It seems that companies don't have to do anything anymore--they just have to spin a story for Wall Street and make sure they lap it up.
(for what it's worth, I do think LLMs are useful for certain tasks, but it's ridiculous that every company is pivoting to be an "AI company" for no real reason...)
So I built their Business Messaging program to try to get access to those apis.
What took me too long to discover is that an API market of 100% confirmed conversions will be worthy less than an intent market with a 10% or 1% chance. Because you can show more ads across the intent market that aggregates to more revenue than a 100% confirmed transaction being auctioned off. (Specifically because an ad can’t go for more than the cost of the transaction of course, but multiple ads can)
TLDR. Google became the same as the newspaper ads they disrupted. Making more money off the failure of their ads to convert than their successful ones.
Sundar is an awful CEO, that's the lesson. That's the problem there. He exhibits no leadership abilities or vision. He's extremely weak. He's essentially the anti-Jobs.
He got where he is by being diplomatic and not stepping on anyone's toes. No surprise he would continue behaving that way in the job.
That goes for Amazon as well imo. They are another company that won about as much as anyone can but has refused to move past the startup mentality and irrational promises of growth. It's going to get them both burned.
Microsoft is the only company that has really handled this well but that's probably got something to do with them getting in antitrust trouble back in the day, when they were behaving much more like a Google or an Amazon.
A friend of mine who worked at Microsoft in the 90s told me that Gates lamented in a meeting that nobody was coming up with new ideas on how to leverage their expertise and make money.
If only they knew !!!
Its like they always say: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Its good that you recognize the problem. Welcome to the other side. That just makes you more intelligent and ready for the next event. If you know what is moral and just, and if you have the capabilities to see the future thanks to your experience... you now know how to handle these events in the future.
For now, support the rise of interest rates and ignore the cries of the SV elite to have the Fed cut rates back down. We all know that crappy projects make less sense when money costs 5.25% / year rather than the 0%/year it cost throughout the 2010s decade.
Beyond that? Hard to say. Depends where things go.
Nearly a decade later, when I say "turn off the music", it'll pause Netflix on the TV I'm actively watching (and talking to it through) while the speaker in the other room keeps playing music. Or if you ask it turn off the light, the whole house goes dark.
I don't need it to read minds, but it sure would've been nice for it to understand the difference between a TV, a music speaker, and a light bulb.
I don't know how Google works (or doesn't, apparently), but I often wished they just sat down with a few interns and manually went through the top 100 most used commands and made manual command chains for them.
The assistants are annoying not because they're not AGI enough, but because they can't reliably do the simple tasks that we actually want to offload to them...
We have a ton of devices connected to Alexa and HomeKit via Home Assistant. We mostly interact with Alexa through our Sonos system.
I want to throw Alexa out the goddamn window every other week, especially when I ask it to turn off a very specific room, and it responds "which device?" Despite parsing my query perfectly.
"You can also..."
Anyway, I had a neat display showing live nodes as green. I was redirected to enhance that display with graphs and charts and linking the nodes, we bought a TV to display it on... long story short, it was more important to show this awesome graphic tool to potential investors then to know whether our systems were actually down.
Some things never change.
That it's the people who say the "right" things that win at life, not the people who study hard and try to make an actual difference. Maya Angelou said it best - she was trying to be inspirational, but it's actually depressing as hell for anybody who thought hard work would get them ahead: "People will forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel".
That's another manifestation of the Labor Theory of Value, where what something is worth is proportional to the amount of labor that went into it.
This is false. Value is only tangentially related to the labor input. Just because you work hard creating a song doesn't mean people will like the song and pay $$ for it.
Working smart is what matters. By that I mean working at creating things people want.
1) Saying the “right” things does not work in the long run because people want results. Also, if the “right” things are not true, they will notice, and there are usually consequences.
2) I think May Angelou is right that people remember how you make them feel. I also think they remember people’s actions and statements. A good example of this is Google itself. People eventually figured out that the “do no evil” moto was bullshit. They also figured out that when Google said something, you should be skeptical because of Google’s track record of canceling products.
IMO what dooms assistants is the competition on who owns the top of the funnel and how that limits what APIs software/hardware services that are exposed to third parties from hardware from LG, Samsung, Sony, etc. The Google Assistant or Alexa is useless controlling the TV if it is only allowed to turn it on or off. I couldn't care at all about the Samsung assistant universe if all I had from them is a TV, but I do want to control it with Alexa or Google.
Maybe Matter[1] will matter in the long run, but is a little late for the momentum/size the assistant teams in any company had years ago to build these things out.
Microsoft didn't invent the PC, but they knew how to make money off of it.
Lotus didn't invent the spreadsheet, but they knew how to make money off of it.
Apple didn't invent the cell phone, but they knew how to make money off of it.
Boeing didn't invent the jet airliner, but they knew how to make money off of it.
I created the AI suggestion chip at Google, which combined with an internal project called Jane, became the Google Assistant. At the time Sundar was desperate for a narrative to counter Alexa in front of investors and wanted a HUGE I/O announcement, so off we sprinted.
But I went to the executives at the time in charge and said look, this really isn't going to be an assistant if it doesn't have the APIs into services that users need to accomplish actual tasks. Sharing some information and changing the music isn't what a butler does, a butler anticipates your needs and executes on them -- and we can't do that until we have the APIs to anticipate and execute.
I was, of course, ignored, because in my naiveness at the time and I didn't realize it didn't matter what the assistant DID, it mattered what the narrative to investors was about its potential. So 2017 I/O Sundar announces the assistant and it looks great inside Allo, and it's a great demo -- mission accomplished.
Now 6 years+ later, it's a stagnant, overspent team across the space -- because why? Because it can't do anything for users. All these years and billions later it still can't do anything important -- it has no user journey.
And it took me equally as long to realize, that still doesn't matter. FAANG has gotten so large that the stock bump that comes from narrative outpaces actual revenue from working products. It makes for a crazy world... because ironically Google ALSO invented the truly disruptive transformer technology behind the LLM and when we tried to launch that with MINA, Sundar blocked it! Too disruptive, no narrative, too scary...
I don't know the lesson to be learned here, but wow, it just makes me want to give up...