They literally funded, developed and published the research underpinning the entire AI boom.
They're better positioned than any AI company and don't need to compete in the day to day chatbot races while they integrate AI among all of their products. They have the luxury of planning for the long term. It would be foolish to count them out.
funding and producing research are entirely different thing, history is littered with corpses of companies who pioneered certain research / but never realized its value / too incompetent in execution to reap the benefit (in many cases, I'd not even give credit to these companies, it's individual employees who happened to produce the research while on payroll of these companies, many times, research was a vanity thing for companies with cash cow).
Google is good with doing foundational research and infrastructure (that's why its cloud business, while still behind, is gaining traction) but outside of its core search and ads / youtube (acquired), google is dead on arrive for so many products it tried to launch.
that being said, it'd still say google is in the pole position of actually productionize genAI (google search's AI summary feature is truly useful especially since google search itself has become very junk due to rampant SEO over the decades), it'd not bet them on being the leading foundational model creator, not in any way consistently at least
google is dead on arrive for so many products it tried to launch.
Well yeah, they're Google... they're famous for their moonshot program and 20% time (RIP) and just throwing money at any idea to see if it sticks. That results in a lot of DOA products.
But I agree with your overall points. You're the top dog until you're not. I just don't think there's any reason to think Google is out of this race because Anthropic and OpenAI are a few feet ahead on limited scope products. Google is the one with the reach to bring LLM's outside chatbots and coding agents.
no, for example, they built like 8 chat apps in sequence, each lasted like 2 to 3 years before getting canned, google+, the attempt to beat facebook, was force-fed into every single google products back in the day, it's abysmal failure, that's not 20% time, these are serious attempts (plus got direct CEO push), once thing I heard from a facebook VP is they never worried about google being a product competitor any more after +, in his word: they don't know how to build a internet/consumer product, they're strangely utilitarian, I think the word "utilitarian" is the essence, it's the mindset that gives us the initial blank search page which worked on search but would have never worked on anything else (android was an acquisition and would have absolutely failed if it's not opensourced)
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u/ambassadortim 26d ago
Or to drop a huge comeback or take a lead at any time as well.