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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

Google wants to win in Quantum so bad, they have to make up for their absolutely embarrassing lack of hindsight with AI.

Edit: Downvote all you want, OpenAI is a half trillion USD company now and quickly rising.

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Lack of foresight in AI? They own one of the world's largest GPU/TPU fleets. They have some of the most advanced research and a path to deploy products. What exactly else should they have foreseen?

That someone else would take their attention is all you need research and scale it.

They should have buried it or been first. Instead they’re playing catchup.

The Google relevant AI team were in full panic mode on the release of ChatGPT. Source: friend’s friend is on the team.

Doubling down on LLMs specifically (which came out of their own research). Also getting to a point to commercialize it first. Their TPU fleet wasn’t really optimized for LLMs until recently afaik.

LLMs are only 3-5 years old (NLP is much older OFC), for all we know they'll be a dead end in research like LSTM are today - LLM/Multi Modal just look super hot. "Attention is all you need" was released in 2017, it took 5 years to prove it was useful, for all we know the new hot thing has already been published and LLMs are obsolete - Google might have been right to wait.

Besides I dont think the top people at Google's DeepMind - and I can only "infer" this from watching them speek online - actually think LLM's are "the one".

Is the goal GAI or to add as much as possible to the market cap? I was specifically talking about the latter and why they got leapfrogged by OpenAI which has been valued at a substantial fraction of Google’s overall value despite having a fraction of the revenue. If Google had managed to generate this much value for themselves they’d be respected differently but for now it seems like they missed the AI tech stack today and are playing catchup for like the next 5 years regardless of where AI evolves later.

Larry's original goal for Google was always to be a revenue vehicle to reach AGI although I don't think Sundar is interested in anything except revenue/profit.

Note also that many of Google's previous attempts with LLM generated significant press controversy, and it was in Google's interest to let other groups take the heat for a while while the overton window shifted.

>1Tn+ USD created

>a dead end

Sure, pal.

Not OP, but maybe lack of achievements in AI is a better way to phrase it. They had one of the earliest, serious AI programs and did an enormous amount of work, but for whatever reason one would like to attribute they've consistently fell behind other competitors. I mean Grok, which was started quite recently, is better than Gemini in most tasks and arguably has a stronger market position. Google should have mopped the floor with them given their funding and the age of their team but that never happened.

OpenAI has the benefit of being priced entirely on promises. Google has a lot of realized potential, which investors always find underwhelming.

why don't investors see same potential in google. 'investors are stupid' is very unconvincing?

Google has grown $1T in valuation in the past year. That is two OpenAI's in size.

Google (alphabet) is a publicly trading company, and its share has doubled in value over last 2 years or so.

s&p is up 60%

Alphabet and companies in similar markets make up a) most of the S&P 500, and b) almost all of the growth.

The valuation comes from SoftBank and some Arab oil money that buy some $6b in shares, not from being publicly traded as Alphabet is.

> Google wants to win in Quantum so bad, they have to make up for their absolutely embarrassing lack of hindsight with AI

Quite the opposite, they have plenty of hindsight. One might argue it's 20/20 even!

With DeepSeek what we found was that the moat wasn't that deep (pun intended!) and they may have lacked some foresight, they caught up pretty well.

Google has led AI research for years with Google Brain and DeepMind, but they have been overtaken by OpenAI now, and perhaps soon also by other players who are building gigantic data centers. Google's core mistake was arguably that they were far too late in coming up with a model that was competitive with GPT-4. Now ChatGPT has likely more than an order of magnitude more subscribers than Gemini. At the same time, Google's search engine is increasingly replaced by ChatGPT, drying up their main source of revenue: search ads.

Recently one of their top reasoning researchers switched to OpenAI, likely leaking Google's internal reasoning secret sauce, if they even knew anything that OpenAI didn't. I doubt they will catch up.

ChatGPT has no revenue model. Once it begins degrading results with advertising content, people won't use it.

They're only using it in preference to Google today because it is ad-free.

> ChatGPT has no revenue model.

They have, subscriptions:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-first-half-revenu...

You can look at comparables to see how that'll workout

Arguably the most mainstream and well-known subscription company is Netflix. People all around the world know about it, most have subscriptions and yet it hasn't "taken over" the world.

That's before we consider any other company (Anthropic, Google) can undercut OpenAI in price or just simply be good

Unless something drastically changes, OpenAI will have tough time justifying high valuation.

To the best of my understanding, OpenAI is investigating exactly one path to AI, while Google has always been investigating many.

I actually believe that Google will survive OpenAI.

Google invented the transformer architecture, so I genuinely have no clue what you're talking about. Do you actually think they should have kept it a secret from the world? Do you think Google would genuinely be a better company if they monopolized the tech?

In this day-and-age, it feels like HN refuses to advocate for anything that isn't a monopoly. Are we incapable of imagining competitive markets now?

Well, I don't think it's particularly related to AI, but Google has been known to make... interesting claims regarding quantum performance, at least once per year, to justify some kind of advance.

To this day, I wonder if Google knew that they couldn't be the ones to unleash AI unto the world. They clearly had the wherewithal and expertise to do it (Vaswani et al, 2017), but were under so much antitrust pressure at the time that it seemed inconceivable that they could be the ones to introduce such a polarizing technology to the world. What kind of firestorm would have rained down on them if they were the first.

Or, you might think, if Google had the technology, and they knew how to turn it into a trillion-dollar product, it's beyond ridiculous to think they would just hand the win over to someone else.

I think they just saw it as slop, they were working to make it more reliable and accurate. Releasing it first would tarnish their name, it just wasn't ready. OpenAI had no name to tarnish, so people were more willing to deal with the subpar experience as they refine it.

Ya mean foresight?

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