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Gemini Robotics

deepmind.google

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Re: Gemini Robotics

#211

Post by candyman »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#212

Post by whiplash451 »

deepGem wrote: post #156
spankalee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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 o…

Building their own car was sending the wrong message to the partners they will sell self-driving to.

Waymo is all about partnerships with carmakers.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#213

Post by mtrovo »

spankalee wrote: post #157
hlfshell wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is very much suffering from the classic Innovator's Dilemma [1]; a side effect of being too focused on stock price and not long term planning. 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

I do not think it's even innovator's dilemma. 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 k…

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.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#214

Post by btbuildem »

karmasimida wrote: post #107
Workaccount2 wrote: post #37

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…

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 it…

> 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.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#215

Post by TeMPOraL »

BoredPositron wrote: post #43
Workaccount2 wrote: post #37

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…

They faked a lot of the showcases in the last years and their public offerings are just weird. Ever heard of https://labs.google/fx/tools/image-fx/ or https://labs.google/fx/tools/video-fx ? Because these sites are the consumer facing video and image model UIs and literally no normal person knows.

> ImageFX isn't available in your country yet

> 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.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#216

Post by filoleg »

zoogeny wrote: post #126
hlfshell wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#217

Post by [deleted] »

cvhc wrote: post #197
moralestapia wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? 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?

This really depends on which day of 2022 you start the calculation. But to be fair, you can claim the same for AAPL (+25%)/MSFT (+22%)/AMZN (+22%)/... 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.

[deleted]

Re: Gemini Robotics

#218

Post by joelthelion »

I don't understand the negativity here. We have made enormous progress both in language models and in reinforcement learning for robotics. Is it really hard to believe that putting it all together like Google is apparently doing, is possible?

Re: Gemini Robotics

#219

Post by optimalsolver »

sgerenser wrote: post #187
zitterbewegung wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought at the time OpenAI were clamoring that they couldn't release it because it was "too dangerous?"

That was GPT-2.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#220

Post by 0x457 »

spankalee wrote: post #200
0x457 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anything will impact Safari. Mozilla will be closing doors tho.

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.

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