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Comment by bartwr | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's been at Google Research ~5y, this nails is it 100%.

I was at the non-Brain part of Research and it was seen as Google Brain is the "cool", pure research one, dealing with some future abstract AI and not caring for the products, feasibility, or even if the research "could" be made practical any day.

Deepmind was an "extreme" version of it, with some animosities and politics between the two, which I didn't follow too closely. There were attempts at making Deepmind useful, called "Deepmind for Google", but the people there were... clueless. Though one really cool thing came out of it (XManager).

(I was at a closer to the product part, "Perception", which I loved. And still got to publish, explore, pursue my own research goals, etc.)

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Ilya _was_ at Google Brain, so something doesn’t add up there. I believe people wanted to launch things, but higher management stopped it.

I was next to the team that created Allo’s chat bot, but they said that they had to take out most cool stuff because legal didn’t allow it to launch, so they had to dumb it down totally.

I believe the main problem was all the ethics/safety teams that just hired a lot of non-programmers, while OpenAI management treated safety as an engineering problem that has to be solved with a technical solution.

Yeah, but Ilya left. Doesn't that prove your point?

OpenAI isn’t a multibillion profitable public company with many prior lost (some won) lawsuits. To some extent they didn’t have anything to loose by cutting corners.

This is one of startups greatest advantages over established players.

Microsoft is a multibillion profitable public company and they managed to extend the search in no time. Google is not as effective as it could be. They have great engineering and they proved that many times, but something is not working on the product design side.

This is such a lousy excuse on Google part. We see multi-billion public companies bringing bold innovative products to extremely regulated sectors, like pharmaceutical and medical devices. Google can't deploy a chatbot because of lawsuits? Oh, c'mon...

Hindsight is 20/20. Before ChatGPT, chatbots had a lousy track record. Pretty much any such project run by bigtech had been cancelled due to PR issues ("Tay" etc).

MSFT got their fingers burned on Tay but were still willing to do a chatbot.

Google didn't even bother despite having all the tech in place.

and i can't believe I'm saying this but it seems microsoft has the ability to at least deliver innovation.

So the problem at Google is not the lack of good product managers and engineers, but the lack of bold leadership, then.

That's what great about competition. It kicks you in the pants and reminds you you need to try.

iPhone scared the shit out of the phone market and today we have great phones from Samsung and Google which dominate the market. If everyone was trying to predict the smartphone market in 2007 they'd be talking about how Nokia missed the boat but excited to see their response (or Motorola/Sony/Blackberry etc). The market today won't necessarily be the market in 10yrs from now. It might be Google, they have a solid head start to be #2 and future #1, but who knows what will happen and whether that talent/advantage stays in Google.

It could just as easily be other companies we don't even consider serious players today.

* dominate the low-end of the market. Apple has the platform where users have money to spend on apps and services.

* dominate the global market. Apple is a very minor player outside of the US and Japan.

"very minor player": I do not agree. I Googled for: "iphone market share by country"

Here is the top hit: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...

What is wild to me: This is a single company. Android has a huge number of makers.

Nearly 100% in North Korea!

I’m not in favor of it, but most of the global market is too poor to matter.

One of the things I do respect Google for is providing services to poor people, but that doesn’t mean it’s a business advantage.

If you offered me control of the entire Android ecosystem or just Apples iPhone business I’d not even blink to take Apple.

They also have the majority of profits in mobile phone sales.

From technical perspective apple phones are usually few years behind competition.

Except in CPU / GPU which is a strange state of affairs.

Really depends on what you're thinking of when you say technical

My Samsung phone was waterproof long before Apple had it.

I bought an s7 or s10 which was waterproof and took photos under the water. Iirc apple was rumored to also be waterproof at the time but it was advertised.

I don’t know how true these things were. Did anyone else get this perception?

Not to nitpick, but XManager was built by the Platform team at DeepMind, not DeepMind for Google, though they helped roll it out beyond DeepMind.

(I was on the XManager team in Platform.)

What is xmanager?

https://github.com/deepmind/xmanager

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