Comment by estearum
5 days ago
Yes, for a company the size of Google, a two year old product is effectively brand new.
It is not ironic whatsoever that much smaller startups in much more precarious positions relative to the incumbent move very quickly to integrate with the incumbent.
Google Wave was launched, marketed, and killed in 2 years
Is this supposed to be evidence that Gemini is mature?
I mean I get your point.
But still, shouldn’t we hold the big companies accountable?
I don’t want to lower my expectations just because I need to understand that the company in charge is huge.
Sure, we should demand good stuff from companies.
That's different than your original claim of not being able to understand why it's this way (and another commenter calling it ironic). Totally expected IMO.
It's very hard to do cross-cutting things in big companies. It just is!
It's so interesting to read these comments because this this is literally my job (to help Workspace teams integrate Gemini faster)
Some thoughts:
- Hardware constraints are real, even at Google.
- Features are often released for enterprise users first, before being released for the general public.
- I only started my current role last year.
- 2 years ago is forever ago in AI and things are changing a lot. For example, with older model generations people used to do a lot more fine-tuning (slow) vs. prompt engineering (fast). The implication is that things that are easier to do today might have been hard to do not that long ago. The rapid changes also create churn for internal platforms and dev tooling.
- Google is less yolo and cares about safety, prompt injection, etc. so some time goes into that
- Typical big company bureaucracy also applies, but TBH there's a lot of pressure to deliver Gemini related stuff so I think there's less of that
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There are forces making a company like Google slow - as you’ve outlined.
There are forces that can make a company like Google move faster - like pressure from customers.
As you might have noticed people within Google have read this thread.
I’m expressing my discontent with their product experience by saying "I don’t understand". I could have also used "it’s insane" or any similar phrase.