[HN Gopher] Interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on Goo...
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Interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on Google's
Enterprise AI Strategy
Author : kjhughes
Score : 32 points
Date : 2024-04-11 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| gentleman11 wrote:
| 1. Train an ai on everyone's data
|
| 2. Try to replace everyone, and their companies too, but do it
| quietly
|
| 3. Try to sell ai tools to make those companies dependent on you,
| until your super ai can replace them completely
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Let's see the products. I'm so tired of hearing Google talk a big
| game about AI without delivering.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| a) I think they have in a lot of ways, that are maybe not super
| flashy. Vertex AI offers more API/functionality/product than
| anyone else, by a mile. I think in a year or two this might be
| more important than the quality of model (not that the model
| won't have to be good, but all of them will be good enough to
| solve most peoples business problems)
|
| b) Gemini 1.5 Pro public preview with 1 mio tokens is out now
| (including API access). Has anyone benchmarked it?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > not that the model won't have to be good, but all of them
| will be good enough to solve most peoples business problems
|
| In a year or two? Mate I think you need to step back from the
| AI hype for a moment. We're not even close.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| When I write that tooling will be more important in the
| future, I am not making any crazy claims about the future
| of AI. My claim is: It does not require much more AI than
| we currently have to solve most business problems. But it
| will take better tooling.
|
| I don't think AGI is even remotely required to solve most
| peoples business problems. Better tooling is.
|
| Maybe we also have different ideas about how mundane most
| peoples business problems are.
| dudus wrote:
| Having tried all 3 (Gemini, chatgpt and Claude) I'll agree
| with GP that 1-2 years seems conservative if anything.
|
| I don't think AI will be won on the model but the tooling.
| Google is arguably ahead.
|
| The models I'd say it's a toss. But it doesn't matter as
| before the year is up all of them will release new versions
| one-uping each other. It's a race to the bottom. They
| either collude on price or most will go bankrupt.
|
| Edit:typo
| refulgentis wrote:
| #1) That's absolutely, harrowingly, shockingly, untrue.
| They're just rolling out system messages! I actively
| integrate with Mistral, OpenAI, Gemini AI API, Vertex AI API,
| and Anthropic's API and Google's are the weakest.
|
| #2) It's Gemini 1.0 with a 1M context. It's not very good, it
| works like OpenAI long context for me (pulls out salient
| text, but it doesn't seem to be 'reasoning' over all of it)
| gentleman11 wrote:
| It's almost like they hire exclusively for your ability to
| leetcode rather than trying to hire people who can produce
| software
|
| Maybe the ai teams were too busy keeping up to date with their
| tree reversals to read those textbooks on their nights off
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Gemini is just as good if not better than GPT-4?
| belter wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... :-))
| icpmacdo wrote:
| Spending time trying out Google's new AI products you can see the
| astonishing amounts of enormous bloat around every single service
| it offers
|
| Sergey shouldn't be pair programming right now he should be doing
| the hard work with Sundar of bringing some semblance of coherence
| to their offerings but it seems like the organizational dynamics
| are too challenging for them at this scale.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| > you can see the astonishing amounts of enormous bloat
|
| In its category, hyperscaler public cloud, GC appears
| consistently leaner compared to AWS Azure
|
| I understand your frustration, but you need to realize that if
| you are paying nothing and you are complaining, then you are
| simply criticizing someone who are not serving you. Like
| criticizing Biden being a bad president from a Chinese citizen.
|
| This type of criticism carries negligible amount of potency and
| relevancy.
| VHRanger wrote:
| I don't see any discussion of their deprecation strategy. What's
| killing GCP is not that they don't have the latest toys, it's
| that *NO ONE TRUSTS THEM ANYMORE* [1].
|
| Why would you build anything on GCP when there's no guarantee the
| GCP thing you're using won't be the next Stadia in 18 months?
| Otherwise, you'll just use them like you'd use DigitalOcean, in
| which case they'd be commodified.
|
| For the CEO not to be laser focused on this issue shows they're
| entirely missing the point.
|
| 1. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-
| deprec...
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I actually heard somebody say gcp was going to be shuttered,
| didn't verify, and just assumed it wasn't going to be around
| for long. Now I assume what I read was nonsense, but it's worth
| noting how non-suspicious of it I was when I read it
| refulgentis wrote:
| The @killedbygoogle account is funny and also a complete
| menace sometimes. I wish they'd drop the sarcastic tweets,
| they've won thoroughly, no need to be an infohazard
| baidifnaoxi wrote:
| Not to mention they were out in their Paris availability zone
| for a month last year.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| Google Cloud DOES have a deprecation "strategy". They publish
| it in Google Cloud Terms of Service.[1] In short, any service
| that is listed as "Generally Available" (i.e., not alpha/beta)
| is guaranteed to have at least 12 months of notice prior to
| deprecation. And services that are in alpha/beta are clearly
| marked as such in the documentation and UI, and require
| explicit steps to use via the command-line or API.
|
| Additionally, if you literally Google "Google Cloud Deprecation
| strategy", a statement on Google Cloud's deprecation policy and
| links to the Terms of Service and Google Cloud's service
| lifecycle is the very first result.[2]
|
| I've been a user of Google Cloud for a long time, and the
| company I'm with has a yearly GCP bill in the millions. While
| Google Cloud does have its frustrations (e.g., their various
| price hikes, and the architecture of their network
| infrastructure that makes them more vulnerable to cross-region
| outages), Google Cloud being "deprecated" is not a thing that I
| worry about.
|
| Can this tired meme please die already?
|
| [1]
| https://cloud.google.com/terms#:~:text=(d)%C2%A0Discontinuat...
|
| [2]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+Cloud+Deprecation+str...
| VHRanger wrote:
| I didn't say they don't have a deprecation strategy. My
| problem is that they do have one, and they're very happy to
| use it.
|
| 12 months of notice is laughable for enterprise customers.
| From planning to getting something rolled out at scale, an
| enterprise will have eaten 2 quarters of time.
|
| More than full deprecation, we often have API deprecation
| from google services, increasing our maintenance burden.
|
| Say what you will about AWS or Microsoft products, if you
| build something on those platforms you know it'll be
| supported for a long time.
|
| Google fundamentally values their own code above the code of
| people using their platform. But good platforms do the
| opposite - they keep the technical debt on their side of the
| fence to make sure you don't have to think about anything if
| your code runs on their stack.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| > Say what you will about AWS or Microsoft products, if you
| build something on those platforms you know it'll be
| supported for a long time.
|
| AWS _literally_ has the same terms.[1]
|
| Azure claims that "certain" Azure services have up to three
| years of notice; otherwise, it similarly offers a one-year
| notice period like GCP and AWS.[2]
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/#:~:text=Notice%20of%2
| 0Chan...
|
| [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/lifecycle/policies/modern#...
| VHRanger wrote:
| Again, you're not getting the point. It's about
| behaviour. How often have you seen AWS deprecate stuff?
|
| The BOTO API for S3 is an ugly mess, but you can still
| run BOTO2 code from a long time ago. With Google I
| guarantee you they'd have killed off the old API in a
| similar situation.
|
| Similarly, how often did you see Windows deprecate core
| Win32 API calls? There's no SLA that says Windows 11
| should run XP era programs. It just does, because they
| don't want to piss off people who depend on them.
|
| As a user, I'm happy with deprecation happy products (hi
| Apple!). As an enterprise customer? Nope. We're paying
| you to ease our problems, not the other way around.
|
| As long as GCP doesn't take this concern seriously,
| they'll be relegated to being a commodity provider, along
| with digitalocean and friends. We'll use them when
| they're the cheapest, and only for stuff we can migrate
| in 24h.
|
| Guess what? If I'm looking for the cheapest cloud for VMs
| and storage, there's much better than GCP out there.
|
| And as long as their freaking CEO doesn't get this they
| won't come out of the hole they dug themselves.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| I'm still using GCP services that were deprecated years
| ago (e.g., legacy VPC, classic non-HA VPNs,
| decommissioned images, etc.). In some cases I can't
| create new instances of these services, but those that
| already existed continue to work.
|
| Similarly, we have infrastructure created with _very_ old
| versions of Terraform whose GCP providers continue to
| work despite being years old. Indeed, I can 't recall a
| time when Google Cloud changed a public non-beta API in a
| compatibility-breaking way.
|
| I'm sure we can continue to go back-and-forth with our
| own personal anecdotes, but they are just that. If a more
| generous deprecation policy was actually something these
| cloud providers were willing to stand behind, they'd add
| that to their terms of service. Azure has some extended
| lifecycle services (to their credit), but otherwise,
| GCP's lifecycle policies are in line with the rest of the
| industry.
| nextworddev wrote:
| This might be an unpopular take but Google is fast regaining LLM
| platform dominance that OpenAI / MSFT took away for a year.
|
| GPT-5 release needs to blow people's mind for MSFT to rejuvenate
| the Azure AI conversations because momentum is shifting again to
| GCP.
|
| P.S. Many customers aren't very happy with AWS Bedrock but they
| should be ok as long as Anthropic & Mistral doesn't get
| annihilated by Gemini / GPT-5 in the next year.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Only recent news is keynote demoware yesterday and a model
| release that is 5 _requests per minute_ and was released 2 days
| ago. Gemini Ultra still doesn't exist, and needs 32-shot CoT to
| beat GPT-4 from March 2023 5-shot.
|
| Impossible for it to be fast regaining LLM platform dominance,
| for those reasons, and Google had no LLM platform before
| OpenAI/MSFT.
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(page generated 2024-04-11 23:01 UTC)