Anyway, I think AI is a sustaining innovation, not a disruptive innovation. It makes existing businesses work better, but it doesn't create new markets where none previously existed like the Internet did. Google makes a ton of money off AI; the core of the ads system is a massive machine-learning model that optimizes ad clicks like no human could. But that only works because they already have the traffic and the data, which they got by positioning themselves as the center of the Internet when it was young.
I do agree that companies need to adjust their processes to take full advantage of AI rather than expecting it to be a magic bullet, but I don't know if I really think "birth trauma" is the right metaphor. More like adolescence; it's a painful identity shift, and some people never successfully make the leap. Those who can't don't die, though, they just become emotionally stunted adults that never reach their full potential.
Does search actively use AI as well? Is it fully dependent on a NN without manual algorithms?
I work on Assistant now, since recently rejoining Google, and it uses AI for the usual suspects: speech and NLP.
Is there a place that doesn't do that? That's entry requirement right?
I wouldn't call Google as sitting on a river of AI gold.
It is using AI to make more gold from the same mine, instead of the obvious gold, it scratches and extract gold from the dirt and rocks. But it's still doing it from that same mine.
And that's exactly what AI is, garbage in, garbage out. I used to be a machine learning engineer in a company that is about as old as the dinosaur. They wanted to apply that gold digging AI machine google had on a landfill, which didn't quite pan out the way they liked it.