julesh
I believe that Google are in the process of the biggest corporate fuckup of recent times (ok ok, not counting Intel who might match them, but I don't even pretend to understand what's happening there). No "they're ruining the internet" here, this is me trying to think in purely corporate terms
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julesh
In short: every big corp has to constantly play whatever is the current hype cycle in order to keep the money rolling from investors. It's irrelevant whether their management actually believe the tech du jour is important or not, this is just the game that they have to play to stay ahead. I think that Google's fundamental mistake is that they have compromised their core product in service of the LLM hype cycle. Yes, the "product" is really Adwords, but the search service is what actually drives it. Yes, they have other products like Android, Youtube, Gmail and Chrome, but search is the biggest of them all
julesh
Compare this to Facebook. The whole metaverse thing is probably one of the biggest wastes of money in the entire history of business, but the whole thing came and went without it ever touching their core products: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. So they write off the loss, pick themselves up and jump onto the next hype cycle (LLMs) much poorer but still fundamentally healthy as a business
julesh
Add to this that generative transformers were literally invented at Google, and they completely failed to see the potential and they've been just another imitator for the entire hype cycle. The big hype battle right now is between GPT and Claude, nobody gives a shit about Gemini, I guess including investors
julesh
I have an additional thing which is even more speculative. The thing that Google's research division is most iconically known for is deep RL. And personally, I believe we're not even close to seeing the last of what deep RL can do. My conspiracy theory is that the top level of Google management basically shut down the AlphaStar project because they didn't want to enter the industries that it would be most useful for, like finance and military tech. I think that history will judge that Google in 2017 were sitting on the 2 most profitable technologies of the decade, and failed to exploit either of them
julesh
I definitely don't expect Google to completely blow up, just to diminish and become a zombie husk of their former selves, like many equally giant tech companies have been doing since IBM. Of all the big tech companies right now, Google are the only one I actually expect this to happen to any time soon
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Σ(i³) = (Σi)²
@julesh I live in that intersection where I read "RL" and my brain yells "Rocket League" but the other part of my brain yells "reinforcement learning" and both sides of my brain have a chuckle at which of the two has been the more commercially successful product over the last 5 years...
Boarders
@julesh it is striking to me that Google was easily at its most innovative when it had “20% time”, “authors at Google”, “flat management structure”, “Google summer of code” etc. etc. and whilst I am sure that created many seeming problems with how they have developed (perceived disorganization), they are left with the remnants of something wildly innovative dying to a new culture of growth-at-all-costs management which is positively contemptuous of all that built the company. A tech company that so disrespects its programmers/researchers will not remain innovative for long - who would want to work in such a place when your talents will be actually appreciated elsewhere?
julesh
Addendum: The alternative, if Google are not going down without a fight, is that they could start trying to end the LLM hype cycle (which they know they lost) and try to trigger a new one in which they have a head start on their main rivals
Ian
@julesh To be fair, Google has been in the quantum computing hype cycle for ages now—given what happened last year with the IBM kicked eagle experiment, I give it around three months before a paper shows that you can do whatever Google's quantum computer did better and faster using tensor networks.
It's pretty suspicious to me that the Google paper about their new quantum processor, which you can read here (<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y>, and you can read the manuscript here <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-makes-a-major-quantum-computing-breakthrough/>) is from an unedited manuscript. Moreover, while most of the paper's authors don't have a personal financial stake in the results being true, the Google Quantum AI company has a *huge* vested interest in this.
While it would definitely be quite cool if this result was true, I'll wait to see if it gets reproduced before drawing any conclusions.
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