I believe what's holding google back isn't lack of cash, but lack of innovation. It's full to the brim with highly paid engineers that aren't really invested in change.
And the funny thing is that they bought HTC mobile, which has always been a competitive and innovative player, and I seriously doubt Taiwan based engineers are paid anywhere close to the ones in Mountain View.
I've had many Nexus and two Pixels (the 5, and 8 now), with an Essential Phone in the middle, hard to beat during the last $220 fire sale.
To me, Google never had a serious hardware strategy. It's improved and keeps improving though, the features getting a lot of focus (like the camera performance) are good, they finally committed to 5 and now 7 years of software updates, the Pixel lineup is sold in an increasing number of countries (Google could still do a much better job here, just sell your hardware ffs). Eventually they'll move to their own in-house SoC, and hopefully Samsung modems won't suck forever.
But when I see something like the Pixel tablet sold at such ridiculous price in most countries, I truly wonder what's going on, it's like some people at Google explicitly want to fail.
So let's see what happens when they are threatened for the first time by Microsoft and OpenAI if Google can afford to spend even more money to prevent the likes of Apple, Samsung and Mozilla from moving from Google to use Bing with GPT 4.
Well, the big difference between ChatGPT and Google is that one of them is profitable. ChatGPT does not make money, and Bing's usage of GPT-4 is almost certainly not covered by ad revenue (even at-cost).
Even from a technical perspective, I'd argue Google outpaces OpenAI. BERT beat GPT-2 and GPT-Neo, T5 and t5-flan bench well against GPT-3, and GPT-4 is so large and wasteful that it's not worth competing against. Relative to the rest of FAANG, Google honestly seems like the only company that actually knows how to use and deploy AI practically. Everyone else is trying to play catch-up with a proprietary competitor and/or pay an unsustainable sum to be king-for-a-day.
I bet Microsoft can afford to spent unsuspecting amounts for way long than ‘a day’. At a certain point due to cheaper hardware and improved optimization GPT-N might become sustainable, by then their competitors might have issues closing the mile wide gap they have to MS/OpenAI.
Yea this is the point, all roads lead back to the lack of innovation at Google.
They have capital, they have free cash flow, they can attract talent, but often they completely fail to compete effectively in new categories they enter.
To be fair, Google enters so many categories that some of them are bound to fail. Neither Apple, Meta or Microsoft really tries as many things as Google, so perhaps Googles issue is a lack of focus and vision.
One problem that Google might have is that their criteria for success has become to high. Products has to make billions within a short time frame, but they aren't willing to make the same kind of investments in ensuring that success as a company like Apple is. The AppleTV, or even the Apple Watch would have been killed or sold off had they been Google products. Why they keep the Pixel I have no idea, maybe it is in fact part of some larger plan.
I've had many Nexus and two Pixels (the 5, and 8 now), with an Essential Phone in the middle, hard to beat during the last $220 fire sale.
To me, Google never had a serious hardware strategy. It's improved and keeps improving though, the features getting a lot of focus (like the camera performance) are good, they finally committed to 5 and now 7 years of software updates, the Pixel lineup is sold in an increasing number of countries (Google could still do a much better job here, just sell your hardware ffs). Eventually they'll move to their own in-house SoC, and hopefully Samsung modems won't suck forever.
But when I see something like the Pixel tablet sold at such ridiculous price in most countries, I truly wonder what's going on, it's like some people at Google explicitly want to fail.