The next chapter of our AI momentum

ccolesantiago about 2 hours ago 44 commentsRead Article on blog.google

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76% Positive

Analyzed from 1283 words in the discussion.

Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

MikhailTal•31 minutes ago

> Google DeepMind: We are building strong momentum: Flash is in high demand, our Cyber model is live, and Gemma models have surpassed 900M+ downloads

Considering these are the best stats they could find, gemini usage+general situation must be really, really bleak.

High demand means nothing. A model being live is nothing to brag about. And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete

giancarlostoro•26 minutes ago

> Flash is in high demand

I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?

simianwords•1 minute ago

> I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?

I keep seeing this but this line of thinking doesn't make any sense. What does it really mean?

There are expensive models that increase the probability of you doing your task under a lower cost. That means you can't use Gemma for coding your new compiler - it would just be overall costlier.

Heavier models are cheaper at more complicated tasks because they use fewer turns and fewer mistakes.

Cheaper models are more likely to be cheap at less complicated tasks. Like if you just ask Gemma "Hi" it would probably be cheaper than asking Opus.

So what does this statement really mean? People don't want to pay the extra for a more costly model? Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost!

svachalek•21 minutes ago

That said though, Flash isn't it. The prices on the latest flash models put Sonnet and Terra to shame.

kokanee•24 minutes ago

Does everyone want AI?

glitchcrab•15 minutes ago

Single data point; no, I don't. I preferred the pre-AI world. It makes me sad that we'll never see it again.

bluGill•12 minutes ago

For what? There are some things I want AI for because it does it well. There are some things I don't want AI for because it just makes a mess (hallucinations). Maybe the next AI will be different and we will have the conversation again.

jgalt212•29 minutes ago

> And gemma downloads also can be from auto CI pipelines etc. Nothing concrete

I have always found NPM download numbers truly suspect. Is no one caching? Are they estimating true number of downloads base on some estimate of cache hits?

xnx•about 2 hours ago

> Lastly, after an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.

Oof. Good for Jeff and Sanjay (who just joined Twitter), bu that is a big loss for Google. Google stock is down 5%. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say these two are worth ~$200 billion.

forrestthewoods•24 minutes ago

Whoa. So is Jeff effectively leaving Google to work on this new venture full time? Or is the venture a side project? It sounds like the former. I’m sure he’ll still have internal access as an advisor of sorts. But this feels like a seismic change. Much larger than I initially realized?

Analemma_•29 minutes ago

For at least a year now the standard reflexive reply to “Google seems way behind OAI and Anthropic” has been “it’ll be ok, they’ve got Dean and Hassabis.” And now they don’t. What reason is there to be bullish about Google now?

basch•9 minutes ago

As much as everyone wants to pay accomplished celebrities, all of these companies have young nameless geniuses that are about to make one for themselves. A guard passing torch can be opportunity.

Now, whether Google is the right environment to nurture, that’s its own quandary.

xnx•19 minutes ago

Data centers, TPUs, customers, data streams, more money than god, most mature crawler system

CamperBob2•17 minutes ago

Couple of things come to mind. One is that Web sites tend to actively fight AI companies' crawlers while actively courting Google's crawler.

Another is that they hold the key Transformer architecture patent. If it is still relevant (which I'm not personally clueful about) and if they start enforcing it, then we may see a reprise of the situation where Microsoft made money for years every time an Android phone was sold. Regardless of that particular patent, it's probably safe to say they'll be better-positioned than anyone else if AI companies start lobbing patent nukes at each other.

A third factor that shouldn't be discounted is that Google has access to warehouses of training data that other companies don't. Google Books alone is an Alexandria-scale archive that the courts forced them to keep to themselves. Those restrictive copyright decisions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Google because no one else will have been able to scrape the data.

650•about 1 hour ago

The first sentence is quite telling

>We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute and products…

Products are third on the list. Google is an incubator for talent first and foremost. Products are an afterthought

bonsai_bar•1 minute ago

I'd bet my mortgage that if the first sentence was "We've got amazing products, amazing talent, and world-class compute", you'd be in the comments complaining that they didn't put talent first.

giwook•about 1 hour ago

My opinion is that you're reading way too much into this. Talent is obviously first. Without that you have no products worth speaking of.

thewebguyd•about 1 hour ago

Hasn't that always been the case with Google? Outside of a few that are mostly good and have stuck around, I've always seen Google has having great tech but being quite bad and making products out of it.

garlic_enjoyer•about 1 hour ago

I was about to invest in Google, but your compelling observation has swayed me. Now it's obvious to me they are a dying company.

zdragnar•35 minutes ago

A company is made up of people, and makes products. Products can come and go for many reasons (or any reason) but the company will always have people.

JacobAsmuth•about 1 hour ago

So then it is similarly telling that compute is second on the list? They have more talent than compute? Layoffs incoming?

cj•32 minutes ago

This is also how Y Combinator operates.

Founders are first. Ideas are second.

add-sub-mul-div•about 1 hour ago

If these products are the place that talent has brought us, of what use was the talent?

luisln•about 1 hour ago

If all the other AI companies are promising AGI by Q4 of next year, what else can you do to satisfy shareholders than also jump on that same bandwagon?

rwalll•10 minutes ago

Real next chapters:

1) Repair search that had been broken by AI initiatives.

2) Include less invasive AI with ads for those that need to be spoon fed.

3) Pretend to work on AGI and data centers in space.

4) Sell shovels and TPUs to the gold diggers.

mlmonkey•41 minutes ago

Google loves to kick senior execs upstairs.

Whatever happened to Prabhakar Raghavan? Got kicked upstairs and we barely hear from him nowadays.

It's only a matter of time before Demis leaves and joins Anthropic or OpenAI.

returnInfinity•14 minutes ago

As what? CEO? Demis will not take up the MTS role.

brcmthrowaway•20 minutes ago

He was a protected entity (tambram)

Mistletoe•40 minutes ago

Lots of talk of us being at the cusp of AGI, but how will we even know when we get there? When AGI develops a religion for itself?

FiddlyPack•31 minutes ago

That's the fun part. We don't. Could have happened 10 years ago without us noticing. I don't expect my skin cells to be able to recognize "me" anymore than I expect we will be able to recognize a superintelligent AGI. If it arrived 10 years ago, then the last 10 years could simply be its PR campaign. We wouldn't even be able to tell if it was successfully achieving its "goals" or not, assuming an AGI even has "goals"

tosh•about 2 hours ago

can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?

colesantiago•about 2 hours ago

It is good for Demis and Google overall.

This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era.

Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms.

The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would hazard a guess he will probably step down in less than 3 years.

junesix•about 1 hour ago

I don't see Demis becoming CEO. He's a scientist and researcher. He wouldn't want to be bogged down by minutiae of corporate politics, org structure, government relations, mobile hardware, etc. Chair lets him have authority to explore any path of interest without overhead of operations.

aix1•about 1 hour ago

> this could be a path for Demis to be CEO in the future in the AI era

His current title is CEO of Google DeepMind. Becoming Chief Scientist of Alphabet seems to be a step away from the path to replacing Sundar, no?

sashank_1509•about 1 hour ago

I agree sundar will step down but I’m not sure if this means they’re grooming Demis to takeover. I suspect not, and someone else might take over.

tonfa•about 1 hour ago

Similar to how Sundar was promoted, isn't it more likely to be a promotion from existing leadership (one of the product leads/SVP).

lokar•about 1 hour ago

My impression, inside and out of G, was that Sundar (and Ruth) were about scaling down R&D expenses (as a fraction of revenue), and focusing on exploiting the monopolies.

Perhaps now there could be a shift back to investing in R&D to get fresh monopolies.

JacobAsmuth•44 minutes ago

> mobile era CEO

He was the guy branding Google an AI-first company back when they invented the transformer.

tosh•about 1 hour ago

ty!

dude250711•28 minutes ago

The momentum is not being conserved here.

sgt101•about 1 hour ago

"Onwards!"

These guys...

0x70run•about 1 hour ago

miss me with the AGI nonsense

VCFundedGenYer•35 minutes ago

Can we please stop saying anything about "AGI"? I remember when people would be like "AGI in 3 months" / "AGI in 2024" / "AGI is confirmed in 2025" like stop, you don't know if it's even a thing, let alone if it's coming/imminent.

josefritzishere•41 minutes ago

Let's see... they ruined their core search product. What's next after that bold move?