At this point, Google just seems to be a conventional company. The writing has been on the wall for a long while now, but their first layoff seems to cement that fact.
Even though they are not providing machine learning models, Google is still the biggest provider of high quality AI research papers in the world.
As AI models are improving, at some point they will turn into business advantages, it's just not yet big enough business for Google to make a big difference compared to ads.
Google is still one of the special companies that are prepared to take advantage of AI when it gets to the point of capturing trillions of dollars of value.
I will be happy to read something nice from FAIR as well, so please elaborate.
I agree that they have at least one of the top AI research groups among the corporate players. But is that going to translate into business advantage?
IBM Research was (and is still to some extent) pretty solid, but did that actually translate into business advantage? The "Watson" that competed on Jeopardy was impressive for its time. But we can look back on how the attempt to commercialize that flopped pretty hard.
Note: I'm not saying Google has IBM levels of sclerosis, at least not yet.
But there's no ironclad law that a solid research division will always turn into something profitable.
* Giant Magnetoresistance (gigabyte hard drives)
* Financial Swaps
* Silicon on Insulator Technology
* DRAM
* Fortran
* Copper metallization on silicon dies
I think they were afraid this tech would cannibalize their existing offerings and wanted to slow-roll things. Now they're sorta f'd.
And it's not the Kodak days, Googlers fully understand that they need to disrupt themselves. And to tell you the truth many engineers there are more excited than afraid that things are happening, I think they will have the opportunity to get much more creative than before.
We can try it, though, so it's great for publicity.
Reality is Google's primary problem in doing demos of their newest models is the activism and views of their own employees, not the rest of the world.
AI Research papers usually don't contribute to the bottom line.... you need execution chops there.
Everything we saw from OpenAI we've seen in one way or form from good ol alphabet already, just not accessible or obvious in their products. They're really both blessed with immense science and engineering talent and highly inert and frankly dumb business side.
Anyway, however obvious you mind find it, to many people watching Google become...this...is disappointing, or vindicating, or just interesting to see. I grew up with them and they're aging poorly.