I am not sure whether the videos are representative of real life performance or it is a marketing stunt but sure looks impressive. Reminds of the robot arm in Iron Man 1.
Not specifically trained on but most likely the Vision models have seen it. Vision models like Gemini flash/pro are already good at vision tasks on phones[1] - like clicking on UI elements and scrolling to find stuff etc. The planning of what steps to perform is also quite good with Pro model (slightly worse than GPT 4o in my opinion)
It's an impressive demo but perhaps you are misremembering Jarvis from Iron Man which is not only far faster but is effectively a full AGI system even at that point.
Sorry if this feels pedantic, perhaps it is. But it seems like an analogy that invites pedantry from fans of that movie.
The robot arms in the movie are implied to have their own AIs driving them; Tony speaks to the malfunctioning one directly several times throughout the movie.
Jarvis is AGI, yes, but is not what's being referred to here.
This is the "Wozniak Standard" (sometimes called the Coffee Test) - Drop an AI enabled robot in front of a random house and ask it to bring you a cup of coffee. The robot would need to enter the house, locate the kitchen, locate the coffee machine, locate the coffee, locate the filters, locate the coffee mugs, locate a measuring spoon - then add the correct amount of water, the filter, the correct amount of coffee, start the brew cycle, wait for the brew cycle to finish, pour your coffee, then exit the house and deliver the mug to you. Extra points for adding cream and sugar.
It is not a high standard, I am sure you could train a chimp to pass this test[1]. If you know how to use a standard coffee maker and live in a typical American home, and the test is done in an typical American home with a standard coffee maker, you can definitely pass this test 100% of the time.
I understand that many people don't live in America and don't know how to use a coffee maker. That is 100% irrelevant. There is a frustrating tendency in AI circles to conflate domain knowledge with intelligence, in a way that invariably elevates AI and crushes human intelligence into something tiny.
[1] The hard part would be psychological (e.g. keeping the chimp focused), not cognitive. And of course the chimp would need to bring a chimp-sized ladder... It would be an unlawful experiment, but I suspect if you trained a chimp to use a specific coffee maker in another kitchen, forced the chimp to become addicted to coffee, and then put the animal in a totally different kitchen with a different coffee maker (but similar, i.e. not a French press), it figure would figure out what to do.
"locate the filters, locate the coffee mugs, locate a measuring spoon" in a random house in America is a very high standard. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. If you teleport me into a random house, I’ll likely spend at least an hour trying and failing at that task, and most of their cabinets and drawers will be open by the end of it.
It also excludes corner cases like "what if they don’t have any filters"? Should the robot go tearing through the house till they find one, or do nothing? But what if there were some in the pantry — does that fail the test? There’s all kinds of implicit assumptions here that make it quite hard.
and what if there's only a Nespresso machine, a Keurig machine, instant, a french press, a moka pot, or a cappuccino machine (we can argue if an americano is actually coffee, but if that's what the house has, and no drip machine + accoutrements, you're not getting anything else)? Human or bot,
that's a lot of possibilities to deal with, but for a bold human unfamiliar with those, they're just a YouTube video away (multiple ones if it's a fancy cappuccino machine). Until AI can learn to make coffee or change an oil filter on a 1997 GMC from watching a YouTube video, it'd be hard to consider it human-grade, even if it has been trained on all of YouTube, which assumedly Google has done. There are certainly things people do on YouTube that I couldn't do after a lot of intense practice, though, so I'm not totally convinced that's the right standard. It doesn't cost millions of hours and dollars of training and fine tuning time for me to, say, be able to tie a bow tie from a YouTube video though, even if it does take me a couple of tries.
It probably shouldn't continue to surprise me how often people's "AI benchmarks" exclude a significant fraction of actual, living, humans from being "human-grade".
You can't honestly claim that it would take you an hour to accomplish such a high probability task - have you never visited the house of a friend or family and had to open a few cabinets to find a water glass or a bowl or a spoon?
As for the point of corner cases being hard - I mean that's the point here, isn't it?
Repeatedly? As in you would come back and tell whoever you're with "I gave up"? Like I can understand wanting to ask for e.g. "where do you keep the coffee", but if that wasn't possible -- say the host is asleep, and I'm there taking care of them -- I would certainly be able to figure it out. Just open cabinets and peek / carefully rummage around until you find what you need.
You might refuse to do it, but I doubt you'd ever actually completely fail it. If someone offered to pay $10 million if someone could go into a house, make a cup of coffee, and come back out with it, I imagine just about any functional adult would figure out a way to return with a cup of some sort of liquid resembling coffee. I don't see anyone saying, "Sorry, making a cup of coffee is too difficult, I'm going to forfeit the $10 million."
But sure, without proper compensation a lot of people would probably just say "I can't do it" as a way of avoiding the task.
I like that test. If the AI couldn't find a measuring spoon it would need to grab any spoon it could and just "eyeball it". Also, if there wasn't an actual mug then maybe a glass will work (but not a pint glass) and certainly not a plastic cup. When delivered it would have to know to say "couldn't find a mug so i grabbed a glass". there's other things too, can't find regular coffee but it found some instant coffee? The AI would need to decide if that will work or should it ask first. All of those things are petty easy for a human.
There's one shot that stood out to me, right at the end of the main video, where the robot puts a round belt on a pulley: https://youtu.be/4MvGnmmP3c0?si=f9dOIbgq58EUz-PW&t=163 . Of course there are probably many examples of this exact action in its training data, but it felt very intuitive in a way the shirt-folding and object-sorting tasks in these demos usually don't.
(Also there seems to be some kind of video auto-play/pause/scroll thing going on with the page? Whatever it is, it's broken.)
I slowed it down to 1/4 speed to check -- the autonomous video is sped up 3x, but the human video seems to be 1x. I say that because generally no one moves that slowly for a physical task, not just in the "problem solving" aspect, but also in the "getting a belt to the gears" aspect. So, it appears that the robot did a better job than the human, but I believe the human only spent 1/3 of the time in the clip. After stretching the belt, it was probably put on easily, and likely the human still completed the task in 2/3 of the time of the robot.
Reference video (saw your clip is robot-only, but the robot vs human video is more telling):
It felt extra fake - the cherry picked people lacking rudimentary mechanical skills, using the ~$50K set of Franka Emika arms vs their default 'budget' ALOHA 2 grippers, the sheer luck that helped the robots put the belt on instead of removing it from the pulley.
The trick was in that the belt was too tight for an average human to put on with brute force, and disabling the tensioner or using tricks would require better than average mechanical skills their specially chosen 'random humans' lacked.
Earlier in the video, where it was going to fold a "fox", I was expecting a fox, but a fox face. I know I should have high expectations at this point, but was disappointed from the result given the prompt.
The problem with Google is that they keep putting out "videos" but almost ship an actual product. I'm not sure what's the end goal of this other than "get some people excited" or "justify R&D spend to shareholders".
This is a great achievement and I'm not underestimating the work of the people involved. But similar videos have been put together by many research labs and startups for years now.
I feel like Google's a bit lost. And Sundai's leadership has not been good for this, if we're honest.
GOOG is around the same price as it was in 2022, which means the AI wave went by through them with zero effect. With other tech companies doubling/tripling their market cap during this time, Sundai really left 1 trillion of unrealized value on the table (!); also consider Google had all the cards at one point, quite mediocre imo.
I'm cynical, but several hundred thousand patents are issued every single year, if you don't get one then your competitors will.
You don't have to release a profitable product, but to compete over the next several decades you are going to need to own valuable land in remote territories where patent wars being fought today. I'm guessing Google's meta-strategy is a type of patent-colonialism.
Even after the massive total market correction in the last few weeks, the earliest that GOOG was the same price as today is not even a full year ago. In fact, it's up 90% since 2022.
Any stock market source would tell you GOOG was ~140 USD at the start of 2022. Today it is ~170 USD. A 20% increase over three years, about the same rate as inflation and S&P.
This is extremely trivial to verify. Was this written by a GPT bot?
My friend why so irritated... I was just explaining why you two got different numbers. And my numbers of other companies are also calculated from the start of 2022.
I guess my broken English doesn't match today's bot quality :)
> > GOOG is around the same price as it was in 2022
That's the comment pb7 replied to by saying it's up 90% since 2022 (which is true, or even an underestimate, depending on where you measure from) and to which you responded calling them a bot because your own measurement, from the start of the year, gives a lower number.
cvhc is pointing out that it's the different choice of where to measure from that caused the difference in results - neither are incorrect.
What’s the problem? They produce really good research, funded by their ad business. Transformers, Waymo, this robot stuff.
Sure, there’s almost nothing for you to buy from them right now from these efforts, except to the extent that it contributes behind the scenes to their ad business. That might be a problem for them, but not for the rest of us that benefit from the publications, software and services.
I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency.
If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic changes implied by this technology are huge. Very little of our daily lives will be undisrupted when it propagates and saturates the culture, even with no further fundamental advances.
Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech?
It does such a good job building a convincing world, and its really good in just not going into details that it can't speak on (like how interplanetary travel works), while some of it's takes (e.g. small anti-personel drones) seem almost prescient after Ukraine.
All the synthetic biology and even the depictions of AIs and their struggles are really compelling, too.
Nah, stories for robots by robots would probably be more like "can we gently and patiently explain to humans that all their problems come from their own lack of understanding without them turning on us"
Yeah it really makes you think about what life would be like if intelligence could infuse anything- be it a ship or a datapad- even if his vision wasn't quite how I imagine it would turn out.
I've also seen it suggested that Harry Potter might be a more realistic look at what proliferated AI might be like.
It's not that they don't keep up, and more that it's hard to make a truly compelling and exciting space opera story it you abide by the reality of physics. The reality of space travel and war will be much closer to the forever war than to the countless water navy inspired stories out there.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams does a great job at being a timeless and priceless way to learn about the relativity of things.
> For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters.
This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower stories in space, and it has never been seriously grounded in science. This isn't a criticism, exactly.
But if you look at, say, the award-winning science fiction of the 90s, for example you have A Fire Upon the Deep, the stories that were republished as Accelerando, the Culture novels, etc. All of these stories assume major improvements in AI and most of them involve breakneck rates of technological change.
But these stories have become less popular, because the authors generally thought through the implications of (for a example) AI that was sufficiently capable to maintain a starship. And the obvious conclusion is, why would AI stop at sweeping the corridors? Why not pilot the ship? Why not build the ships and give them orders? Why do people assume that technological progress conveniently stops right about the time the robots can mop the decks? Why doesn't that technology surpass and obsolete the humans entirely?
It turns that out that humans mostly want to read stories about other humans. Which is where many of the better SF authors have been focusing for a while now.
This reminds me of my favorite note [1] from Ursula Le Guin on technology:
> Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.
> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
While it doesn’t touch on AI at all (that I remember, I think there is some basic ship AI but it’s not a major plot point and it never “talks”) the Honor Harrington series is “Horatio Hornblower in space” and I highly recommend it.
Also I love the Zones of Thought series and The Culture.
Yeah that tracks. If we're being real, there won't ever be much of actual human exploration beyond Earth, it'll all be done with fully automated systems. We're just not physically made for the radiation and extremely long periods of idle downtime. Star Wars has the self-awareness to call itself fantasy as some kind of exception, even though 99% of all other other sci-fi is pretty much that too.
Seeing drones do all the work unfortunately isn't very interesting though.
The sun is dying. A capable team is assembled and put into cryosleep in an automated ship for a journey to a neighboring star system to try to diagnose the problem. Only one member survives, and they have amnesia.
The novel does a great job of explaining the process of troubleshooting under pressure and with incomplete information.
Strong warning: Start with either book 2 (Player of Games) or book...7, Look to Windward.
I strongly suggest you skip book 1 until you're comfortable with the rest of the books that focus on the Culture itself, and not some weird offshoot story that barely involves the Culture.
I also thought about the Minds in the Culture novels. That universe has many gradations of artificial brains.
Though I wouldn't recommend starting with any of the stories in the series. Or reading any at all. Find a summary or a Cliff's Notes instead. Iain M Banks has a talent for making great stories tedious.
I'm guessing it'll only be a matter of time before we see more stories about AI. For example, a spaceship that crashes into strange planets killing the humans on board because AI hallucinated, resulting in a civilization of aliens built around the combined wisdom of every youtube comment and facebook post that the surviving AI was trained on creating the largest and most destructive religion/dumpster fire in the universe.
It's pretty normal for it to take a few years to write a good book so I wouldn't look to science fiction to keep up to date on the latest tech hype train. This is probably a good thing because when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, those books would often end up looking very dated and laughably naive.
There's a lot of books about AGI already which is probably more fun to write about than what passes for AI right now. Still, I'm sure that eventually we'll see characters getting their email badly summarized in fiction too.
Vernor Vinge has argued that far-future SF makes no sense because of the "wall across the future" that The Coming Technological Singularity will create. [0]
If you're open to Theory Fiction, you can read Nick Land. Even his early 1990s texts still feel futuristic. I think his views on the autonomization of AI, capital, and robots - and their convergence - are very interesting. [1]
In The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler there are fleets of fishing boats that are all controlled by AI to maximize the catch. Each boat also has it's own AI that can act somewhat independently, but they all communicate with the main corporate AI as well as with other boats in the vicinity. Initially the boats are all fully automated and have robots doing all the work, but in the ocean environment the robots tend to break down a lot due to corrosion. At some point the AI in charge of the fleet figures out that it can use kidnapped humans in place of the robots. The humans are kidnapped and drugged so that they don't wake up until the ship is well out at sea. Even after that they're kept drugged to some extent so that they aren't inclined to escape. They're given just enough food to enable them to do their work and no more. When they become sick they're thrown overboard and new kidnappees replace them.
This is just one of the side plots of the book, I think it could've been the whole plot of a book.
Oooh edgyyyyyy comment! Truly you are awake and the rest of us are asleep.
Tell me, which corporation exactly is kidnapping and drugging people to enslave them and then discard their bodies at sea to feed the capitalist global machine?
It seems like you have a big scoop if you are doing on the ground reporting, because that seems like it would be international news if it was real!
Actually, as bizarre as it sounds, drugging and kidnapping people to enslave them on fishing boats is a real problem, and has been reported on by the international news.
Strongly recommend murderbot diaries (starts with "All systems red").
Has a cyborg/AI as protagonist and paints a really interesting world with AIs and synthetic biology in it. Also does a good job at just shutting up about things it can not talk about, like interplanetary travel.
A bit of a jump but have a look at Pantheon the tv series, it is on Netflix at the moment. Based on a book by Ken Liu, the end of the series, blew my mind.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Blindsight. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it is a book about the place of human intelligence in a universe with other options, both biological and artificial.
Dan Simmons' books often include AI plot elements and contemplate the consequences of humans becoming overly reliant on AI such that they lose basic competencies.
No matter how well documented system us, how helpful error message is or how good self diagnostics are - some humans will act dumb. Access to knowledge (I assume by embedded you mean better access) is clearly not enough.
I found Vernor Vinge is spot on. I recommend focusing on recent work. E.g. the Bobiverse (https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse) by Denis E. Taylor is a super easy read that touches on that. He takes a shortcut in early books by capping the progress in US via turning the country into a theocracy and then a bad WWIII that wiped out most of the mankind. Note that I haven't read the latest books, but even the previous ones are full of automation and humans are "ephemerals" - they don't live long.
I am recently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of time series. It goes beyond AI and mind uploading, expanding into biotech, the next big deal. With the right understanding of proteins and DNA/RNA, hacking living things is way easier than creating robots, as they self-repair, replicate, feed themselves, recycle things effectively, create ecosystems. The only reason we are not doing it is because our understanding of these mechanisms is very shallow.
Robotics has been trying the same ideas for the last who knows how many years. They still believe it will work now, somehow.
Perhaps it goes beyond the brightest minds at Google that people can grasp things with their eyes closed. That we don't need to see to grasp. But designing good robots with tactile sensors is too much for our top researchers.
Ex-Googler so maybe I'm just spoiled by access to non-public information?
But I'm fairly sure there's plenty of public material of Google robots gripping.
Is it a play on words?
Like, "we don't need to see to grasp", but obviously that isn't what you meant. We just don't need to if we saw it previously, and it hadn't moved.
EDIT: It does look like the video demonstrates this, including why you can't forgo vision (changing conditions, see 1m02s https://youtu.be/4MvGnmmP3c0?t=62)
I think the point GP is raising is that most of the robotic development in the past several decades has been on Motion Control and Perception through Visual Servoing.
Those are realistically the 'natural' developments in the domain knowledge of Robotics/Computer Science.
However, what GP (I think) is raising is the blind spot that robotics currently has on proprioception and tactile sensing at the end-effector as well as a along the kinematic chain.
As in you can accomplish this with just kinematic position and force feedback and Visual servoing. But if you think of any dexterous primate they will handle an object and perceive texture, compliance, brittleness etc in a much richer way then any state-of-the art robotic end-effector.
Unless you devote significant research to creating miniaturized sensors that give a robot an approximation of the information rich sources in human skin, connective tissue, muscle, joints (tactil sensors, tensile sensor, vibration sensors, Force sensors) that blind spot remains.
Ah, that's a really good point, thank you - makes me think of how little progress there's been in that domain, whether robots perceiving or tricking our perception.
For the inverse of the robot problem: younger me, spoiled by youth and thinking multitouch was the beginning of a drumbeat of steady revolution, distinctly thought we were a year or two out from having haptics that could "fake" the sensation of feeling a material.
I swear there was stuff to back this up...but I was probably just on a diet of unquestioning, and projecting, Apple blogs when the taptic engine was released, and they probably shared one-off research videos.
I'm convinced the best haptics that I use every day are the "clicks" on the Macbook trackpad. You can only tell they're not real because they don't work when it's beachballing.
Sorry, but I just burst out laughing at my own comment, when I considered the technical difficulties in trying to teach a robot to handle the change of context needed to balance on its hands, rather than its feet, let alone walk around on them. Ahaha.
This is lack of impulse response data, usually broken by motor control paradigms. I reread Cybernetic by Norbert Weiner recently and this is one of the fundamental insights he had. Once we go from Position/Velocity/Torque to encoder ticks, resolver ADCs, and PWM we will have proprioception as you expect. This also requires several orders of magnitude cycle time improvement and variable rate controllers.
I think this is correct, to an extent. But consider handling an egg while your arm is numb. It would be difficult.
But perhaps a great benefit of tactile input is its simplicity. Instead of processing thousands of pixels, which are passive to interference from changing light conditions, one only has to process perhaps a few dozen tactile inputs.
To me the part where the two robots clean the desk while the person is working would be a dream come true. This could easily increase my productivity by 100%.
Anyone else is just not interested in deepmind? They keep releasing "breakthrough" after "breakthrough" with zero code release. I just checked and I still can't do anything with alphaproof, almost a year later. They might as well tell me they solved world hunger, can stop aging and discovered a way to travel FTL.
They have a tendency to make impressive blog posts way, way before they can figure out how to make products. In the spirit of openness it's nice to know what they're working on, but yeah it's important to add a couple years to any availability estimation.
Google is probably the most undervalued tech company there is currently, by far:
1.) Has cutting edge in house AI models (Like OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, etc.)
2.) Has cutting edge in house AI hardware acceleration (Like Nvidia)
3.) Has (likely) cutting edge robotics (Like Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Figure)
4.) Has industry leading self driving taxis (Like Tesla wants)
5.) Has all the other stuff that Google does. (Like insert most tech companies)
The big thing that Google lacks is excitement and hype (Look at the comments for all their development showcases). They've lost their veneer, for totally understandable reasons, but that veneer is just dusty, the fundamentals of it are still top notch. They are still poised to dominate in what the current forecasted future looks like. The things that are tripping Google up are relatively easy fixes compared to something like a true tech disadvantage.
I'm not trying to shill despite how shill like this post objectively is. It's just an observation that Google has all the right players and really just needs better coaching. Something that isn't too difficult fix, and something shareholders will get eventually.
That's because normal people are supposed to use the Gemini chat interface, which has access to the same image generation model as ImageFX, and I'd imagine video is coming.
I still maintain the reason they're playing catch-up with everyone else wrt. LLMs is because their Gemini models were not available in the EU until recently. Back when they were doing their releases, years ago, like everyone else here I took one look, saw the "not available in your country" banner, and stopped caring at all.
This is all true, but at the end of the day, the shareholders care about return on value, and they get that from selling ads. All this amazing tech doesn't generate any revenue.
People said the same thing about Bell Labs and they were profoundly wrong.
There is nuance. Saying A about B and being wrong does not imply saying A about C means you're wrong. It is indeed possible to lose focus on revenue and die. But it is also possible to focus too much on revenue and die. It is unclear if Google will achieve anything from it's "pure research" investments, but certainly they have room to try, and I personally am glad they are doing so.
> People said the same thing about Bell Labs and they were profoundly wrong.
They were profoundly wrong, but not about Bell Labs' ability to create value from their research. That, they were absolutely dead-on about. AT&T and Bell Labs were absolutely awful at reading the room about what their technology could do and how it could be monetized.
Some of that was just packaging things the right way, and some of it - like charging absolutely insane license fees for UNIX in the 80s and 90s during the beginnings of the personal computing revolution - was because of lazy execs who didn't want to really put in any effort. Either way, I'm not using a Bell Labs LabsBook Pro to write code for a UNIX OS, and I'm not using Bellgle to search for information. AT&T ultimately thought the best way to create value from Bell Labs was to sell that division.
We're in a long, hot AI summer, but we've had winters too. Who knows which hemisphere they're in at Google right now.
Google make almost all their money from search, an extremely lucrative property, which is under threat from all the new ai players.
So while they have a bunch of cool tech on the possibility horizon the only thing the market cares about is the ability to make money and there's some uncertainty on that front.
On one hand, I agree with you, on the other, as a former Googler I think that "just needs better coaching" is a huge barrier in Google's current corporate culture and environment.
Google as a whole has a long history of not being able to successfully build great products out of great tech. That seems wrong from looking at search, Gmail, Maps*, Docs*, etc., but I think these are cases where a single great insight or innovation so dominated the rest of the product qualities that it made the product successful on it's own (PageRank, AJAX, realtime collaboration). There have been so many other cases where this pattern didn't hold, and even though Google had better tech, it wasn't so much better on one axis as to pull the whole product along with it.
That's the problem I see here. Maybe they have a better model. Can they make it a better product? OpenAI and Anthropic seem to ship faster, with a clearer vision, and more innovation with features around the model. Is their AI hardware acceleration really going to be a game changer if it's only ever available in-house?
I do believe in Waymo, but only because they've been incrementally investing and improving it for 15 years. They need to do that with all products, instead of giving up when they're not an instant hit.
*Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place, so I wonder how much they even count.
Yeah and even Gemini only seemed to come about because OpenAI forced their hand and gave them a product vision to follow. If OpenAI didn't exist I bet Google would still be fumbling over how to make a product out of transformers.
Even OpenAI wasn’t going to release ChatGPT because the product internally was that it wasn’t that good but with some obvious internal pressure we are where we are at now.
Only disagree with the last part of your footnote. YouTube was acquired with an underpants gnomes' business model: spend $$$$ on network traffic; ????; profit! The "key advantage" that enabled YouTube was dirt-cheap global networking. And I think that is the thread that ties together all of Google's products. They are the protobuf moving company, first and foremost. Even on AI one of their key advantages is the ability to reliably and rapidly start training, literally they have blogged about their cutting-edge protobuf tsunami capabilities.
This is a bad take. The business model is pretty clear: subsidized new line of business using the search revenu until it is so dominant that no competition is viable, only then heavily monetize it.
On the topic of better management, I can't believe they haven't replaced Sundar Pichai. Satya Nadella by comparison really seemed to have turned MS around.
Larry Page was making the rounds when all of this AI hype started. He seemed to have a much more aggressive stance, even ruffling feathers about how many hours Google employees should be working to compete in AI. And there is obviously Demis Hassabis who is the most likely contender for a replacement.
I doubt it is an easy position to fill. But Pichai has presided over this lackluster Google. Even if he isn't strictly to blame, I am surprised he hasn't be replaced.
Google (Alphabet's) stock price has generally gone up 200% in the past 5 years. That is the only reason he is there, and that is the only way he is judged.
Yes, that is fair and probably the accurate assessment. A bit like Tim Cook. He may not be innovative but Apple sure has been profitable.
I guess it is easy to view it from my own perspective, one tinged with a hope for invention and innovation. But the market probably loves the financial stability Pichai has brought to the table and doesn't care about the flaws I see.
And I 'm not sure why I have rose tinted glasses for Nadella. I believe MS has been doing well financially (not something I've studied) while also supporting things I believe are valuable (e.g. VS Code, GitHub, TypeScript). Maybe I just wish I felt the same kind of balance in Google.
I just saw an interview w/ Nadella where he said straight up: Open Source takes half of every market, and this will happen with AI.
That’s such a refreshing change from the “DIE OPEN SOURCE DIE” attitude that Gates/Ballmer had.
I also love GitHub, TypeScript, and VSCode. These have become the foundation of my development toolset. That was something Gates did well, and Ballmer gave lip service to (“developers! developers!”) but for me only recently has Microsoft actually been maintaining good quality developer tools again.
That’s where my goodwill comes from anyway.
Google makes a better Office Suite (Gmail, Docs, Maps), ironically. But it’s hard for me to get too excited about that. It’s been pretty stagnant for 10 years.
Imo this is just Tim Cook’s public image. By all accounts, comparing Sundar to him is just not fair.
Just off the top of my head, under Tim Cook the company managed to:
* Propel smartwatches as a brand new product category into the mainstream and be the leader in that category.
* Propel AirPods as a brand new product category into the mainstream (and be the leader in that category as well).
* Smoothly transition to ARM (aka Apple Silicon) with great success.
* Various behind the scenes logistical/supply-chain achievements (which makes sense, as Tim Cook is the logistics/supply-chain guy by specialization).
None of those things were simple or uncontroversial. In fact, I remember the pushback people and the press had against smartwatches and airpods, calling Apple washed out and Tim Cook a bean-counter. And these are just the largest examples off the top of my head, there are definitely more. However, Google doesn’t seem to have even a singular product win of such magnitude in the past 10 years.
In the meantime, what did Google do productwise? Catching up on the cloud compute game to AWS (while nearly killing it due to their PR nightmare announcements during 2019-2020 iirc), killing their chat app that finally managed to gain enough mainstream traction (Hangouts) and then rebranding/recreating it at least twice since then, redoing their payments app multiple times (gWallet vs gPay vs whatever else there was that I forgot), etc.
I am trying to be generous here, and of course Apple had their misses too (the butterfly keyboard on 2016-2019 intel macbooks, homepod is kinda up in the air as a product category, mac pro stagnating, etc.). But I legitimately cannot think of a single consumer product that Google knocked out of the park or any that wowed me.
This sucks, because I know for a fact it has nothing to do with their engineers lacking the skill to execute on a new innovative product (as evident by Google being early to the AI/transformers era and being fundamental to what is happening with AI right now). Google has all the technical prerequisites to succeed. But the product and organizational strategies there are by far the most cartoonishly bad I’ve ever seen for such a company.
I don’t want to blame it on Sundar, because I cannot say for sure that the root of this dysfunction is at his level. I just know it is on some level between org directors and Sundar, but not where exactly. I just know that killing off a whole org working on a truly innovative AR org/product, only for most of those people to switch to Meta and continue working on an improved version of the exact same thing (the Orion glasses) wasn’t the move. And I just know that having 5+ major reorgs in one year for a single team is not normal or good.
TLDR: apologies for the long rant, but the short version is that Google under Sundar has absolutely zero sense for internal organization management or delivering products to consumers. And comparing him to Tim Cook (who has been the CEO through the AirPods/Apple Watch/ARM macbooks era) is unfair to Tim Cook and is based purely on the public image.
Because we are talking about what product wins they had. Apple Car was never officially announced, and Vision Pro is clearly their experimental/devkit sort of a product.
Vision Pro might succeed or fail, and that’s fine. I tried it, and it is clearly a significant step towards the future, but I am not sure of it becoming a successful product at its current price point and in its current state.
I am not judging CEOs or companies negatively for taking ambitious product bets and not always striking gold on those bets. I am judging them negatively for not having any product wins and not taking any ambitious product bets.
Exactly. If the founders (who still have majority voting control) or board wanted an innovator they wouldn't have picked Sundar in the first place. His job is bean counting and increasing profits, and he is doing that brilliantly.
But why does that matter to Google? They'll never need to issue more stock to raise cash; last year they had $200 billion in gross profit, money they literally didn't find a reason to spend.
Imagine being so replete with cash that after paying all your costs, all your salaries, all your R&D - you still can't find a way to spend 200 billion, so you threw a chunk of it away as tax and put the rest in the bank.
The price of a share should be utterly irrelevant to them.
Take chat, one of Google's biggest fumbles. They had a good thing with Gtalk. Really screwed things up with Hangouts (thanks, Vic!), added the weird Allo to the mix, almost turned things around, and then brought in Chat to compete with Slack as opposed to AIM...WhatsApp.
If they had just incrementally invested in chat, even if they swapped out back ends, they could have kept most of their user base, maybe even have grown it. Gchat was pretty popular, even during the rise of Facebook Messenger.
But they screwed around with the public-visible product side of things too much, and revealed their tech stack and org chart as product changes. There was no product-first, continuity-oriented planning.
The main problem with chat is that there are too many angles to communication, making it impossible to fulfil all requirements with a single tool. Apple does IM, period, they don’t want any of the Slack-type team communications and that's fine for them. Even Facebook realised that having multiple chat apps is fine as long as they offer value on their own. Meanwhile, Google has gone through several iterations, with internal groups competing for the top spot in defining what a chat app should be, but ultimately falling short because there's no single chat app for all requirements. They aimed too close to the average and failed to deliver anything useful enough for any specific group.
Or we need to break it up. The ai search team should not be afraid of killing the traditional search engine.
Many of the decisions companies make are to ensure the cow they are currently milking very efficiently does not die. This is bad for the rest of us, specially if they place barriers to innovation.
You couldn't break up the AI search engine and the traditional search engine. They're basically one and the same. The AI search engine relies on the index. The index uses AI in various places. The "traditional" side has long used AI for query understanding, ranking, and fact extraction.
Legislators don’t (and should not) care about your implementation. The old company will be banned from using ai for their search for x years the new company will get employees and assets including source code to startup the new entity.
Google needs to be broken up. The DOJ / FTC want to do it.
There's far too much value and scale in the company and they can't even focus their energies appropriately.
YouTube is the most valuable media property in the world. As a standalone company, it would still outperform Netflix on the basis of ads alone.
The monopolistic stuff Google is pulling off with Chrome/Android/Search is unfathomably market distorting, so those business units alone could/should be pulled apart. The tech sector would probably be better off if YouTube, Waymo, and GCP/AI efforts were similarly split up.
Maybe, but IMO the DOJ's current proposal would be harmful for users and the web. Chrome is not worth as much to anyone else what it is to Google. And with Google barred from paying for default search engine placement, all browser investment everywhere will be severely cut back. Mozilla will probably finally fall, Safari will stagnate, and Chrome will rot.
Apple would no longer get $20 billion from Google for default search engine placement. Microsoft... and DDG or Yandex? might pay some, but nothing like that with the biggest bidder off the table. Safari funding would _definitely_ take a huge hit.
I don't think we know how much google pays for it right now. That 20B figure is from 2022. Also, that payment is mainly for iOS's Safari. Google would still pay Apple for search engine placement on iOS even if Apple stopped updating Safari today. What I'm poorly trying to say: I don't think safari development funding related to how much it brings in.
Also there is MS that wants to pay for search engine placement and it's fact.
As a consumer I don't have any great desire to see it broken up. Youtube has worked well for me for years. If they spun it off it would probably get way more aggressive in trying to extract money and sell data.
Waymo clearly stands out as an exception amongst all moonshots that Google went after. However, they don't seem to have that one axis advantage in Waymo. I can't believe they didn't double, triple down on their efforts to build a fully integrated car. Compared to Apple, they were at a much better position to do this because of all the underlying tech/models and research.
May be that's the problem - that there is no one rallying individual for Waymo. They should just spin it off and make it an independent private company and retain % ownership.
I somehow feel Google will be way better if it's run like Berkshire, the CEO just focuses on capital allocation and let's the managers do their jobs in their respective companies - YT, Waymo, search, cloud, deepmind.
I'm not sure that culture can dissipate in Google at this juncture.
> *Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place.
I don’t think the same logic applies to Google Docs as it does to YouTube. The original companies behind Docs, Sheets, and Slides were practically unknown, and Google deserves credit for their evolution, features, and clear vision. Developing an office suite might be “easier” from a vision standpoint since the category already exists, whereas marketing something like Gemini Robotics is an entirely different challenge. Just my two cents.
I think you might be on to something. I heard Google Gemini has a best in class system for depicting historical figures accurately, it is extraordinarily unphased by “modern audience” political bias.
Sounds like Xerox, they had cutting edge everything in the 70s, did nothing with it. Or AT&T, with Bell Labs inventing Unix. Or Kodak inventing the portable digital camera in 1975.
really? just unsubscribed OpenAI today, was one of the first to subscribe, now it lost all its edge to me, so many options elsewhere, paid or free to use.
OpenAI is fading away fast. Plus all major leaders left, Microsoft is leaving too, I don't feel its future is promising anymore.
That's fair. I would argue that OpenAI capitalized on transformer tech in a way that Google was late to do, but we shall see if Google will adapt faster than Xerox could
As anecdata, I would offer that the conversations I've had with ChatGPT over these couple of years have been incredible for me. Even just for relieving loneliness, it's been worth the monthly subscription a few times over.
Maybe the company and their business model are doomed to fail, but I'm grateful for what they enabled so far.
that's true, there are just many options these days and I think OpenAI was not keeping its team together and innovating fast enough. the first-move advantage is disappearing quickly.
I’ve seen too much inaccurate info from AI to have any trust in it. From declaring the Eiffel Tower the world’s largest Ferris wheel to claiming that hippos can be trained to perform complex medical procedures, it all seems a hot mess.
You might say, yeah, but I can spot those mistakes, but can you really? I showed my fifth-grade son the result of asking if hippos were intelligent and the absurdity of the answer didn’t leap out at him. Now, consider something that’s more subtly wrong like an invented precedent in an AI-generated legal brief or a non-existent citation or citation that doesn’t support the claim and it’s all a disaster.
If you connect ChatGPT to a traditional search engine, it will suffer much less such issues. It essentially digests 100 webpages for you, then render it in a single answer.
For sure, hallucinations will always be there, but I don't think it will hinder its take over, the usage trumps its shortcomings
Yesterday I tried asking ChatGPT "Can an Amazon L6 software engineer afford a house in [location]", without explicitly using the search mode. It went to levels.fyi to look up salary and redfin to look up housing price (exactly how I would have done it myself), and gave me a reasonable answer that agrees with my own analysis, and is definitely much faster than clicking things around myself.
I used to think that the multidirectional aspect of GPT would be a killer feature. But really it's too flaky which remove the initial alleged value. And then results are too artificial or wildly too "imaginary", even asking to compile a list of books on a medical topic you'd get half false titles. Sadly.
Agreed. Google isn't aggressive enough to productize many of their ideas and their existing products feel like they're developed by N different companies with no unified experience.
Names stick, it’s as simple as that. In most practical situations (such as this discussion), the distinction between Google and Alphabet doesn’t matter.
I once tried to rebrand an in-house, purely dev facing product. I failed.
It hired a project manager to be the CEO, who has zero charisma comparing to other big companies(Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI,Oracle,AMD, Apple, etc), that made the company "boring"
Confusing "having the tech" with "having product-market fit" is huge here. If the company was so undervalued they wouldn't try juicing their search profits at the cost of enshitiffying their product.
> Google lacks is excitement and hype
People(me) used to look up to Google and the projects they had. 80/20 work/project time, moonshot projects, all the google perks, etc. It felt like the place to be. Fast forward 10 years, I just want antitrust to shatter it into smithereens.
> that veneer is just dusty
The problem is systematic, affecting the whole org from top to bottom and especially the top. They either get a new CEO that turns things around or become another IBM.
Google also has a shit reputation for privacy, a terrible (or worse) reputation for customer safety or resolution of issues, and all of that on top of psychopathic executives.
All of the technology in the world doesn't make up for that.
I agree with you, but even though OpenAI is much lower in my esteem than Google, I would give OpenAI slightly better scores in general on productization. In the last day I have played with Gemini functionality (see https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs) that I have not tried before, and I also played with OpenAI's just released openai-agents-python library. OpenAI's examples seemed a little easier to play with; that said Gemini product manager Jason Stephen reached out to me yesterday on social media in a very helpful way after I commented on Gemini's code execution sandbox.
On other similar products like Google's NotebookLLM and Open AI's GPT 4.5 Research Mode: both products are awesome.
>Google is probably the most undervalued tech company there is currently, by far: [reasons]
The only thing you left out of this analysis is their valuation. The market values Google at $2.05T (just over $2,000,000,000,000) which is 21 times their earnings (net profit). They are valued at $250 per person on Earth while selling, annually, $43.75 per person on Earth (sales) of which $12 per person is their profit.
How much would you pay to own a golden goose laying $12 in gold per year? Like, $250? If so you are the proud buyer of Google right now. (There is a buyer on every sale of every stock and this is the price they are paying right now.)
If the goose is likely to live for significantly longer than 20 years and has potential to lay $15 or $20 in the future then yes I'd probably buy that goose for $250. Of course there's risk with it (eg. Google might significantly lose business to competitors) but that's why you diversify. A PE of 20 for a mature company like Google isn't crazy. Even Coca Cola has a high PE at 28.
An alternative viewpoint is the consideration of the P/E of all of the Mag 7. These numbers might be slightly off since there's been a lot of market movement lately, but...
Apple (AAPL): 34.07
Microsoft (MSFT): 35.07
Amazon (AMZN): 36.69
Alphabet (GOOGL): 21.82
Meta Platforms (META): 24.49
Nvidia (NVDA): 41.33
Tesla (TSLA): 87.87
from this perspective Google, and to a lesser extent Meta, stand out as being valued quite conservatively.
Do I think Microsoft is performing 50% better than Google? Not really, no.
Sounds like Xerox. They have everything, some employees will become multi-billionaires within 10 yrs after they leave the company and create their own startup. But I have zero conviction this corporate moloch will be the one to productize any of it.
I think OP is suggesting that because Alphabet purchased Boston Dynamics in 2013, and then sold in 2017, that they were able to take their learnings from the acquisition and integrate it in-house, but haven't shown the world the extent of their capabilities. Potentially supported by the Gemini Robotics announcement highlighting extremely dexterous robots.
It's somewhat debatable based on lack of results that have made it to market.
In addition to the other comment mentioning Boston Dynamics, they are also the employers of a lot of folks that were formerly at the Open Source Robotics Foundation(?) (OSRF) (it's more complicated than that) which is behind the ROS1/ROS2 framework that are widely (not universally) used; They also have an internal division or whatever, Intrinsic Robotics (or is it Intrinsic AI? too lazy to check). Plenty of smart people that I've met are involved there!
But I remain skeptical of the top level comment's take, given the lack of any robotics product execution of note by Google for a very long time now.
Discussing with a coworker yesterday, they also pointed out the distinction I'd missed, which is that there are separate robotics groups doing research (Gemini) and applied work (Intrinsic? physicalintelligence.company; these are under the Alphabet or X projects umbrella, I infer? Really haven't paid attention.)
This is the biggest cloud looming over Google right now, for sure. The stock will have a lot of interested buyers the moment this issue is resolved and evaluated.
Their AI strategy is just baffling. It lacks direction and vision.
They have a thinking model way back ago, which is pretty good with clean CoT and good performance close to R1. But it never gets any marketing whatever.
Veo2 has really good performance too, yet it is so slow in its rollout now Chinese competitors are getting all attentions because it is just easier to access.
It feels to me that Google is reliving its experience with messengers where you they have multiple competing roadmaps from different parties. The execution is disoriented and slow.
They will have to catch up in 2025, the fact grok is this good in one year is a wake up call to everyone, especially Google.
If they failed to do so, Gemini is going nowhere, it already has no tractions outside of Google, nobody’s first instinct when it comes to AI is Gemini
I think its 2 things, but Google is big and slow but also they do not need to monetize the models like OAI. If they believe models get commoditized (Meta's plan), heavy investment is wasteful. AI summaries keeping Search strong and people using the Google bar instead of chatgpt is probably their priority.
They have Gemini and rolled out AI in Workspace and I believe they still have the most capability million token model
I don’t think it is do not need to, it is mainly they can’t at this moment. None of their LLMs are better than competitors, then it is not monetizable.
ChatGPT is already top 5 websites people visit, it is behind Google, but it will eat into its business very soon. That will happen regardless.
The Transformer LLM came from Google's NLP research and input method(phone keyboard) development. Prompt processing and next word prediction is exactly what CJK keyboard software always did for past 30+ years, only datacenter sized now.
Doesn't ring a bell that very few, if any, of "AGI achieved" people seem to have backgrounds with or exposures to either classical NLP, or Google, and/or cultures that make heavy use of IME? To me the situation looked like that Googlers "have seen that trick" previously, and are doing bare minimum to defend the company from losing presence in this AGI hype storm.
> Their AI strategy is just baffling. It lacks direction and vision
It's an artifact of their size -- no large corporation has vision or direction. Best they can aspire to is "stay the course". It's just something that inevitably happens as companies grow and age.
And yet I worked on a Google X robotics project which was later canceled and doesn’t even appear in this announcement despite those machines notionally going to Google brain for research purposes. They have a very hard time capturing value with any innovations that aren’t ads.
Google had a revenue of $348 billion in 2024. For a new product to generate 1% more revenue, it needs to generate $3.48 billion annually.
Even extraordinary products are rarely going to do that. Their AI products could be a huge success, and still not significantly change how valuable the company is.
Following up on the Factorio metaphor from the other thread, the bigger your factory is, the more difficult it is to change it to get to the next organization level needed for long-term success.
Imagine working there : you could create the best thing you always dreamed of... but you know they will cover it in ads and violate every ones privacy, and sell it to isreal to kill, then use your hard work to create an AI to replace you and fire you.
Your assumptions are actually not correct. They are behind in many AI areas. Their LLM models for example are not in the same level as the frontier models. The main reason Flash 2.0 is so popular is that it's good enough for most things and is 30 times cheaper from Sonnet 3.7 for example.
They definitely have pricing power and also a large stake in Anthropic, so I'm not worried about them.
My experience there was that good tech was held back by an inability to have a consistent long term vision. My and many of my friends were on lots of projects that would get abruptly "reprioritized", often after yet another re-org. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what the solution is but it didn't give me confidence in their ability to execute on a long term vision, it was very demoralizing and my work ended up feeling sorta pointless (which having talked to someone recently about the state of the projects I worked on it sorta was pointless). Though that being said it's a big company so it's very possible that other orgs will execute more effectively.
Google had really great products, that almost everyone I knew used, then they scrapped them for new shiny thing that competed. The one that angers me most is Google Talk, it used to work with any XMPP client, until it did not, and now its long since dead. They made their own version of tinychat (hangouts) and then mostly killed that too.
Obligatory overview of things Google has killed, because its easy to forget some of the gems:
I think if they make a product, they should support it long-term (within reason of course). Hangouts was great, for example. It could do SMS, voice and video calls, and regular web-based text chat. It was everything you need from a messaging client, all in one app. It was so close to being a real iMessage/FaceTime competitor, but instead they killed it and launched Allo/Duo instead, which was an incredibly baffling decision.
Sure it could've used a bit of a facelift and some other tweaks, but they have a history of launching new, half-baked products instead of just maintaining the existing ones.
I think GTalk being spun off into its own thing might have seen Google Talk succeed beyond whatever Hangouts became. Google Talk had a native client plus it had native clients that supported its protocol.
I even messaged from my GTalk to my Facebook as a test, which worked because both were Jabber. Both companies closed both services off to anyone else. Sadly.
And I think this is the problem. They have all the necessary pieces and are not yet very successful at stitching them together. Google has a very strong foundation and execution skills but failed to effectively govern it.
Not sure if this is "vision" or "management" or whatever, it feels like that they're just self shackling in every single possible direction. There are something like 50 different teams involved at a major launch and they make some process/infra requirement/review/integration or whatever, from good will. Imagine how much time, effort and compromises you would need to appease all of them.
I think the recent memo from Sergey shows that the leadership finally acknowledges this problem at heart. But solving it is a different story of course. But a long time disconnection between IC, managements and leadership has been the culprit of this problem and at least some awareness might not hurt.
I disagree. As a former googler, that company has never had a problem creating IP.
It has a problem executing on that tech to create great products. It has a real problem with canning any project that doesn't have a billion users within a year.
Honestly they fail to understand how lucky they got with doubleclick and culturally the entire project evaluation criteria is based around the assumption that they can do another computer science rain dance to make it rain ads-level cash.
This is interesting because I think the opposite. What is amazing about Google seems to be their incredible ability to squander their lead in absolutely every area.
Maps used to be the absolute best and now I frequently get baffling driving directions in a US major metro area. No improvements within the last 10 years. New pixel phones are worse than latest Samsung. Some huge lead in AI absolutely totaled, their investment in anthropic their only hope. Inference HW accelerators that noone uses.
They are becoming like M$ - I expect M$ to be this terrible at product development - but at least M$ is fantastic at making money despite terrible products.
Google has allowed search experience to slide so much people would rather use some slow-ass unreliable chatbot. Are they really losing the war on SEO or have they decided that the internet-of-shit (i.e. affiliate marketing) is more valuable?
Maps are still pretty good. I use street view and the reviews and opening hours a lot. Which competitor can I use for that? I think the driving directions may have got messed up by merging with Waze.
Yes, the reviews are still very good, but I think this is more due to users (as a 6-point local guide myself) and less due to google.
I am seeing bot-generated reviews more and more often, and when I look at what happened to search, I don't have a lot of faith in google to do a better job with maps. But I sure hope they do, because I'm with you - I really do rely on maps reviews.
Google has massive technological assets, but as an organization it has shown repeatedly that it is completely unable to leverage pretty much any of it as a viable business.
On the tech side they are excellent, but on the management/business/corporate culture side they have repeatedly proven that they are much less competent than pretty much everyone else.
Fortunately for them, they have a very prolific cow to milk with their ads business, and that's where they get their valuation from, but there tech is legitimately undervalued because they have repeatedly shown that they don't know how to convert that into business.
I think they hired the wrong people for too long. At least this is my impression. (no, I did not apply).
Based on P/E the US stock market is overvalued. So I would be careful with "undervaluation". Most undervalued tech stocks are probably in China.
Google also lost a lot to LLM. I use perplexity now 50% of the time, where I would have used Google. I also read a lot of "degoogeling" and "going off Amazon". My impressions of both companies are not the best. I have a gmail account I never got access back, even with the right password. And Amazon defrauded me of 40 USD. Claimed in a chat that they would reimburse express shipment after they f. up but then did not and called it a "misunderstanding".
I have somewhere list of the most valuable companies. And it changed every decade. So, past performance is not a guarantee for future performance :-)
The Chinese stock market is still a crapshoot, so even if stocks are undervalued, if you don't have inside information you can't make much money beyond trying to ride the waves of those who do. So the undervaluing makes sense to a degree (the stock market can't operate very efficiently).
Chinese tech ETFs haven’t done very well, basically as anemic as emerging market funds are now (which are heavy into Chinese tech companies anyways). You aren’t making money with these right now, which might mean they are undervalued, but they seem to go boom the bust too quickly to be long term holds.
Well, they are of performing well, this means they might be bad or they might be undervalued. It was asked, what is undervalued? Not what did perform well (and might be overvalued).
Bust is unlikely with an ETF. They rebalance without you having to do anything. Most tech might come from China in the future.
It is at the same price it was at in 2019. You can't rebalance them because the techs all boom and bust together, there isn't any point. Still, if you think Chinese techs are going to take off big soon, now is a great time to get in (or at least as an emerging market hedge).
I think all those are basically true, but I still don’t see them actually dominating any space besides their “gross monopolist” categories - ads and their dominant Chrome and Android that enhances those ads. In everything else (look at GCP) they’re performing worse than their products merit.
I think what keeps Google up at night is knowing that their ads business which pays all of the bills could be upended by regulation or by disruptive consumer AI of some kind and they’d then have approximately nothing in terms of revenue.
They have due to circumstances a different business model to OpenAI, Claude, Grok etc.
Open-Claude-Grok: "our AI is so cool, AGI next year" but we are losing money so invest in us at a $crazy bn valuation
Google: We are swimming in money from ads so no need to hype anything. If anything saying we will dominate AI as well as search, email, video, ads, browsers, phones etc would just get us broken up. So advance quietly.
Agree. A majority of people on HN are in a startup mood so they feel a company should market aggressively to attract investments and expand. But I don't think Google would achieve more than marginal gain were they to aggressively make Gemini/Imagen/Veo available to Search/YouTube/Workspace users, and the cost could be terribly high.
Gemini has been one of the most cost-efficient models. Probably this is exactly what Google needs for productization.
Google is an Engineering company. What they're really bad at, in my opinion, is productizing their technology.
Google Cloud is decent, again in my opinion, because they can more or less copy the product vision from AWS and focus on the technical excellence.
When were you last excited to use a Google product or service?
Part of the problem is also their internal incentives that lead to lot's of products being retired waay too soon, leaving behind a lot of users and hurting their reputation a lot.
First of all if you are going to talk about valuation then that should be included here. And Google has always been terrible at developing and managing products. The list is too long to begin writing down. One funny example is the Pixel. I had a meeting with a slew of Google managers regarding mobile strategy (maps, reservations) and every single one of them had an iPhone. I doubt any of them ever even tried a Pixel. Same with the dozens (hundreds?) of software products that have died off or languished over the past 20 years.
> To further assess the societal implications of our work, we collaborate with experts in our Responsible Development and Innovation team and as well as our Responsibility and Safety Council, an internal review group committed to ensure we develop AI applications responsibly. We also consult with external specialists on particular challenges and opportunities presented by embodied AI in robotics applications.
Well, for now, at least.
I know who will be the first shown the door when the next round of layoffs comes: the guy saying "you can't make money that way."
I don't think this argument really matters. Consumer drones are being used in active warfare today, as we speak, with minimal modifications. The cat is out of the bag no matter which way you look at it. You could just as well say that many chemicals at the construction store are easily weaponizable, they make for an explosive and there's plenty of guides online on how to do so.
Even with access to explosives, you still need a bit of gusto to carry out the rest of the crime. I think it's a bit different when you can ask the weapon to find and eliminate its target without you ever having to leave your garage.
Not being a high profile target myself, I'd rather take that risk and see where it goes. Unfortunately it's the high profile targets themselves that make the decisions, so after the first few incidents I figure there will be this whole mess where they try to clamp down on access to such things without sufficient forethought.
it's about to reach that point soon actually. There is no reason these models can't be optimized/distilled. And actuators be cheaper (it's happening already).
I suspect that if a nuclear war brings humans to extinction tomorrow, this project could be looked at by hypothetical aliens, visiting our planet in the future, as the "Antikythera mechanism" of our times. (well.... if we can trust the video)
What's interesting is the vision language capability they have. Being able to verbally describe tasks and determine if a task was completed means they might be able to do self-play for a massive number of different tasks to improve motor skills.
I'd like to see more about what the Gemini system actually tells the robot. Eventually, it comes down to motor commands. It's not clear how they get there.
I think they call it Gemini while it is a voice activated robotic arm that is very well designed. I doubt this has anything to do with LLC other than communicating with the robotic software.
The problem with Google is that their ad business brings so much revenue that no other product makes sense. They will use whatever they learn with robots to raise their ad revenue, somehow.
Google uses their insane ad revenue to subsidize the Xerox Parc / Bell Labs of the current generation. Waymo, DeepMind, Gemini Robotics. They're killing it and leading the entire market.
It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too. Google has more money than God to throw around.
Google's ad dominance will probably never go away unless antitrust action by the FTC/DOJ/EU force a breakup. So they'll continue to lead as long as they can subsidize and outspend everyone else. Their investments compound and give an almost unassailable moat into deep tech problems.
Google might win AI and robotics and transportation and media and search 2.0. They'll own everything.
If Chatgpt replaces Google search then it will be effectively signing it's own death warrant.
ML models like chatGPT rely on the open web for training data, particularly for information about recent events. But models like chatGPT are horrible about linking to their sources. That means that sources that rely on ad revenue or even donations to exist will effectively disappear as chatGPT steals all of the traffic. With no cash flow, the sites with current data disappear. With no new training data, chatGPT stagnates.
ChatGPT is basically a parasite on the free and open web - taking content but not giving back.
Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now. They certainly won't dominate forever and have several signals flashing red for a few years now.
Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now
With a reasonable degree of success. In their last quarter (see https://abc.xyz/investor/earnings/) 25% of their revenue was non-ads, and that percentage has been consistently increasing.
That is much higher than I expected. Thank you to share the link. Can you imagine anyone saying "Media company XYZ has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now"? It makes no sense. To me, Google is like a post-film/TV/newspaper media company that, unsurprisingly, makes most of its money from adverts.
YouTube has bigger revenues than Netflix. While the majority of that revenue is from ads, they get it by providing immense value in the form of near-unlimited entertainment.
My bet is on transparent, contextual ads. Assuming the product from all of this is having a robot in your house, when you're doing something like cooking, it will say things like "have you considered trying an oat milk base? Oatly is a great option. I can Doordash some for you if you'd like..."
They’ll never make their money back. Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon.
Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the world paid for by Google ad revenue, startup investors, and later, auto companies.
I agree here, because the profit margin on taxi services is too low. Well, on an unrealistically long time horizon, like 50 years, they might make it back, but surely much worse returns that investing that same money into US Treasury bonds.
> Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
I disagree here. To be clear, when we talk about AI/ML here, I separate it into a few parts: (1) the code that does training, (2) the training data, (3) the resulting model weights, (4) the code that does the inference. As I understand, self driving uses a lot of inference. (Not an expert, but please correct me if wrong.)
How can Waymo's software be "commoditized very shortly after it works well" if competitors don't have (2) and (3)? The training data that Waymo has incredibly valuable. (Tesla and some Chinese car companies also have mountains of it.)
You point out yourself that Waymo doesn’t have a monopoly on training data. And the trained model is software, of which the price-to-use trends towards epsilon, even when it’s very expensive to make. For example Google search, maps, docs, YouTube. An exception is Netflix, but there the value provided by a subscription is access to novelty, which is not intrinsic to driving software.
Gcloud is a running business, and AI is a billable service in it. There's a strong incentive to branch out from 1 line of business, especially as AIe can replace regular Google search and the web browsing that shows Google ads.
Search is in real danger of mostly obsolescence. Ads aren't safe.
I love how everything is just "AI" now.
Machine Learning? AI
Random Forest models: AI
Some basic curve fitting? AI
People in India Mechanical Turk-ing responses ? AI.
A guy in a van running the robot pouring you a drink? AI.
Gemini was a solution looking for a problem. And whilst doing so, to keep up with the Joneses, they kept stepping in it along the way. To me, it seems Gemini is another service thats going to fall by the wayside.
Had they focused more on driving innovation and not profit/being relevant, they could have had another win instead of another Google+
Instead, we got African-German Nazi's.
i love these robots and all but it's still the world's most expensive paper folder. none of these are energy efficient enough for production or are ever going to be as profitable as a simpler automated process that misses some targets every now and then
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadedit: it didn't.
Don't need the robot to smash a grape when we can use a fake grape that won't smash.
This video reeks of the same shenanigans as perpetual motion machine videos.
1. A framework to control your phone using Gemini - https://github.com/BandarLabs/clickclickclick
How it's doing it is the impressive part.
Current arms and their workspaces are calibrated to mm. Here it's more messy.
Older algorithms are more brittle than having a model do it.
It's an impressive demo but perhaps you are misremembering Jarvis from Iron Man which is not only far faster but is effectively a full AGI system even at that point.
Sorry if this feels pedantic, perhaps it is. But it seems like an analogy that invites pedantry from fans of that movie.
Jarvis is AGI, yes, but is not what's being referred to here.
I understand that many people don't live in America and don't know how to use a coffee maker. That is 100% irrelevant. There is a frustrating tendency in AI circles to conflate domain knowledge with intelligence, in a way that invariably elevates AI and crushes human intelligence into something tiny.
[1] The hard part would be psychological (e.g. keeping the chimp focused), not cognitive. And of course the chimp would need to bring a chimp-sized ladder... It would be an unlawful experiment, but I suspect if you trained a chimp to use a specific coffee maker in another kitchen, forced the chimp to become addicted to coffee, and then put the animal in a totally different kitchen with a different coffee maker (but similar, i.e. not a French press), it figure would figure out what to do.
It also excludes corner cases like "what if they don’t have any filters"? Should the robot go tearing through the house till they find one, or do nothing? But what if there were some in the pantry — does that fail the test? There’s all kinds of implicit assumptions here that make it quite hard.
As for the point of corner cases being hard - I mean that's the point here, isn't it?
But sure, without proper compensation a lot of people would probably just say "I can't do it" as a way of avoiding the task.
Wasn't that easy?
Hope to share the details here soon.
As a matter of fact,they may very well end up being the last bastion.
(Also there seems to be some kind of video auto-play/pause/scroll thing going on with the page? Whatever it is, it's broken.)
Reference video (saw your clip is robot-only, but the robot vs human video is more telling):
https://youtu.be/x-exzZ-CIUw?feature=shared&t=65
The trick was in that the belt was too tight for an average human to put on with brute force, and disabling the tensioner or using tricks would require better than average mechanical skills their specially chosen 'random humans' lacked.
This is a great achievement and I'm not underestimating the work of the people involved. But similar videos have been put together by many research labs and startups for years now.
I feel like Google's a bit lost. And Sundai's leadership has not been good for this, if we're honest.
GOOG is around the same price as it was in 2022, which means the AI wave went by through them with zero effect. With other tech companies doubling/tripling their market cap during this time, Sundai really left 1 trillion of unrealized value on the table (!); also consider Google had all the cards at one point, quite mediocre imo.
You don't have to release a profitable product, but to compete over the next several decades you are going to need to own valuable land in remote territories where patent wars being fought today. I'm guessing Google's meta-strategy is a type of patent-colonialism.
I see, are you a VC in the valley?
Even after the massive total market correction in the last few weeks, the earliest that GOOG was the same price as today is not even a full year ago. In fact, it's up 90% since 2022.
Any stock market source would tell you GOOG was ~140 USD at the start of 2022. Today it is ~170 USD. A 20% increase over three years, about the same rate as inflation and S&P.
This is extremely trivial to verify. Was this written by a GPT bot?
It's just the up and down of the entire market (and these big techs dominate S&P 500). I don't think that actually indicates anything.
I guess my broken English doesn't match today's bot quality :)
Your initial comment didn't:
> > GOOG is around the same price as it was in 2022
That's the comment pb7 replied to by saying it's up 90% since 2022 (which is true, or even an underestimate, depending on where you measure from) and to which you responded calling them a bot because your own measurement, from the start of the year, gives a lower number.
cvhc is pointing out that it's the different choice of where to measure from that caused the difference in results - neither are incorrect.
I replied to @cvhc.
Sure, there’s almost nothing for you to buy from them right now from these efforts, except to the extent that it contributes behind the scenes to their ad business. That might be a problem for them, but not for the rest of us that benefit from the publications, software and services.
If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic changes implied by this technology are huge. Very little of our daily lives will be undisrupted when it propagates and saturates the culture, even with no further fundamental advances.
Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech?
"Will the security update finish before we're discovered and killed by the hunter seeker, stay tuned to find out more!"
It does such a good job building a convincing world, and its really good in just not going into details that it can't speak on (like how interplanetary travel works), while some of it's takes (e.g. small anti-personel drones) seem almost prescient after Ukraine.
All the synthetic biology and even the depictions of AIs and their struggles are really compelling, too.
I've also seen it suggested that Harry Potter might be a more realistic look at what proliferated AI might be like.
This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower stories in space, and it has never been seriously grounded in science. This isn't a criticism, exactly.
But if you look at, say, the award-winning science fiction of the 90s, for example you have A Fire Upon the Deep, the stories that were republished as Accelerando, the Culture novels, etc. All of these stories assume major improvements in AI and most of them involve breakneck rates of technological change.
But these stories have become less popular, because the authors generally thought through the implications of (for a example) AI that was sufficiently capable to maintain a starship. And the obvious conclusion is, why would AI stop at sweeping the corridors? Why not pilot the ship? Why not build the ships and give them orders? Why do people assume that technological progress conveniently stops right about the time the robots can mop the decks? Why doesn't that technology surpass and obsolete the humans entirely?
It turns that out that humans mostly want to read stories about other humans. Which is where many of the better SF authors have been focusing for a while now.
> Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.
> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
[1] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
Also I love the Zones of Thought series and The Culture.
Seeing drones do all the work unfortunately isn't very interesting though.
The sun is dying. A capable team is assembled and put into cryosleep in an automated ship for a journey to a neighboring star system to try to diagnose the problem. Only one member survives, and they have amnesia.
The novel does a great job of explaining the process of troubleshooting under pressure and with incomplete information.
Strong warning: Start with either book 2 (Player of Games) or book...7, Look to Windward.
I strongly suggest you skip book 1 until you're comfortable with the rest of the books that focus on the Culture itself, and not some weird offshoot story that barely involves the Culture.
Though I wouldn't recommend starting with any of the stories in the series. Or reading any at all. Find a summary or a Cliff's Notes instead. Iain M Banks has a talent for making great stories tedious.
It's pretty normal for it to take a few years to write a good book so I wouldn't look to science fiction to keep up to date on the latest tech hype train. This is probably a good thing because when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, those books would often end up looking very dated and laughably naive.
There's a lot of books about AGI already which is probably more fun to write about than what passes for AI right now. Still, I'm sure that eventually we'll see characters getting their email badly summarized in fiction too.
If you're open to Theory Fiction, you can read Nick Land. Even his early 1990s texts still feel futuristic. I think his views on the autonomization of AI, capital, and robots - and their convergence - are very interesting. [1]
[0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
[1] https://retrochronic.com/
This is just one of the side plots of the book, I think it could've been the whole plot of a book.
Tell me, which corporation exactly is kidnapping and drugging people to enslave them and then discard their bodies at sea to feed the capitalist global machine?
It seems like you have a big scoop if you are doing on the ground reporting, because that seems like it would be international news if it was real!
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-nov-12-2...
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/seafood-from-slaves/2015/...
My brother in Christ, ChatGPT blew up just 25 months ago. Give it time.
Has a cyborg/AI as protagonist and paints a really interesting world with AIs and synthetic biology in it. Also does a good job at just shutting up about things it can not talk about, like interplanetary travel.
Unironically, Wall-E. Humans leave earth behind on a ship where everything is automated.
This seems like it's rooted in reality.
Perhaps it goes beyond the brightest minds at Google that people can grasp things with their eyes closed. That we don't need to see to grasp. But designing good robots with tactile sensors is too much for our top researchers.
All the best ideas are tried repeatedly until the input technologies are ripe enough.
Ex-Googler so maybe I'm just spoiled by access to non-public information?
But I'm fairly sure there's plenty of public material of Google robots gripping.
Is it a play on words?
Like, "we don't need to see to grasp", but obviously that isn't what you meant. We just don't need to if we saw it previously, and it hadn't moved.
EDIT: It does look like the video demonstrates this, including why you can't forgo vision (changing conditions, see 1m02s https://youtu.be/4MvGnmmP3c0?t=62)
Those are realistically the 'natural' developments in the domain knowledge of Robotics/Computer Science.
However, what GP (I think) is raising is the blind spot that robotics currently has on proprioception and tactile sensing at the end-effector as well as a along the kinematic chain.
As in you can accomplish this with just kinematic position and force feedback and Visual servoing. But if you think of any dexterous primate they will handle an object and perceive texture, compliance, brittleness etc in a much richer way then any state-of-the art robotic end-effector.
Unless you devote significant research to creating miniaturized sensors that give a robot an approximation of the information rich sources in human skin, connective tissue, muscle, joints (tactil sensors, tensile sensor, vibration sensors, Force sensors) that blind spot remains.
For the inverse of the robot problem: younger me, spoiled by youth and thinking multitouch was the beginning of a drumbeat of steady revolution, distinctly thought we were a year or two out from having haptics that could "fake" the sensation of feeling a material.
I swear there was stuff to back this up...but I was probably just on a diet of unquestioning, and projecting, Apple blogs when the taptic engine was released, and they probably shared one-off research videos.
Blind people can grasp.
Stretch goal: small kids can walk on their hands.
Sorry, but I just burst out laughing at my own comment, when I considered the technical difficulties in trying to teach a robot to handle the change of context needed to balance on its hands, rather than its feet, let alone walk around on them. Ahaha.
But perhaps a great benefit of tactile input is its simplicity. Instead of processing thousands of pixels, which are passive to interference from changing light conditions, one only has to process perhaps a few dozen tactile inputs.
1.) Has cutting edge in house AI models (Like OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, etc.)
2.) Has cutting edge in house AI hardware acceleration (Like Nvidia)
3.) Has (likely) cutting edge robotics (Like Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Figure)
4.) Has industry leading self driving taxis (Like Tesla wants)
5.) Has all the other stuff that Google does. (Like insert most tech companies)
The big thing that Google lacks is excitement and hype (Look at the comments for all their development showcases). They've lost their veneer, for totally understandable reasons, but that veneer is just dusty, the fundamentals of it are still top notch. They are still poised to dominate in what the current forecasted future looks like. The things that are tripping Google up are relatively easy fixes compared to something like a true tech disadvantage.
I'm not trying to shill despite how shill like this post objectively is. It's just an observation that Google has all the right players and really just needs better coaching. Something that isn't too difficult fix, and something shareholders will get eventually.
That's why nobody knows about it.
> VideoFX isn't available in your country yet
Maybe that's why?
I still maintain the reason they're playing catch-up with everyone else wrt. LLMs is because their Gemini models were not available in the EU until recently. Back when they were doing their releases, years ago, like everyone else here I took one look, saw the "not available in your country" banner, and stopped caring at all.
There is nuance. Saying A about B and being wrong does not imply saying A about C means you're wrong. It is indeed possible to lose focus on revenue and die. But it is also possible to focus too much on revenue and die. It is unclear if Google will achieve anything from it's "pure research" investments, but certainly they have room to try, and I personally am glad they are doing so.
They were profoundly wrong, but not about Bell Labs' ability to create value from their research. That, they were absolutely dead-on about. AT&T and Bell Labs were absolutely awful at reading the room about what their technology could do and how it could be monetized.
Some of that was just packaging things the right way, and some of it - like charging absolutely insane license fees for UNIX in the 80s and 90s during the beginnings of the personal computing revolution - was because of lazy execs who didn't want to really put in any effort. Either way, I'm not using a Bell Labs LabsBook Pro to write code for a UNIX OS, and I'm not using Bellgle to search for information. AT&T ultimately thought the best way to create value from Bell Labs was to sell that division.
We're in a long, hot AI summer, but we've had winters too. Who knows which hemisphere they're in at Google right now.
So while they have a bunch of cool tech on the possibility horizon the only thing the market cares about is the ability to make money and there's some uncertainty on that front.
Google as a whole has a long history of not being able to successfully build great products out of great tech. That seems wrong from looking at search, Gmail, Maps*, Docs*, etc., but I think these are cases where a single great insight or innovation so dominated the rest of the product qualities that it made the product successful on it's own (PageRank, AJAX, realtime collaboration). There have been so many other cases where this pattern didn't hold, and even though Google had better tech, it wasn't so much better on one axis as to pull the whole product along with it.
That's the problem I see here. Maybe they have a better model. Can they make it a better product? OpenAI and Anthropic seem to ship faster, with a clearer vision, and more innovation with features around the model. Is their AI hardware acceleration really going to be a game changer if it's only ever available in-house?
I do believe in Waymo, but only because they've been incrementally investing and improving it for 15 years. They need to do that with all products, instead of giving up when they're not an instant hit.
*Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place, so I wonder how much they even count.
> they have blogged about their cutting-edge protobuf tsunami capabilities.
Not sure if you recall the blog post url or title, but I'm curious to read more.
Do you have a link to this?
A better management with long term thinking would utilize Google's enormous base of talented engineers far better.
[1]https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46
Larry Page was making the rounds when all of this AI hype started. He seemed to have a much more aggressive stance, even ruffling feathers about how many hours Google employees should be working to compete in AI. And there is obviously Demis Hassabis who is the most likely contender for a replacement.
I doubt it is an easy position to fill. But Pichai has presided over this lackluster Google. Even if he isn't strictly to blame, I am surprised he hasn't be replaced.
I guess it is easy to view it from my own perspective, one tinged with a hope for invention and innovation. But the market probably loves the financial stability Pichai has brought to the table and doesn't care about the flaws I see.
And I 'm not sure why I have rose tinted glasses for Nadella. I believe MS has been doing well financially (not something I've studied) while also supporting things I believe are valuable (e.g. VS Code, GitHub, TypeScript). Maybe I just wish I felt the same kind of balance in Google.
That’s such a refreshing change from the “DIE OPEN SOURCE DIE” attitude that Gates/Ballmer had.
I also love GitHub, TypeScript, and VSCode. These have become the foundation of my development toolset. That was something Gates did well, and Ballmer gave lip service to (“developers! developers!”) but for me only recently has Microsoft actually been maintaining good quality developer tools again.
That’s where my goodwill comes from anyway.
Google makes a better Office Suite (Gmail, Docs, Maps), ironically. But it’s hard for me to get too excited about that. It’s been pretty stagnant for 10 years.
Just off the top of my head, under Tim Cook the company managed to:
* Propel smartwatches as a brand new product category into the mainstream and be the leader in that category.
* Propel AirPods as a brand new product category into the mainstream (and be the leader in that category as well).
* Smoothly transition to ARM (aka Apple Silicon) with great success.
* Various behind the scenes logistical/supply-chain achievements (which makes sense, as Tim Cook is the logistics/supply-chain guy by specialization).
None of those things were simple or uncontroversial. In fact, I remember the pushback people and the press had against smartwatches and airpods, calling Apple washed out and Tim Cook a bean-counter. And these are just the largest examples off the top of my head, there are definitely more. However, Google doesn’t seem to have even a singular product win of such magnitude in the past 10 years.
In the meantime, what did Google do productwise? Catching up on the cloud compute game to AWS (while nearly killing it due to their PR nightmare announcements during 2019-2020 iirc), killing their chat app that finally managed to gain enough mainstream traction (Hangouts) and then rebranding/recreating it at least twice since then, redoing their payments app multiple times (gWallet vs gPay vs whatever else there was that I forgot), etc.
I am trying to be generous here, and of course Apple had their misses too (the butterfly keyboard on 2016-2019 intel macbooks, homepod is kinda up in the air as a product category, mac pro stagnating, etc.). But I legitimately cannot think of a single consumer product that Google knocked out of the park or any that wowed me.
This sucks, because I know for a fact it has nothing to do with their engineers lacking the skill to execute on a new innovative product (as evident by Google being early to the AI/transformers era and being fundamental to what is happening with AI right now). Google has all the technical prerequisites to succeed. But the product and organizational strategies there are by far the most cartoonishly bad I’ve ever seen for such a company.
I don’t want to blame it on Sundar, because I cannot say for sure that the root of this dysfunction is at his level. I just know it is on some level between org directors and Sundar, but not where exactly. I just know that killing off a whole org working on a truly innovative AR org/product, only for most of those people to switch to Meta and continue working on an improved version of the exact same thing (the Orion glasses) wasn’t the move. And I just know that having 5+ major reorgs in one year for a single team is not normal or good.
TLDR: apologies for the long rant, but the short version is that Google under Sundar has absolutely zero sense for internal organization management or delivering products to consumers. And comparing him to Tim Cook (who has been the CEO through the AirPods/Apple Watch/ARM macbooks era) is unfair to Tim Cook and is based purely on the public image.
Vision Pro might succeed or fail, and that’s fine. I tried it, and it is clearly a significant step towards the future, but I am not sure of it becoming a successful product at its current price point and in its current state.
I am not judging CEOs or companies negatively for taking ambitious product bets and not always striking gold on those bets. I am judging them negatively for not having any product wins and not taking any ambitious product bets.
Imagine being so replete with cash that after paying all your costs, all your salaries, all your R&D - you still can't find a way to spend 200 billion, so you threw a chunk of it away as tax and put the rest in the bank.
The price of a share should be utterly irrelevant to them.
Take chat, one of Google's biggest fumbles. They had a good thing with Gtalk. Really screwed things up with Hangouts (thanks, Vic!), added the weird Allo to the mix, almost turned things around, and then brought in Chat to compete with Slack as opposed to AIM...WhatsApp.
If they had just incrementally invested in chat, even if they swapped out back ends, they could have kept most of their user base, maybe even have grown it. Gchat was pretty popular, even during the rise of Facebook Messenger.
But they screwed around with the public-visible product side of things too much, and revealed their tech stack and org chart as product changes. There was no product-first, continuity-oriented planning.
Many of the decisions companies make are to ensure the cow they are currently milking very efficiently does not die. This is bad for the rest of us, specially if they place barriers to innovation.
There's far too much value and scale in the company and they can't even focus their energies appropriately.
YouTube is the most valuable media property in the world. As a standalone company, it would still outperform Netflix on the basis of ads alone.
The monopolistic stuff Google is pulling off with Chrome/Android/Search is unfathomably market distorting, so those business units alone could/should be pulled apart. The tech sector would probably be better off if YouTube, Waymo, and GCP/AI efforts were similarly split up.
Also there is MS that wants to pay for search engine placement and it's fact.
They'd just have to watch out for similar antitrust action.
May be that's the problem - that there is no one rallying individual for Waymo. They should just spin it off and make it an independent private company and retain % ownership.
I somehow feel Google will be way better if it's run like Berkshire, the CEO just focuses on capital allocation and let's the managers do their jobs in their respective companies - YT, Waymo, search, cloud, deepmind.
I'm not sure that culture can dissipate in Google at this juncture.
Waymo is all about partnerships with carmakers.
I don’t think the same logic applies to Google Docs as it does to YouTube. The original companies behind Docs, Sheets, and Slides were practically unknown, and Google deserves credit for their evolution, features, and clear vision. Developing an office suite might be “easier” from a vision standpoint since the category already exists, whereas marketing something like Gemini Robotics is an entirely different challenge. Just my two cents.
OpenAI is fading away fast. Plus all major leaders left, Microsoft is leaving too, I don't feel its future is promising anymore.
Maybe the company and their business model are doomed to fail, but I'm grateful for what they enabled so far.
It won’t go anywhere, Windows is still a thing.
But ChaGPT is a fundamental threat to its search business. It replaces Google for me 50% of the time.
It is the natural language search engine people tried to build
You might say, yeah, but I can spot those mistakes, but can you really? I showed my fifth-grade son the result of asking if hippos were intelligent and the absurdity of the answer didn’t leap out at him. Now, consider something that’s more subtly wrong like an invented precedent in an AI-generated legal brief or a non-existent citation or citation that doesn’t support the claim and it’s all a disaster.
For sure, hallucinations will always be there, but I don't think it will hinder its take over, the usage trumps its shortcomings
Yesterday I tried asking ChatGPT "Can an Amazon L6 software engineer afford a house in [location]", without explicitly using the search mode. It went to levels.fyi to look up salary and redfin to look up housing price (exactly how I would have done it myself), and gave me a reasonable answer that agrees with my own analysis, and is definitely much faster than clicking things around myself.
They foster the confusion themselves.
I once tried to rebrand an in-house, purely dev facing product. I failed.
> Google lacks is excitement and hype
People(me) used to look up to Google and the projects they had. 80/20 work/project time, moonshot projects, all the google perks, etc. It felt like the place to be. Fast forward 10 years, I just want antitrust to shatter it into smithereens.
> that veneer is just dusty
The problem is systematic, affecting the whole org from top to bottom and especially the top. They either get a new CEO that turns things around or become another IBM.
All of the technology in the world doesn't make up for that.
They are a roadblock to a lot of the startups backing the current administration
On other similar products like Google's NotebookLLM and Open AI's GPT 4.5 Research Mode: both products are awesome.
The only thing you left out of this analysis is their valuation. The market values Google at $2.05T (just over $2,000,000,000,000) which is 21 times their earnings (net profit). They are valued at $250 per person on Earth while selling, annually, $43.75 per person on Earth (sales) of which $12 per person is their profit.
How much would you pay to own a golden goose laying $12 in gold per year? Like, $250? If so you are the proud buyer of Google right now. (There is a buyer on every sale of every stock and this is the price they are paying right now.)
Apple (AAPL): 34.07
Microsoft (MSFT): 35.07
Amazon (AMZN): 36.69
Alphabet (GOOGL): 21.82
Meta Platforms (META): 24.49
Nvidia (NVDA): 41.33
Tesla (TSLA): 87.87
from this perspective Google, and to a lesser extent Meta, stand out as being valued quite conservatively.
Do I think Microsoft is performing 50% better than Google? Not really, no.
In addition to the other comment mentioning Boston Dynamics, they are also the employers of a lot of folks that were formerly at the Open Source Robotics Foundation(?) (OSRF) (it's more complicated than that) which is behind the ROS1/ROS2 framework that are widely (not universally) used; They also have an internal division or whatever, Intrinsic Robotics (or is it Intrinsic AI? too lazy to check). Plenty of smart people that I've met are involved there!
But I remain skeptical of the top level comment's take, given the lack of any robotics product execution of note by Google for a very long time now.
Discussing with a coworker yesterday, they also pointed out the distinction I'd missed, which is that there are separate robotics groups doing research (Gemini) and applied work (Intrinsic? physicalintelligence.company; these are under the Alphabet or X projects umbrella, I infer? Really haven't paid attention.)
They have a thinking model way back ago, which is pretty good with clean CoT and good performance close to R1. But it never gets any marketing whatever.
Veo2 has really good performance too, yet it is so slow in its rollout now Chinese competitors are getting all attentions because it is just easier to access.
It feels to me that Google is reliving its experience with messengers where you they have multiple competing roadmaps from different parties. The execution is disoriented and slow.
They will have to catch up in 2025, the fact grok is this good in one year is a wake up call to everyone, especially Google.
If they failed to do so, Gemini is going nowhere, it already has no tractions outside of Google, nobody’s first instinct when it comes to AI is Gemini
They have Gemini and rolled out AI in Workspace and I believe they still have the most capability million token model
ChatGPT is already top 5 websites people visit, it is behind Google, but it will eat into its business very soon. That will happen regardless.
Doesn't ring a bell that very few, if any, of "AGI achieved" people seem to have backgrounds with or exposures to either classical NLP, or Google, and/or cultures that make heavy use of IME? To me the situation looked like that Googlers "have seen that trick" previously, and are doing bare minimum to defend the company from losing presence in this AGI hype storm.
It's an artifact of their size -- no large corporation has vision or direction. Best they can aspire to is "stay the course". It's just something that inevitably happens as companies grow and age.
Even extraordinary products are rarely going to do that. Their AI products could be a huge success, and still not significantly change how valuable the company is.
why work hard to be a part of that?
They definitely have pricing power and also a large stake in Anthropic, so I'm not worried about them.
Obligatory overview of things Google has killed, because its easy to forget some of the gems:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Sure it could've used a bit of a facelift and some other tweaks, but they have a history of launching new, half-baked products instead of just maintaining the existing ones.
I even messaged from my GTalk to my Facebook as a test, which worked because both were Jabber. Both companies closed both services off to anyone else. Sadly.
Not sure if this is "vision" or "management" or whatever, it feels like that they're just self shackling in every single possible direction. There are something like 50 different teams involved at a major launch and they make some process/infra requirement/review/integration or whatever, from good will. Imagine how much time, effort and compromises you would need to appease all of them.
I think the recent memo from Sergey shows that the leadership finally acknowledges this problem at heart. But solving it is a different story of course. But a long time disconnection between IC, managements and leadership has been the culprit of this problem and at least some awareness might not hurt.
It has a problem executing on that tech to create great products. It has a real problem with canning any project that doesn't have a billion users within a year.
Honestly they fail to understand how lucky they got with doubleclick and culturally the entire project evaluation criteria is based around the assumption that they can do another computer science rain dance to make it rain ads-level cash.
Maps used to be the absolute best and now I frequently get baffling driving directions in a US major metro area. No improvements within the last 10 years. New pixel phones are worse than latest Samsung. Some huge lead in AI absolutely totaled, their investment in anthropic their only hope. Inference HW accelerators that noone uses.
They are becoming like M$ - I expect M$ to be this terrible at product development - but at least M$ is fantastic at making money despite terrible products.
Google has allowed search experience to slide so much people would rather use some slow-ass unreliable chatbot. Are they really losing the war on SEO or have they decided that the internet-of-shit (i.e. affiliate marketing) is more valuable?
I am seeing bot-generated reviews more and more often, and when I look at what happened to search, I don't have a lot of faith in google to do a better job with maps. But I sure hope they do, because I'm with you - I really do rely on maps reviews.
On the tech side they are excellent, but on the management/business/corporate culture side they have repeatedly proven that they are much less competent than pretty much everyone else.
Fortunately for them, they have a very prolific cow to milk with their ads business, and that's where they get their valuation from, but there tech is legitimately undervalued because they have repeatedly shown that they don't know how to convert that into business.
Based on P/E the US stock market is overvalued. So I would be careful with "undervaluation". Most undervalued tech stocks are probably in China.
Google also lost a lot to LLM. I use perplexity now 50% of the time, where I would have used Google. I also read a lot of "degoogeling" and "going off Amazon". My impressions of both companies are not the best. I have a gmail account I never got access back, even with the right password. And Amazon defrauded me of 40 USD. Claimed in a chat that they would reimburse express shipment after they f. up but then did not and called it a "misunderstanding".
I have somewhere list of the most valuable companies. And it changed every decade. So, past performance is not a guarantee for future performance :-)
Bust is unlikely with an ETF. They rebalance without you having to do anything. Most tech might come from China in the future.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CQQQ/
It is at the same price it was at in 2019. You can't rebalance them because the techs all boom and bust together, there isn't any point. Still, if you think Chinese techs are going to take off big soon, now is a great time to get in (or at least as an emerging market hedge).
But yes, CQQQ is exactly the one I am going to buy.
I think what keeps Google up at night is knowing that their ads business which pays all of the bills could be upended by regulation or by disruptive consumer AI of some kind and they’d then have approximately nothing in terms of revenue.
They have due to circumstances a different business model to OpenAI, Claude, Grok etc.
Open-Claude-Grok: "our AI is so cool, AGI next year" but we are losing money so invest in us at a $crazy bn valuation
Google: We are swimming in money from ads so no need to hype anything. If anything saying we will dominate AI as well as search, email, video, ads, browsers, phones etc would just get us broken up. So advance quietly.
Gemini has been one of the most cost-efficient models. Probably this is exactly what Google needs for productization.
Google Cloud is decent, again in my opinion, because they can more or less copy the product vision from AWS and focus on the technical excellence.
When were you last excited to use a Google product or service?
Part of the problem is also their internal incentives that lead to lot's of products being retired waay too soon, leaving behind a lot of users and hurting their reputation a lot.
Well, for now, at least.
I know who will be the first shown the door when the next round of layoffs comes: the guy saying "you can't make money that way."
Not being a high profile target myself, I'd rather take that risk and see where it goes. Unfortunately it's the high profile targets themselves that make the decisions, so after the first few incidents I figure there will be this whole mess where they try to clamp down on access to such things without sufficient forethought.
And you can train the model by yourself without relying on cloud services.
Some URLs to get your started:
https://huggingface.co/lerobot
https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot/blob/main/examples/10...
the latest project: Le Kiwi, using the SO-ARM100 arm:
https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot/blob/main/examples/11...
the super advanced HopeJR shoulder + arm + hands:
https://github.com/TheRobotStudio/HOPEJr
cool video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHfy2vACyw
It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too. Google has more money than God to throw around.
Google's ad dominance will probably never go away unless antitrust action by the FTC/DOJ/EU force a breakup. So they'll continue to lead as long as they can subsidize and outspend everyone else. Their investments compound and give an almost unassailable moat into deep tech problems.
Google might win AI and robotics and transportation and media and search 2.0. They'll own everything.
chatgpt has good chance to kill google search -> kill google.
ML models like chatGPT rely on the open web for training data, particularly for information about recent events. But models like chatGPT are horrible about linking to their sources. That means that sources that rely on ad revenue or even donations to exist will effectively disappear as chatGPT steals all of the traffic. With no cash flow, the sites with current data disappear. With no new training data, chatGPT stagnates.
ChatGPT is basically a parasite on the free and open web - taking content but not giving back.
With a reasonable degree of success. In their last quarter (see https://abc.xyz/investor/earnings/) 25% of their revenue was non-ads, and that percentage has been consistently increasing.
That's just one of their many business units.
This might have been true 10-15 years ago. I assure you it is not the case today.
There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon.
Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the world paid for by Google ad revenue, startup investors, and later, auto companies.
How can Waymo's software be "commoditized very shortly after it works well" if competitors don't have (2) and (3)? The training data that Waymo has incredibly valuable. (Tesla and some Chinese car companies also have mountains of it.)
Search is in real danger of mostly obsolescence. Ads aren't safe.
Had they focused more on driving innovation and not profit/being relevant, they could have had another win instead of another Google+ Instead, we got African-German Nazi's.