Ex-Googler says company's AI panic is like Google+ fiasco all over again
the-decoder.com
the-decoder.com
I've been unemployed ever since the Great 15% Layoffs, about 14 months ago. I finally landed a job (well, once the paperwork is done) related to bringing up a new processor. But it's a DL accelerator.
I really hope there's not another employment bloodbath if/when the AI bubble bursts, since my savings are pretty much depleted.
A lot of the 15% bloodbath was also because of severe overhiring during Covid's 0% interest rate times, so AOPs needed to be reworked for a high interest rate period.
You should worry if you were working on a GPT-frontend, lol.
But that was just a link I came across quickly. You can look at almost any economic statistics you want and see that the economy (at least in the US, you mentioned the S&P 500 so I assume you are US-based) is quite strong right now.
The S&P500 and others don't remove the outliers going to the moon which is good for investors but as a data metric would make for a pretty large deviation.
This has all happened before and will happen again.
No big breakthroughs; what we're seeing now is spare GPU power and memory (since those the only things still advancing significantly from year to year) brute forcing black box neural nets that nobody understands or can get to work right. If that's "AI", then me using ChatGPT to write my essay is "doing my English homework".
The bigger issue for Google, at least in my view, seems to be that they don't seem capable of responding or competing in a real tangible way. Over the years they've seemingly lost the ability to rapidly and coherently release a product. Instead, you get this bizarre, incoherent, and spasmodic, response from all of these different product teams that don't seem to really work together all that well and don't have a clear product identity.
At this point, I doubt Google can turn the ship around. The company is just a gigantic behemoth of petty fiefdoms that will go the way of the Carolingian empire.
I don't see any vision in Google's products other than "ad money printer go brrrr."
By that metric, measured against Google's recent product releases, Google's org/cooperation structure is broken.
It's tired to reiterate the 'launch and abandon product for promotion' incentives, but it also seems to go higher up.
Individual teams at Google are amazing, and build amazing features, but the company as a whole whole seems incapable of knitting those features together into a coherent product.
Microsoft was in a bad shape too but they did turn the ship around when Ballmer left. Not sure whether MS was better entrenched than Google is but what seems to me is that Google need a drastic leadership change. Or they could be milking whatever they have and eventually go the way of the dodo.
Reasonably successfully?
Call screen is easily one of the best features of my phone. Call hold navigation is also really useful. It calling restaurants and the like is not something I commonly use but it works and I've used it sometimes.
The call features on my Pixel are amazing IMO, and new ones (like the one that warns you if you are being scammed) could be great for large swaths of people.
VR and Crypto/Blockchain didn't pan out, so now the new hotness is AI. There is an opportunity to make something useful out of AI that people want to pay for, in order to keep shareholders happy.
AI is especially interesting for shareholders as it allows you to cut down on labour cost for certain professions. It's an almost ideal tool for creating shareholder value.
Yet, I think the hype will come crashing down eventually. Because we know that it's all statistics and no actual reasoning. Cool that your service now has new AI features that tells me things, but why would I believe any of it?
Meanwhile, I'm pondering what the next hype will be. Not VR for sure. 'Normal' people don't want to wear heavy stuff on their head messing up their hair. Fun for games but let's be real.
But I have absolutely no sense of direction where things are headed, if there even is such notion. What I do observe is that society is more diverging between the haves and the have-nots.
The next hype could be private security via weaponized drones!
Remember smart chatbots? That's where AI is headed, straight into the blackhole of bad ideas in IT.
> ...Apple is pursuing a similar AI lock-in strategy with Siri, Jenson believes.
I remember when Microsoft got sued for including a web browser in Windows. Oh how anti-trust has fallen.
The case was more complicated than you’re suggesting, and a lot less relevant.
Which of these companies are you suggesting has the monopoly position in the phone market? Apple? Google?
Which other OS-level AI voice assistants are being prevented from competing in this case? This isn’t like a web browser download where the marginal cost is negligible download bandwidth. Voice assistants are expensive to develop and run. They’re investments made in the product being sold.
Most importantly: What outcome do you even want? That the government forbid companies from developing AI integration into their own platforms because it might make people more loyal to those platforms?
Microsoft Windows enjoyed a staggeringly huge market share at the time.
They even managed to charge PC manufacturers a tax on computers with Linux preinstalled instead of Windows.
Just in my personal life:
GitHub Co-Pilot: I love this tool and really don't like working without it. Is it perfect? No. Does it make mistakes? Yes. But I think of it as having a full-time junior developer working under me. They can take care of a LOT of the boilerplate crap while I focus on the more difficult parts of programming.
GPT4: Has replaced most of my internet searches. It's so easy to ask it focused questions and get a reasonable answer, or, a starting point for more in-depth research.
Kagi's Summarizer: I like being informed on world events, but, every news org likes to write 9000 page articles for the most mundane things. With Summarizer, I can, get a nice bullet-pointed list of facts without all the fluff. In turn, I can get through much more news quickly.
Apple Photos: I use A.I. recognition of various objects and the ability to search for them almost daily.
Grammarly: It prevents me from sounding like the absolute idiot I am in online conversations.
I'm very eager for A.I. stuff to be integrated into more tools, such as my file manager. How amazing it would be if I could just point an A.I. system at a directory and say something along the lines of "Please organize this using Johnny.Decimal." or "Please find all documents related to my financials."
You can find a lot of ppl in companies like that who arent up to date with mission, marketing or strategy and theres nothing very wrong with that
I was in the fortunate position to have a supremely talented admin/chief of staff a couple years ago when I was in charge of a 100+ people org. They were amazing. Spoke 5 languages, took detailed notes for me, created decks and ran status update meetings on my behalf, scheduled my time based on my priorities. Ultimately, it was nice to have, because when they left, I never ended up replacing them.
The only thing I really missed was scheduling meetings. But now a calendly link works just as well.
I think Meta is doing much better. They are not freaking out, instead they are hyper-focusing on winning the race and then see how can they use that to improve. They have a lot less nonsense. I have no idea how they are going to monetize this huge expense, but I would bet they are going to be fine. (who would've thought only a couple of years ago)
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More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40429041
He posted this on LinkedIn: “ I just left Google last month. The "AI Projects" I was working on were poorly motivated and driven by this panic that as long as it had "AI" in it, it would be great. This myopia is NOT something driven by a user need. It is a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind.
The vision is that there will be a Tony Stark like Jarvis assistant in your phone that locks you into their ecosystem so hard that you'll never leave. That vision is pure catnip. The fear is that they can't afford to let someone else get there first.
This exact thing happened 13 years ago with Google+ (I was there for that fiasco as well). That was a similar reaction but to Facebook.
BTW, Apple is no different. They too are trying to create this AI lock-in with Siri. When the emperor, eventually, has no clothes, they'll be lapped by someone thinking bigger.
I'm not a luddite, there is some value to this new technology. It's just not well motivated.
Edit: Well, this has blown up. To be very clear, I wasn't a senior leader at Google, my projects were fairly limited. My comment comes more from a general frustration of the entire industry and it's approach to AI”
— https://www.linkedin.com/posts/scottjenson_this-years-google...
From that perspective, Google (Android, Maps, Drive/Calendar/Photos/Gmail), Apple (iOS, Maps, iCloud/Calendar/Photos/Mail), and Microsoft (Office, AAD/Windows, GitHub, XBox) all look solid.
Even if they screw up initial efforts.
Those data streams aren't something you can create out of thin air, without first creating products and attracting users.
AI assistants are only as smart/dumb as their context.
And now, as all the FOMO-driven AI integrations are starting to bear fruits, it seems that we're going to enter a chapter of unprecedented bullshit and disappointment in the history of personal computers.
History seems to point to the latter.
So, one way or the other, we'll end up with some variation of your scenario.
Of course, just a lot of companies went under when that bubble collapsed, and there's no guarantee that any of the current AI players will make the right move this time either.
We are talking about profitable and established businesses trying to catch the train before it leaves.
I think there is space for a lot of interesting innovations and products in the AI space, even within its current limitations.
But what we're seeing now is not smart, and frankly ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong - i'm also not a big fan of company's hamfisting "ai" into every product that they have. But in Google's case it might be a do-or-die situation.
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Basically, AI tech's current value proposition is simple - information retrieval.
What does Google happen to do? Information retrieval.
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Google absolutely should be scared if they aren't already.
The phrase "Just ask ChatGPT" has already entered the common parlance, in much the same way "Just Google It" did in the 2000s. Zoom killed Skype in much the same way.
In 10 years, gen-alphas could be using ChatGPT exclusively for performing their information gathering. In 20 years, Google's search revenue (55% of their revenue) might be hit sufficiently that they have to pivot something else. In 30 years, more time than it took Yahoo to become completely irrelevant as a company (founded 30 years ago!), Google may be just as irrelevant then.
Google is already giving up the meta-physical space to Facebook and Apple. They've already given up the services space to Apple. They hardly even build their own hardware anymore, so all that's all going to Apple and Samsung. If the balance of power shifts, Google might just lose Android to Samsung completely.
Now they might just lose the information-retrieval space too, which is their core identity.
What do they have left after? YouTube, Business, and Infra, and Play Store. None of which actually makes them much money at all.
They absolutely need to put their AI thing in as many things as possible, and try to leapfrog the competition. But at this point I think they may have already lost in the current consumer headspace.
My casual 2cents