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Comment by serjester | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone met Googlers that are confident in the company's AI strategy? Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to seems to have serious concerns but that might just be a small sample size.

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The board and Pichai should go. They had the best researchers at Deepmind and Google Brain, sitting on the best pile of data of any tech company (web, Google Books, YouTube, ...), having the leading custom hardware (TPUs), and top tier datacenter engineering. And they put idiots in charge with ridiculous quota systems. They bled a lot of key people for nothing. And spent 2.7 bn to get one guy back. TWO POINT SEVEN BILLION FOR JUST ONE GUY. And Alphabet didn't even buy his company, they just got a non-exclusive arrangement. It's beyond incompetent.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-paid-2-7-billion-12305...

Noam Shazeer is not any guy. And I would bet the latest jump in Gemini capability is a result of him coming back.

On one hand, Pichai paid 2.7bn to get 1 guy back. On the other hand, Pichai laid off 200 Core devs and "relocated roles" to India and Mexico [1]. The duality of Pichai-style management.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...

They're in a tough spot where the CEO does just enough to stay, but they need someone better.

They lagged in AI, but the new Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible. They built an incredible tool in NotebookLM but failed to market it

Agreed. Sundar seems like a peacetime CEO that got pulled into war and seems like he's struggling. But with Larry and Sergei having all voting control it seems unlikely he'll get fired.

I thought Stadia was incredibly well-engineered, had good performance playing modern games with a Thinkpad. But none of my friends had any idea what Stadia was, the ad campaign was atrocious. Time and time again, Google builds great products and then shelves them a year or two later.

Google is not alone. Intel halfheartedly develops GPUs. It doesn't work without strategy.

Only works if you have a very stable internet connection

Then take a look at how Nvidia markets a similar product (GeForce Now). It not only works way better (much better GPU) but also is growing by leaps and bounds every year and adding hundreds of games. And it uses your existing steam library for cross saves and cross plays. It was around before Stadia and survived long after Stadia.

Google has a bunch of amazing engineers and finance people but apparently they just can't productize anything.

I’d say give it time. NotebooksLM probably gets rereleased with a new name. Simultaneous iOS release, giant press storm. Not attempting to do so is a mistake.

But yes, absolutely need new leadership. Nest/Pixel/etc are such a wasted opportunity tight now. The software layer is so disconnected between each component. As a dumb example im pretty sure you still can’t talk out of a hub max or tv remote into a nest cam, but can through the home app. The “it works in one place, but not another” prevents so much usability discovery for normal people.

I tried using notebookLLM many many times and it's just not good. On the other hand I'm writing proofs using chatgpt and they look really good.

Google has turned it around quite exceptionally. A lot of my professional work has turned back to Google products, and 2.5 Pro is absolutely exceptional. It is absolutely a benchmark model.

Google did seem asleep at the wheel, and then when they did come out with some products they were so incredibly afraid of Gizmodo soliciting an image or text output that was socially unacceptable, paralyzing them with fear (and leading to some incredible stupidity). But their pace now is rapid.

Is anyone confident in what a winning strategy might even be? The market keeps getting more crowded and yet AI is still only creating incremental value for company's that adopt it. It's not clear to me that this is going to be quite as much of a sea change in how businesses run as people like Altman have been pitching.

Nor do any of the top 10 AI companies have any kind of moat. The fact that Elon Musk can found a competitor out of spite and have a plausible competitor in 6 months with a multi-billion dollar value actually just dilutes the perceived value any of the market leaders. OpenAI is still riding the high of being first and having the ChatGPT brand be so strong.

Google doesn't need to win on all the benchmarks, they just need to embed themselves in enough enterprises and they have a huge leg up in that regard.

I think the winning strategy is making a small model that's good enough to embed in search, etc, at no cost. Google has the best small models. But whoever wins this will be whoever makes a more efficient computing substrate for LLM inference, like running a transformer with lenses or something like that. Winning strategy there is acquisition.

Maybe the substrate will be flesh.

You lost me. Lenses? Are you being fanciful or is this a thing?

I think google will end up winning enterprise, and the fact that Apple didn't sign a sole partnership with OpenAI, but kept Gemini in the mix lends a lot of credence to this.

Google is the only "classic" org in the SOTA model space, and the only one in the whole race who doesn't have to kiss the ground Jensen Huang walks on. They are big enough to be able to "pay you back" if they colossally fuck up, and the chances of them going belly up are pretty slim. They also have the cheapest models to boot.

From a business standpoint, Google is the safest play on many levels, even if their models are just good enough.

The winning strategy is that Google has so many surfaces that they can embed their own AI in (also use as training data sources) that they essentially can't lose unless their models are just terrible. Fortunately, their models are great and they've truly been moving very fast to integrate AI into both enterprise (via Cloud) and consumer products this past year. As a xoogler, I'm truly impressed.

Have you met any OpenAI employee who is confident in the company's AI strategy? There is very little moat here for anyone.

Many have pretty serious concerns about its direction, speed and product strategies, but I guess most of them also agree that there has been some progress and the situation has improved. I think that not many people think that Google will surely return to its dominant position on AI research again, but they may keep being relevant in the competition.

I am, I was VERY skeptic initially but now it's clear Google will win.

Wait. What? By what measure? There is a very solid chance that Google will simply cancel the project.

I'm looking at you, Google. I'm still bitter about Google Reader.

Suggesting they’ll cancel gemini makes about as much sense as suggesting they’ll cancel gmail.

Sorry, your comment isn't particularly helpful or convincing.

Googlers who aren't working for Deepmind are mostly Leetcode monkeys who have absolutely no clue about business strategy, marketing, distribution, branding, margins

This isn’t true at all.

Quite a bias displaying username you have though.

Maybe a lot, sure. But at least the top 10% are elite at their craft. DeepMind, Google Brain, the TPU people, the datacenter people, etc.

Sadly, Pichai is firing Core teams in USA and moving them to India.

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