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Comment by ralph84 | Hacker News Reader

And none of them still work for Google. It’s truly baffling that Google’s CEO still has a job after how badly he fumbled on AI.

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I'm not 100% sure I agree...

Google is an ad company at the end of the day. Google is still making obscene amount of money with ads. Currently Gen AI is a massive expense in training and running and is only looking like it may harm future ad revenue (yet to be seen). Meanwhile OpenAI has not surpassed that critical threshold where they dominate the market with a moat and become a trillion dollar company. It is typically very hard for a company to change what they actually do, so much so that in the vast majority of cases its much more effective (money wise) to switch from developing products to becoming a rent seeking utility by means of lobbying and regulation.

Simply put, Google itself could not have succeeded with GenAI without an outside competitor as it would have become its own competition and the CEO would have been removed for such a blunder.

>it may harm future ad revenue (yet to be seen)

It harms ad revenue at the moment.

For some specific queries (like code-related), I now go to chat.openai.com before google.com, I'm sure I'm not the only one.

AI is the only thing that can put an end to Google's dominance of the web. I also have no idea how Sundar still has a job there.

Google is an AI/ML company that has shoehorned AI/ML researchers into working on ads to pay the bills.

Classic Innovator's Dilemma case study.

> It is typically very hard for a company to change what they actually do

Microsoft started out selling BASIC runtimes. Then they moved into operating systems. Then they moved into Cloud. Satya seems to be putting his money where his mouth is and working hard to transition the company to AI now.

Apple has likewise undergone multiplet transformations over the decades.

However Google has the unique problem that their main cash cow is absurdly lucrative and has been an ongoing source of extreme income for multiple decades now, where as other companies typically can't get away with a single product line keeping them on top of the world for 20+ years. (Windows being an exception, maybe Microsoft is an exception, but say what you will about MS, they pushed technology forward throughout the 90s and accomplished their goal of a PC in every house)

Also, though I dislike it greatly, Microsoft purchasing GitHub was a brilliant way to buy into a growing segment which were natively hostile to what they stand for. LinkedIn, maybe less clever, they only make pocket change on it, but it is profitable.

Google doesn't really do acquisitions on that level. They do buy companies, but with the purpose of incorporating their biological distinctiveness into the collective. This tends to highlight their many failures in capturing new markets. The last high-profile successful purchase by Google, that I recall at least, were YouTube and Android, nearly twenty years ago.

Waze was bought 10 years ago, and I think that one went well. They didn't try to integrate it to the whole Google Account thing, but they definitely share data between it and Maps (so Waze users get better maps, and Google Maps gets better live traffic information).

Office was the cash cow compared to windows.

Microsoft effectively controlling the PC market as a platform to sell Excel is akin to Google controlling web standards as a platform to sell ads.

Now is Active directory + Office 365 + Teams

Remember that Microsoft spent 10 years fighting the open internet, and only launched the cloud much later. The Windows business was allergic to the web-model, and they fought it tooth and nail.

In fairness, the web model tends to be objectively worse in every way except profits.

It's not about just ad revenue though, is it? Many thousands, if not millions of sites rely entirely on Google Search for their revenue. You cannot simply replace all of them with a chatbot - there are massive consequences to such decisions.

>It's not about just ad revenue though, is it? Many thousands, if not millions of sites rely entirely on Google Search for their revenue.

I mean these are kind of tangled together. Chatbots actively dilute real sites from what we are seeing, by feeding back into their fake into googles index in order to capture some of the ad revenue. This leads to the "Gee Google is really sucking" meme we see more and more often. The point is, Google had an absolute cash cow and the march towards GenAI AGI threatens to interrupt that model just as much as it promises to to make the AGI winner insanely rich.

Their wildest success at Google would have meant the company's stock price doubling or tripling and their stock grants being worth a couple million dollars at most. Meanwhile all of them had blank checks from top VCs in the valley and the freedom to do whatever they wanted with zero oversight. What exactly could Sundar have done to retain them?

It would have gone much better for Google if the Brain team had been permitted to apply their work, but they were repeatedly blocked on stated grounds of AI safety and worries about impacting existing business lines through negative PR. I think this is probably the biggest missed business opportunity of the past decade, and much of the blame for losing key talent and Google's head start in LLMs ultimately resides with Sundar, although there are managers in between with their own share of the blame.

They should have been spun out with a few billion dollars budget, no oversight, and Google having 90% (or some other very high %) ownership and rights of first purchase to buy them back.

It is a successful model that has worked again and again to escape the problem of corporate bureaucracy.

Interestingly Google itself has followed this model with Waymo. Employees got Waymo stock not Google, and there was even speculation that Google took on outside investors. It's weird to me that they didn't consider generative AI would be as game changing as self driving cars, especially considering the tech was right in front of them.

Funnily enough, the same AI safety teams that held Google back from using large transformers in products are also largely responsible for the Gemini image generation debacle.

It is tough to find the right balance though, because AI safety is not something you want to brush off.

I thought Google fired it's AI Ethicists a few years back and dismantled the team?

Ethics != Safety. Also, Google still has both afaik

> AI safety is not something you want to brush off

It really depends on what exactly is meant by "safety", because this word is used in several different (and largely unrelated) meanings in this context.

The actual value of the kind of "safety" that led to the Gemini debacle is very unclear to me.

I think the issue is that there is no future for a trustworthy AI that doesn't completely cannibalize their ad revenue cash cow.

Like, who wants to use an AI that says things like, "... and that's why you should wear sunscreen outside. Speaking of skin protection, you should try Banana Boat's new Ultra 95 SPF sunscreen."

Yeah, but isn't the idea to cannibalize your own products before someone else does?!

In any case, consumer chatbots isn't the only way to sell the tech. Lot's of commercial use too.

I don't see why ads couldn't be integrated with chatbots too for that matter. There's no point serving them outside of a context where the user appears to be interested in a product/service, and in that case there are various ways ads could be displayed/inserted.

You are not imaginative enough.

"Based on the research I have available wearing sunscreen with a SPF at or greater than 95 is the most likely to prevent the harmful effects of sunburn".

Go to google -> Search "sunscreen" -> (Sponsored) Banana Boat new Ultra 95 SPF sunscreen

Oh wow! 95 SPF! Perfect

> Like, who wants to use an AI that says things like, "... and that's why you should wear sunscreen outside. Speaking of skin protection, you should try Banana Boat's new Ultra 95 SPF sunscreen."

On the other hand, their history suggests most people would be fine with an AI which did this as long as it was accurate:

> ... and that's why you should wear sunscreen outside.

> Sponsored by: Banana Boat's new Ultra 95 SPF sunscreen…"

Among other things (like cloud for instance). I always think Sundar is the Steve Ballmer of Google.

Google doesn't have to try to be the best at AI now, it can just buy whoever is the winner later - a lesson learned from google video.

No Google can't just buy the winner.

Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion (and I recall that seemed overpriced at the time).

The way VC works for private companies now is completely different than in 2006.

If that winner turns out to be OpenAI and they attempt to buy them it'll be blocked by regulators instantly.

Just like Xerox and Bell. Innovation isn’t necessarily their most important job, at least when innovations are being made.

Well, ads are doing well.

He was too distracted with all the other things going on under his watch. He spent too much time trying to convince rank and file that it's OK to do business with customers they don't like, trying to ensure arbitrary hiring goals were made, and appeasing the internal activists that led protests and pressured to exit people that didn't fall in line.

This is why the CEO of Coinbase sent the memo a few years back stating that these types of people (not mission focused, self absorbed, and distracting) should leave the company. The CEO of Google should be fired.

How has he been appeasing internal activists? He's been pretty clear about firing them

Edit: I'm also unclear on what makes you think he's spending much time on "arbitrary hiring goals". I remember an initiative for hiring in a wider variety, also conveniently much cheaper, locations but there wasn't indication he was personally spending time on it

It is intellectually dishonest to call the military-industrial complex merely "customers that some Google employees didn't like".

Humans are more than their companies' mission, and your freedom to exercise your political views on how companies should be run inherently relies on this principle, too. So your argument is fundamentally a hypocrites projection.

“ Humans are more than their companies' mission”

Not when they’re on the clock.

Besides, many of the Google employees who are against defense projects are against them because those projects actively target their home countries. Much harder problem to fix!

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Obviously you don't get to ignore your morals and values just because you're currently employed by someone?

I mean if you had the pedigree these people have, the right move is to leave a big company and go start your own thing, there is simply a lot more upside there. You’d be foolish to stay with a big company, not sure what Google could have done here. Not everyone wants to be Jeff Dean.

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