I disagree - I will be surprised if google doesnt win the AI race long term. They have the money, the chips, and the ability to attract talent.
Are they measurably attracting more talent here? It seems like they're losing some of it right now, so is there public info about numbers of researchers they have or etc
Agree that I would (and do) still place my bet on them for the long term. Maybe the outcome will be a couple of good startups seeded and DeepMind _really_ focusing on LLMs now.
Ever heard of the innovator’s dilemma? Don’t underestimate the inertia of large companies and their unwillingness to pivot from their cash cow.
Google specifically has a track record. You could have made the same argument about social media (Google+) a decade ago.
social media is a completely different market though - since there are massive returns to scale, it's incredibly hard for a new entrant to break in.
model training and inference is the opposite. people switch LLMs like people change clothes in the morning. there are popular services (openrouter) that make moving as easy as changing a model string.
Which poses the question: Why does Google even need to catch up? At least currently, the name of the game is integration. The actual model is a commodity.
Demis will get an offer he can’t refuse - they’ll make him the CEO of Alphabet and have the whole company go all in - the question is when.
If the new cow doesn’t have cash, it is better to stick to the cow you know.
Unfortunately the new cow is cannibalizing the old cow, so Google is in a bit of a bind here. (So far I cannot imagine them monetizing AI overviews enough to compensate for the sharp loss of ads on SERPs.)
To its credit Google seems willing to disrupt itself before its competitors can.
One option would be to become vegetarian.
I said that too at the start of the year, but that's a looong time in "AI years". I feel like by now they should have announced a Fable-killer model. They may still do it but looking back I am becoming less convinced now than I was 6 months ago.
They also have the money, the hardware and the talent to be the best cloud infrastructure provider, yet they're still far behind AWS (for good reason, as anyone who's dealt with their customer service will understand).
They’d be hard pressed to lose, if it’s what they want.
They need to route all browser search strings to an LLM, and slowly begin to charge where people will pay. Likely ad space.
> ability to attract talent.
No, the top talent is clearly at Anthropic and OpenAI