Comment by GodelNumbering
9 hours ago
So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner
And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL
Combined with no gemini frontier GA release in about 14 months. You have to have created an environment pretty hostile to innovation for this to happen
This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
I remember a time when a tweet was 140 characters.
> sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.”
so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.
lmao that's actually so good
Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.
I remember after that release everyone was saying "well obviously google is going to win this, we all knew it, they have the data and the infrastructure"
All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.
What's more annoying is that so many people say it with a passion. Like it's about their favorite soccer team or something.
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Correct, but it was preview release. I was referring to GA in my comment.
Does that mean anything at all? They released it. Customers paid for it. Sticking a preview label on it doesn’t change that it was released
That's another problem Google have: they won't stand behind their products until they are outdated.
That can work in the B2C space but it's horrible in B2B.
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My guy clutching at his Gemini pearls here worried that daddy Sundar might get upset.
I am decidedly anti ai, but even I know that 8 months is a lifetime in this race.
I mean it was legitimately frontier for all of a week or two, and then OAI and Anthropic made better releases, and then did that several more times over the year. Google’s pace is not cutting it.
Part of me thinks Google's entire problem is crappy internal tooling, not really an anti-innovation environment. Just making a dev take 2x as long to get something done has a bigger effect than you'd think. With LLMs it's more like 10x now because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.
Google's internal tooling is still, hands down, better than anything that exists for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
the processes are a result of repeated lawsuit
Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so.
Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.
Sounds like a big-company issue, large scale lead to large burden and complexity.
Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.
google had the best tooling a decade ago...
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I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
> I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.
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How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
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A few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.
I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI.
Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).
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It's not a tooling problem. It's more of a layer of policy problems. If you realize that you cannot run a simple experimental code even in non-production environment for weeks due to 10s of privacy, security, access, process and legal issues where you gotta collect a bunch of approvals, this is critical. And the problem gets worse because the tooling is too good when it enforces. There used to be some holes and circumvention which are all gone these days. This is probably why they said "the infra is good for services but not for research".
I don't even think it's good for services. It's not like you go through cumbersome reviews/tools and then things are safe. They have insane homemade config languages and obscure systems that 99% of SWEs don't really understand but won't say it out loud. That's how they dropped cns2, and the postmortem is never going to blame the tools.
If the tools are all in the same monorepo idk if that's actually true
What do you mean about them being in the monorepo?
The tooling is not the problem. If shit takes forever to launch, it's because there are many stakeholders that need to be satisfied (some for security, some for regulatory, some for the kinds of politics you get in a company that employs almost half a million people.)
But GDM isn't gated on launches. They were freely releasing things internally for dogfood. Problem is that stuff was just not as good as the competition.
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Maybe they are forced to use Google search.
No, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.
this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.
Only the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper.
Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.
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Uh isn’t google known to have the best tooling in the world
They earned that reputation in like 2005. Some people have been there so long (without doing side projects) that they don't know what non-Google tooling looks like in this decade or even previous.
Gemini has been improving by what feels like 1% every week
All this talent has delivered... Gemini.
Oh well, emperors, clothes, ... you know.
Gemini is arguably the fulfilment of what AskJeeves promised and never delivered, nor did the rest of Silicon Valley succeed in natural language search and question answering for the 30 years it took to finally arrive. Gemini works great for answering questions and delivering answers for probably 90%+ of the things that people are going to ask Google for, while running on Google’s TPUs paid for with Google’s profits instead of hyper expensive Nvidia racks funded with VC Hopium, and integrated seamlessly free of sign ups to novel portals.