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?

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

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.

I keep hearing this, but Hassabis did not leave Google/Alphabet. He merely changed from an administrative position to a more technical one.

Maybe they'll replace Hassabis with someone more focussed on beating OAI and Anthropic at chatbots? He always seemed a bit more into science, protein folding, new drugs and the like.

It just depends on what are the most upvoted comments in HN. If they are bearish, you can be sure that you should be bullish in your investments. Meta was supposed to be broken as a business already, OpenAI and Anthropic would be failures as well.

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.