The first sentence is quite telling
>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…
Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought
> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.
Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.
If all the other AI companies are promising AGI by Q4 of next year, what else can you do to satisfy shareholders than also jump on that same bandwagon?
miss me with the AGI nonsense
"Onwards!"
These guys...
can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
It is good for Demis and Google overall.
This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era.
Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms.
The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.
> mobile era CEO
He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.
> this could be a path for Demis to be CEO in the future in the AI era
His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no?
I agree sundar will step down but I’m not sure if this means they’re grooming Demis to takeover. I suspect not, and someone else might take over.
Similar to how Sundar was promoted, isn't it more likely to be a promotion from existing leadership (one of the product leads/SVP).
I don't see Demis becoming CEO. He's a scientist and researcher. He wouldn't want to be bogged down by minutiae of corporate politics, org structure, government relations, mobile hardware, etc. Chair lets him have authority to explore any path of interest without overhead of operations.
My impression, inside and out of G, was that Sundar (and Ruth) were about scaling down R&D expenses (as a fraction of revenue), and focusing on exploiting the monopolies.
Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.
ty!
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So then it is similarly telling that compute is second on the list? They have more talent than compute? Layoffs incoming?
My opinion is that you're reading way too much into this. Talent is obviously first. Without that you have no products worth speaking of.
Hasn't that always been the case with Google? Outside of a few that are mostly good and have stuck around, I've always seen Google has having great tech but being quite bad and making products out of it.
I was about to invest in Google, but your compelling observation has swayed me. Now it's obvious to me they are a dying company.
If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?