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X, the moonshot factory

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Re: X, the moonshot factory

#171

Post by joezydeco »

codetrotter wrote: post #104
joezydeco wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say that here. You'll be downvoted as trite and cynical. IMO, it's all headed for the graveyard.

> IMO, it's all headed for the graveyard Every company will die some day. But some companies have been around for a very very long time. Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. (株式会社金剛組, Kabushiki Gaisha Kongō Gumi) is a Japanese construction company founded in 578 A.D., making it the world's oldest company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi And there are some other pretty old companies that are still around as well. https:…

Googly things aren't going anywhere, as long as they are pulling in ad revenue.

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#172

Post by codetrotter »

skulk wrote: post #142
codetrotter wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO, it's all headed for the graveyard Every company will die some day. But some companies have been around for a very very long time. Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. (株式会社金剛組, Kabushiki Gaisha Kongō Gumi) is a Japanese construction company founded in 578 A.D., making it the world's oldest company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi And there are some other pretty old companies that are still around as well. https:…

[warning: dangerously off topic rabbit hole] Huh, according to Wikipedia (without citation, unfortunately), that ancient construction company pioneered the use of CAD for temple design. I wanted to see if I could corroborate this claim, so "kongo gumi cad" on Google lead to: https://worksthatwork.com/3/kongo-gumi which makes a very similar claim. From what I can tell, this claim is echoed all over the (English) inter…

> I wish Wikipedia had a "blame" feature like git. If it exists, I couldn't find it.

If there is an edit war going on, and this claim is being removed and added you’d still need to look at quite a lot of revisions manually.

But there are tools to export Wikipedia page edit history to git I think. And you could write a script to grep every revision of the article for the word “CAD” to determine at what point in time it first appeared in the article. And then from there you could look at who added it and so on.

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#174

Post by accoil »

jkestner wrote: post #67
astrange wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Xbox brand is very unique because they think numbers go from 0 to 360 to 1.

Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns. I guess that would make more sense if they were rebranding the 360. To be pedantic, there's no need for "very" in front of "unique", as my spouse is happy to pounce on despite my protests that English is a living language.

Dropping the "very" would lose some of the sarcasm though.

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#175

Post by prepend »

tehlike wrote: post #134
julianlam wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard of the latter two, and Waymo is currently in development/testing and is not nearly as ubiquitous as it seems to be in the States.

Brain is everything you know of today in GenAI space, and many more internally used products and technologies.

Has google landed anything from AI yet?

Bard just launched and it may be a $100B product in a few years, but now it’s still playing catch-up to OpenAI (that started without any moonshot and “only” with $1B in its first major seed round [0]).

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/openai

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#176

Post by beepbopboopp »

ke88y wrote: post #119
prepend wrote: post #83

How long do these “moonshots” have until they are considered failures? It seems like an anti pattern that some huge, futzy organization launches a “moonshot” to explain why they burn money on something without needing a return because it’s a “moonshot.” JFK gave his “to the moon” speech in 1962, targeting 1970 [0]. And the USG did it. So 8 years was the first one. It cost a ton of money and was successful and had mas…

> Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?” Waymo, Brain, and Chronicle

Waymo was acquired externally.

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#177

Post by prepend »

ke88y wrote: post #169
foooorsyth wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Brain is everything you know of today in GenAI space I know ChatGPT, Midjourney, StableDiffusion, Adobe Firefly, And GitHub Co-Pilot in this space. Where’s Google? Let me guess: Brain’s research led to those products? Even if that were the case, Google still failed to market and capitalize. Are they running an open research lab for the greater good? Or are they still interested in launching market-leading products?

Unlike the original moonshot, which was famously first-order revenue-positive ;)

Yes, it was. It was a political program to gain reputation against the Soviets and phenomenally successful in that I think the US was happy with its ROI.

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#178

Post by prepend »

ke88y wrote: post #159
sf_rob wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though it came out of X, I don't see how Chronicle could reasonably be considered a moonshot for Google. A cloud-based SecOps suite that emphasizes integration with Google Cloud/GSuite seems like a fairly obvious vertical expansion. That said, I don't know much about SecOps.

I'd argue that the OG Moonshot was less of a metaphorical moonshot than most of the X projects. Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon, and I think we were way further away from a science and tech perspective than we were from the moon in the early 60s.

> Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon

I don’t think that’s fair in the sense that going to the moon was absurdly difficult in 1962. It’s hard to compare things so different, but going to the moon only seems easier now, 60 years later. At the time of the moonshot it was one of the most difficult things humanity ever attempted.

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#179

Post by prepend »

brycewray wrote: post #105
prepend wrote: post #83

How long do these “moonshots” have until they are considered failures? It seems like an anti pattern that some huge, futzy organization launches a “moonshot” to explain why they burn money on something without needing a return because it’s a “moonshot.” JFK gave his “to the moon” speech in 1962, targeting 1970 [0]. And the USG did it. So 8 years was the first one. It cost a ton of money and was successful and had mas…

The main JFK speech about the manned moon landing was May 25, 1961, before a joint session of Congress. The “we choose to go to the moon” speech at Houston’s Rice University in the fall of 1962 was more a case of pumping up public enthusiasm about the very expensive program, given that polls — especially in that mid-term election year — were showing growing doubts among voters that the expenditure was worth it.

Thanks for the clarification. So it’s more like 9 years than 8.

Re: X, the moonshot factory

#180

Post by ke88y »

prepend wrote: post #177
ke88y wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike the original moonshot, which was famously first-order revenue-positive ;)

Yes, it was. It was a political program to gain reputation against the Soviets and phenomenally successful in that I think the US was happy with its ROI.

Reputation isn't revenue.

You could say the same thing about Brain or Waymo.

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