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Having amazing foundational technology that gets wrapped into subpar products has been Google's standard operating procedure for a long time. That being said, it's not clear that proprietary harnesses are going to be any kind of moat. For OAI and Ant, these are marketing vehicles that need to be good if the 1T+ valuation are to be justified given how easy it is to swap out inference.
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For OpenAI and Anthropic, their entire business is AI. If this thing does not work out, their company is over.

Google? They are shoving AI into every product for sure, but the company is going to do ok even if they immediately stop all AI work. Their revenue comes from ads, cloud etc, and AI doesn't directly translate to revenue much.

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They are at least 6 months behind the other labs because they got a late start.
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There is a Google way to develop software and all engineers have to follow it, willing or not. There is no space for creativity and joy.
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I've wondered the same thing but Gemini (free, just in the browser) helped me complete a GIS/radar app that Codex/GPT didn't seem informed enough to do. Really gave some excellent suggestions and I was impressed and feeding it into Codex we were off on a positive track again.

Then I tried to use Gemini for coding and it was like being back to GPT3 or something. Really bad. But on this topic at least it had possession or access to more knowledge than GPT.

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They simply have no incentive. If AI tanks there's no sweating it, the cash cow of Search will keep printing money and no one is the wiser.
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a mistery indeed
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After first firing half their AI staff, to follow up with reorganizing BOTH AI departments so most survivors don't trust their managers?

Oh and the OG AI department at Google had essentially everyone fired (you know, the one that had linguists) and then the AI department that took over was taken apart, half fired, to have it's corpse picked over by Deepmind. Everyone who mattered left (over 40) with only ONE real exception.

Meanwhile firing a third of the rest of the company, to make sure that whoever remains encounters company morale somewhere between mandatory fun and PIP.

Oh and you're wondering about the management reaction? They canceled PIPs (you're now fired when you'd normally have gotten a PIP)

Which also resulted in many memes of people who just don't care anymore directly criticizing leadership. Things like "Wondering about senior management? Just ask yourself how this can be made worse. For example: how can a PIP be made worse? This is how"

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Damn this sounds like a tough workplace. How do ppl cope?
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They're paying pretty well and recruiting everywhere, especially for ML. Same reason people ignore the "60 hours per week is the sweet spot" comments.
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