> “I think I left just before it got too bureaucratic for me,” Mensch said. “I didn’t want to build opaque technology from within big tech.”
Interesting point of view in light of the ongoing train wreck of bard/gemini/gemma/whatever it's called today thing.
From zero to 2 billion valuation in 9 months is impressive.
Assuming it's actually worth $2b, of course.
I'd argue the fact startups are able to compete in just 9 months suggests there is little to no moat here and others will be able to do the same. I'd also argue there's a lot of speculation around the value of these products right now so it's debatable wherever it's actually worth $2b even if there is a moat. Not saying it isn't, but I don't think anyone really has a good sense for the long-term value of these new AI products / companies just yet. The valuation is mostly a result of speculation and AI FOMO.
But regardless of valuation, it's still insane that Google has become so dysfunctional that they're now struggling to compete with tech offerings from 9-month old startups. And this article does a disservice saying "big tech", because this is specifically a Google problem. Meta has had no problems pivoting their focus towards AI, creating a strategy and releasing interesting products and models.
And it's not even just that Google's products are bad, their announcements always feel rushed and clumsy, and their AI strategy seems to be nonexistent. None of this is a result of a lack of talent at Google, it's all down to crappy leadership and bureaucracy.
AI chat is really only useful for a niche area of the search market orientated around non-real-time question and answer type questions. Eg, "who was the greatest US president?"
The valuable search ad space is mostly around transactional searches like "sofas" where a company could place an ad and convert a user looking for a new sofa. No one is using chatbots for this. That's not to say it's not a risk, but I think people are wrong to think that web search and AI chat are directly competing products. AI chat competes with search in a similar way that Alexa and Siri already does – they're useful within a certain niche.
Do you assume he did not produce anything valuable at Google while working there ? (That's entirely possible, but not certain.)
As the old joke goes:
A: "What if I train them, and they leave ?"
B: "Sure. What if you don't train them, and they stay ?"Oh - I'm not saying that. I assume he did, but was also paid to do that.
I'm more commenting on the marketing, rather than the person.
That’s been the Silicon Valley way ever since 1957 when Fairchild Semiconductor was started by the “traitorous eight” who later jumped ship again to found companies like Intel and AMD.
That does not affect my usage and Gemini works fine for me.
“This free artificial intelligence doesn’t generate sufficiently accurate pictures of non-existing Nazis.”
Talk about first-world problems. (Back then most people still had the naïve idea that they’d probably rather see less pictures of Nazis, much less spend time looking at ones that didn’t even exist.)