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by mlmonkey 3 hours ago
I still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something.
4 comments

There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company.

My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They've been very "GOFCT" and have only recently started to incorporate ML concepts.

>> There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times,

Well...there is the uncanny similarity to the T-800 and and uneasy realization that the owner of BD could become Cyberdyne Systems IRL. Perhaps some companies like that notoriety but not sure if many want that.

https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-800

What is Gofct and does robotics industry generally just have had a slower adoption of ML because of the realtime domain requirements, I'm just curious and wondering aloud here.
Sorry, I wanted to make a pun for GOFAI (good old fashioned AI). CT stands for control theory.
Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal.

This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high.

Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?

Can we go on a small tangent and wonder how we don't know when the guy was born?
Is it really that surprising that no-one has invested the time and effort into figuring out the personal information of some tech employee-turned-founder? I bet no-one outside of tech even knows his name.
Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.
Wow I’m so glad that didn’t happen.
Google dumping a project when it does not produce instant results?

That seems out of character

2017 was shortly before Google stopped being afraid of being pegged as an AI killbot company.