[alecco]

The board and Pichai should go. They had the best researchers at Deepmind and Google Brain, sitting on the best pile of data of any tech company (web, Google Books, YouTube, ...), having the leading custom hardware (TPUs), and top tier datacenter engineering. And they put idiots in charge with ridiculous quota systems. They bled a lot of key people for nothing. And spent 2.7 bn to get one guy back. TWO POINT SEVEN BILLION FOR JUST ONE GUY. And Alphabet didn't even buy his company, they just got a non-exclusive arrangement. It's beyond incompetent.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-paid-2-7-billion-12305...

[redlock]

Noam Shazeer is not any guy. And I would bet the latest jump in Gemini capability is a result of him coming back.

[alecco]

On one hand, Pichai paid 2.7bn to get 1 guy back. On the other hand, Pichai laid off 200 Core devs and "relocated roles" to India and Mexico [1]. The duality of Pichai-style management.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...