| > After all, if a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its advertisers for user attention. Google Assistant has the exact same problem: where do the ads go? This is Google / Alphabet's biggest problem. Unlike Microsoft that has Enterprise, Gaming, Cloud and multiple other 10B+ businesses that don't rely on ads, Google has only cloud. And Google Cloud is a distant third where they actively sabotage their own success by not caring about customers. 90% of Google revenue comes from ads. From Search, youtube, Adsense e.t.c If they build an AI that gives exactly what the user wants without ads, Google's stakeholders would fire the CEO the next day. My perception is that Google is in AI race to be relevant and capture the talent, but they don't want to actively put AI anywhere near their products that would eat into their ad revenue. Google Brain/Deepmind produces great research, they have the most number of published papers, by a big margin, but Google is not the place if you want to work on productionizing AI. Top AI Researchers probably make the most money being at the big tech labs - DeepMind / Open AI / Meta FAIR. I've heard comp being into the 10s of millions per year. |