Google could be sitting on the most advanced AI on the planet, but none of that matters as long as they're under the current leadership.
Bard should have been limited access and been the absolute most power model they had.
Now everyone is questioning if Google actually can compete with OpenAI at all, despite decades headstart and far more research and funding.
https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05
Happy now?
Having been in both places (Brain and DM), this feels so far from what I experienced that I must ask, what are you basing this on?
Aside: thank you for asking. When I previously encountered incorrect top-level comments that I knew to be wrong (insider information), I'd simply ignore and move on. You've inspired me to push back more often.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-res...
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...
> The end of the long-running negotiations, which hasn’t previously been reported, is the latest example of how Google and other tech giants are trying to strengthen their control over the study and advancement of artificial intelligence.
> Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure
Further, I don't understand how explicit examples of company infighting over autonomy doesn't already address your point.
It seems like a big leap to take these articles as support the statement:
> Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who previously were rooting for his failure
It certainly might be true, but I'm missing the connection between these articles and the statement.
Only if you use vague standards like
-"doesn't really directly support"
-"Google Brain employees"
How are "Google Brain employees" distinct from "Google leadership with Google Brain personnel in their respective reporting line?" What is the criteria for that distinction?
Signed, “didn’t work at brain or dm but was involved in a lot of alphabet level decision making”.
While this does occur, in general what I see is that with any large-enough group of people, there will be strong differences of opinions on how to steer the project to success.
In fact, I don’t think I can remember a single “political battle” that didn’t stem from a legitimate concern in how some project was being run and what they had decided to focus on.
But we can all pretend to live in idealism la la land where everything is operating on someone’s best intention.
I read that to mean the party is over, we are treating that as a strategic subject and are streamlining our organisation. As you rightfully pointed Google basically had two competing organisations with all the complexity associated with that. That’s now over. From now on, there is only one captain steering the ship.
It is a really hard problem to "commercialize" imagination or innovation. Two very different mindsets between "doing product" and "doing research." DOW Chemical did a pretty good job of it, but they have always been more "components of the solution" rather than the full solution.
Which sort of illustrates the point...
the view of outside google of how great they are has zero bearing on the realities inside the company. the company is people - and google is no longer the place to be if you have talent. simple as that.
No shit, way to be pedantic over a common simple abstraction. Do you want a list of every author for every thing that is ever invented when someone refers to something?
“Google” is the wrong model of abstraction to deal with as with the founders long gone there is no intrinsically stable mapping between “Google” and “ai talent”.
This isn’t PageRank where the founder invented the original tech. Sundar going on 60 minutes saying vapid nonsense like “ai is fire” is the furthest extent of his abilities. There is nobody in power at google who is capable of leading in this moment.