> I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment.
Why? (Genuine question).
Google is just some corporation, and one that’s been drifting for the last 15 years or more (since Schmidt left). They are not even a good actor, yet (and I don’t blame them for this) have sucked a lot of air out of the ecosystem.
Creative destruction is one of the key values (-> leads to benefits) of capitalism, and with US & EU antitrust asleep at the wheel we should be glad if Google is ground to dust and replaced by somethings (plural!) better.
Because in an ideal situation (as indicated with your last sentence) you'd have a bunch of active competitors yielding up better and better products. Not one active competitor with the singular new thing and a couple of reactive competitors that can't get things right.
Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet. If ChatGPT sinks that innovation (or at least makes it non-free) the loss may be more than the gain.
There's a lot of work going on in transformers, generative models, and all sorts of other things in addition to LLVMs. I'm not too worried at this point of OpenAI or openai+microsoft having any sort of monopoly.
It appears that neither does openAI believe that as they were happy to sell 50% of their company in addition to all the ownership they'd already given away. That was clear harvesting.
> Search is also supporting a lot of relatively free innovation at Alphabet.
Is it, really? Hard for me to come up with much of a meaningful list, even if you don't try to compare their history with outliers like PARC or Bell Labs. They are clearly spending but I don't see a lot of doing. They seem to have ignored Hamming's advice.
Because I was there to witness the disintegration of a company and the losses it created? Instead of layoffs, you have entire departments/factory shuttering.
When Nortel shut down, many engineers interviewed for BB (same province). I still remember how they looked when we told them we won't proceed with the hiring.
If Google were to collapse they'd be releasing a lot of skilled people into a hot job market. This isn't a case of shutting the "company town" heavy industry employer suddenly cutting a lot of blue collar people (many equally highly skilled but for jobs that require more infrastructure).
I understand the Nortel case (I remember those days), but the job scene in Ontario was quite different 20 years ago.
And that's certainly no reason to try to prop up a company that's basically a drag on the industry.
Why? (Genuine question).
Google is just some corporation, and one that’s been drifting for the last 15 years or more (since Schmidt left). They are not even a good actor, yet (and I don’t blame them for this) have sucked a lot of air out of the ecosystem.
Creative destruction is one of the key values (-> leads to benefits) of capitalism, and with US & EU antitrust asleep at the wheel we should be glad if Google is ground to dust and replaced by somethings (plural!) better.