They literally “invented” the method used by chatgpt. They are still ahead with AI research. Their main problem is bringing the value to the market. But that is a management problem. Management has no clear vision unfortunately. But it might takes just few changes at the highest management level to completely change the game. Google has still the best r&d in the tech world, they must return to use it properly
And DeepMind is doing things that no one has done before, some of which were groundbreaking contributions to the field of biology. Ah, what am I saying … I got confused. Google bad!
In a way, it looks even worse for a company that it was ahead in the fundamental research, and the corporate bureaucracy and management held it back so much that competitors took the difficult ideas invented there and turned them into products first. My intuition is that it’s easier to fix being behind on a research and technology level than it is to fix having bad corporate culture and complacent management focused only on protecting existing cash cows.
Both are difficult. Microsoft had most money in the world for a long time and never managed to have a barely decent R&D. The only decent internal “original” product was probably c#, that is still a copy of java. The problem is companies focused on making money prefer paying external companies to take the risks of innovation, and eventually buy them. It is the same for big pharma companies. When MBAs are in charge, innovation stops, because MBA fundamentally do not understand it. On the other hand innovation-focused companies struggle to make money, because they don’t understand customers and market.
Google tried to put itself in the middle, a 3rd way, but on the long term money people won, and left the innovation part as those companies that display an original Leonardo’s notebook in the entrance of their offices. It became a prestigious token to show around.
They need to evolve going back in time, otherwise there’s a real risk for them.
