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Comment by gandalfgeek

6 hours ago

Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.

There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".

70 comments

gandalfgeek

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la6479  2 hours ago

This just shows that the "great minds" of AI in these companies are not able to come up with anything that radically differentiates their AI than the others. Wether it is gemini or openAI or grok - meh they all are similar and at this point one can interchange one with the other , excep that Google sits right at the edge with almost every browser search query hitting the google search engine AKA Gemini on the backend and one can switch easily into chat mode right from the search page. I dare say that the google CEO has done his job and set up the cash printing machine but from the AI masterminds in Google, not a groundbreaking progress has been made.

  • largbae  2 hours ago

    AlphaFold is interesting. Maybe LLMs converge because the ideal "use of language" converges. But there are other types of model.

  • ionwake  2 hours ago

    I don’t know man I prefer Gemini to everything other than claude I’m really surprised at the late comeback and happy for it

oblio  6 hours ago

Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.

  • swat535  4 hours ago

    > Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.

    They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,..

    You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals.

    I don't think Google is going anywhere.

    • rockskon  3 hours ago

      Once upon a time it would've been unthinkable for Google search to become awful and nearly worthless due, in large part, by Google's discretionary choices.

      Related - interns these days don't seem to have any particular preference for using Google for finding information...

      2 replies →

    • smcleod  3 hours ago

      I think it's a bit inflated to label Gmail a "great tech for consumers". Maps certainly, YouTube mostly, Chrome & Android for loyalists, but Gmail hasn't been "great tech" for well over a decade.

      Additionally these are all old products - even the company's more recent products such as Gemini feel stale and on unsteady ground.

  • impulser_  5 hours ago

    People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.

    • jrflo  5 hours ago

      Their entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.

      30 replies →

    • michaelt  3 hours ago

      IBM is also still going, believe it or not. 260k employees, 200 billion market cap, $67 billion revenue.

      I'm not sure what they do these days - it's about 20 years since I used an IBM Thinkpad to connect to an IBM pSeries.

      2 replies →

    • reaperducer  5 hours ago

      People have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.

      So is IBM.

      There was a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back about how IBM is flying under the radar, and doing well by not taking the hype bait.

      It noted that 70% of all credit card transactions on the planet go through an IBM system.

      5 replies →

    • fragmede  4 hours ago

      I dunno about going strong. $1,000 in Microsoft stock in 1990 would have made you a multi-millionaire today. $1,000 in IBM stock in 1990 would make you a ten-thousandaire today.

      1 reply →