You talk tough but I don't think your understanding of the problem space warrants that tone. Doing research & development is not something that involves lying to investors. Investors love new products. That is how they make money by investing.
Consider the project mentioned in the article. Sure, it will cost millions of dollars to develop. But OSes are in high demand, existing OSes have quite a few sore points, and plenty of people have made money selling operating systems or devices that need a custom operating system (MS/DOS, Windows, iOS, etc.) So it is not categorically insane from a business or engineering perspective to say "hey, we're going to invest in the development of a new operating system that will change the world."
On the other hand, maybe all the OS world needs are some patches on top of Linux to smooth over the rough spots.
People that see the project the first way will say they're working on a "moonshot". People that see the project the second way will say they're working on a "senior engineer retention project."
Any big company will likely want to hedge its bets, and indeed... apparently Google has people working on a new OS, and they obviously have people patching the Linux kernel (Android). No matter which approach ends up being correct, Google makes money. I don't think the investors are going to be filing many criminal charges against the board.
Back to the retention aspect, remember what the downside is in this scenario. The people that want to build their own OS to change the world or whatever just leave and go do it. They have money and can probably rope in some investors. If they end up being right about the approach... there is no more Android and that means no more Google ads on mobile phones, no more location history, no more searches... etc. That is quite a downside for Google. So even though the project is "this seems crazy, but we don't want these people to quit", it's 100% the right financial decision.
I think the shareholders can appreciate that.
That said, as an employee... this was all a little too much for me when I was at Google. No matter what you worked on, there was always a competing project with twice as much headcount and 1/10th the users. You would have a meeting with them along the lines of "hey, this thing you're assembling a 30 person team for... my team already made and it's in production and working." They would be like "nah, our use case is slightly different and rather than editing 1 line of code and getting no promotion, I'd like to build a HUGE team and put an EZ promotion packet together." Not for me.
We tend to think investors love to chase clouds. These ideas have existed for a long time, and making them a reality - of course - isn't easy. I tend to believe an investor is looking at how good a company can sell the idea to consumers, even if the tech isn't there yet. The company tricks the consumer - not the investor. People buy the half-finished tech, the company appreciates in value, and the investor very likely planned for this. Maybe the investor is more interested in snake oil than full self-driving automation.
There are stupid investors out there, but they won't be investors for long.
I simply do not understand the mindset of silicon valley investors. I used to think that perhaps they had some edge that helped them to get behind successful companies, but looking at this -- how much money they raised and from whom -- I think that there are just a bunch of people who have so much money that they can afford to risk throwing it away on something that will not likely succeed.
Can someone watch the video in the article and explain what sort of mindset you have to be in and think that this is a good idea? Perhaps the initial vision was different somehow and the final product does not align with what you thought you were putting your money behind? Is it possible that you see the issues, but have so little faith in consumers not to buy crap that it seems like you'll make a reasonable profit? Maybe there's something you see or know that I don't -- perhaps some sort of shake up in the fruit industry was set to make this a hit only to not meet expectations?
I am now more deeply concerned than ever about the effect that an exploding tech bubble is going to have on our economy.
Did you even read article or just here to troll? All of your points (except for 1 about investing in everything, which is covered in the article) are FUD that have been debunked or addressed for years. Are you even in the software space, the whole point of software is to replace the limits physical world and now its possible with money, get excited!
You can't blame them: gratuitous moats (like those provided by winner-takes-all dynamics) are not common in a functioning (competitive) economy so they get to be revered.
It feels unlikely that the recent period of big tech can keep the same benefits going forward. It was basically a political moat: counting on the ongoing lack of antitrust and consumer protection regulation. Even if the political dysfunction that allows that continues (quite likely), the wheels of the universe are turning.
The "leaked" report focuses on open source - a mode of producing software that is bound to become a major disruptor. We tend to discount open source because of its humble beginnings, long incubation, many false dawns and difficult business models. But if you objectively take a look at what is possible today with open source software, its quite breathtaking. I would not discount some tectonic shifts in adoption. The long running joke is "the year of the linux desktop", but keep adding open source AI and other related functionality and at some point the value proposition of open source computing (both for individuals and enterprises) will be crushingly large to ignore.
Don't forget too, that other force of human nature: geopolitics (e.g., think TikTok and friends). The current "moats" were established during an earlier, more innocent era. Now digitization is a top priority / concern for many countries. The idea that somebody can build a long-lived AI moat given the stakes is strange to say the least.
Yeah for all the possible criticism of Google he's seriously arguing it's that there's too much speculative R&D? Generally companies become irrelevant by trying to hold onto their cash cow and not trying to reinvent / find new revenue streams.
I can think of ways I would have approached some specific instances differently (e.g Waymo), but the existence of speculative projects isn't evidence of waste. The specific callout of retirement accounts is strange too. I'm sure many institutional investors are backed by 401ks but is that actually representative? As a wealthy investor I'm guessing he's thinking more about himself and his dividend than other's retirement accounts.
comments like this really make me smh. what's wrong with some lucky people getting rich off of this? you do realize they financed that research for the past 20 years, and if it's actually an investment group instead of a few passionate individuals I can guarantee you they also financed a shitload of other endeavours that went nowhere and ate the losses, lol.
you could do the same, get together with a group of other people and invest in something using your disposable software eng income (maybe you already are). or you could just complain when someone else takes the risk and reaps the rewards because you apparently have no concept of things like jealousy, envy, or basic economics lol.
I know many people who have set up Llama locally (myself included), and they mainly use OpenAI tools for their day-to-day tasks.
I can’t imagine that for the vast majority of people, Llama would be an option, not without extensive packaging. That will happen, but the way Android has been available, usable, and even good for a decade, while all the profits are for iOS/Apple.
Again: I’m not absolutely convinced this will happen at 100%, but more than 10, more than 20% likely? Yeah. An oligopoly with Mistral, Anthropic, and Google might be more likely, but they’ll all make a lot of money.
My point isn’t that you should invest at that price but that investors who have are not completely detached from reality. They are confident, for sure and might be over-paying a bit, maybe by a factor or 2 or 3 — but not the way people who invested for Theranos, WeWork, or Pets.com.
It’s not a scam; it’s just a guy who can credibly say: “I’ll get as much money as a worldwide phone operator within a few years.” I don’t know if he will, but I can see how.
Thing is, the approach your describing is fundamental dishonest... Leading investors to believe that you have technology that will be ready in 2011 when in reality you expect it to be ready in 2016 is not flipping a start up business model... It's just lying to get investor money
This assumes a very high level of naivety by the people funding the company, who at least theoretically, should be, or have access to, technical experts that can study the technology for themselves.
We're not talking about people raising money from the general public or using heavy-handed sales tactics. We're talking about billionaires funding this thing - I'm not going to cry if they lose money on a bad investment (unless there is outright fraud involved).
Is there any indication that there is actually light at the end of this tunnel, and not just a lot more tunnel? How much of this is just smoke and mirrors for the sake of product development, and how much is just to bilk investors? I read the entire article, and I don't get the sense that the author is totally sure either.
Right, but all of what they are doing is self-serving. They develop these things to give their client portfolios an edge over other investment firms. They aren't developing these technologies to apply them to healthcare or general science, it's just to give them an edge in the investment business.
For a company of their size and wealth, their open source contributions are paltry. A handy way to deal with arrays in Java? Wow, that's game changing...
Really, we should be buying Google/Meta/Microsoft/etc stock because they will have interplanetary profits in [future]? I think there's a lot of other companies (both existing and not-existing-yet) that would capture a bunch of that growth first anyway.
Nah, the mistake people make is assuming that everyone actually believed all these companies would grow forever.
A huge part of recent tech valuations has been driven by "greater-fool" type pumping of selling questionable business models and half-baked ideas as fast as possible.
> The public spent a few million dollars on the Grand Challenge, while Waymo alone is worth 10's of billions of dollars.
False comparison. First of all DARPA has invested a lot more than that in all sorts of related AV technologies (e.g. LIDAR, AI, robotics). But the real question is when were those "few million dollars" invested. Seed investments generally are much smaller than what companies end up being worth.
In our high tech system, taxpayers generally take on the riskiest stage of very early development, where it takes billions of dollars in bets spread over a very large area over 10+ years. And you're right, there are some socialized benefits, but the statement stands that the costs are socialized as well.
Imagine if you told Google's earliest investor that their investment was a tiny percentage of what it's worth today, and they enjoy the benefit of using Google now, so it's fair that Google's later investors kept all the equity.
Consider the project mentioned in the article. Sure, it will cost millions of dollars to develop. But OSes are in high demand, existing OSes have quite a few sore points, and plenty of people have made money selling operating systems or devices that need a custom operating system (MS/DOS, Windows, iOS, etc.) So it is not categorically insane from a business or engineering perspective to say "hey, we're going to invest in the development of a new operating system that will change the world."
On the other hand, maybe all the OS world needs are some patches on top of Linux to smooth over the rough spots.
People that see the project the first way will say they're working on a "moonshot". People that see the project the second way will say they're working on a "senior engineer retention project."
Any big company will likely want to hedge its bets, and indeed... apparently Google has people working on a new OS, and they obviously have people patching the Linux kernel (Android). No matter which approach ends up being correct, Google makes money. I don't think the investors are going to be filing many criminal charges against the board.
Back to the retention aspect, remember what the downside is in this scenario. The people that want to build their own OS to change the world or whatever just leave and go do it. They have money and can probably rope in some investors. If they end up being right about the approach... there is no more Android and that means no more Google ads on mobile phones, no more location history, no more searches... etc. That is quite a downside for Google. So even though the project is "this seems crazy, but we don't want these people to quit", it's 100% the right financial decision.
I think the shareholders can appreciate that.
That said, as an employee... this was all a little too much for me when I was at Google. No matter what you worked on, there was always a competing project with twice as much headcount and 1/10th the users. You would have a meeting with them along the lines of "hey, this thing you're assembling a 30 person team for... my team already made and it's in production and working." They would be like "nah, our use case is slightly different and rather than editing 1 line of code and getting no promotion, I'd like to build a HUGE team and put an EZ promotion packet together." Not for me.
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