Google shares sink following reports that some of their AI demo was faked | Hacker News Reader

Google shares sink following reports that some of their AI demo was faked

cnbc.com

84 pointsdonsupreme33 comments

Why would Google announce a software release, without releasing it? There are many answers to that question, but "because it works as advertised" is not one of them.

I didn't even bother reading their announcement once I saw an HN comment pointing out that nobody can use the thing yet.

It's an LLM. If it works like they say, let me talk to it and see for myself. Otherwise, it's pretty obvious why they don't want me to do that...

Flashy product announcements without an immediate release are part of the “big company game”. Usually they are just a mechanism to make leadership more confident about the product by showing them how excited external people are about it, creating hype, etc.

Guessing, someone had to get something out of the door before the year ends and people leave for the holidays.

How does Sundar Pichai still have a job? Isn’t he ultimately accountable for turning Google’s state of the art AI research into multiple bungled attempts at commercialization?

Not just AI either. Nothing launched under his tenure has survived. The business hasn’t diversified.

Google under an unimaginative McKinsey suit is the epitome of burn money and accomplish nothing.

Anyone notices how Amazon is taking baby steps with Luma? The gaming service?

Reminds me of the 4k@60fps Stadia with cloud connected controller etc.

He worked at McKinsey before 2004 and only for a short time. Consulting must be the hardest sin to forgive in the tech world :)

Well, he's certainly not being held accountable.

He's been absolutely useless, and everything relating to AI under his watch this last year has been disastrous. This is all way over his head, he doesn't have either the knowledge, the charisma or spirit to move things forward. They should show him the door before any other major embarrassment.

Investors are reading balance sheets, not HN comments. Look at Google's stock price since Pichai took over and you will understand how he still has a job.

Google has underperformed all of big tech except Meta since he took over.

Put another way – Google is only the third best performing company in the world just not the first or second.

The big tech companies are not playing the same game as other companies in the world.

It seems reasonable to hold them to a higher standard if you think they have more potential.

With the resources available at that level the only limiting factors seem to be leadership and what's actually possible. So I think it's fair to hold them to a high standard.

You can debate the definition of big tech, but among the companies Google has underperformed in the Pichai era are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, TSMC, Broadcom, Adobe, AMD, and Netflix.

You can say that with no leadership and just keep working on ads they would maybe have even more revenue

People said the same about Steve Ballmer.

And look at how much MS has changed since they got an innovative CEO in his place.

Hopefully Sundar is shown the door and the reins are given to someone else actually willing to innovate. And the share price will skyrocket like it has with MS.

MSFT when Ballmer became CEO in 2000 – $40

MSFT when Ballmer was replaced in 2014 – $40

GOOG when Sundar became CEO in 2015 – $30

GOOG today – $137

The situations aren't exactly comparable.

MSFT today: $373. Yeah I would say 10x growth vs 4x isn’t comparable.

The point of the comparison was to compare the stock growth during the tenures of the two CEOs in question. Steve Ballmer ceased to be CEO in 2014.

What a terrible comparison. Both companies went through a stock split while they were CEOs.

All stock apps account for splits.

The post I am commenting on is NOT accounting for a stock split.

They dont really have a signal as well. The stock price could be due to external reasons like growth of mobile, growth of internet etc. These are the products that Google had always had. MSFT under Satya otoh launched a major initiative into the cloud and delivered growing revenue yoy.

Sink is too dramatic for a 1.5% drop. The stock has increased in the past week.

Their last AI marketing flop from January had a larger drop of 9%: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-ai-chatbot-bard-of...

It's weird that they had two such marketing flops in a single year, and both for AI products, and even weirder that such flops happen to the king of the online advertisement market.

Well, I think it's relevant in that you would expect shares to rise after a major product announcement. The fact that they sink at all is a bad sign.

Yeah, how can you even be certain this is why?

The marketing pages, the whole pitch was that we have a native grounds up multi modal that processes multi modal inputs as a whole unlike other approaches where multiple different models of different modalities are stiched together.

With all that emphasized, the duck demo was jaw dropping. It felt like now computer systems really have eyes and ears. A computer system is responding and commenting on what it is seeing. That's just really really revolutionary.

But then... the fine print somewhere.

Which should have been first slide on the video in bold headings staying for a few seconds.

off: In the other thread I found out about chat.google.com, what a product. Growing up I looked up on google products, their simplicity, efficiency and engineering seemed amazing and I strive for those qualities in my software. Google Chat has none of these qualities, it's slow (really slow), complicated and buggy. What's happening to Google?

My guess is: they got a MBA bureaucrat who is mostly adept at increasing his own power as a leader, instead of a technologist who truly values innovation and building quality products.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38559582

This is the one demo they needed not to blow. :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com