[HN Gopher] Can Demis Hassabis save Google?
___________________________________________________________________
Can Demis Hassabis save Google?
Author : laurex
Score : 98 points
Date : 2024-03-29 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bigtechnology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bigtechnology.com)
| ijijijjij wrote:
| as bad as Google is becoming, does it need saving to survive?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Anthropic (which Google owns a large stake in) and Gemini are 2
| of the 3 best LLMs (both of which outperform GPT in at least
| _some_ non-trivial tasks).
|
| Is it really that bad?
|
| Or is it just en vogue to trash?
| dkasper wrote:
| Imo the criticisms are more cultural or philosophical than
| technical, ie the Gemini image search kerfuffle. Clearly
| Google and Anthropic have a lot of solid people.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Gemini is painfully over censored. It is good at some niche
| tasks and probably the best commercial vision model though. I
| think people just don't want to spend time evaluating a model
| if it's mostly not great.
| Jensson wrote:
| Google would fix that really quickly if it became a do or
| die situation. All they need to do is throw out all the
| overeager social justice people who wants to ruin the model
| by censoring it. Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of
| organizational changes already happened after the last
| debacle.
|
| Currently Google care more about PR with ad customers than
| market share but if things continue like this that will
| change really quick.
| aneutron wrote:
| My opinion is quite simpler: GPT got the 1st mover's
| advantage from a marketing perspective, and until Google,
| Anthropic or another proposes something VASTLY revolutionary
| for the layperson, then it's unlikely they'll "catch up"
| (which is only a percetion ofc, perhaps a wrong one at that)
| rileyphone wrote:
| LLMs aren't nearly as monetizable (now) as search ads. Very
| possible that search collapses in the near future alongside
| the open web, and that whole line of revenue destroyed.
| ijijijjij wrote:
| Gemini sucks and is much more censored than alternatives.
| Didn't try Anthropic yet, but Google will probably kill it
| soon (or change its name and cripple it). I don't even think
| your claim is true though.
|
| For example, I asked a question about a firearm (completely
| legal topic) and it tells me "I am an LLM, and can't
| answer"... instead of saying something like "I was disallowed
| to answer questions similar to this one" or "topics I don't
| like, I won't talk about them".
|
| (I tried to reply as soon as you posted your comment but HN
| would not let me)
| PunchTornado wrote:
| I find Gemini the best. Paying the 20PS subscription for
| advanced. It's been almost 2 months since I opened chatGPT,
| gemini completely replaced it for me and I'm a happy
| customer.
|
| Everyone has their preference and maybe some people like
| you prefer chatGPT, but the way google makes deals with
| other companies like apple and samsung, I don't see openai
| competing in the future.
| ijijijjij wrote:
| > maybe some people like you prefer chatGPT
|
| not sure when I said that... that's news to me
|
| > I don't see openai competing in the future.
|
| I think you can see it in one of the branches of the
| possible future.
| elorant wrote:
| The problem isn't who has the best LLM, but how can you
| monetize a LLM the way you monetize search. Can you apply
| keyword auctions on LLMs and then have links? Will that work?
| We don't know, and I haven't read any concrete study on the
| issue.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I feel like if anything it will be _easier_ to target ads
| with LLM queries.
|
| The user intent will be so much easier to identify, and it
| would be trivial to show ads based on it.
| yinser wrote:
| The smaller the team Demis has leadership on the more he can
| absolutely achieve but I'm worried he'll by hamstrung with
| steering a goliath.
| neximo64 wrote:
| If anyone has actually used Gemini and seen how good it is, Demis
| has probably already saved Google.
| fumar wrote:
| I've slowly started to switch over to Gemini Advanced the paid
| tier from ChatGPT4. Longer conversations seem possible with
| Gemini and it has more recent information - at least for the
| topics I care about.
| loudmax wrote:
| Google's problem isn't lack of engineering talent, it's the
| absence of competent management. Gemini could be far ahead of
| GPT-4 or whatever OpenAI comes out with next. It won't matter
| unless they actually build a profitable business around running
| an AI. This should be feasible, but so far there's no
| indication of this happening.
|
| The infrastructure is there. The institutional knowledge and
| engineering talent is there. Google can do this if they return
| to their core mission statement: "To organize the world's
| information and make it universally accessible and useful."
| This is in contrast to their current objective, which from the
| outside seems to be "To maximize next quarter's ad revenue."
|
| I would love to see a return of the old Google. No amount of
| engineering skill will make up for clueless management.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I've spent this week re-writing a significant document, section
| by section, with Gemini Advanced. It had opinions (some were
| offered straight, and some with caveats given other statements
| in my document), and readily highlighted gaps in the passages.
|
| I was impressed. I'm still doing a good portion of the human-
| does-writing bits, but things I'd wanted to include, but have
| forgotten along the way -- or which are buried in notes I
| didn't give to Gemini, were brought to my attention again.
| pphysch wrote:
| What sort of prompts do you use for this process? "Please
| rewrite this: <ctrl-v>"?
| belter wrote:
| How good is Gemini? Because my experience of Gemini Advanced,
| is that would be sci-fi by the standards of 2020. Compared to
| LLM technology available in 2024 is pretty bad.
|
| Even before posting this comment, and just to make sure I have
| not been hallucinating lately, just shot a simple programming
| prompt into Claude, ChatGPT4 and Gemini Advanced. While the
| first two provided a template that worked even on first
| attempt, after 5 prompts Gemini Advanced can't even get the
| expected indent of a Python function block correct...
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| What is it particularly good at? video at 1M tokens sounded
| neat, I've been very impressed with Cladue's 200k + pretty good
| reasoning + not lazy output at the moment.
| danjl wrote:
| Terrible writing. Creates drama where it doesn't exist. The
| author makes statements about "problems at Google" and provides
| anecdotal evidence. Desperately tries to create a "knight on a
| white horse" storyline for no reason. Assumes Google makes its
| money off of products, when actually it makes money off of ads.
| So much bad.
| riku_iki wrote:
| No products -> no ads?
| danjl wrote:
| No, search -> ads. It isn't like their ads come from Google
| Meet or GMail. Their ads come from search. Their search is
| still best with no challengers of note.
| riku_iki wrote:
| GMail plays crucial role of making sure all search users
| are logged into google account and their searches can be
| tracked for ads targeting.
|
| But also, they have some other inventories: youtube, maps.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Google makes money directly from several products.
|
| "Ads" is also an oversimplified way to describe it. Ads
| aren't a single revenue stream, they're a category of
| revenue stream with many different ways to tap in, grow,
| and evolve.
| loudmax wrote:
| LLMs are absolutely a challenger to Google's search. Google
| search is the still best option much of the time, but
| they're far from dominant like they were a year or two ago.
| There are many situations now where ChatGPT or Claude or
| Perplexity gives more useful results than Google search.
| And the LLMs are improving _rapidly_. Far more rapidly than
| Google search.
|
| Google has tremendous engineering talent and Gemini is
| extremely powerful. But adapting their business to LLMs
| requires a level of talent and vision from the management
| side that we have not seen from Google's executive suite in
| a long time. I won't count out Google as a company, due to
| the potential that could be put to use by competent
| leadership. But I've given up on their current management.
| I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
| AlpHaAriEtiS wrote:
| It's undeniable--LLMs (Large Language Models) are now a
| formidable challenger to Google's search dominion. While
| Google Search still holds its ground as the go-to in many
| scenarios, its dominance isn't as unshakable as it was a
| couple of years ago. There are now numerous instances
| where ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity provide more
| relevant results than Google Search. Moreover, these LLMs
| are evolving at an astonishing pace--far outstripping
| Google Search in terms of development speed.
|
| Google possesses incredible engineering prowess, and the
| Gemini project has proven to be extremely potent.
| However, adapting their business model to accommodate
| LLMs demands a level of vision and capability from their
| management that we've not witnessed from Google's
| executive ranks in quite some time. I'm not ready to
| write Google off entirely because of their potential, but
| I've grown skeptical of their current leadership. I
| remain open to being pleasantly surprised, though.
|
| PS: My personal experience with the Gemini project has
| been stellar. It's enabled me to produce high-quality
| code, underscoring that Google still has much to offer--
| provided its leadership can effectively leverage its
| resources.
| Hasu wrote:
| Gmail absolutely has ads. Maps has ads. YouTube has ads.
| Meet doesn't have ads but does have a paid version.
|
| > Their search is still best with no challengers of note.
|
| Kagi has better search. It's a paid subscription, and by
| market share it's fair to say they aren't a "challenger of
| note", but the quality is there. (I pay for Kagi but am
| otherwise not affiliated.)
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > Their search is still best with no challengers of note.
|
| Like I've said in other comments, google is not my go-to
| for search anymore. Perplexity is superior.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Google has diversified a bit, even if most revenue still comes
| from ads. About half their revenue comes from search, and the
| rest mostly from YouTube (10%), cloud (10%) and Android (25%,
| incl. a major chunk from the Google Play store).
|
| Their search revenue is potentially at risk from people using
| LLMs instead, but no reason they can't integrate ads into
| Gemini, even if they haven't figured it out yet. Lots of
| opportunity for AI: selling API access, Gemini subscriptions,
| product licencing (Apple apparently interested, Android
| potential too), etc.
|
| Definitely a mismanaged company though.
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| Given his experience with AlphaGo/Star/Zero/etc, I'm sure if
| there's any way to apply tree search, or policy networks, to
| LLMs, Demis will find it.
|
| I've always found it strange that a LLM is basically an
| action/value model that scores all next possible actions
| (tokens), and yet we DON'T traverse it like a tree. Well, "beam
| search" exists, but that's kind of the most naive approach.
|
| Then again, I'm not smart, and lots of very smart people are
| thinking nonstop about LLMs, and no type of tree search has
| become widely used, so maybe there's really nothing there.
| dbmikus wrote:
| I think part of the problem for LLMs is that they don't operate
| in an easily scoreable "game". We can make them work well for
| optimizing next token(s) log likelihood, but how do we judge
| quality of the output for the task it was made for?
|
| Then after that, there are other challenges, such as do LLMs
| have a world model that lets them think how to attain a reward?
|
| Wherever you can have an automated feedback mechanism, you can
| start to address the first problem and allow for the AI to
| explore more of the "tree". These are situations like coding
| (you can run the code and evaluate the output), or situations
| where you can let the LLM crowd-source user feedback.
|
| For models that have some actual world model, who can reason
| across modalities, and who can plan, LeCunn talks about this
| often. The videos/slides here[1] were good content.
|
| [1]: https://www.ece.uw.edu/news-events/lytle-lecture-series/
| visarga wrote:
| Yes, whatever is not written in any books, AI will have to
| learn directly from the feedback generated by the environment
| to its actions.
|
| AlphaZero discovered go from scratch, and beat us who
| invented the game and had thousands of years to practice it.
| This is how powerful a teacher can be the environment.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > I think part of the problem for LLMs is that they don't
| operate in an easily scoreable "game".
|
| Unfortunately "social media" is the gamified environment for
| language.
| Jensson wrote:
| But it has human voters, you can't train a model using
| human voters to vote during iterations, and AI aren't good
| enough to replace human voters.
|
| Not sure if AI voters even can result in a model smarter
| than the voting model.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > you can't train a model using human voters to vote
| during iterations
|
| Why not? Just comment multiple times on a post in
| different ways. Score outputs with more of a desired
| response higher than outputs with less desired responses.
| Scale that up site-wide on multiple sites, and it seems
| like you have a pretty powerful way to get human
| feedback...
| Jensson wrote:
| These models trains on billions of examples, having bots
| posting billions of posts on different social media sites
| every time you train a new model probably isn't a viable
| strategy. You would get banned real quick since most of
| those will be really low quality in the early stages.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| So I agree with your overall sentiment, BUT we already
| have good LLMs, so I think we've crossed the bridge from
| "bad low quality responses in the beginning" and I also
| suspect there's more Social Media bots than we'd like to
| admit.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I think we're simply talking about different things.
| Obviously you wouldn't want to start with a model of pure
| noise when interacting with real humans like that. I am
| describing using RLHF to fine tune existing models. That
| is a way to gamify training.
| user_7832 wrote:
| I personally feel like these problems can be broken into two
| types - one where the output is expected/deterministic, and
| one where creativity is a virtue. Asking Siri what the
| current temperature is (only 1 correct answer) is an example
| of the former, but asking chatGPT to write an email is closer
| to the latter. Tree type algorithms are better when you don't
| have (millions of english words)^10 for a 10 word response,
| and where there are multiple "correct" answers.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| I mean you can make any set of LLMs produce any set of output
| you want. The problem is that it isn't terribly efficient and
| you have to filter between the real stuff and the
| hallucinations.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| Tree decoding exists and is being worked on by multiple groups.
| At the end of the day tree based methods are still just
| injecting some kind of interpretable prior.
| snats wrote:
| It's been pretty interesting to see some research trying to
| solve this. For example, Stanford researchers recently
| published QuietSTaR[1]. This makes LLMs "think" before they
| speak. By generating a chain of thoughts and just choosing the
| best possible path from the generated thoughts.
|
| This method is better than Chain of Thought and I think is a
| step in the right direction.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09629
| pama wrote:
| I've wondered about the same point for a long time. In smaller
| language models of chemistry the tree search in decoding has
| made a huge difference [1]. If the training data set doesn't
| include the right conditioning it may be hard for the LLM to
| learn to associate high probability answers with more useful
| answers, however, this seems like a solvable problem for many
| subdomains.
|
| [1] search for branch-and-bound in:
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.0c00321
| hiddencost wrote:
| Beam search can be optimized incredibly aggressively on
| hardware.
|
| Check out finite state transducers.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've found it
| complements it pretty well. Questions I never would have searched
| on Google because of length or complexity are well suited to
| ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always gone to Google for
| I continue to use Google for. Also when ChatGPT spits out a few
| paragraphs of answer for a complex question I'm not even sure may
| have an answer, I have some concrete directions to pursue which
| translate much better to Google search than general/fuzzy complex
| questions.
|
| At this point saving Google doesn't require replacing the golden
| goose of Search but rather wrapping it with Gemini/whatever that
| can decide whether to give an answer it's thought up or returning
| tailored search results.
|
| It's much more a UX question than a deep technical one. Google
| has all the pieces it needs, it just needs to package them into a
| seamless experience. You don't need a mind like Demis' for
| this...
| brigadier132 wrote:
| I've found perplexity to be a replacement for google for 90% of
| my queries and i only use google now as a website index. If I
| have any sort of question, instead of jumping through the hoops
| of thinking how to structure the query in a way that fits
| google i just ask it naturally to perplexity and the answers it
| gives are correct often enough for me to use it over google.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| And perplexity.ai and phind annotate their results with
| footnotes, linking to the source of the information.
| neverokay wrote:
| It's for Apple/Amazon/Google to fuck up if they can't integrate
| AI into web old point o apps.
|
| When I pick up my phone, my Amazon groceries should already be
| bought. We are not even there yet.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _When I pick up my phone, my Amazon groceries should
| already be bought._
|
| Why even pick up the phone? Or have one! We should stay in
| bed 24/7, fed through a tube controlled by AI, and watching
| multiple video streams in VR! Let AI think, write music and
| poetry, let our internet connected fridges and programmable
| lightbulbs experience things, let our corporate overlords
| govern!
| neverokay wrote:
| Yes.
| realslimjd wrote:
| Maybe our consumption habits are different, but why would you
| want an AI buying your groceries?
| neverokay wrote:
| Because I forget.
| MaanuAir wrote:
| You're so human after all.
| visarga wrote:
| > Google has all the pieces it needs, it just needs to package
| them into a seamless experience.
|
| Google prefers it would be 2019, when LLMs were a "remote"
| threat. They don't make more ad money when people find things,
| they prefer to keep us searching and seeing ads. They will be
| dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
|
| I think AI also presents a huge threat to Meta and other social
| networks. We can get interactive experiences with AI now. We
| don't need social networks like before. I personally read as
| much LLM text as human text in a day because it is so clean and
| useful.
|
| Ads are also under threat. I think web browsers and phones will
| equip with a layer of "user-agent-ai" where the AI extracts the
| useful parts from the web and redisplays it for the user under
| their own controls. You can bet ads are not going to be shown,
| thrown away together with low quality content. Only AIs will
| read ads.
|
| Search, social and ads are going to be digested by AI and
| redisplayed for us. We gain control and protection. AI will
| form a layer of protection when going online, as the web will
| be crawling with AI bots trying to gain something from us.
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| There's an easy fix for AI transforming the output of the
| Internet giants into useful content for us: just block those
| AI apps/services. They are determined to be the interface
| between humans and machines because that is where you make
| your money.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've
| found it complements it pretty well. Questions I never would
| have searched on Google because of length or complexity are
| well suited to ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always
| gone to Google for I continue to use Google for.
|
| Agree, though there are things that I used to google (normally
| across multiple searches) that I now use ChatGPT for. For
| example, instead of looking up how to use 4 arguments of a cli
| tool and putting it together myself I just say "Write me a sed
| command that replaces X with Y" to ChatGPT.
|
| I've said this here a number of times but I've found a _crazy_
| amount of value in having ChatGPT build bash one-liners or
| small scripts to process/parse data and give me actionable
| information. I know what's possible on the command line with
| cut/sed/awk/grep/sort/uniq/wc/etc but, with a few exceptions,
| I'm not proficient in writing it quickly. I can get there and
| in the past there were times I put in the effort to pipe
| together 4-10 commands to extract something important BUT I
| really needed to have a compelling reason or I needed to be
| sure it would bear fruit for me to spend that time. Nowadays I
| simply paste the raw logs/output/etc to ChatGPT and say "I need
| to extract ABC and XYZ from that string, get a count XYZ per
| ABC group, sort them and get a count" or similar.
|
| I can take logs and grab what I need out of the lines and
| quickly say "here is a breakdown by minute of how many times X
| happened in the logs". This may seem small to some of you or
| trivial but it's not for me and in the past I wouldn't have
| spent the time since I wouldn't be sure of the ROI (especially
| in the middle of a production issue) but now I can take 1-2min,
| get results, then decide if I should chase it further. Using
| this I've been able to go from "The data is in our logs" to
| "Here is an HTML/CSS/JS file visualizing the data in realtime
| (on refresh)". ChatGPT does a great job at writing the
| HTML/CSS/JS to graph data and in PHP I can have the PHP script
| run the one-liner that ChatGPT then "embed" that info for JS to
| read and graph.
|
| Yes, I'm aware of prometheus and friends and I use them but in
| the middle of an issue I'm not going to start writing a new
| prom file, write a grafana widget, and wait for new data to
| start rolling in especially if we have been logging it but just
| not sending it prometheus. Long-term I reach for prometheus but
| short-term I just need the data now and visualizing data in
| graph form can make thing obvious that no combing through logs
| is going to expose.
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| demis for ceo
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
| rvz wrote:
| DeepMind was Google's life-line. This man (Hassabis) should be
| CEO of Google.
|
| We have given Sundar enough time and without DeepMind, Google
| would not have Gemini and he did not put DeepMind to use for a
| long time until now.
|
| Google AI that made 'Bard' is NOT DeepMind. You should be looking
| at Google DeepMind, which made breakthroughs like AlphaGo,
| AlphaCode, WaveNet, GraphCast, etc.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I'm not sure Hassabis's time would be well spent thinking
| about, I dunno, how to allocate headcount to the Google Cloud
| Enterprise Sales team. Or glad-handing with world leaders to
| convince them that ad tech can self-regulate.
| objektif wrote:
| This exactly. Job of a CEO includes doing lots of donkey
| work.
| rvz wrote:
| > I'm not sure Hassabis's time would be well spent thinking
| about, I dunno, how to allocate headcount to the Google Cloud
| Enterprise Sales team.
|
| Exactly. There is a CEO of Google Cloud (Thomas Kurian) that
| should be doing that. That's called "delegation".
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Ok, so then evaluating whether Thomas Kurian is doing a
| good job, discussing and pressure testing the rationale
| behind his proposed targets and strategies, figuring out
| how they fit in with the broader company strategy and
| communicating this vision effectively, having a contingency
| plan if Thomas Kurian leaves or a better candidate for
| Cloud CEO appears on the radar. These are just off the top
| of my head.
|
| You seem to believe "Delegation" is a passive act; the
| reality is Hassabis would end up spending, generously,
| about 1/10 of the time he is now thinking about things like
| how to monetize LLM's.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| No CEO is going to be strong in all areas, and it seems
| different but incredibly successful CEOs can come from a
| variety of backgrounds and management styles.
|
| >"Ok, so then evaluating whether Thomas Kurian is doing a
| good job, discussing and pressure testing the rationale
| behind his proposed targets and strategies, figuring out
| how they fit in with the broader company strategy and
| communicating this vision effectively, having a
| contingency plan if Thomas Kurian leaves or a better
| candidate for Cloud CEO appears on the radar."
|
| You could say the same thing about CEOs who are good at
| that sort of thing as well: Does Sunadr or Satya
| understand the technical decisions of going all in on
| Spanner opposed to NoSql type systems or backing the Go
| language over Carbon, these are all things that will have
| huge second order effects 10+ years down the road.
| esafak wrote:
| I don't think Hassabis is ideal for the job, but this kind of
| thinking is what caused Google to stumble. Google needs a
| leader who understands technology and product. Google is not
| Procter and Gamble; the kind of company a suit can run.
| zippothrowaway wrote:
| Demis "Infinite Polygon Engine" Hassabis? Please.
|
| Once a charlatan, always a charlatan.
| rhaps0dy wrote:
| What's an "Infinite Polygon Engine"?
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Surprisingly hard to find information about this via Google.
| Seems related to Demis' game company Elixir and their game
| Republic: The Revolution [0] for which he made some claim
| that it supported an infinite level of detail/polygons.
|
| Just a cursory glance at the information though. Happy to be
| corrected or have more detail added.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic:_The_Revolution
| belter wrote:
| The Internet never forgets...Pag 44:
| https://retrocdn.net/images/c/c7/Edge_UK_078.pdf
| zippothrowaway wrote:
| It's an in-joke in the British gaming industry.
|
| Hassabis started out working for Pete 'Project Milo' Molyneux
| and learned how to hype himself very obviously from him (see
| the Edge article linked above). It's working out well for him
| but you can see the same breathless self-promotion from him
| now that we saw 20 years ago.
|
| Fair play, it's made him rich, but we're screwed if we think
| people like him are the solution to anything.
| montag wrote:
| I don't understand how this warrants the label of "charlatan."
| methuselah_in wrote:
| Google definitely needs saving. As Android will die and it's the
| only thing Google did right
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > "I haven't heard that myself," Hassabis says after I bring up
| the CEO talk. He instantly points to how busy he is with
| research, how much invention is just ahead, and how much he wants
| to be part of it. Perhaps, given the stakes, that's right where
| Google needs him. "I can do management," he says, "but it's not
| my passion. Put it that way. I always try to optimize for the
| research and the science."
|
| Sundar makes ~200M as the CEO of Google whereas DeepMind sold for
| ~400-650M. There's plenty of monetary incentive to take the job,
| not to mention more power to set the company direction through
| resource allocation. And it's clear that there's been a PR
| campaign being set up to push out Sundar. Maybe Hassabis is a
| contender because he's been getting some pretty serious press
| since the beginning of the year (which is when the Sundar article
| grumblings started).
| londons_explore wrote:
| > there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar.
|
| There has been mumblings of that for the whole time he has been
| CEO...
| underdeserver wrote:
| Google has been failing continuously in user experience under
| his leadership:
|
| 1. Search has become an ad-riddled, clickbait SEO infested
| mess
|
| 2. All those naming kerfuffles (how's Allo and GSuite doing?)
|
| 3. Cloud still significantly behind AWS and Azure
|
| 4. AI stuff behind at least OpenAI and Anthropic. Applied ML
| stuff well behind specialized startups.
|
| 5. Pixel still not selling very well. Android still feeling
| like it's trying to catch up to Apple, still fragmented.
|
| 6. Layoffs everyone believed wouldn't happen until the very
| last second they were announced.
|
| 7. Customer support story, including toward large cloud
| customers, still abysmal.
|
| Etc etc.
|
| Yes, ad revenue increased and with it the share price, but ad
| revenue comes from having had a good product 5 years ago. To
| sustain it you need good products and good engineers to build
| them.
|
| Google is trending downward. It needs a fresh CEO.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Who would waste money on a PR campaign? Googles fumblings of
| the last ~5 years speak for themselves.
| tdullien wrote:
| You don't need a PR campaign to oust Sundar. I think 7 out of
| 10 Googlers would agree that Sundar is uninspiring and has
| allowed the erosion of most of what was good about Google's
| culture.
|
| I left partially because I hated the feeling that "this year
| will be average - meaning worse than last year but better than
| next year". Slow downward drift, culture erosion, lack of
| leadership, lack of clarity, etc.
|
| Management isn't leadership, and Sundar is more of a manager
| than a leader.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Very well put
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| My impression from the outside is indeed that the man is a
| problem. And part of the problem is that the problem is
| allowed to continue to exist by the Alphabet board. Which
| means the real problem is over there. They are just looking
| at the stock price, which is of course fine. Until it isn't.
| I think the whole point of Sundar always was that he's very
| obviously not a leader. He's a care taker.
|
| I used to work in a big multi national (Nokia) with a care
| taker CEO (Olli Pekka Kallasvuo) who took over from the man
| that grew Nokia from a large but insignificant Finnish
| company to the smart phone behemoth it was around 2005 (Jorma
| Ollila). Kallasvuo presided over the emergence of the Apple's
| iphone and Google's Android as the two new competitors that
| ultimately killed it off. And did nothing whatsoever about
| it. The man was a bean counter whose job it was to protect
| the stock price.
|
| By the time the Nokia board (under leadership of the former
| CEO, Ollila) appointed a new CEO (Stephen Elop, an MS
| executive) with the clear intention to orchestrate some
| collaboration with and the eventual takeover by MS, it was
| already too late. Nokia flailed for a few years and MS
| eventually pulled the plug a year after acquiring what
| remained of the phone business unit for next to nothing. By
| then the stock price had tanked, market share was in the
| gutter, and the value was gone. Everything the board thought
| they knew about smart phones was no longer relevant. Ollila
| got removed from the board in the aftermath.
|
| People blame CEOs, but it's the boards of these companies
| that appoint these CEOs, protect them, and decline to fire
| them when they fail. That's where the problems are. Nothing
| changes until you fix the boards. It's always fixable with
| the right people and leadership. Just look at MS post
| Ballmer. In Alphabet's case, the two founders are on the
| board and they are the ones that put Sundar in their place.
| Maybe it's time for them to move on? Of course the issue is
| that they have a lot of shares (class B) in Alphabet.
| Institutional investors have about 35% of the class A shares
| and the rest is publicly traded. So, nothing happens until
| the stock nosedives. By which time it might be too late.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yeah if I wasn't planning on a big career shift anyway in the
| next 2-3 years, I'd be out the door at Google. Pay is great,
| I'm able to be fully remote, and it isn't too stressful to do
| my day job - but the company feels nothing like it did 10
| years ago.
|
| You know how there are top down and bottom up companies? My
| experience at Google now is that it is neither. VPs expect
| bottom up work and then smash it down whenever they don't
| like it - but they also cannot articulate what they actually
| want. I'm constantly being asked to go through prioritization
| processes that take a ton of time and end with "eh, every
| project stays at the funding level it is already at."
| strangattractor wrote:
| My own perception of OpenAI vs Google seems at odds with many
| things I read. I don't really see Google as being behind at
| all.
|
| 1. Google pretty much invented the technology
| (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762)
|
| 2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute and
| access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI on
| both counts.
|
| 3. New models are released on a weekly basis by all sorts of
| companies. So OpenAI has no monopoly on LLM models. In fact
| their competition is staggering (NVIDIA, Meta, Google,
| DataBricks, Amazon (numerous other startups)) It will not be
| long before there are even more.
|
| It seems to me that Altman saw this all as a timing thing.
| Reveal your cards now and force others to do the same in the
| hopes of obtaining a strategic position over competitors.
| Googles cashflow seems to be doing just fine and I haven't had
| to fight off any urges to use Bing.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > 1. Google pretty much invented the technology
| (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762)
|
| > 2. In order to create the models one needs lots of compute
| and access to a lot of text. Google scores higher than OpenAI
| on both counts.
|
| If a smaller company with less compute and data
| commercializes something before Google which has more compute
| and data, doesn't that mean they are behind? You don't
| measure a car race by fuel available in the pit and faster
| top speed. You measure by who gets to the finish first. It
| just goes to show that Google has a horrible driver.
| rvz wrote:
| Well said.
|
| While everyone is hyper-focused on LLMs, Google is able to do
| more than that and imagine what Google DeepMind has not
| announced yet.
|
| > It seems to me that Altman saw this all as a timing thing.
| Reveal your cards now and force others to do the same in the
| hopes of obtaining a strategic position over competitors.
| Googles cashflow seems to be doing just fine and I haven't
| had to fight off any urges to use Bing.
|
| LLMs are something that is already played out to the first
| movers. Google has already caught up and the moat and
| monopoly has been evaporated.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| You're missing the final point - the use case beyond Chat.
| Google has search, GMail, Android, Docs, Developer Tools, etc
|
| Google can put an LLM into everything and sell it. Not just a
| chatbot. OpenAI can sell theirs to consumers as a chat bot or
| an API. Google can out monetize them handily.
|
| The best thing Google can do (which it's starting to do) is
| open up access to LLMs. And help everyone else do the same.
| Give it away and flood the internet with more LLaMAs, more
| Groks, more CLIPs, more Hermes, more Mistal, more SIGLIPS,
| etc. If they just drown out the competition, and turn good
| enough" models into a true commodity, they'll dethrone OpenAI
| easily.
|
| Also no one mentions YouTube. Surely that data is a massive
| untapped opportunity. We saw the multi-modal abilities of
| Gemini today. A few years from now, and some better GPUs, and
| it might be able to handle video in real-time.
| blueboo wrote:
| Beware popularity in the Landsraad
| laurex wrote:
| At some point is more money really important? My impression
| from meeting Demis like a decade ago is that he is an actual
| good person. Being a CEO of a top corporation does not seem
| like a good life move for someone who cares about others. There
| are myriad examples of how much engineers who become managers-
| only find it insufferable. If you're excited about thinking
| about the technical problems of AGI, is simply more money (or
| even more power) going to matter?
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| It is very hard for me to imagine an engineer who has FU
| money picking a CEO position that pays hundreds of millions
| of dollars a year over an innovative, R&D type position that
| likely pays tens of millions of dollars a year.
| mrkramer wrote:
| But what is the end goal of OpenAI? Be a non-profit AI R&D
| leader, convert to for-profit and then sell(license) its AI tech
| to other companies or get acquired and then eventually devoured
| by Microsoft?
|
| In this shape and form OpenAI is not a threat to Google; since
| Google is extremely versatile, taking in consideration how fast
| they adapted to iPhone threat with their alternative smartphone
| OS(Android) and taking in consideration lack of clear long-term
| vision of OpenAI's leadership.
| blueboo wrote:
| OpenAI's "end goal" has OpenAI becoming a >$1T (100x their >$1B
| investment) company en route to its non-profit incarnation.
| Hardly benign
| pphysch wrote:
| This is exactly right. AI is a multiplier for the services and
| data moats that Google already has; the absolute value of
| generative AI has been greatly overstated. The gold rush
| (OpenAI) will end and the shovel-sellers (NVIDIA) will hurt
| too.
| sys32768 wrote:
| I just miss Picasa.
| az226 wrote:
| You talking about Sir Demis Hassabis?
| nabla9 wrote:
| Sometimes the most hyped research is not the most important.
|
| Demis Hassabis was doing good research applying ML to important
| scientific problems. Then Google became jealous about ChatGPT and
| they pulled Hassabis to work with that.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I would love to hear from some folks who have worked with him.
| The quote is interesting, that his prof would say he's "not a
| magician at any one thing".
|
| Does that mean he's not all that technical or struggles with
| math? Not sure how to read that.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-29 23:01 UTC)