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Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

People forget that Larry Page's ultimate goal was to have Google predict what you wanted before you even asked for it. This isn't about hype. This isn't about beating the competition. This is about delivering on a 3 decade dream that's now coming to fruition and Sundar just happens to be the one leading the org as it manifests in the real world. We're going to end up with 10+ vertically integrated AI solutions like this. Google will be core infrastructure for the world and this thing will be an assistant to everyone who buys into the Google ecosystem.

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I'd love for this to be true. I bought into the Google ecosystem in a huge way, but it seems like they have been more focused on the data collection, and advertising end of things, rather than the innovation, and productivity enablement one. Their ecosystem has consitently been a let down in many regards, and they have lost a lot of forward momentum. I hope they can super charge this stuff, but I feel their corporate structure/environment is their biggest hurdle at this point. They have capable people, and brilliant minds, but the structure of the organization, and them being beholden to their market/shareholders gives them little room to innovate in these areas. Hopefully the prove me wrong.

Having all humans as the target audience means that it will always be more profitable to make users the product instead of making them the customer. This in turn means that incentives are not geared towards being in the interest of the user.

One thing's for sure - it's much easier to quantitatively define an OKR for growing advertising mindshare (especially when you operate the exchanges that measure that mindshare!), than it is to, say, define an OKR for how a project loosely contributes to Google leading the mindshare in the movement towards generative AI outputs as they redefine practically every job in the world.

And I'm certain that however much Google historically stressed that OKRs aren't tied to performance reviews, there's a lot of fear that deviating from OKRs could trigger one being on the top of the list for the next round of layoffs. So there are definitely headwinds that could stifle experimentation and innovation in such a brave new world. For Google's sake I hope that top leadership is redoubling its efforts to get buy-in up and down the management chain for redesigning structures to allow innovation to take place.

So gross, and so true. I get bouts of nausea every time I hear "OKR" now.

Similar sentiment here. I look at the state of my android phone today and see a company that seems like it got bored of building out a mobile platform after they “won” on usage.

They just brought this extremely innovative thing to market in very little time. The problem may have been that they haven't really had any competition in their core business to push them in a long time.

This thing that no one except those bound by NDA has ever tried. I think I’ll reserve judgement for just a little bit before declaring Bard “extremely innovative.”

>They just brought this extremely innovative thing to market in very little time.

Did they? Where can I use it?

I also want this to be true.

I've just been soul-crushingly disappointed with Google's execution over the last few years, particularly the outright degradation of so many products (Gmail) or just not keeping up with competition (Hangouts is garbage compared to Zoom, Sheets still is barely usable, etc), or just screwing over users by deactivating features (I used to be able to play a youtube video's audio over my Google Home speaker, but they long ago removed that ability and I can only play Youtube music now).

All of the above are just consumer rants, but let's not forget how frighteningly bad the Customer Support or support in general is for G Cloud. I WANT to get off of AWS, but these clowns at Alphabet have this amazing ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with anyone trying out GCloud.....

I hope Bard is great..... I want it to be.... but I'm not confident it will be.

Meh, lot's of corporations have had all kinds of outlandish visions. I don't think this one is any more or less aligned with any other vision statement from 20+ years ago. They're just capitalizing on the technology that's available at the time, like any good company should be doing.

This "core inrastructure for the world" wıll also be maintained about as well as HVAC in the seminal film Brazil

Imagine a government controlled AI that partners with mega corporations to "assist" AI in getting you the "correct" results you desire. Call me a pessimist but we may already be staring down the gun of a dystopian future

It was literally Dune. Men handed their thinking over to machines. That let other men with machines control them. It wasn't even subtle!

Meh. Enthusiasm about Larry Page's ultimate goals and dreams went out the window right about the time don't be evil went out the window.

At this point in SV history, harkening back to what a founder said as an anonymous PhD in his pre-billionaire 20s, sounds a lot like when people talk about "what the Founding Fathers wanted".

Nothing is set in stone, and the world is very different from the Web 1.0 era in which Google formed.

Your comment and parent’s look aligned to me. He’s saying it went down the drain, and you posit things do change and we shouldn’t expect current Google to be aiming at benevolence and ethicality.

I think Google was always "evil" however you define that. The plan from the start was to focus on the product, build the brand, and eventually switch to monetization mode like they are now. That's what the slogan meant, think long-term.

The founders still own >50% and make decisions, but the employees still act like Larry and Sergey are some founding fathers spinning in their graves. "_____ wouldn't have happened under them," oh yes it would, and it did.

Sundar did nothing but failed projects. Google is still where it was many years ago.

My Google phone can instantly translate almost any foreign language, embedded in an image, without an internet connection. Pretty sure that was not a thing 8 years ago.

If/when Google embeds an (local and/or lightweight) Bard model into every Pixel phone, that will be a game-changer.

That was a feature of google translate many years ago. Absolutely nothing new.

And was came from a purchase of Word Lens not something in house if I remember right.

While cool, that's a feature, not a product. Sundar has not led the company on any new products that have succeeded. The chat apps failed, Meet/Hangouts/whatever lost to Zoom, Stadia got cancelled, etc. All their current cash cows made their names before him.

At least he didn't oversee the introduction of Google Plus, though.

He’s leading Google Cloud to strong growth, which is more important than something niche but innovative like Stadia.

Technically they poached Thomas Kurian from Oracle for that.....

That's fine, Kurian is under Sundar too. But GCP isn't winning.

That's WordLens, which Google acquired in 2014, 9 years ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/16/google-has-acquired-quest-...

Do you have a source that WordLens worked without an internet connection?

If it didn't, surely that wasn't a tech limitation? Google Translator itself has had offline translation capabilities for many years now, and Bing had that feature even longer. Offline OCR has been around even longer.

Yes, offline capability was there since day one.

The Android version of Word Lens actually launched last month [June 2012]. All of the features that made the iOS app interesting are available in the Android version, including completely offline translations.

https://lifehacker.com/word-lens-for-android-brings-offline-...

> Google will be core infrastructure for the world and this thing will be an assistant to everyone who buys into the Google ecosystem

Pretty optimistic, considering things Google "delivered" in the past 5 to 10 years.

Considering what ChatGPT does with internet knowledge, I'm scared to have it trained on my internet history of clicks... It will be massively dangerous and totally centralized in so few hands...

Sounds amazing indeed but so far I see no indication of it going to happen at Google. I think the Google ecosystem, at least as it appears to regular consumers, is in a poor and frozen state ever since Google+ failed. YouTube is YouTube as usual, Gmail feels like ten years ago, and Google Docs etc. is as it was five years ago. Even Google Maps doesn’t amaze me, following its long period of innovations. I fondly look back at the times Google went where no man had gone before.

Maybe the way Google will know what you want before you ask for it is by showing you ads to manufacture demand.

Google wants to serve you

to ad buyers.

I cannot help but laugh at this comment. I bet this is what Google corporate tells its employees in orientation and All hands meetings.

And how will they make money?

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