Comment by fsh

1 year ago

Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?

You could interpret this the other way - Why has Jeff Dean been snubbed by the Nobel committee? Why hasn't Larry Page gotten a Nobel for inventing the search technology that half the planet now depends on? I don't know what category to put that one in, but there's some important results in lightspeed-limited communications in "The Datacenter as a Computer" that would be worth extending the Physics category for.

  • "search technology"

    Google is an advertising company, search is a by-product and has been for a long time.

    • About 20 years ago it wasn't, and Google's pagerank stuff was revolutionary and potentially nobel prize worthy (no idea, I'm not a scientist)

      1 reply →

Spanner is one thing I'd say they invented but they built a whole bunch of really neat stuff in order to be able to run search, back in 1998. that they're this behemoth conglomerate that it's cool to hate on doesn't erase the fact that they had to build all sorts of new things when they were just starting out.