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    Google is winning on every AI front

    (www.thealgorithmicbridge.com)
    993 points vinhnx | 13 comments | 12 Apr 25 03:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source | bottom
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    thunderbird120 ◴[12 Apr 25 06:13 UTC] No.43661807[source]▶
    This article doesn't mention TPUs anywhere. I don't think it's obvious for people outside of google's ecosystem just how extraordinarily good the JAX + TPU ecosystem is. Google several structural advantages over other major players, but the largest one is that they roll their own compute solution which is actually very mature and competitive. TPUs are extremely good at both training and inference[1] especially at scale. Google's ability to tailor their mature hardware to exactly what they need gives them a massive leg up on competition. AI companies fundamentally have to answer the question "what can you do that no one else can?". Google's hardware advantage provides an actual answer to that question which can't be erased the next time someone drops a new model onto huggingface.

    [1]https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...

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    noosphr ◴[12 Apr 25 06:29 UTC] No.43661870[source]▶
    And yet google's main structural disadvantage is being google.

    Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search. I mean it as no exaggeration that _everything_ google does for search is now obsolete. The only reason why google search isn't dead yet is that it takes a while to index all web paged into a vector database.

    And yet it wasn't google that released the architecture update, it was hugging face as a summer collaboration between a dozen people. Google's version came out in 2018 and languished for a decade because it would destroy their business model.

    Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product. Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need. I don't see google being able to pull off an iPhone moment where they killed the iPod to win the next 20 years.

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    petesergeant ◴[12 Apr 25 07:46 UTC] No.43662277[source]▶
    > Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product.

    Google's cash-cow product is relevant ads. You can display relevant ads in LLM output or natural language web-search. As long as people are interacting with a Google property, I really don't think it matters what that product is, as long as there are ad views. Also:

    > Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need

    This sounds like a gigantic competitive advantage if you're selling AI-based products. You don't have to give everyone access to the good search via API, just your inhouse AI generator.

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    1. michaelt ◴[12 Apr 25 09:07 UTC] No.43662697[source]▶
    Kodak was well placed to profit from the rise of digital imaging - in the late 1970s and early 1980s Kodak labs pioneered colour image sensors, and was producing some of the highest resolution CCDs out there.

    Bryce Bayer worked for Kodak when he invented and patented the Bayer pattern filter used in essentially every colour image sensor to this day.

    But the problem was: Kodak had a big film business - with a lot of film factories, a lot of employees, a lot of executives, and a lot of recurring revenue. And jumping into digital with both feet would have threatened all that.

    So they didn't capitalise on their early lead - and now they're bankrupt, reduced to licensing their brand to third-party battery makers.

    > You can display relevant ads in LLM output or natural language web-search.

    Maybe. But the LLM costs a lot more per response.

    Making half a cent is very profitable if you only take 0.2s of CPU to do it. Making half a cent with 30 seconds multiple GPUs, consuming 1000W of power... isn't.

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    2. djtango ◴[12 Apr 25 11:06 UTC] No.43663362[source]▶
    This is a good anecdote and it reminds me of how Sony had cloud architecture/digital distribution, a music label, movie studio, mobile phones, music players, speakers, tvs, laptops, mobile apps... and totally missed out on building Spotify or Netflix.

    I do think Google is a little different to Kodak however; their scale and influence is on another level. GSuite, Cloud, YouTube and Android are pretty huge diversifications from Search in my mind even if Search is still the money maker...

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    3. fragmede ◴[12 Apr 25 12:05 UTC] No.43663684[source]▶
    It goes to internal corporate culture, and what happens to you when you point out an uncomfortable truth. Do we shoot the messenger, or heed her warnings and pivot the hopefully not Titanic? RIM/Blackberry didn't manage to avoid it either.

    People like to believe CEOs aren't worth their pay package, and sometimes they're not. But a look at a couple of their failures and a different CEO of Kodak wouldn't have had what happened happen, makes me think that sometimes, some of them do deserve that.

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    4. decimalenough ◴[12 Apr 25 12:16 UTC] No.43663737[source]▶
    Sony's Achilles heel was and remains software. You can't build a Spotify or Netflix if you can't build a proper website.
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    5. dgacmu ◴[12 Apr 25 12:56 UTC] No.43663969[source]▶
    1/2 kW/minute costs about $0.001 so you technically could make a profit at that rate. The real problem is the GPU cost - a $20k GPU amortized over five years costs $0.046 per second. :)
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    6. johnecheck ◴[12 Apr 25 13:20 UTC] No.43664137{3}[source]▶
    If the king/ceo is great, autocracy works well.

    When a fool inevitably takes the throne, disaster ensues.

    I can't say for sure that a different system of government would have saved Kodak. But when one man's choices result in disaster for a massive organization, I don't blame the man. I blame the structure that laid the power to make such a mistake on his shoulders.

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    7. vel0city ◴[12 Apr 25 13:40 UTC] No.43664285{3}[source]▶
    That, and while Sony had all these big groups they often didn't play nice with each other. Look at how they failed to make Minidisc into any useful data platforms with PCs, largely because MD's were consumer devices and not personal computers so they were pretty much only seen as music hardware.

    Even on the few Vaios that had MD drives on them, they're pretty much just an external MD player permanently glued to the device instead of being a full and deeply integrated PC component.

    8. ◴[12 Apr 25 15:52 UTC] No.43665437[source]▶
    9. pingou ◴[12 Apr 25 17:18 UTC] No.43666278[source]▶
    How do you get that? I get $0.0001 per second over 5 years to reach 20k.
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    10. dgacmu ◴[12 Apr 25 17:38 UTC] No.43666426{3}[source]▶
    Because I'm an idiot and left off a factor of 365. Thank you! A 20k GPU for 30 seconds is 1/3 of a cent. Still more than the power but also potentially profitable under this scenario informing all the other overhead and utilization.
    11. fragmede ◴[12 Apr 25 19:43 UTC] No.43667384{4}[source]▶
    that seems weird. Why hold up one person as being great while not also holding up one person as not? If my leader led me into battle and we were victorious, we'd put it on them. if they lead us to ruin, why should I blame the organizational structure that led to them getting power as the culprit instead of blaming them directly?
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    12. fennecfoxy ◴[14 Apr 25 09:23 UTC] No.43679541{3}[source]▶
    I firmly believe the majority of CEOs and executives may do something useful (often not) but none of them truly _earn_ their multi-million salaries (for those that are on the modern 100-1000x salaries). It's just suits, handshakes and social connections from certain schools/families. That's all.

    Constantly I see them dodging responsibility or resigning (as an "apology") during a crisis they caused and then moving on to the next place they got buddies at for another multi-mil salary.

    Many here would defend 'em tho. HN/SV tech people seem to aspire to such things from what I've seen. The rest of us just really think computers are super cool.

    13. johnecheck ◴[14 Apr 25 13:13 UTC] No.43680915{5}[source]▶
    I'm not saying you'd be wrong to blame the bad leader - just that blaming them doesn't achieve much.

    The CEO takes the blame, the board picks a new one (Unless the CEO has special shares that make them impossible to dismiss), and we go on hoping that the king isn't an idiot this time.

    My reading of history is that some people are fools - we can blame them for their incompetence or we can set out to build foolproof systems. (Obviously, nothing will be truly foolproof. But we can build systems that are robust against a minority of the population being fools/defectors.)