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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

> "Realistically, we could have had GPT-3 or even 3.5 probably in 2019, maybe 2020. The big question isn’t, did they see it? The question is, why didn’t we do anything with the fact that we had seen it? The answer is tricky.”

The answer is that monopolies stifle technological innovation because one well-established part of their business (advertising-centric search) would be negatively impacted by an upstart branch (chatbots) that would cut into search ad revenue.

This is comparable to a investor-owned consortium of electric utilities, gas-fired power plants, and fracked natural gas producers. Would they want the electric utility component to install thousands of solar panels and cut off the revenue from natural gas sales to the utility? Of course not.

It's a good argument for giving Alphabet the Ma Bell anti-trust treatment, certainly.

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A better example of that behaviour would be Kodak which invented the first digital camera as soon as 1975 then killed the project, because it was a threat to their chemical business.

Digital photography works not just because of the camera but because of the surrounding digital ecosystem. What would people do with digital photos in 1975?

We'll never know. Tech delayed is tech denied.

It does not matter. In the 80s, they owned the whole photography market, now they only exist as a shell of it's former self.

By not pursuing this tech, they basically committed corporate suicide over the long run and they knew it. They knew very well, especially going into the 90's and early 2000 than their time making bank selling film was counted.

But as long as the money was there, the chemical branch of the company was all-powerful and likely prevented the creation of another competing product that would threaten its core business, and they did so right until the money flow stopped and suddenly they went basically bankrupt figuratively overnight since the cash cow was now obsolete.

Kodak did plenty of great things with digital cameras in the early 2000s. Their CCD sensors from then are still famous and coveted in some older cameras. Go look at the price of a Leica M8 (from 2006) on eBay.

The problem Kodak had is what the person you're replying to is alluding to. They got outcompeted because they were a photography company, not a digital hardware manufacturer. Companies like Sony or Canon did better because they were in the business of consumer electronics / hardware already. Building an amazing digital sensor and some good optics is great, but if you can't write the firmware or make the PCB yourself, you're going to have a hard time competing.

It's not chemical-wing vs digital-wing. It's that Kodak wasn't (and rightly wasn't) a computing hardware manufacturer, which makes it pretty damned hard to compete in making computing devices.

(Granted companies like Nikon or Leica etc did better, but it's all pyrrhic now, because the whole category of consumer digital cameras is disappearing as people are content to take pictures on their phones.)

>They got outcompeted because they were a photography company, not a digital hardware manufacturer. Companies like Sony or Canon did better because they were in the business of consumer electronics / hardware already.

Huh? This makes no sense. Sony was indeed a consumer electronics company at that time, but Canon was not: Canon was a camera manufacturer. They didn't get into electronics until later as cameras became digital: their earlier cameras were the all-mechanical kind. Sony was an electronics company that had to learn how to make cameras, but Canon was a camera company that had to learn how to make electronics. Kodak could have done the same.

> Kodak could have done the same.

Kodak, while they incidentally made some cameras, were a film and film processing company that wasn’t great at cameras and wasn’t anything in electronics.

They were much worse positioned than either a camera company, or a consumer electronics company, for a pivot to the post-film photography world.

Canon was only a camera company when it started, but by the 1960s was moving into other markets like lenses, magnetic heads, photocopiers, fax machines, etc.

Kodak could have diversified like that too, but they didn't. They were positioned badly because they concentrated almost all their efforts on film and nothing else. Of course, part of this is probably due to American business culture compared to Japanese; Japanese businesses tend to be much more diverse and long-term in thinking, but regardless, Kodak did this to themselves.

Agreed but my additional point is that Kodak actually did branch out beyond film, and did so pretty well from a technical POV.

The problem was competing in hardware manufacturing, which is a whole different ballgame from concentrating on just the imaging aspects of it. So they were reduced, near the end, to just being really a (decent) component supplier to other companies. But that's the wrong part of the food chain to be in.

What are you talking about? Canon was making copiers, printers, scanners, video cameras from the late 80s on.

So they were already making digital hardware and so presumably had the internal expertise on how to product manage that.

https://global.canon/en/corporate/history/04.html

Ok, but they were a camera company before they moved into copiers and printers, right?

Obviously, they were well-positioned since they had already moved into electronics and such before the digital revolution happened.

1995 would have been a sensible time for them to pivot to digital. 1975 would not.

> In the 80s, they [Kodak] owned the whole photography market,

No, they shared it with Fujifilm (1/3rd each in 1990 according to https://pdgciv.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/tfinnerty2.pdf). And essentially via film, film processing but no significant camera market share, which is likely far more relevant to the transition to digital.

“Their days…were numbered” is more what a native speaker would say.

I was privy to the details of this. Sundar blocked the NEMA team from presenting at I/O with its gpt3 level product in the form of a character.

Sundar was afraid of the technology and how it would be received and tried to ice it.

How is that not immediate grounds for his termination? The board should be canned too for allowing such an obvious charlatan to continue ruining the company.

Two judgements were made to my knowledge:

1) Google enjoyed significant market status at the time and a leap forward like seemingly semi conscious AI in 2019 would be seen as terrifying. Consumer sentiment would go from positive to “Google is winning to hard and making Frankensteins monster”

2) it didn’t weave well into googles current product offering and in fact disrupted it in ways that would confuse the user. It was not yet productized but would already make the Google assistant (which at the time was rapidly expanding) look stupid.

A fictional character companion was not clearly a good path.

All this being said, I integrated the early tech into my product division and even I couldn’t fully grasp what it would become. Then was canned right at the moment it became clear what we could do.

Eric Schmidt was the only leader at Google who recognized nascent tech at Google and effectively fast tracked it. When my team made breakthroughs in word to vec which created the suggestion chip in chat/email he immediately took me to the board to demo and said this was the future. (This ironically wound a long path to contribute later to transformer tech)

Sundar often ignored such things and would put on a McKensey face projecting everyone just was far dumber than him and his important problems.

The first time I met with Eric Schmidt he asked what I did (harvest idle cycles to do scientific calculations), and then we talked about how Google was slowly getting into cloud. I remember him saying "I've tried to convince the board that the cloud is the future of growth for google, but they aren't interested" (this was before GCS and GCE launched).

The second time I met him I presented my project (Google Cloud Genomics) to the board of the Broad Institute, of which he was a member (IIRC the chair) and he was excited that Google was using cloud to help biology.

The irony, of course, with that, is that then Google/Alphabet like Microsoft eat its lunch in the space by poorly supporting The Broad and allowing Verily to sign a $150m deal with Azure. Quite a few of the folks who were working on HCLS products in Cloud (were you one of them?) subsequently departed for Verily.

I worked on the predecessor of HCLS and was pushed out before any Azure deal (and would never have moved to verily). I had set up a relationship between Google Research, the Broad, and Cloud (to apply large-scale Google ML technology in genomics) and all that went away when other folks took it in different strategic direction.

The Broad is still a google cloud customer and verily seems to support all three clouds now, but I'm not aware of the details. The whole thing seemed really strange and unbusinesslike.

This is a good illustration of why the common sentiment that "capitalism drives innovation" is ... not exactly accurate.

On the other hand, Alphabet's inability to deploy GPT-3 or GPT-3.5 has led to the possibility of its disruption, so anti-trust treatment may not be necessary.

Disrupted by a whom? Microsoft? Facebook? The company formerly known as Twitter? Even if one of these takes over we'd just be trading masters.

And that's ignoring how Alphabet's core business, Search, has little to fear from GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. These models are decent for a chatbot, but for anything where you want reliably correct answers they are lacking.

Honestly, this is part of the reason why I don't think Google will be a dominant business in 10 years. Searching the web for information helped us service a lot of useful 'jobs to be done' ... but most of those are now all done better by ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

Sure we have Gemini but can Google take a loss in revenue in search advertising in their existing product to maybe one day make money from Gemini search? Advertising in the LLM interface hasn't been figured out yet.

Google (kind of) feels like an old school newspaper in the age of the internet. Advertising models for the web took a while to shake out.

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