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Comment by light_hue_1 | Hacker News Reader

Google with some of the best people in the world. Unlimited resources in almost every way, manages to fall further behind and further into irrelevance in AI.

A bunch of closed models no one can run. A mediocre bard that is way behind everyone else. Pretty pathetic. Is anyone home at Google?

Google's AI budget is higher than the total funding for AI at all US universities combined. It's just mind boggling how they can drop the ball so badly.

What a change in fortunes. Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.

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Well, Google has a bunch of people who tell themselves they’re the best in the world. I’ve known perfectly reasonable humans start working there and by the time the left they felt they were smarter. By that I mean, in general, smarter than others. You can’t be smarter, you can be smart, but smarter isn’t a state of being. But they definitely feel they are, and assume you know that too. When discussing work I had done with one they insisted I must have based it off of a Google paper, which they weren’t sure if there was one on it, but surely I didn’t do it myself. That level.

One when confronted with the actual remit of their new job at a new company said “wow you hired an atom bomb to open a tin can.” They failed to achieve anything in two years and was fired.

I'm afraid I'll have to call bullshit on your story, as firing an atom bomb is against the Geneva convention.

Are you suggesting Google is a narcissist incubator? (only slightly tongue in cheek)

If you’ve met Eric Schmidt you will know that is precisely what it is. His narcissism is boundless and he apparently figured out how to make it infectious.

Gemini Pro, with arguably comparable quality to GPT4, competes with GPT4 with its superior pricing and speed.

If you actually use Gemini Pro, you will find that it gives nearly instantaneous full responses, which makes me use it more than even GPT4 Turbo for a lot of quick questions. And certainly more than Bing AI with GPT4, which is so slow and awkward to use and which I gave up on.

It's something that doesn't get discussed: speed and pricing, with near top quality. That's maybe how Google is planning to win for now.

Google's own benchmarking shows that Gemini Pro is just slightly better than GPT 3.5 and Gemini Ultra is comparable to GPT 4 (see their technical paper).

Google probably has at least 5x the management bloat as the competitors and it's killing them. Too many cooks in the kitchen vying to be the next AI thought leader. They're acting like IBM to be honest.

It's nice to see this. Hopefully small upstarts will make breakthroughs in different areas. Better than an AI monopoly.

This last decade, Google hasn't really made much of relevance outside AI either. The company is just milking its existing ad flows and not much else, it seems.

Google doesn’t really have much of a track record in real breakthroughs, does it?

It was built on its founders’ initial application of an eigenvector centrality algorithm to web search. The main innovation there was the application, not the algorithm - it was innovation more than invention.

Since then, perhaps the most technically impressive thing I’m aware of that Google has actually productized is their language translation system. But again, that was primarily innovation that built on existing technology and access to a lot of data, hardware, and distribution capability.

> Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.

Wasn’t that mainly because of money and the collection of smart people you mention, bought by that money? Which is not the same thing as a record of achievement.

I admit I could be wrong, I’m open to being corrected.

Something something transformers

I’m not familiar with what you’re referring to, but I’d guess it has to do with some academic breakthrough in transformers. But that wasn’t something they productized, was it?

The comment I replied to seemed to be lamenting Google falling behind in the market, talking about closed models and Bard. My point is that Google doesn’t have much of a track record of homegrown invention that they’ve successfully brought to market.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have good R&D, but that can be a lot like a university: all sorts of cool ideas and interesting discoveries, but it doesn’t necessarily translate directly into something useful.

I believe Google Maps invented AJAX. Google Docs I think was actually acquired, but it was definitely ahead of its time.

Microsoft invented Ajax/XMLHttpRequest for Outlook Web Access.

Microsoft invented XHR for use in Outlook Web Access. The Gmail/GMaps teams developed that technology into AJAX.

This makes it seem like they invented XHR and did nothing with it, but Outlook Web Access already used XHR for dynamic/asynchronous update of an email web interface context four years before Gmail.

If your claim is that Google popularized the ideas behind Ajax, then I'll happily agree: The term Ajax was invented outside Google [0] to describe Gmail front-end inner workings. My first contact with Ajax-like technologies was certainly Gmail in 2004 and not OWA in 2000, so I am not denying the merits of popularization. But I think even saying Google "developed the technology into" Ajax is unfair to OWA, given that Microsoft was pushing the other components of Ajax for a lot longer as DHTML (which led to standardizing DOM [1]; document.all anyone?) and OWA used DHTML+XHR, which was at the time essentially a non-cross-browser version of Ajax (props to Mozilla for implementing a compatible version of XHR and shipping it as part of Mozilla 1.0 in 2002).

I won't argue for Microsoft any further, though, because the "cross-browser" part is key. The fact that they invented and shipped these things in IE with no effort to standardize them (as part of their embrace, extend, extinguish approach) was a big headache for cross-browser compatibility. Google gets most of the credit for Ajax because web developers hated Microsoft's approach to the web at the time (for very good reason). It is interesting to compare Microsoft's behavior back then with Google's current approach of flooding standards bodies with (at times half-baked) proposals.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepa... [1] https://www.w3.org/DOM/faq.html#DHTML-DOM

Aside from the fact that Google didn’t invent AJAX, it was trivial technology. It wasn’t some kind of amazing breakthrough, it was simply a workaround for explicitly designed limitations on prior technology. What AJAX did could trivially be done by any programmer with the ability to write networking code. It’s just that the browser environment placed artificial constraints on that.

But anyway, Google didn’t even invent AJAX.

The maps UX (zoomable infinite scrolling map) was implemented independently previously to maps, which was originally built by an australian start up (?) iirc before being acquired by google.

The term "AJAX" was coined around 2005 though. Before XMLHttpRequest there were iframe hacks. Most early stuff didn't really work due to browser incompatibilities and bad security.

Nope, I was using XmlHttpRequest back in 2003 (through ActiveX) for some intranet where clients used IE5. Might have popularised the concept but the technique predates GMaps for at least 3-4 years.

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