[PxldLtd]

This is short-sighted IMO, I bet money that once the dust settles with the current LLM-boom that Google will still be around and pioneering in AI across the board. They aren't locked in to Nvidia, they have world class research, they aren't bogged down with VC returns or upcoming IPOs.

[BoorishBears]

I see that being about as likely as IBM doing the same.

I'm too young to have seen the arc of Xerox PARC first hand, so to me stuff like the innovators dilemma made sense, but didn't feel particularly visceral.

AI Studio (or whatever their internal name is) is the first time in my own lifetime witnessing how real deep it really cuts.

Google realizes GCP is too slow and overwrought to get mindshare vs nimble OpenAI and Ant, spins up a new product org as a work around, and that product org ends up moving obviously much faster than Vertex, but also with a sort of malaise (relative to the technology they're supposed to be selling) that makes it clear to me that Google actually cannot move like a startup anymore.

That might seem super obvious to most people, but I grew up with Google being the startup. I knew they grew up to be a mega cap, but I guess I always assumed the bones of a startup were still in there.

There's no bones. It actually feels like a mini-identity crisis for myself to realize there is no startup left in Google: what other invariants I assumed about people and organizations are just plain wrong?

[xyzzy_plugh]

I agree with you for the most part. However they have been raising a lot of cash, and to do so they took on a ton of debt.

It's a totally reasonable investment as long as they are within shooting distance of the market leaders, but the more they lag behind (i.e. the longer it takes for them to release their next model on par with industry leaders) the more hurt they're going to be in.

If they can't materialize returns off the tens of billions of dollars they just raised then it will come back to bite them hard.

Luckily they have a ton of options (such as selling compute) but it's still not a great look and the market is going to hammer them given the opportunity.

[estearum]

Strongly disagree. Google (and Apple) need only be near the frontier. Their incredible distribution and integration will propel them far beyond the next marginal billion dollar benchmarkmaxxing.

[xyzzy_plugh]

I'm saying that. But they're falling further behind day by day. Gemini 3.5 Pro is allegedly months behind. If they can't keep up they're going to be left in the dust.

[computably]

Lol. The average American isn't ponying up $20/mo for the latest and greatest model. Barring major breakthroughs, being months ahead is a race to the bottom of who can burn more money to get 0.1% on a benchmark with no practical relevance.

[andai]

Their niche is that you get the quality of a Chinese model for the price of an American model.

[WarmWash]

> they have world class research

It's a pretty bad look when all they do is shed researchers. Whether to other labs, or to people launching their own things. "I work at Google" doesn't have the ring it had 10-20 years ago either, something that OAI and especially Anthropic enjoy nowadays.

Deepmind is looking less and less like a place of prestige, and more and more like a smash-and-grab.

[sidibe]

Google has always shed researchers but they still have way more of them than everybody else.