshop.org/p/books/goliath-the-100-year-war-betwee...)

[jppittma]

Is Google not on the bleeding edge of research into LLMs? Are they not investing billions into cloud? Google research has quantum computers, and is investing in self driving cars, healthcare, and god knows what else.