Ask HN: Will Sundar face consequences for Google's stagnation and AI fiascos?
It's no surprise that over the past several years Google has been stagnating. Look at their progress in cloud and AI. Most of their actions are merely reactions. I think Sundar should be held accountable for this and face consequences. Thoughts?
Pichai got promoted from CEO of Google to CEO of Alphabet some time ago. Therefore, as strange as it is, Larry and Sergey are fully on board with whatever it is that he's doing.
I don't see the stagnation.
GCP is by far my preferred cloud. I don't see their competition meeting them on UX, reliability, or performance. They have been investing a lot in enterprise oriented features.
Their AI portfolio has been growing. I was surprised recently by how good the OCR on handwritten text is. Their OpenAI like APIs are already being rolled out.
That being said, I'm also impressed by Microsoft. Of the 3 big players, AWS seems to be the closest to stagnation. What was the last exciting thing they did?
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What consequences did you have in mind? Most CEOs get a golden parachute when they're sacked.
The industry direction has generally not been good (Covid, recession, backlash against these big companies and ad business, competition escalation etc).
Google doesn't care about this because it is a vehement waste of their time. They sell ads, and have no reason to burn money on LLMs for goodwill; Microsoft does.
Avoiding conflict with Microsoft/OpenAI might be an excellent bluff-check in a world that wants to monetize, distribute and advertise AI generated content.
> Google doesn’t care about this because it is a vehement waste of their time
If Microsoft/OpenAI succeeds with driving their AI Chatbot as the public interface of the web, neither the kind of ads Google sells on external properties nor some of the core Google properties on which Google sells ads will be relevant anymore. (Youtube will be, and that’s about it.)
The problem Google faces (and probably why it hemmed and hawed until someone else was at their throat with this) is that the same problem faces them if they led the same revolution, and its not as clear how to effectively monetize the AI Chatbot. So, even though it would have left Google still dominant, disrupting the way the web works the way Microsoft/OpenAI now threaten to, would have upset Google’s golden goose with no clear replacement.
Except, they're not disrupting the way the web works. The web still works fine, and LLMs are an incomplete and often incorrect interface for some of this information. AdSense will be relevant for as long as networked visual ads are relevant, and that's not going away until LLM brain interfaces catch on.
I'm no Google fan, but it increasingly feels like HN is trying to justify it's FAANG hate boner with predictions of imminent failure. The reason Google is successful is because they ignored search and focused on greener pastures. Investing further into LLMs at this point would be a money pit with plenty of room to backfire.
The fact is, almost nobody uses Bing, and normal people don't care or even really know about ChatGPT. Just like you'd get the impression that Twitter is super-popular and used by everyone from reading MSM, you'd get the impression that everyone spends all day on ChatGPT from reading HN, but it's just not true.
You have intent when writing something in the interface. Thus you can still show ads.
As the Spartans quipped to Philip of Macedon: “If”
Well they clearly care enough since they released Bard, not that it’s anything special… most a mediocre version of ChatGPT. I use ChatGPT as a pair programmer and it has saved me a lot of time so far. IMO OpenAI is a threat to Googles empire.