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I remember Pichai mainly for his "AI now first everything" in 2015, destroying Google search as a reliable channel to acquisit users somehow for free.

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That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me.

I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.

> if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision.

Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.

Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.

Not sure if the days of SEO spam where that much worse than todays AI spam? :-D

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