All large tech co's seem to be kind of the same more or less, having worked at most faang co's in my career. They become so big, especially after peaking on their core revenue-driving business (ads for FB, GOOG, and retail/cloud for AMZN/AWS, hardware devices for APPL) that you essentially regress towards some type of "mean" which seems to be a byproduct of scaling. Because exceptional people are several SDs above the mean, with every incremental hire you regress to the mean (unless you are really, really, really good at hiring).
Ultimately I think it is the illusion of a moat (we are too big to fail, we are the default search engine/browser/os etc.) Coupled with over hiring. Along with a fear of taking risk and willingness to disrupt yourself. Ultimately, they became too fearful and focused on building a wall around the kingdom than expanding the kingdom.
Also is it just me, or has the execution from GOOG just been really disappointing? Look at this talk [0] These are not innovators, these are business leaders. Google (and many big tech like AMZN/AWS) have become more packed with these "business leaders" types and not the core, quirky, unusual and strange innovator types. I think it is very much a regression to the "above average" which has killed the ability to launch / productize new technologies (vs. new businesses..)
> Under Steve Jobs, Apple had a track record of cannibalizing its own products. In 2005, when the demand for the iPod Mini remained huge, the Nano was launched, effectively destroying the revenue stream of an existing product. And while iPod sales were still going through the roof, Jobs launched the iPhone which combined iPod, cell phone, and Internet access into a single device. Three years after the iPhone’s launch, iPad made its debut and raised the prospect of cutting into Mac desktop computer sales. So resolute was Apple’s determination in trading a highly profitable business for an unknown future that Jobs reportedly said “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”
> "The iPhone has to become so great that you don't know why you want an iPad," Schiller explained. "The iPad has to be so great that you don't know why you want a notebook. The notebook has to be so great that you don't know why you want a desktop. Each one's job is to compete with the other ones."
> Apple has shed light on this way of thinking before. During a quarterly earnings call with investors in early 2013, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company's "base philosophy is to never fear cannibalization."
> "If we do, somebody else will just cannibalize it, and so we never fear it," Cook said. "We know that iPhone has cannibalized some iPod business. It doesn’t worry us, but it’s done that. We know that iPad will cannibalize some Macs. That doesn’t worry us."
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Meanwhile, Google is very cannibalization reluctant to the point of throwing away products that may impact its main revenue sources.
I don't think google lost ground to OpenAI in terms of technology, but losing it in terms of reputation. People no longer view Google as a shining model of engineering success anymore. I work in cloud space, GCP is almost an afterthought now. ChatGPT actually put Azure into better light than AWS.
I feel like GCP's losing ground to AWS and Azure has been a trend for at least before AI, though perhaps you're saying the same thing, that Google has long lost the reputational lead.
I can't speak from experience, but what I hear from friends of friends is that Azure is really on the come up, though in my experience AWS has still been the default. GCP seemed to be more tempting when they were the only ones throwing tons of money at you and Firebase had less alternatives.
Considering all the messes with the ChatGPT launch, I'm not sure if Azure is in a better light than AWS. It runs better on the API than the website, so that raises some question on the site itself.
Google's plan was to guard AI and put it lock and key and use it to enable better core products. OpenAI primary focus is enable AI to all. Bard came out to show investors they have something just as good and didn't impress. Google needs new leadership and things can flip back
Google has a history of keeping its innovations under wraps. The Google File System and MapReduce programming models, for instance, remained proprietary until Google engineers shared them in a 2003 publication (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...). It wasn't until a few years later that the Hadoop project, under the Apache Software Foundation, emerged, providing an open-source framework for distributed storage and processing of large datasets.
Google's approach to AI advancements follows a similar pattern. Projects like Imagen and Muse boast impressive capabilities but remain locked away, inaccessible to anyone outside of Google. While the company may be a thought leader in the field, the true value of a product lies in its utility. Possessing unique and groundbreaking technology that remains inaccessible to the broader public is comparable to owning an NFT art piece—intriguing but ultimately of limited practical value.
It was Google's DeepBrain research paper that basically enabled the majority of progress we've seen in AI over the last few years.
Google has their own LLM and probably access to more data to train future models any other company in the world. What OpenAI seems to have got right was fine tuning their LLM and putting it behind a UI which the average user could use. Then more recently they've created more hype by adding APIs and plugins for their models.
Not saying that what OpenAI's done isn't impressive, but Google really isn't that far behind in terms of tech. 90% of OpenAI's lead is usability stuff.
Well,Google needs to hire some tech-savvy leaders and streamline their processes if they want to keep up with the likes of OpenAI. With too many non-technical folks calling the shots, it's no wonder they struggle to execute quickly and innovate.
Google needs to trim some fat from their leadership and streamline their processes if they want to keep up with the agile and innovative pace of OpenAI. It's no wonder they're falling behind if they're more focused on stakeholder alignment sessions than actually developing their AI products. Maybe they should hire some product managers who actually understand technology and engineers who don't overcomplicate things. Otherwise, they'll continue to play catch-up while OpenAI leads the way in the AI industry. Google only wakes up when competition does stuff. See nest for ring, pixel for iPhone or android for iOS.
I ran the exact same prompts through ChatGPT and Bard, and got eerily similar responses. Bard likes bulleted lists better than ChatGPT, but formatting aside the quality of content felt equivalent.
So it seems plausible that Google is behind on productizing and marketing their AI, but I'm not so sure they are behind on the AI itself.
I think Google are way to slow and careful in integrating new technology into their products, even if they are the ones developing the technology.
Take for example Gmail, Docs, and any other of their products. The generative stuff exists for a while. Did they implement it into Gmail? Well, yes, a while ago they introduced Compose. Does it generate any text besides super common phrases like "see you tomorrow"? Not reallly. Their leaders are too careful and scared tbh.
Finally, in most big tech companies it's not easy to make major changes without a huge effort and push from leadership. That's because many teams are involved and people move pretty often, so you have huge part of the codebase that even the people who own it don't know very well. So teams prefer not to touch it unless they have to.
IMO gpt represents a more optimal way to find answers than search. That is disruptive to googles business . Paid search becomes obsolete when your assistant (ai) can more effectively answer your questions. The big disruption IMO happens when an AI is connected to search like what Bing is doing… but google can’t do that without dramatically hurting their search ads business - not sure MS can execute on the user experience to be the ultimate solution to break google but as llama and perhaps other GPTs are available or built googles monopoly on information is definitely at risk. since the business model of monetizing search ads is no longer feasible with a generative chat based window to information that appears to be possible very soon as demonstrated by chatgpt…
Tech moves fast. OpenAI moved faster while Google slowed down. It's like Google stopped for gas, bathroom breaks, and lunch in a road rally while OpenAI ignored the speed limits.
This happens frequently in high tech. This is not the 1st, 10th, or 100th time the old guard got left behind in tech.
I think it is overblown. ChatGPT was released about a few months ago and google have already created their own alternative albeit a worse version. I would say that is pretty good for an enterprise organisation to react that fast.
Maybe some search users? I use ChatGPT as my primary search engine now, via an API CLI. It answers abstract / conceptual / complex queries far better than Google. Google's just a secondary search engine now for me, if I need some links or details. Surely I can't be the only one using ChatGPT this way.
Ad-dependent business model. A chatbot wouldn’t work with Google’s business model unless it was programmed to give the answer desired by the highest bidder.
Google always had a problem of launching tons of of stuff and then killing them. I vaguely remember reading some articles from earlier days that pretty much everything gets killed or dismissed if it can't be justified by numbers. Some purely creative processes get killed very fast because of these rules. The days where you can come up with some shit and carry on for years ended very long time ago there.
Why was Google poised to compete with OpenAI in the first place? I don't get this take. I don't think they lost any more than Amazon did, which is to say they're indirectly profiting from it by selling compute hardware.
I reckon they haven't lost any ground yet. OpenAI are struggling to keep their service working with the demand they have. Most of the world isn't paying attention to LLM yet. Google already has that massive audience.
but that is nothing compared to how google crafted products then threw them to the graveyard, which did them bad
add a shit demo of bard to that, i dont know anymore, they got massive $$$ to compete in that area but i dont know: lack of vision? lack of people in charge? only insiders in bard could tell
“Attention Is All You Need” was a Google paper, wasn’t it?
I think neither they know OpenAI expected that this would create such a hype. I mean, GPT 3 has been here for quite a while, and most people just didn’t care.
Elon Musk has been warning about AI for like a decade now. So far, nobody listened. It took a viral chat interface to make people realize what is going on.
Kinda like the internet in 1994 vs. 1999. Or remote work in 2008 vs. 2020. A thing that has been there all along suddenly gets the mainstream’s attention and becomes “cool”.
Ultimately I think it is the illusion of a moat (we are too big to fail, we are the default search engine/browser/os etc.) Coupled with over hiring. Along with a fear of taking risk and willingness to disrupt yourself. Ultimately, they became too fearful and focused on building a wall around the kingdom than expanding the kingdom.
Also is it just me, or has the execution from GOOG just been really disappointing? Look at this talk [0] These are not innovators, these are business leaders. Google (and many big tech like AMZN/AWS) have become more packed with these "business leaders" types and not the core, quirky, unusual and strange innovator types. I think it is very much a regression to the "above average" which has killed the ability to launch / productize new technologies (vs. new businesses..)
[0] https://youtu.be/yLWXJ22LUEc?t=829