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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

If anything, I think Sundar Pichai will have to face more consequences for botching this launch than firing 12k people in the stupidest way possible. Boards are a fun thing to have to respond to.

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If the board get upset over this, the board is the problem. They are probably the ones who pushed Pichai to rush it anyhow.

> If the board get upset over this, the board is the problem.

Are you saying that boards shouldn't get upset at botched product launches, especially ones involving tech inflection points?

Because they are the very ones who made this urgent, yes. Getting it out this week or this month isn't going to make a difference in the long run.

> Because they are the very ones who made this urgent, yes.

If the board did do that, Sundar is the directly responsible individual who said "yes". If the board suggests "jump" and Sundar reflexively response "how high?", in my view Google has bigger problems.

Since when do the largest companies capitalize on tech inflection points early? If this is a goal its a new and ambitious one in the history of large business

Is it early? LLMs have been around for a long time, and BERT was 2018.

Yes, better to let small, scrappy startups like Microsoft blaze the trail

What have MS got to lose? They were not making a dent in search. Google has to be measured. They rushed it unnecessarily. It's not like an overnight coup --where it's done and over. Google has lots of time to respond.

Bing is making a ton of money because they actually have a usable search API for Bing.

Exactly! When it comes to search they are a small scrappy startup lol

Google is one of the leaders in this.

Their competitor, whom they’re responding to, is Microsoft, which has been one of the largest companies for much longer than Google has even existed.

Pichai makes over 100M per year. I think we can expect him to deliver a presentation on a tight schedule, otherwise how is he special?

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