911–920 of 989 posts
So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL Combined with no gemini frontier GA relea…
So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL Combined with no gemini frontier GA relea…
The ideological capture of Google and the gatekeeping around the ring of effective altruism AI power around there probably led to the demoralization of the technologists. I think it was pretty clear that their AI efforts were in trouble when their AI Image generator would only make an African American George Washington, and that dude in AI research was demanding that the much earlier generation AI was conscious and h…
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> That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated. > That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B. My experience differs: (conservative) companies like stability, so calling some very new model "Preview" is a good idea to make it clear to the customer that this frontier model should be treated as more experimental than the default offering.
The problem at Google is their (lacking) process for Preview -> GA. Maybe it's a consequence of their rigorousness around SRE, but it doesn't seem like there's a plausible and efficient path for that to happen. Ergo, the only competitive options from Google are ever-Preview products.
Adopting a month-old AI model version for new development is the default industry expectation right now. Adopting a six month old model is a recipe for having to migrate to a new one almost immediately, when it hits EOL.
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Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close. Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
I think the internal web tooling was pretty good compared to anyone but AWS circa 2016 but by 2020 when I left it felt a bit antiquated. Similarly they didn't have linters rolled out until it was industry standard iirc. But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.
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And then there's GWT which was "you can write webpages in Java." Yeah I never really kept up with the web frameworks there, just knew that for non-customer-facing things we were always recommended to use Angular, and that Wiz also exists.
Backend-generated templated web apps were the pinnacle of web development in 00s.
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I think death, and most extreme pain/suffering should be optional. Superintelligence, if done safely, lets us solve most of our problems.
The vast majority of pain and suffering in the world is already entirely optional, but as people we allow it to exist. How is another computer going to fix that? It is far more likely that whoever controls a super intelligence uses it to gain more power and inflict far more suffering
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All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
Is Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.
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> sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.” so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.
Reminded me of a bit from the GOAT political comedy Yes, Prime Minister: "But he's the Prime Minister!" "Indeed he is Bernard. He has his own car, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life. What more does he want?" "I think he wants to govern Britain." "Well stop him, Bernard!"
"Tobacco-related diseases cost the NHS £150 million per year!"
"Yes we've looked into that, it turns out that if those people had survived they would have cost us billions in pensions and healthcare costs! From a financial perspective, it's vastly preferable that they continue to die at the current rate."
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This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
> sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.” so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.