The best minds were never working on getting people to click on ads. That was an internal industry narrative so people could feel better about themselves.

The best minds of the generation are on wall street trying to figure out how to quickly spot inefficiently priced options 1% more often.

Seriously, I wish more than anything I was kidding.

Not sure about that. Sometimes Google legitimates a field. I was in a kite power startup company back in 2019. Before Google canceled it's Makani kite power project VCs and angels would at least talk to us - it gave them some frame of reference: "Oh, this is like the kite power thing Goggle is doing?" "Right, but on a much smaller scale". After they canceled Makani in the summer of 2019 it was crickets. We folded by the end of 2019. They figured if Google couldn't make it work then it probably wasn't something to invest in.

It's not that opaque, it's recruitment. Basically same marketing as a univeristy. "We do state of the art research here. If you are a talented researcher who wants to advance the field, you'll want to work here"

Now, how Google plans to make money with all this bleeding edge research, that's the mystery.

They were not though, this is very similar to the one that came out last month. https://arxiv.org/html/2411.00769v1

Why is this downvoted and flagged? I am laughing so hard at the second sentence, that I am on the verge of tears. Nothing has made me laugh so hard in a while. This part really did it for me:

    > get absorbed into some hype mill startup

Wait... isn't that basically YC?