The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not.
Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity)
But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it.
They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley.
Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category.
Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not).
But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket.
When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.
If you look into 2005-2009, there were products like Chrome, Waymo, Youtube, GCP, Google docs and lot more that were very ambitious. After 2009 I can't name any one product on that realm.
And no, Waymo didn't "come out in 2009". It still hasn't come out except in three limited areas, but it's shown astonishing success where it has. So again, if you're only going to count the year a project was started, and not the decades of work it takes to build a world-changing business... I don't know what to tell you.
Except just... talk about moving the goalposts. Geez. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single company on earth that you're going to find impressive enough.
What was argued was not whether Google created impressive things. I was clear what I meant was Google hasn't started anything to their product suite. Adding to the product suite is more challenging than research project for the company, and it was where Google thrived and which led to success of Google.
? Microprocessors ? Neural networks ?
They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use Gemini or ChatGPT, that was pretty impressive.
Also, Waymo is crazy impressive. If you're considering Alphabet as a whole (which there's no reason not to, it's just corporate structuring).
Those are two industry-changing things, so I think Google's doing OK.