For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels.
Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.
All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.
I think this is directionally true: Google would have taken a lot longer to release something like Bard/ChatGPT if their hand had not been forced, but I don't think pr/regulatory pressure was the reason YouTube Shorts was not done before TikTok.
I think short form video is just hard to monetize in comparison to long form. Why would you make a product that has uncertain appeal and is likely to be a money loser if it does succeed?
If Google were to try this early, it is uncertain that Google will discover a monetization strategy before the product joins the Google graveyard.
Let's not even talk about short form video, just YouTube. How many years did Google subsidize YouTube with Search money before it really turned up advertising on YouTube? Do we know how much effort Google expended in experimenting with monetization strategies for YouTube?
Or, which is more likely, by the CCP. TikTok is the perfect piece of propaganda warfare - it gives destabilizing forces, anything from weird left-wing Hamas supporters to the hardcore far-right / incel crowd, a direct link to the brains of our children. It's unreal just how toxic the trending content on TikTok is, and how little effort is done to moderate it. Way worse than the YouTube radicalization spiral [1], but for whatever reason there's almost zero attention to TikTok.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...
It's hard to even know if the methodology of the paper you cited (analyzing comment trajectories) is a good one, given YT is constantly tweaking their algorithms, including in response to public outcry, and this phenomenon does not show up in other analysis: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...
I assume the methodological questions are even trickier for TikTok which has many more creators than YT.
I would love to see someone actually study TikTok though, since people love to ascribe blame to platforms for radicalizing people rather than accepting that some users just have views we find unacceptable regardless of the platform.
I wouldn't be so sure, in my case ChatGPT passes the bar of being mildly useful but Bard is still absolutely useless. I can see two equally likely explanations for this: they simply can't manage to pull it off due to their culture or they can't release something that isn't massively more nerfed than the competition.
This was not my view being somewhat close to the technologies there. Lamda did exist internally for several years, with pretty good demos.
It was clearly not GPT-4, but there was a lot of exec-level fear about releasing these systems and having them say something offensive.
"Responsibility" is kind of bullshit, but fear of bad press is very real.
This doesn't really match the reality of the layoffs. They weren't team/project based or performance based, they were seemingly random. If they were concernee about too many low performing products and employees they went about it in completely the wrong way.
The whole industry didn't magically accumulate debt weight all at the same time in the same proportions.
And before someone says opportunity cost, if the treasury offering a 5% ROI on your dollar is enough to dissuade you from executing on your business plan, that was never a very good business plan.
Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.