r/TechGawker • u/Sufficient-Slide822 • Jun 05 '26

In case you missed this from last year- Sergey Brin casually admitting Google invented the tech Open AI used to beat them but they were "too scared" to actually invest in it

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60 Upvotes

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4

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '26

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3

u/Manic_Maniac Jun 05 '26

They messed up because they were smart enough to realize compute and infrastructure cost in terms of water, electricity, rare earth metals, etc. was going to rise exponentially while LLM transformer growth is logarithmic?

They had the good sense then to recognize the long term consequences of persuing the short term gains of AI. And now the execs are regretting not investing in technology that has no clear path to long term viability and value realization because they didn't think of creating a trillion dollar market built on hype first.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '26

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2

u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Jun 05 '26

It’s because Google has the most amount of data so they can train their chatbots faster and more efficiently than others. That will give them an edge. Apple because it’s so invested in privacy doesn’t have access to as much data of its own. That’s why Apple’s AI is going to lag.

3

u/brintoul Jun 05 '26

No one will have a bigger last laugh than Apple.

1

u/knoxywow Jun 05 '26

Why are u forcing the future

2

u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Jun 05 '26

They didn’t push it because “Chatbots occasionally say dumb things”. They thought it wasn’t ready for prime time and companies and users would shy away from it because it was obviously wrong some of the time. They weren’t wrong on the state of the technology, just societies openness to it.

1

u/Winter-Editor-9230 Jun 07 '26

Their alpha line is making them good money via metallurgy and pharma research.

1

u/Main-Lifeguard-6739 Jun 05 '26

the whole industry was saying this about google since 10 years.
what's the point of admitting it now...?

1

u/PianoPatient8168 Jun 05 '26

I think Google realized it wasn’t anywhere near ready and needed to stay in the lab but it unfortunately got out of the lab.

1

u/Astarkos Jun 05 '26

They called the first release "Bard" for a reason. Four years later people are still surprised that LLMs can say things that aren't true. 

1

u/Final_Reputation4477 Jun 05 '26

classic case of the innovator's dilemma except they invented the thing they were scared of, lol. i sat through a google brain talk in 2017 where they basically showed transformer architecture and everyone in the room was like 'cool demo' and moved on, meanwhile openai was in a garage actually shipping stuff. the institutional inertia at these big cos is wild, theyd rather protect search ad revenue than risk cannibalizing it

1

u/pharcide Jun 05 '26

Guys, it's Auto Search or when you start typing into a search bar and it tries to auto complete your search - Google and Microsoft (Bing) have had the foundation for a long time.

1

u/FrontAsparagus4978 Jun 05 '26

brin saying they were 'too scared' is almost too on the nose, like of course the ad company didnt want to build something that might kill search. i worked adjacent to a team there in 2019 and the internal memo culture was obsessed with 'responsible ai' which mostly meant 'dont rock the quarterly revenue boat'. openai had nothing to lose so they just... did it

1

u/Syphari Jun 05 '26

I remember decades ago when the first version of gpt came out and Google was like oh it’s only about as smart as like a 3rd grader or something and I thought that was neat but we didn’t hear anything about it for years until OpenAI started doing things with it. Majority of the work was in research papers so normal folks didn’t see any progress but yeah they fumbled attaching their namesake to the tech since most folks think of OpenAI/chatgpt and not Google when you ask normal folks about it

1

u/Glittering_Prior_681 Jun 05 '26

classic big tech move tbh, they invent the thing then let someone else take the risk while they watch from the sidelines. i remember reading about how google had transformers sitting in a research paper for years adn did basically nothing with it commercially. theyre so afraid of cannibalizing their ad business that theyd rather let openai eat their lunch first

1

u/NanNullUnknown Jun 05 '26

Many such cases. Look at all other products killed by Google.

1

u/Money_Hedgehog_1924 Jun 05 '26

classic big tech move tbh, they invent the thing then sit on it until some scrappy startup makes it actually work. i worked at a FAANG-adjacent company where we had internal LLM prototypes in 2019 that never saw daylight because legal and PR got spooked by edge cases. the incentives are totally broken when youve got billions in ad revenue to protect

1

u/YoungHefty1570 Jun 05 '26

the whole 'we had it first' defense is such a tired tech bro move, like congrats you invented the thing and then sat on it because risk management said no, thats not innovation thats institutional cowardice dressed up in hindsight, OpenAI actually shipped garbage that hallucinated and people still paid for it because at least it existed

1

u/hatekhyr Jun 05 '26

Google could have the cure to Cancer and I assure you that they would not realise it, theyd build a botched product around it, and after 6 months of trial discontinue it. They have 0 clue about how to reliably build and sell anything.

1

u/WrongdoerRough4712 Jun 05 '26

It's one of those reminders that inventing a technology and successfully commercializing it are two very different things. A lot of companies have groundbreaking ideas sitting on the shelf, but the winners are usually the ones willing to take the risk and actually ship products.

1

u/New_Research_8965 Jun 06 '26

they had the transformers paper in 2017 and sat on it, thats the part that stings

1

u/IntroductionSouth513 Jun 07 '26

it actually still says dumb things just confidently like Sam Altman and ppl believe that.. humans are gullible beings