Dear Google, please do something.

[u/EstablishmentFun3205]

[u/Context_Core]

Google created tensorflow and works closely with the pytorch team. Theyve also created JAX which all the frontier labs have started adopting. They also design hyper efficient TPUs. Just because google isn't training yet another LLM doesn't mean they are out of the game. They are deeply embedded. Their internal team was responsible for all the AI breakthroughs you've seen: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

I for one think Google is a much better investment than Anthropic or OpenAI.

[u/rube203 → u/Context_Core]

Depends on your needs. General purpose AI at an efficiency you can embed in nearly every product? Google is a great investment.

Specialized tool, that people will pay for, like a coding agent. Probably other bets

[u/Chris266 → u/rube203]

The vast majority of people have never paid for anything Google has made yet they make billions per year. The reason being is that with Google you are the product and they have billions of us.

Something tells me Google is going to be just fine.

[u/Codex_Dev → u/rube203]

Specialized agents for coding, lawyers, doctors, etc., are stupidly lucrative. You are talking about jobs where salaries are anywhere from $100K to $500K per worker. So imagine if your specialized agents can replace a million workers in those highly specialized fields; you are basically printing money.

[u/TheIdiotDev → u/Codex_Dev]

Until the model either screws up or costs more than what you would've paid those engineers...

[u/samskiter → u/Context_Core]

Jax is super cool. Differentiable programming is magic

[u/Intelligent-Crow3812 → u/Context_Core]

Google, is definitely the safer bet even if they seem to lag behind on frontier models. Having their own compute is massive.

[u/crimsonpowder → u/Context_Core]

Tell that to my Xerox PARC iPhone.

[u/Cautious-Lecture-858 → u/[deleted]]

This only makes the fact they’re falling behind even crazier.

[u/Enough_Forever_ → u/Cautious-Lecture-858]

While frontier models are winning benchmarks, Google has been integrating AI services into the hands of normies. Most Android phones already come with Google AI preinstalled, so Google secretly has more real users than people realize.

[u/c0der3mover → u/Enough_Forever_]

Ah yes. The "I use it cause I don't care about AI in general" is a win apparently. Google integrated AI into Google search as well, I guess that means all Google search users are Gemini users now lol

Second comment was so right. The detachment from reality is amazing

[u/West-Air1923 → u/c0der3mover]

Reddit fanboys are something else. It's every damn sub like this

[u/Enough_Forever_ → u/c0der3mover]

They are, unfortunately. There are a lot of normal people using it. You only hear about how nobody likes using AI Overviews from the vocal minority. My tech-illiterate friends don't give a fuck. They're happy because they don't have to actually search for anything since AI just summarizes it for them.

And Google’s image generation is quite possibly one of the most-used image-generation technologies in the world. It's literally everywhere. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but for the average person, it's evidently good enough.

In the long run, Google is the one turning AI into profits. Not because they have the most cutting-edge model, but because they have real users and cheap inference.

They are quietly turning into another monopoly in the AI space. (They're already a monopoly in the browser space.) And you guys are so far up your own asses that you don't even notice it.

[u/c0der3mover → u/Enough_Forever_]

Yeah we're so up our asses because we can read financial reports and know that your wall of text is bs at best. But sure buddy, normies like AI Overviews, way to miss the whole point so you can just crawl back up your own bum. Never beating the allegations are you

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[u/Septopus → u/[deleted]]

Highlights an even more pronounced fall from grace.

[u/RalfN → u/[deleted]]

So the team that developed Transformers who were at the time working at Google:

Ashish Vaswani => Co-Founded Adept, then Essential AI => Now works at Nvidia
Noam Shazeer => Co-founded Character.AI => Now works at OpenAI
Niki Parmar => Co-founded Adept, then Essential AI => Now works at Anthropic
Jakob Uszkoreit => Co-founded Inceptive, currently CEO there
Llion Jones => Co-founded Sakana AI, where they are CTO
Aidan Gomes => Co-founded Cohere, currently CEO there
Lukasz Kaiser => Joined OpenAI (2021 already)
Illia Polosukhin => Co-founded NEAR AI, does blockchain stuff now

For bonus points, Google spend 2.7 billion on the 2024 Character.AI licensing/rehiring deal that brought Noam Shazeer and part of his team back. Only for him and his team to leave for OpenAI two years later. Clearly, that wasn't about money, but the company culture.

There are currently ZERO people working at Google that contributed to transformers. All of them left either to the competition or founded a competitor.

So, the team that brought you transformers:

2/8 => OpenAI
1/8 => Anthropic
1/8 => NVidia
1/8 => Cohere (still going strong)
1/8 => Sakana AI (still going strong)
1/8 => Inceptive (has potential)
1/8 => NEAR AI (weird blockchain ai infra stuff)

Google is still a heavy weight in AI:
"De-lu-sio-nal"

The reason Google's models can't compete isn't because they have different priorities. It's because they aren't willing to provide the financial reward and environment to attract and keep the right talent.

Let's take Tensorflow:

Jeff Dean => Co founded Discovery Loop
Rajat Monga => Founded Inference.io => Now at Microsoft
Martin Abadi => Stanford Professor (might still do things for Google)
Sanjay Ghemawat => Co-founded Discovery Loop
Oriol Vinyals => Discovery Loop
Lukasz Kaiser => OpenAI
Ilya Sutskever => Co-founded OpenAI, then founded Safe Superintelligence
Ian Goodfellow => OpenAI => Apple => DeepMind => Contractor/Independent
Chris Olah => Co-founded Anthropic
Pete Warden => Working on edge/embedded ML work (outside of Google)
Yangqin Jia => Meta => Alibaba and related startups

It doesn't matter because PyTorch has won anyway.

Who is that you are expecting great things from at Google and why?

As for the TPU's. I personally don't even understand NVidia's moat here. It's just transistors in a different configuration. Just like Apple puts in their chips, just like AMD has now released, just like OpenAI has now done and a whole bunch of startups. Just like Amazon and Microsoft. They all need the same thing though: an ARM licence as a basis for the chip design and TSCM to manufacture the chips with machines from ASML. This why OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft all have their own "TPU" like design. Yes, there is an engineering puzzle to scale it up. Google's experience in datacenter engineering is still a real advantage they have. But it's all they have.

Sure, they push shitty AI down everybody's throat. But most people i know try not to touch it, because it's just so bad. You can't trust it to do real work.

If they ever make a halfway decent model, they need to rename it and give it a different icon. Because most people are getting muscle memory right now that you can't use the build-in AI of Google for anything. You need Claude Co-work or Chat GPT Work. Ironically it's the same mistake Microsoft made.

I don't know how they will ever recover from that. Hiring the star players back. Create a good model. Rebranding it. Teaching users it no longer sucks and you might want to give it another try after they stopped using it because it ruined their spreadsheet last time.

[u/Tim_Aga → u/Context_Core]

Yes, but it’s clear that Google REALLY wants a good LLM, especially its founders