| Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written. As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle: - huge, quasi unmatched data war chest - huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure - native AI chip design and production (TPU) - the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there - deepmind, enough said - pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT - a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...) - supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley Why do the best people leave ? Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ? Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance? The only answer I can think of is: - culture is completely broken - management sucks something fierce - company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore |
Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].
The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.
Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.
1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1