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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Kind of sucks to be google. Even they're making good progress here, and have laid the foundations of a lot if not most things.. their products are, well there aren't any noteworthy compared to rest. And considering google is sitting on top of one of the largest if not THE largest video database, along with maps, traffic, search, internet.zip, usenet, vast computing resources vertically integrated.. they have the whole advantage in the world. So, the hell are they doing? Why isn't their CEO already out? Expectations from them are higher than from anyone else.

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I don't know how more people don't talk about the 1M context tokens. While the output is mediocre for cutting edge models, you can context stuff the ever living hell out of it for some pretty amazing capabilities. 2M tokens is even crazier.

It is pretty amazing. I've been using it every day. I do wish you could easily upload an entire repo into it though.

Have it write a program to output a repo as a flat file.

Anything approaching the token limit I turn into a file and upload to a vector store. Results are comparable between Chat and Assistants.

That's a good point. Gemini gatekeeping me on so many answers made me forget about this extraordinary feature of it.

Google search has been absolutely ruined in terms of quality. You're right, they've built the base in terms of R&D for many of the AI breakthroughs thats powering competing alternative products.... that happen to be better than Google's own products. Google went from "Don't be evil" to just another big corporate tech company. They have so much potential. Regrettable.

They are fast on their way becoming IBM 2.0.

More like Xerox

If anything google search with the Gemini area on the top has been very good for me.

Their CEO is generating massive, growing profits every quarter while releasing generative technology, all the while threading a fine line in what those models generate because it can be pretty devastating for a large corp like Google.

you think it's because of him or despite him?

Because they punish experimentation as it eats into their bottom line. AI is a tool for ads in the mind of executives at Google. Ads and monetization of human productivity, not an agent of productivity on its own.

C'mon, Google doesn't "punish" experimentation. Google X, Google Glass, Daydream, Fuschia, moonshots, the lab spinoff (whose name I can't remember)... hell, even all the abandoned products everyone here always complains about.

The experiments often/usually fail, but they do experiment.

If you prune all the branches, where will the fruits grow?

The branches were dead and could bear no fruit. New branches will sprout next season.

For grapes, the conventional wisdom is to prune all the old branches at the end of each season.

"Laser-focused on the bottom line at the expense of all else" is not how I'd describe Google, now or at any point in the past. They have a lot of dysfunction, but if anything that dysfunction stems from too much experimentation and autonomy at the leaf nodes of the organization. That's how they get into these crazy places where they have to pick between 5 chat apps or whatever.

If Google were as focused on ads as you seem to think we'd at least see some sort of coherent org-wide strategy instead of a complete lack of direction.

I'd describe Google as focused on the bottom line after they put the ads guy in charge of search.

I'm referring to this article that was posted here recently:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

The person now in charge of Search is Elizabeth Hamon Reid, a long-time googler who came up through the ranks from engineer (in Google Maps) to VP over 20 years. She's legit.

Is Wikipedia out of date then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan

Ah, according to this, she’s head of Search but reports to Prabhakar. I thought from recent reports that she’d taken search over from him.

Nonetheless, she was a good engineer and a good manager, back when we crossed path many moons ago.

https://searchengineland.com/liz-reid-google-new-head-of-sea...

That was a decision that prioritized the bottom line over other things. But saying that Google is "focused" on the bottom line implies that there's a pattern of them putting the bottom line first, which is simply not true if you look at Google as a whole. Search specifically, maybe, but not Alphabet.

It's often said you need to disrupt your own business model.

Google had blinders on. They didn't relentlessly focus on reinventing their domain. They just milked what they had. Gradually losing site of the user experience[1] to focus on monetization above all else.

1 - https://twitter.com/pdrmnvd/status/1707395736458207430

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