upvote
Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?
reply
What is anticompetitive about it? The comment above is literally claiming they’ve been outcompeted.
reply
Not sure that's the right way to look at it, given that Google's huge head start in capital and talent did not prevent AI competition at all. It's a demonstration of reasonable, non-problematic dynamics between smaller and larger companies. (Of course, there's an implicit risk here, the folks at Cruise probably worked harder and more passionately than Waymo staff too.)
reply
you are right. I guess what I was thinking was that google's bigness was essentially a bad capital allocation strategy, since they were lazy and not motivated by absolute return, but some combination of acceptable risk, politics, personal preferences, etc in a large management team that has seemed...disconnected for quite some time.

They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability is also a handicap when disruption is the objective.

reply
It's a notoriously double edged sword. When you create huge absolute return incentives, you get things like the Airtable acquisition, where everyone's sad that you built a $1.2B company because some investor at some point mistakenly thought it was an $11B company.
reply