I think Google needs a visionary leader who can anticipate the future and make strategic investments. I do not think internal structure will change without visionary leader.
I think of “Google and AI”, and I remember hearing more about their work on “AI ethics” than work on actual “AI” itself. Of course, ethics is important, but if you are more focused on the ethics of doing something than actually doing it, that’s scarcely a recipe for leading the market-on the contrary, it sounds rather risk-averse-and, maybe that’s unfair, I don’t know, but that’s just the impression I get from my own limited perspective.
Google has created things like TensorFlow tho, OpenAI is flashy but only time will tell if that leads to real, monetizable results
I really dislike how Microsoft is being considered to "be better at AI" recently. No, they just integrated another AI solution in Bing. They haven't released any big AI product themselves for a long time.
TensorFlow? MobileNet? TPUs? Products like Google Translate, Image Search, Youtube's voice recognition subtitles? Google's done plenty of cutting edge ML stuff.
I'll admit their voice assistant is nothing to write home about - but it was the equal of its mediocre competitors at the time it was released.
It's almost like Google is not immune to the fate of being a massive company.
And just like prior large, market dominating firms (IBM / Microsoft / Intel), managed to miss a new trend (commodity PC hardware / web/mobile / contract fabbing) due to wildly profitable legacy revenue streams whose sheer size masked competitor acceleration.
What? Tensorflow, one of the 2 main frameworks for doing AI work is a google project. Google has domain specific processors to accelerate AI workloads - tensor processor. Google Brain. Id argue they have been making the biggest effort out of all the large tech conglomerates. They just haven't made an effort to turn their developments into consumer facing products, instead of milking the ad-cow even more.
This goes back to way promotions are handled: clearly people are incentivized to build stuff but no one cares if that would have any path to profitability.
Does the world really need fucsia? ChromeOS?
A business needs both and needs to incentivize innovation along with long term commitment.
kubernetes came after the rise of aws, likely to keep google in the game
> Does the world really need fucsia? ChromeOS?
ChromeOS is an extremely popular OS, especially in education markets and there is definitely a need for such an OS. The majority of computers in the world are overkill for what the average end-user is trying to achieve and chromeOS fills that space very neetly.
Otherwise I agree with you that technology needs more than just technical vision to succeed, but my opinion is that AI isn't ready for the mainstage and maybe some people within google thought the same and chose to not rush anything. Then google made a massive blunder by going on the defense with their bard unveiling.
The problem lies with translating that innovation to long term product vision, and reimagining how these innovations could be made into a product.
I suspect that they announce it to fast too, too soon - before it's proven. Stadia and LaMDA is an example of this. They actually showcased LaMDA last year or the year before that in I/O. The other is that they give up on innovations too soon because they can't think of ways to monetize them.