Comment by sigmoid10
9 hours ago
I'd bet that too if their management wasn't so incredibly uninspiring. Like, Apple under Cook was also pretty mild and a huge step down from Jobs, but Google feels like it fell off a cliff. If it wasn't for OpenAI releasing ChatGPT, they might still be sitting on that tech while only testing it internally. Now it drives their entire chip R&D.
To be fair, I don't think any of the AI players wanted what OAI did. Sam grabbed first mover at the cost of this insane race everyone else got forced into.
Google was calling itself an "AI-first" company beginning in 2016 or 2017. They designed and built TPUs nearly a decade ago and were using transformer models in products like Google Translate but didn't make a big fuss about it, it just made the product way better. People should at least credit Sundar somewhat for this, it turned out to be quite prescient, especially the advantage of having your own chips that are specifically designed for ML.
I am not fan of the era when CEO is expected to be a cult leader type person.
Cook did very well in all areas as well as in not trying to create a cult.
What would an inspiring leader do differently for you?
Inspire
The line between inspiring and a grift can be hard to see in the moment.
They had no reason to destroy their golden goose, why release something that could hurt their money printing business.
Honestly im rather impressed with how they handled it, they had enough of the infra and org in place to jump at it once the cat was out of the bag.
Sundar declared a code red or whatever and they made it happen. But that could ONLY happen if they had the bedrock of that ability already built.
No one really remembers now that google was a year behind.