Just look at their "Projects" page here: https://x.company/projects/ Still touting public failures like Everyday Robots, Loon, Glass, Makani, now Mineral. Fail fast shouldn't mean fail always...
'Fail' in this context mostly means 'choose to use resources to do other things'. Alphabet has certainly learned a huge amount from all of these ventures, and that doesn't go away if they close them down. There'll be people at Alphabet looking for uses of what came out of these companies in the future. The point of Google X was to try projects that had very little chance of success but that would have been world-changing if they pulled it off. The probability of 'fail always' was always quite high.
The same lesson applies to everyone. Your startup might fail but you take the learning and experience with you, and use it to do other things in the future. When you're setting goals there should be a reasonably high probability of failing because otherwise you're just not aiming high enough.
This is a fantasy, and I know first hand.
I worked for a startup that was acquired by Google. They shut us down after a year. I am here to tell you that they "learned" absolutely nothing. The archived technology was never touched. Years later there were multiple teams doing stuff redundant to what we did. They didn't know we ever existed and their projects will probably never be released.
I've worked there for 12 years and this is 100% accurate. It's all one big director and vp level circle jerk.
Do you have any evidence for this? Because at a certain point, the framework almost defines failure out of existence. Which is very much in line with X’s philosophy.
I see that as a good thing. I'd much rather Google pour $ billions of its profit into moonshot R&D than simply returning it to shareholders or growing its ad business.
A failure in what sense? It's their research arm.
It feels crazy to bash down what they're doing even if it led nowhere. I'd prefer the money goes toward funding "failed research" than sit in their bank accounts.
Do you feel the same way about NASA, CERN, scientific research in general? There are many areas that receive significant funding for decades and lead nowhere by the looks of it.
It's about efficiency. Even for research that doesn't make revenue, you can do it efficiently or inefficiently. SLS and Google X are way down on the inefficient end of the spectrum.
Your comment was pretty harsh. Google X has been around for what? only 14 years? The number of projects they funded and the researchers they employed during that time frame is great initiative and admirable on its own.
Yeah it costs more. But it costs less than if you ever needed it suddenly and it didn’t exist.
So they decide what google does with its money, not the other shareholders?
Tech stocks are weird compared to most company stocks because many of them have never issued dividends to shareholders, which is what companies traditionally do with excess cash.
I know of some great people (like "Best In Their Field" great) attracted to google to work on X projects. Then while they're there, they may as well spread some of their knowledge to other google projects. Or the tech developed there failed as a standalone product, but the knowledge gained folded in to another project.
Even if every "moonshot" project failed, it may have given benefits to the company as a whole. Though at some point I do wonder if the intent of google X projects is to fail as a standalone product, and just be folded into more core projects....
I thought there were several companies selling fully working systems for camera-targeted weed/fertiliser spraying, right now? Including John Deere? And Trimble and others have things like precision GPS auto-steer for tractors for over a decade?
Seems to me Google has unlimited ad money, so people working there can make the big bucks without needing to deliver sales or profits or build a sales/dealer/repair network or set up a farm equipment manufacturing operation or anything else they don't feel like doing.
Waymo hasn't succeeded yet. Their excessively slow scaling may yet be their downfall. And again, the project predates X. It's more like X came out of Waymo than the other way around.
A lot of projects like X were really about keeping people off the job market.
edit: or they were about finding a way to marginalize competitors for senior roles. Give them a cushy job that plays to their ego, so they don't fight you for the key positions of power in the company.
Why do you expect better lower failure rate for *moonshots* than for startups? That's entirely unreasonable.
It's very interesting that you're focusing on failures rather than on graduated projects. Do you really expect 100% success rate for moonshots?
It might actually be hard to estimate success rate as best ideas got absorbed into Google itself. E.g. Google Brain originated at X. Wikipedia has other examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Development#Others
Seems creativity and memorizable branding isn't a thing anymore.
And I guess US trademark law agrees with me since they're both operating without hiccups.
Have you heard about X's new AI project?
And you already made it clear you're not going for some kind of "all X go together" claim because you said there are different Xs.
Oh, wait, are you implying you switched X between sentences without saying so? That would just be bad communication on your end.
Https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1dvsod6/phoenix_police_officer_pulls_over_a_driverless/
The standard isn't good enough and probably never will be, they've been restricted to super-well-mapped, mostly-good-weather cities without a lot of adverse real-world conditions they're going to encounter.
In fact, performance may not improve, it may worsen as they expand geographically, and/or encounter "new" conditions (other robot drivers, who knows?)
Humans are remarkable at coping with new conditions, machines are not.
What's your point?
I don't see the point of picking one example of a mistake and pretending it's indicative of a failing endeavour when literally no other company is even close to what Waymo is doing right now.
Machines don't make mistakes.
If a crane collapses, it didn't make a mistake.
If a robot car drives into oncoming traffic, it's not a mistake, it's an engineering failure, a bad design.
This wasn't a fuckup in a prototype, this was a life-critical fuckup 15-20 years into the project which is still confined to a small number of well-mapped cities with good weather.
So my point stands, major fuckups decades into a project when conditions are fairly close to ideal are not acceptable and are indicative of a failed project.
As an aside, it's also not the case that "better than human" is all that matters. The kind of fuckup also matters because people vote, and votes change regulations. If people don't like it, it won't be legal. Driving into oncoming traffic in broad daylight with 20 years of engineering progress is not something people are going to say "oh okay well sometimes my grandma does that too" to.
You guys are wearing rose-tinted glasses.
There is a lot of press trying to "gotcha" Waymo but from what I can tell, their systems are actually quite good.
Do you hear how naive you sound?