The fact they caught up with OpenAI you almost expect. But the Nobel winning contributions to quantum computing, the advances in healthcare and medicine, the cutting edge AI hardware, and the best in class weather models go way beyond what you might have expected. Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.
They kind of are though?
Like, there is indeed amazing research supported by the company. The core user facing products are really declining in quality by being user hostile.
A search right now results in a made up LLM output followed by 4 ads disguised as content, and then maybe followed by the wanted result.
I’m not sure what happens inside the company for those two things to be true at once.
Ads subsidize experimentation of loss-generating moonshots until they mature into good businesses, or die.
- Their main source of revenue seems to be decaying, as if the talent that made it great isn't there anymore. Few people would tell you that search (or maps, or youtube) is better today than it ever was.
- Talent is there, and the quality of their moonshots is proof.
This contrast is curious.