I’m sure no one will read this but I was on the team that invented a lot of this early pre-LLM math at Google.

It was a really exciting time for me as I had pushed the team to begin looking at vectors beyond language (actions and other predictable perimeters we could extract from linguistic vectors.)

We had originally invented a lot of this because we were trying to make chat and email easier and faster, and ultimately I had morphed it into predicting UI decisions based on conversations vectors. Back then we could only do pretty simple predictions (continue vector strictly , reverse vector strictly or N vector options on an axis) but we shipped it and you saw it when we made hangouts, gmail and allo predict your next sentence. Our first incarnation was interesting enough that eric Schmidt recognized it and took my work to the board as part of his big investment in ML. From there the work in hangouts became all/gmail etc.

Bizarrely enough though under sundar, this became the Google assistant but we couldn’t get much further without attention layers so the entire project regressed back to fixed bot pathing.

I argued pretty hard with the executives that this was a tragedy but sundar would hear none of it, completely obsessed with Alexa and having a competitor there.

I found some sympathy with the now head of search who gave me some budget to invest in a messaging program that would advance prediction to get to full action prediction across the search surface and UI. We launched and made it a business messaging product but lost the support of executives during the LLM panic.

Sundar cut us and fired the whole team, ironically right when he needed it the most. But he never listened to anyone who worked on the tech and seemed to hold their thoughts in great disdain.

What happened after that is of course well known now as sundar ignored some of the most important tech in history due to this attitude.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand it.

[dead]