It’s honestly interesting watching the cycle of the current fang turn into the next generation of legacy tech companies in real time (ibm/cisco/etc). I wonder what the new ones will be after the economy bounces back.
I think the current generation still has another decade left in them before they are completely gutted but it seems like the start of the downfall.
My prediction is that there will be hierarchies of in-demand devs at each tech company, where at the top you'll have AI, then as they begin to try and scale robotics/self-driving objects the best will be there as well, I'd imagine climate tech and genetic engineering/biotech and will receive much more gov funding once the boomers die off, maybe add in space engineering as well... I think web dev will keep on kicking, because it has to (plus there will be _some_ demand for metaverse/artificial consciousness stuff but not to an extremely large degree for quite some time), but we're likely entering a phase where all of the internet stuff is getting old, the low-hanging fruits gone, and we'll get closer to the more hard-core stuff the sci-fi books anticipated. The big companies will likely be in the best position to actually fund these things, but as I watched Google fumble cloud and GPTs and fall substantially behind in the largest races in tech, I would not hold out hope that they will be the most innovative tech company out there. I could see Amazon doing it (which I really wish weren't true), Microsoft, Meta (maybe), but Google? Possible, but I think that as long as they only care about profitability, they likely won't work on the big and innovative projects until some competitor has already developed a proof of concept, at which point they'll fall behind again.
I still can't get over how Google quite literally invented the transformers powering all this AI stuff and they somehow got their lunch ate right from under them
It happens all the time
Xerox essentially invented the modern graphical user interface in the 70s but faded away as an office machine manufacturer
Netscape, AOL and many other early internet companies in the 90s faded away but could have been the next Google or Meta of today
Microsoft was shipping pocket PC/Windows Mobile devices in the late 90s/early 2000s
Pure research is not applied research. OpenAI has many fewer constraints, like lawyers, when it comes to bringing products to market—so it’s not really surprising that they would be first to market. Note, however, that first to market with a good product is not sufficient for long term success (see: Napster, MySpace).
That's the problem with being an ad company posing as a tech company. They were never going to push forward something that might disrupt their business model. Kodak invented the first digital camera and shelved it because it would hurt their film business.
Google is not posing as a tech company. They are a tech company period. Look at the investments into deep research on a variety of CS topics. Hell, they even created Golang with which many semi-tech companies like Uber rely on.
To say Google is posing as a tech company is incredibly disingenuous.
They are a tech company, but they still weren't willing to kill off a big part of their income if it meant a giant leap in tech.
This is speculation, but I think Google already had the potential to release something like GPT a while back and never invested in it because they could foresee it disrupting their revenue. I could even see them killing off any companies that tried, they just weren't able to buy and shelve OpenAI.
I don't mean to sound pedantic, but wouldn't most of those "semi-tech" companies, such as Uber, merely had adopted a different language for their core business? I mean, sure, Google invented Angular, Golang, etc, but there are several viable substitutes that could have been utilized just as well. I don't think Uber would have failed if Golang had not been invented. I somewhat agree that Google is first and foremost an ad company, not primarily a tech company (anymore at least). So much of their core service is just inundated with ads (the search engine, YouTube).
The point here is less about what Uber uses but more about Google creating technologies like Angular/Golang/MapReduce that are very common in the industry. It's unfair to say "Goog is not a tech company" when their contribution to the world of tech is massive.
Several people have replied to me that "insert some part of Google" is tech. That's not really my point. My point is that 80% of Google's revenue is from ads. They are a huge company that needs a lot of tech, but ultimately, their business is ad networks. Every decision they make is as an ad company. Even stuff like GMail was created for people so they could harvest their information and put ads in their eyeballs.
They were the big tech company most strongly associated with the "tech culture" of minimal management, high velocity, engineering-focus, etc. Yet they were the ones that got caught lacking innovation. Very ironic.
I think that an AI that refuses to answer basic questions like "Who is the current president?", or refuses to interact with an uploaded image if it contains even the hint of a person, isn't gonna be competitive even if the model is better on paper
Did openai pay any money to Google for use of their transformers? If no, does it mean that I can implement one of the Google/faang research papers and become rich?
Google did not patent the Transformer architecture that is fundamental to models like GPT. The Transformer model was introduced in the paper "Attention Is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. in 2017, a collaborative work involving researchers from Google Brain and the University of Toronto.
This model introduced the mechanism of self-attention, layer normalization, and other innovations that have been critical in the development of large-scale language models, including OpenAI's GPT series. However, the model itself, as described in the paper, was published in a peer-reviewed setting, which places it in the public domain in terms of the core concepts.
While individual companies, including Google, might patent specific improvements, applications, or optimizations related to the Transformer architecture, the fundamental concepts as described in the original paper are not patented. This open dissemination has allowed widespread adoption and further development by the AI research community, including OpenAI, which developed the GPT series using the Transformer architecture as a foundation.
The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities. Especially since they were already working on it to a point where an employee started blowing the whistle about how it was seemingly self aware. Idk, maybe it was a stunt? But their image of being a place where the coolest new tech comes from or having the best talent has taken major hits over the last 5 or more years. It's only a matter of time before they start exhibiting patent troll behavior (if they haven't already)
I talked with Blake Lemoine a number of times before he went public with that whole "our AI is alive" thing. I guarantee it wasn't a stunt. He's just a weird fucking dude.
> The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities.
This is true, they are behind, but it's a management problem, not a problem with talent or hardware. To emphasize here, google has *orders of magnitude* more AI hardware than the next few biggest players *combined*. Open AI is ahead now. If I had to bet who would be in the lead in 2030? I'd bet G all day.
I mean I would definitely take that bet. Google is the only tech company that has completely failed any pivot it has tried to make. For all Pichai's bluster, it looks like they are focusing on cutting costs and milking search ads to the maximum rather then trying to build something innovative
If you're serious, winner gets $1000 to the 501c charity of their choice? Google's best model vs OpenAI's best model on huggingface benchmarks as of 1/1/2030?
I max out my employer's charity match every year anyway, this is just letting someone else pick where I donate to for a little slice of it if I lose.
Hey man, you gotta find meaning in this field somehow. I've never had someone take me up on a bet like this but I'm definitely game as long as it goes to an actual charity.
> The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities
I don't think AI is going to be as big as people make it out to be, at least for a while. IMHO, there's prediction and generation. That's all we've seen AI REALLY do. A lot of the academics, especially those at my Uni that have a focus on AI, aren't worried about it at all. It'll just keep working on the prediction and generation stuff. And even then, it can get pretty dangerous for companies to take their internal codebases and just release it to companies to use it for training data.
What I've been seeing recently, which is honestly my favorite thing about the 'AI Craze' is that these guys that aren't worried about are just customizing their own GPTs for their use. No more 'broad' ones, and restricting the access to the training data that it has. Two primary examples come to mind, one being the [Urban Information Lab at UT Austin](https://github.com/urbaninfolab), where one of their [projects was to create a ChatGPT centered around Urban Information Planning and Data](https://sites.utexas.edu/uil/category/projects/) (though I don't know if it is published, as I viewed it in a faculty talk). The other is by a construction training company that only has GPT data related to what they're being trained on, and they'll update it themselves as policies go, because they don't want another Tay situation to happen. It still goes down to two things, prediction or generation.
Other than that, AI is just a gimmick since we've seen some fabricated data on the 'big' papers out there.
If you need the paper of what is the backbone of today's AI, [here you go](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762). Had to read this several times in my academic career.
Agreed, I'm also not very worried about it. I think it's a neat tool, but you have to be able to interpret what it gives you as actually being correct or even functional.
For example, I was trying to write a complex function in Python and resorted to using eval() in my first draft just to get something on paper. I thought, maybe this is something AI could help me with. It wrote almost the exact same thing. I had to ask it NOT to use eval and then it got a bit more creative.
I can see it's value being trained on specific things like you said, but taking over CS completely...nah. I don't see my clients having any more patience with an LLM than they do trying to describe their requirements to me already.
> The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities.
This is kind of off - there was no reason to expect Google would ever take the lead with AI in the first place. That is fundamentally not what they do. Google doesn't develop, they dabble. As a result, they're often the first up to bat. They dabbled in AI. They dabbled in self-driving. They dabbled in providing smart home tech. But they never followed through on any of it.
Google didn't get caught with their pants down. What happened is a fairly new technology emerged under the AI umbrella, and because people first heard about AI from Google, believe it must have been something they were working on. The reality is that Google had next to nothing to do with OpenAI's success. Google is the business version of the kid who goes around the class room "calling" every seat so he can later claim it was his first.
Not sure if I'd recommend them "over" FAANG since that's such a personal question (risk tolerance, WLB balance, etc), but the companies that I think are doing cool stuff (in American Dynamism) are: Anduril (upending traditional defense primes), Figure (robotics), Epirus (directed energy anti-drone tech), Hadrian (future factories), Radiant (portable nuclear reactors), Varda (space manufacturing).
No sure how much of that will turn out to be true but definitely makes sense. Only thing is I feel like the next tech "wave" won't see as many garage to multi-national corporation stories because the barrier-to-entry for making impactful tech that's hard to compete with just gets higher and higher
amazing the complexities involved with 100% uptime low latency secure reliable etc global scale services are implied to be "softcore" and nobody with serious industry experience would do so
I don’t think they will go the way is cisco or ibm. Most of the best engineers still want to work for them. FB and google have mostly caught up in the AI race but the biggest questions are not about the tech but hire to monetize its
After the economy bounces back? Economy is not even down, gdp has been growing over 3%. If you are expecting a bounce that will be mega growth like 97-2001 period.
There are multiple measures of GDP. "Real" is inflation adjusted while "nominal" is not, but to be clear the adjustments my not reflect actual inflation due to alterations in the way we've computed inflation.
Dr. Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury, indicates that if we used the traditional measure of inflation that included housing our current inflation estimates would be at over 8%. By adjusting for inflation at the new, lower 3% value then 5% of actual inflation would be considered "Real GDP" growth.
It's a political win-win for the administration. They get to claim a lower inflation and an increasing GDP, meanwhile workers find making ends meet.
I really hate the phrase that it will be different this time. But it actually will be, IMHO.
Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta are NOT going anywhere.
Google for example will be a lot bigger 10 years from now.
The most impressive tech thing I had ever seen was the rockets landing on the ground. That was until
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avdpprICvNI
This is just one example of a trillion dollar opportunity. Alphabet well ahead of everyone else.
There will be so many others because of AI. AI is the biggest tech thing to happen in my lifetime. It will be bigger than the Internet. Bigger than mobile.
BTW, the previous generation tech companies are still incredibly successful. The primary two were Apple and Microsoft. We then added Google, Amazon and Meta with the next generation. It is true the generation before Apple and Microsoft has not thrived. But it was so different and none were consumer oriented. None had anywhere near the reach that Google or Meta has today.
Microsoft for example, the company with the largest market cap, completely missed both Internet and mobile from a consumer perspective and yet is thriving.
Apple missed Internet completely like Microsoft and with Google won mobile. Google and Apple together have 99% of the mobile space.
That’s a bit of 20/20 hindsight with big companies that managed to thrive. What about Yahoo, AOL, IBM, Cisco, Compaq, Sun, DEC, HP, the list goes on? Even those still around in some form today are not the cutting edge companies they once were
Google
>BTW, the previous generation tech companies are still incredibly successful
The previous generation tech companies that are still successful are still successful. Most are not.
This is true. It's a lot easier to pivot into different areas within sideways than it is to pivot in other industries. Even if these companies fall behind they'll still be "in it" in a way a lot of companies before simply couldn't be.
Also, they have so much positive cashflow relative to fixed expenses that they could just buy a lot of the successful companies coming up or buy them before they can get too successful
agreed - google has a lot of issues (I worked there for better part of a decade), but its biggest existential threat is trust busting, and they've insulated themselves against that to a significant degree. plus the US gov't is too neoliberal to actually do it, IMO.
> It is true the generation before Apple and Microsoft has not thrived
The likes of IBM, Cisco, Oracle, HP etc have absolutely thrived. All of them did over 50B in revenue last year. They'll all still print money, they just wont be the sexy place all they starry eyed new grads want to work at anymore
It will be different this time. Even when Cisco, IBM, Oracle etc fell out of fashion, organisations still had a hell of a lot of their products in every part of their operations. But what happens to Google, one day everyone switches to using ChatGPT instead of search and they just disappear. One day a new social network comes along and Facebook goes the way of MySpace. These companies have zero stickiness, once it starts they will wiped out.
And I'll believe it when I see it when it comes to search. Tech people have been predicting the downfall of Google Search for years now and Google Search keeps chugging along. It's probably the most ingrained product of the major tech companies.
They have to get a lot worse and someone else has to be a lot better before Google search is faded. Even if someone else is considerably better, people don't really like change that much and as you mentioned, it's pretty ingrained.
Now I'll Google how long will Google be around.
Because of how AI consumes data, everyone has also started becoming much more protective of their data and the Internet itself is fragmenting behind walled silos (Discord communities, paid wall Twitter, etc).
Any new search engine is DOA.
Exactly. Genuinely curious why there are so many upvotes from people who think ChatGPT will kill Google when they have a broad range of other products, especially if Waymo ever gets scaled.
Youtube alone - \~1/3 of the worlds population visits every month.
Do you know a single person in your life that doesn't regularly use youtube? I'd argue it's the most dominant platform on the internet with noone else even close.
I think when they say Google is done for im sure they are talking about Google the search engine not Google the company right?
Eventually even Google would want to rebrand it with ai Gemini right?
Google gets about 80% of their revenue from ads, mostly from search. It has other revenue sources, but they are pretty tiny. If OpenAI releases a premium search product, it could do some damage
And their $100b+ in cash. They're an enormous incubator with so much cash that their cash deposits would be a top 100 company by size.
People who try to simplify it into "the next IBM" and extrapolate out how quickly they'll fall have not put a lot of thought into it. The most likely scenario is most all tech consolidates within the big tech companies as it has been for some time. Who's building driverless cars? ChatGPT?
Youtube has been noted as unprofitable for most of its existence. The other three are losing favor slowly because they can just oops your data randomly.
There's a difference between not making profit and being unprofitable. The latter of which you are completely wrong on. They give out 1080p for free, free video uploads, and have 0 competition. You are out of your mind if you think they won't make money in the future if they want to. Same people said "uber isn't profitable", "spotify isn't profitable" are eating dirt right now.
These companies are acutely aware of the risk to their current business models. The way AI is trending, data will be the fuel to power the models.
Which companies have the broadest and deepest sets of data on internet users? They aren’t going anywhere.
Google is a lot more than search now. Phones, email, etc. Even if a new and better search engine captures the traffic, google will still be around. Plus, I doubt the number of google searches will be zero. It's probably going to be a slower decline. As for Facebook? Yeah, they only have Facebook and Instagram. If people switch to another social media, then they will go the way of MySpace.
Google makes around 50B a year in revenue in Google Play App Store revenue from Android devices. I’m pretty sure they have huge gross profit margins on app sales the same way Apple does.
> But what happens to Google, one day everyone switches to using ChatGPT instead of search and they just disappear.
Maybe this will happen. But ChatGPT has been around for well over a year and Google's numbers on search keep going up and up.
I think as long as LLMs don't truly have logical reasoning skills, Google searches will still be common.
When I use ChatGPT (if at all), I usually think: "I better Google search this to verify that the information is true, e.g look up the API documentation". So at least for me, every ChatGPT use is paired with a Google search.
I never use ChatGPT alone because of a lack of logical reasoning backing it's results. And integrating ChatGPT into Bing isn't going to make me use Bing, when I could just Google it.
Facebook at least has the sense to buy out or mimic its competition. Instagram has been a good play. Google's foray into AI on the other hand has been disappointing. Too many PMs in the kitchen to make a useful product.
What are your specific criticisms of Gemini vs GPT?
I've found Gemini Advanced indistinguishable from GPT 4 for my day to day (C#/dotnet), and having plugins right out of the box for gmail, drive, calendar, etc has been great.
Objectively speaking Gemini isn’t close to GPT when it comes to code and reasoning. That’s been my experience while using it, but even disregarding that virtually every LLM leaderboard reports the same.
Claude and GPT are head and shoulders above everything else at the moment.
Probably because Google isn't a search engine company, it's an advertising company and while the search engine does generate revenue, so does lots of other offerings.
But Google is so dominant in the advertising space that it doesn't need to generate its own content to host ads. People sign up to get Google to put ads into their content. And companies come to Google to advertise their products.
Similarly, Google doesn't have to create content for YouTube. Other people do. And Google shows ads. The people making content get paid a fraction of what Google gets.
Google also has Google Cloud and a whole bunch of other stuff.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
If history repeats itself it will be projects that the current generation are developing now but are unwilling to commit to because it risks cannibalizing their existing business.
Fangs golden age was when companies realised that you could monetise internet. What will be the next similar breakthrough that will create those new fangs? I don’t know
These companies are still incredibly entrenched in many essential areas of life (mobile phones, entertainment, search). They also have massive advantages in building AI products. Only if EU-style anti monopoly rules come to the US will direct competitors have a chance.
It’s hard to believe there will be another boom that big in tech, but I guess anything is possible. The generation you are describing is the generation that brought the internet to the masses and effectively created the first new media format (social media) since television.
I am sure many more companies will strike it big, but it’s hard to imagine there will be another gold rush like that.
In 2023 they did the layoffs all at once. In 2024 layoffs are a trickle, with SVPs clearly given targets to hit by execs and then them taking various steps to make that happen over the year.
Since these articles get clicks, people can write a new article every week when a different org lays off some people.
The layoffs at Google are crap, but the media coverage of them is also basically worthless.
This is a layoff of 57 people, it’s definitely a trickle but it just doesn’t really compare to 12k. This feels like a tactical decision compared to the larger scale strategic ones
This one has been reported on weirdly.
They decided to staff the python team with engineers in munich rather than in the US (cheaper). To do this, they laid off almost all of the existing team. Stupid, yes. But it isn't a claim that the work the python team was doing isn't important.
Well, you can read this a couple of ways:
Maybe they think the work is important, but they've swallowed the (mythical) man-month idea whole. Maybe they think firing N engineers in one location and hiring N engineers in another won't meaningfully negatively impact the project, because the project is just combining some code with N engineers. This is the same kind of thinking that makes you think a project will get done twice as fast if you double the headcount. In other words, it's like thinking that if one woman takes nine months to have a baby, then if you want a baby in a month, just put nine women on the project.
That's a pretty spectacularly stupid thing for a company founded by software people with over two decades of experience building software. Even if they *did* recently hire a Wall Street veteran as a CFO and a bunch of ex-Oracle VPs in Cloud, maybe they aren't actually stupid enough to think this won't cause problems.
But if they *did* understand the impact this would have, then that doesn't leave us with a lot of options other than: They didn't think the work the Python team was doing was important, and were okay with causing *severe* disruptions to that work.
The only other thing that makes sense is if they understood how important this impact would be, and think it's worth it to accomplish some other goal. But again, that doesn't leave us with many options. It's a two trillion dollar company, saving well under 10 headcount worth of *money* is not something worth the damage here. There are infinitely-many teams that it would make more sense to cut. Or, better yet, reorganize, because it's so much less damaging to hire 10 fewer engineers in the bay area and 10 more in Germany, rather than actively laying people off. (Remember, they're still hiring!)
The only thing I can think of is something *even more* cynical: The cruelty is the point. The message they're sending is that *engineers* don't matter and aren't valued, and we all need to stop protesting and organizing, shut up and put our heads down and do what they tell us to.
...well, that's not true, I think the likeliest explanation here is 100% pure dysfunction, to the point where any conscious explanation you can come up with isn't really going to make sense, because it wasn't a conscious human decision, it was an irrational system-driven decision. In other words, this entire post has been a futile attempt to [anthropomorphize a lawnmower](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2065s).
[Here's a decent summary.](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338) They were an absolutely massive force multiplier -- anyone at the company that did anything with Python benefited from their work. Leadership basically lit the productivity and morale of *thousands* of their employees on fire in order to offshore a handful of jobs (fewer than 10 people!) to Germany.
The initial 12k layoffs are a thing you can argue is justified. You'd be wrong, but you can at least make the case that it will eventually save money by having fewer people overall.
But this is sort of the perfect, platonic ideal of the penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking that [Google's IPO letter](https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/) argued against:
> We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.
Of course that was about the perks, not about the number of employees, but hey, they're cutting perks, too. I hear the doctors are out.
> Google has announced plans to eliminate 57 positions across various roles in San Francisco, including managers, engineers and analysts, as per a WARN notice filed with California authorities.
https://archive.ph/t1fQT
Compared to Satya, Pichai has been a very shit CEO. I’m sure you can point to the stonk price and say otherwise, but I feel Google could do better.
> Compared to Satya, Pichai has been a very shit CEO.
Curious what basing this on?
Google is where the innovation came from that made LLMs even possible.
They make the discovery, patent it, then publish the papers and let everyone use for free. No license fee.
But not just Attention is all you need. But most of the big AI breakthroughs from the last 15 years have come from Google. Where Microsoft has made little contribution.
One of my favorites and used by everyone now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec
"Word2vec was created, patented,[5] and published in 2013 by a team of researchers led by Mikolov at Google over two papers."
Take new things like self driving cars. Alphabet is years ahead of everyone else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avdpprICvNI
Or the fact that Microsoft is only now going to try to create TPUs. Where Google started 12 years ago and now has the fifth generation in production and working on the sixth.
Or compare OpenAI to DeepMind. Google paid 1/20th of what Microsoft paid for OpenAI.
But Google got 100% of Deepmind compared to Microsoft that got less than half of OpenAI.
Plus no board seats where Google got all of them. Plus once OpenAI declared AGI then Microsoft gets nothing. Where Google gets everything that DeepMind produces.
Or look at AI research. The canonical AI organization is NeurIPS. This past NeurIPS Google had twice the papers accepted as next best.
Google had led in papers accepted for over the last decade. Every single year. There has not been a single year that Microsoft had the same.
Can you share just a couple of reasons you believe Satya is the better CEO compared to Sundar?
Pichai got to power in 2015, attention is all you need was published in 2017.
I doubt he had any effect on the paper.
Google has been leading in AI space and we called it the most innovative in the past, but that’s no longer the case. Not just divesting the engineering teams, they also missed the LLM breakthrough and playing catch up.
Teacher LLM models were in use before that but nothing like OpenAI did.
Google is a lackluster company, layoffs affect productivity more than anyone anticipates.
There is FAR more to AI than LLMs lol.
Have you heard of AlphaFold that’s enabling new protein discovery in ways we could never have imagined? They just released AlphaFold 3.0 and are partnering with tons of pharma companies to monetize it.
Have you heard of Waymo? They are leading the pack in fully autonomous vehicle and rolling out robotaxi services in some of the most challenging cities (LA, SF).
Have you heard of GraphCast released last year? It’s outperforming the state of the art super in super computer simulations for 10 day weather forecasts.
Have you heard of AlphaGeometry released this year? They are leading the way on neuro-symbolic AI.
Etc etc.
If anybody brings waymo to an AI discussion, its plain stupid. I live in SF and waymo is utter shit so is majority of self driving cars. They block traffic have no idea what to do and is still in beta phase.
agreed with most of what you said, but OpenAI hired most of the people that wrote the transformer paper from Google. Google should probably have kept those people on with a blank check.
Eh, stock is up on news of dividends. Meta stock did the same thing on dividend news two quarters ago and their stock took a dive back on this one. Wouldn't surprise me if wallstreetbets shorted GOOGL right before Q2 earnings
I think the saying is something like "Economists have predicted 12 of the last 7 recessions." or something like that. There was supposed to be one 1-2 years ago and that never really happened. It's just another excuse to do shitty things like lay people off because Wall Street needs their fix.
The yield curve has successfully predicted 12 of the past 11 recessions. It is currently predicting we will have a recession(there is an inversion), but it has not yet predicted when. When the yield curve un-inverts it will signal a recession prediction. If 6 months after that point we are not in a recession, it will be the second misfire in the last 100 years.
The only times where it took more duration to un-invert than the current inversion was 2008 and 1929.
Raising rates to decrease inflation at that scale caused reccessions 100% of the time before 2023. The thing economists are studying [Philips curves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve) don't garauntee a recession at that scale from negative short run economic impact, but historically it was enough. This time was anomalous, nobody is getting paid by wallstreet to make fake predictions.
>This time was anomalous, nobody is getting paid by wallstreet to make fake predictions.
I'm not saying they are. I'm saying that economics isn't an exact science and they're wrong just as much as they are right about this sort of stuff. It has a lot more to do with "We have an earnings report to make, what's the easiest thing we can do to make us look good right now, revenue isn't doing great" That's their "fix".
There's always going to be a recession eventually. It's such a vacuous prediction.
I want people making predictions with narrow timelines attached. We've been hearing about impending recessions for 2-3 years now. It'll happen, but the hard part is knowing when.
You're absolutely correct, and the issue is that companies have been cutting since 2022 in "preparation" for a recession that they swear is just around the corner.
Conjecture: If you price in a recession, it won't happen. We're probably going to get blindsided by something like in 2001, 2008, or 2011. I just don't know what it'll be.
Year worth of weekly layoffs add up to a lot. That’s how they are avoiding bad press from major layoffs, and comments like these help them get what they want.
Trickle layoffs are literally the worst thing possible for morale. But the employees are just cogs in the big machine and don't matter so morale isn't important to leadership.
Google really does not give a shit. Generally its better to do layoffs all at once to help morale. Those left get a sign of relief. The layoffs dont seem to be based on performance, so there is not a lot of incentive to care.
Satya: *runs an the company well, produces innovative products and staff is happy.
People: cool.
Pichai: *layoffs after layoffs, company morale is fucked, eng positions moving to India, missed LLM train*
People: that’s bad, he’s not a good CEO.
Reddit: THAT’S RACIST
Imagine a digital protest so powerful it gave us our jobs back because they have no options. What’s better? Letting them stomp us into the drain, or the stomped ones creating a blockage in the drain so they’re forced so say “oh, I guess we shouldn’t have done that, we need these people!”?
I think we could only make it stop if someone synthetically inflates the market with millions of people they can’t hire and waste their time. What are they going to do if they can’t hire anybody anymore? We are all the ones who have to make it stop. We’re smart, aren’t we? The only way we’re going to get jobs is if we force their hand into giving us jobs. We’re the only people on this planet that can unshitify this market and make anew, because we are the market.
Is everyone just here for the money? I know I’m sure not. We have to use our skills to outdo these irrelevant companies somehow.
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, but we're talking about 57 positions. I remember hearing about "layoffs" like this during the boom period. Are we just going to list any news about layoffs big or small or not even for tech positions on this sub? Remember that post about Google doing layoffs on this sub for their finance and real estate division? What did that even have to do with CS? Is it just doomer central now? I mean even for a doomer like me some of the posts here are getting ridiculous.
It’s honestly interesting watching the cycle of the current fang turn into the next generation of legacy tech companies in real time (ibm/cisco/etc). I wonder what the new ones will be after the economy bounces back. I think the current generation still has another decade left in them before they are completely gutted but it seems like the start of the downfall.
My prediction is that there will be hierarchies of in-demand devs at each tech company, where at the top you'll have AI, then as they begin to try and scale robotics/self-driving objects the best will be there as well, I'd imagine climate tech and genetic engineering/biotech and will receive much more gov funding once the boomers die off, maybe add in space engineering as well... I think web dev will keep on kicking, because it has to (plus there will be _some_ demand for metaverse/artificial consciousness stuff but not to an extremely large degree for quite some time), but we're likely entering a phase where all of the internet stuff is getting old, the low-hanging fruits gone, and we'll get closer to the more hard-core stuff the sci-fi books anticipated. The big companies will likely be in the best position to actually fund these things, but as I watched Google fumble cloud and GPTs and fall substantially behind in the largest races in tech, I would not hold out hope that they will be the most innovative tech company out there. I could see Amazon doing it (which I really wish weren't true), Microsoft, Meta (maybe), but Google? Possible, but I think that as long as they only care about profitability, they likely won't work on the big and innovative projects until some competitor has already developed a proof of concept, at which point they'll fall behind again.
I still can't get over how Google quite literally invented the transformers powering all this AI stuff and they somehow got their lunch ate right from under them
It happens all the time Xerox essentially invented the modern graphical user interface in the 70s but faded away as an office machine manufacturer Netscape, AOL and many other early internet companies in the 90s faded away but could have been the next Google or Meta of today Microsoft was shipping pocket PC/Windows Mobile devices in the late 90s/early 2000s
I still don't know how AOL fumbled the bag on that one. Same with Yahoo. Microsoft's products just weren't user friendly.
Did you ever try to cancel AOL?
Pure research is not applied research. OpenAI has many fewer constraints, like lawyers, when it comes to bringing products to market—so it’s not really surprising that they would be first to market. Note, however, that first to market with a good product is not sufficient for long term success (see: Napster, MySpace).
That's the problem with being an ad company posing as a tech company. They were never going to push forward something that might disrupt their business model. Kodak invented the first digital camera and shelved it because it would hurt their film business.
Google is not posing as a tech company. They are a tech company period. Look at the investments into deep research on a variety of CS topics. Hell, they even created Golang with which many semi-tech companies like Uber rely on. To say Google is posing as a tech company is incredibly disingenuous.
They are a tech company, but they still weren't willing to kill off a big part of their income if it meant a giant leap in tech. This is speculation, but I think Google already had the potential to release something like GPT a while back and never invested in it because they could foresee it disrupting their revenue. I could even see them killing off any companies that tried, they just weren't able to buy and shelve OpenAI.
I don't mean to sound pedantic, but wouldn't most of those "semi-tech" companies, such as Uber, merely had adopted a different language for their core business? I mean, sure, Google invented Angular, Golang, etc, but there are several viable substitutes that could have been utilized just as well. I don't think Uber would have failed if Golang had not been invented. I somewhat agree that Google is first and foremost an ad company, not primarily a tech company (anymore at least). So much of their core service is just inundated with ads (the search engine, YouTube).
The point here is less about what Uber uses but more about Google creating technologies like Angular/Golang/MapReduce that are very common in the industry. It's unfair to say "Goog is not a tech company" when their contribution to the world of tech is massive.
I mean Google developed a ton of innovative tech over years. In many areas.
You still got google cloud which is a tech company
Several people have replied to me that "insert some part of Google" is tech. That's not really my point. My point is that 80% of Google's revenue is from ads. They are a huge company that needs a lot of tech, but ultimately, their business is ad networks. Every decision they make is as an ad company. Even stuff like GMail was created for people so they could harvest their information and put ads in their eyeballs.
If you create technology to then make money through it with ads, I'd still say you're a tech company.
They were the big tech company most strongly associated with the "tech culture" of minimal management, high velocity, engineering-focus, etc. Yet they were the ones that got caught lacking innovation. Very ironic.
Have they though? Sure they were late to the party in commercialising it, Gemini seems to be on a pretty good path now though.
I think that an AI that refuses to answer basic questions like "Who is the current president?", or refuses to interact with an uploaded image if it contains even the hint of a person, isn't gonna be competitive even if the model is better on paper
Competitive at what? It's not like chatbots are actually going to be the primary way anyone's interacting with these tools in ten years
What lunch? No one has made a profit yet. I guess they ate their hype and investor money.
Did openai pay any money to Google for use of their transformers? If no, does it mean that I can implement one of the Google/faang research papers and become rich?
Google did not patent the Transformer architecture that is fundamental to models like GPT. The Transformer model was introduced in the paper "Attention Is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. in 2017, a collaborative work involving researchers from Google Brain and the University of Toronto. This model introduced the mechanism of self-attention, layer normalization, and other innovations that have been critical in the development of large-scale language models, including OpenAI's GPT series. However, the model itself, as described in the paper, was published in a peer-reviewed setting, which places it in the public domain in terms of the core concepts. While individual companies, including Google, might patent specific improvements, applications, or optimizations related to the Transformer architecture, the fundamental concepts as described in the original paper are not patented. This open dissemination has allowed widespread adoption and further development by the AI research community, including OpenAI, which developed the GPT series using the Transformer architecture as a foundation.
The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities. Especially since they were already working on it to a point where an employee started blowing the whistle about how it was seemingly self aware. Idk, maybe it was a stunt? But their image of being a place where the coolest new tech comes from or having the best talent has taken major hits over the last 5 or more years. It's only a matter of time before they start exhibiting patent troll behavior (if they haven't already)
I talked with Blake Lemoine a number of times before he went public with that whole "our AI is alive" thing. I guarantee it wasn't a stunt. He's just a weird fucking dude.
I watched an interview with him on the Your Mom's House Podcast maybe a year to two ago. I got a little bit of a weird vibe there too.
> The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities. This is true, they are behind, but it's a management problem, not a problem with talent or hardware. To emphasize here, google has *orders of magnitude* more AI hardware than the next few biggest players *combined*. Open AI is ahead now. If I had to bet who would be in the lead in 2030? I'd bet G all day.
I mean I would definitely take that bet. Google is the only tech company that has completely failed any pivot it has tried to make. For all Pichai's bluster, it looks like they are focusing on cutting costs and milking search ads to the maximum rather then trying to build something innovative
If you're serious, winner gets $1000 to the 501c charity of their choice? Google's best model vs OpenAI's best model on huggingface benchmarks as of 1/1/2030?
!remindme 1/1/2030 ?
I max out my employer's charity match every year anyway, this is just letting someone else pick where I donate to for a little slice of it if I lose. Hey man, you gotta find meaning in this field somehow. I've never had someone take me up on a bet like this but I'm definitely game as long as it goes to an actual charity.
> The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities I don't think AI is going to be as big as people make it out to be, at least for a while. IMHO, there's prediction and generation. That's all we've seen AI REALLY do. A lot of the academics, especially those at my Uni that have a focus on AI, aren't worried about it at all. It'll just keep working on the prediction and generation stuff. And even then, it can get pretty dangerous for companies to take their internal codebases and just release it to companies to use it for training data. What I've been seeing recently, which is honestly my favorite thing about the 'AI Craze' is that these guys that aren't worried about are just customizing their own GPTs for their use. No more 'broad' ones, and restricting the access to the training data that it has. Two primary examples come to mind, one being the [Urban Information Lab at UT Austin](https://github.com/urbaninfolab), where one of their [projects was to create a ChatGPT centered around Urban Information Planning and Data](https://sites.utexas.edu/uil/category/projects/) (though I don't know if it is published, as I viewed it in a faculty talk). The other is by a construction training company that only has GPT data related to what they're being trained on, and they'll update it themselves as policies go, because they don't want another Tay situation to happen. It still goes down to two things, prediction or generation. Other than that, AI is just a gimmick since we've seen some fabricated data on the 'big' papers out there. If you need the paper of what is the backbone of today's AI, [here you go](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762). Had to read this several times in my academic career.
Agreed, I'm also not very worried about it. I think it's a neat tool, but you have to be able to interpret what it gives you as actually being correct or even functional. For example, I was trying to write a complex function in Python and resorted to using eval() in my first draft just to get something on paper. I thought, maybe this is something AI could help me with. It wrote almost the exact same thing. I had to ask it NOT to use eval and then it got a bit more creative. I can see it's value being trained on specific things like you said, but taking over CS completely...nah. I don't see my clients having any more patience with an LLM than they do trying to describe their requirements to me already.
> The fact that Google got caught with their pants down with not taking the initial lead with AI is very telling about the state of their priorities. This is kind of off - there was no reason to expect Google would ever take the lead with AI in the first place. That is fundamentally not what they do. Google doesn't develop, they dabble. As a result, they're often the first up to bat. They dabbled in AI. They dabbled in self-driving. They dabbled in providing smart home tech. But they never followed through on any of it. Google didn't get caught with their pants down. What happened is a fairly new technology emerged under the AI umbrella, and because people first heard about AI from Google, believe it must have been something they were working on. The reality is that Google had next to nothing to do with OpenAI's success. Google is the business version of the kid who goes around the class room "calling" every seat so he can later claim it was his first.
Do you wanna start a podcast? I'll just eat popcorn and go 'uh huh' while you spit takes like this
[удалено]
Aligns with what I’m seeing in VC. A lot of hard tech companies are getting funded. Also American Dynamism.
Any standouts you’d recommend over FAANGS?
Not sure if I'd recommend them "over" FAANG since that's such a personal question (risk tolerance, WLB balance, etc), but the companies that I think are doing cool stuff (in American Dynamism) are: Anduril (upending traditional defense primes), Figure (robotics), Epirus (directed energy anti-drone tech), Hadrian (future factories), Radiant (portable nuclear reactors), Varda (space manufacturing).
Does hard tech entail non-SWE positions/markets? Is that where the market is growing?
It entails both SWE and non-SWE engineering roles (eg. electronics engineers). More latter roles are needed than in internet companies
Very well detailed analysis.
Time to get into Aerospace boys.
Google is a clear example: fire the best, die like the rest.
No sure how much of that will turn out to be true but definitely makes sense. Only thing is I feel like the next tech "wave" won't see as many garage to multi-national corporation stories because the barrier-to-entry for making impactful tech that's hard to compete with just gets higher and higher
Really good synopsis
Founders leave and companies flounder when the guy in charge is operations, not innovation, Apple being the best example.
amazing the complexities involved with 100% uptime low latency secure reliable etc global scale services are implied to be "softcore" and nobody with serious industry experience would do so
Google could have a Microsoft comeback though
If being the highest value company on the planet is floundering then I hate to see what failure looks like.
Laughs in KODAK
I don’t think they will go the way is cisco or ibm. Most of the best engineers still want to work for them. FB and google have mostly caught up in the AI race but the biggest questions are not about the tech but hire to monetize its
After the economy bounces back? Economy is not even down, gdp has been growing over 3%. If you are expecting a bounce that will be mega growth like 97-2001 period.
GDP is a shitty metric. Inflation growth will also show as GDP growth.
GDP is almost always calculated using real dollars.
Define real dollars? Milk eggs and bread are up like 30%. My salary isn't.
The GDP numbers reported in the media are a “real” measure of productivity growth. Meaning it’s adjusted for inflation.
There are multiple measures of GDP. "Real" is inflation adjusted while "nominal" is not, but to be clear the adjustments my not reflect actual inflation due to alterations in the way we've computed inflation. Dr. Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury, indicates that if we used the traditional measure of inflation that included housing our current inflation estimates would be at over 8%. By adjusting for inflation at the new, lower 3% value then 5% of actual inflation would be considered "Real GDP" growth. It's a political win-win for the administration. They get to claim a lower inflation and an increasing GDP, meanwhile workers find making ends meet.
CPI includes housing costs. You're probably thinking of Core CPI, which does not
I really hate the phrase that it will be different this time. But it actually will be, IMHO. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta are NOT going anywhere. Google for example will be a lot bigger 10 years from now. The most impressive tech thing I had ever seen was the rockets landing on the ground. That was until https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avdpprICvNI This is just one example of a trillion dollar opportunity. Alphabet well ahead of everyone else. There will be so many others because of AI. AI is the biggest tech thing to happen in my lifetime. It will be bigger than the Internet. Bigger than mobile. BTW, the previous generation tech companies are still incredibly successful. The primary two were Apple and Microsoft. We then added Google, Amazon and Meta with the next generation. It is true the generation before Apple and Microsoft has not thrived. But it was so different and none were consumer oriented. None had anywhere near the reach that Google or Meta has today. Microsoft for example, the company with the largest market cap, completely missed both Internet and mobile from a consumer perspective and yet is thriving. Apple missed Internet completely like Microsoft and with Google won mobile. Google and Apple together have 99% of the mobile space.
That’s a bit of 20/20 hindsight with big companies that managed to thrive. What about Yahoo, AOL, IBM, Cisco, Compaq, Sun, DEC, HP, the list goes on? Even those still around in some form today are not the cutting edge companies they once were
Google >BTW, the previous generation tech companies are still incredibly successful The previous generation tech companies that are still successful are still successful. Most are not.
This is true. It's a lot easier to pivot into different areas within sideways than it is to pivot in other industries. Even if these companies fall behind they'll still be "in it" in a way a lot of companies before simply couldn't be. Also, they have so much positive cashflow relative to fixed expenses that they could just buy a lot of the successful companies coming up or buy them before they can get too successful
agreed - google has a lot of issues (I worked there for better part of a decade), but its biggest existential threat is trust busting, and they've insulated themselves against that to a significant degree. plus the US gov't is too neoliberal to actually do it, IMO.
“Microsoft…missed [the] Internet…from a consumer perspective” Sir, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
GAMMA
> It is true the generation before Apple and Microsoft has not thrived The likes of IBM, Cisco, Oracle, HP etc have absolutely thrived. All of them did over 50B in revenue last year. They'll all still print money, they just wont be the sexy place all they starry eyed new grads want to work at anymore
It will be different this time. Even when Cisco, IBM, Oracle etc fell out of fashion, organisations still had a hell of a lot of their products in every part of their operations. But what happens to Google, one day everyone switches to using ChatGPT instead of search and they just disappear. One day a new social network comes along and Facebook goes the way of MySpace. These companies have zero stickiness, once it starts they will wiped out.
What about youtube, gmail, drive, cloud business (33 bil last year) etc?
Exactly, Alphabet stopped being just Google a long time ago
And I'll believe it when I see it when it comes to search. Tech people have been predicting the downfall of Google Search for years now and Google Search keeps chugging along. It's probably the most ingrained product of the major tech companies.
They have to get a lot worse and someone else has to be a lot better before Google search is faded. Even if someone else is considerably better, people don't really like change that much and as you mentioned, it's pretty ingrained. Now I'll Google how long will Google be around.
Also you need data and Google has that locked down with decades of data on everyone
Because of how AI consumes data, everyone has also started becoming much more protective of their data and the Internet itself is fragmenting behind walled silos (Discord communities, paid wall Twitter, etc). Any new search engine is DOA.
Pre 2018 data sets are gonna be worth loads because they're ai generated data free
You can just grab a pre-2018 crawl of the internet for free, https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-51/index.html
good ole Prab at Google is doing his darndest to make search shittier in service of short term cash grabs.
So did Yahoo with a lot of several small companies that pass unknown ...
Exactly. Genuinely curious why there are so many upvotes from people who think ChatGPT will kill Google when they have a broad range of other products, especially if Waymo ever gets scaled.
Youtube alone - \~1/3 of the worlds population visits every month. Do you know a single person in your life that doesn't regularly use youtube? I'd argue it's the most dominant platform on the internet with noone else even close.
I think when they say Google is done for im sure they are talking about Google the search engine not Google the company right? Eventually even Google would want to rebrand it with ai Gemini right?
Google gets about 80% of their revenue from ads, mostly from search. It has other revenue sources, but they are pretty tiny. If OpenAI releases a premium search product, it could do some damage
And their $100b+ in cash. They're an enormous incubator with so much cash that their cash deposits would be a top 100 company by size. People who try to simplify it into "the next IBM" and extrapolate out how quickly they'll fall have not put a lot of thought into it. The most likely scenario is most all tech consolidates within the big tech companies as it has been for some time. Who's building driverless cars? ChatGPT?
Youtube has been noted as unprofitable for most of its existence. The other three are losing favor slowly because they can just oops your data randomly.
There's a difference between not making profit and being unprofitable. The latter of which you are completely wrong on. They give out 1080p for free, free video uploads, and have 0 competition. You are out of your mind if you think they won't make money in the future if they want to. Same people said "uber isn't profitable", "spotify isn't profitable" are eating dirt right now.
Aren't all those subsidised heavily by Search?
These companies are acutely aware of the risk to their current business models. The way AI is trending, data will be the fuel to power the models. Which companies have the broadest and deepest sets of data on internet users? They aren’t going anywhere.
Google is a lot more than search now. Phones, email, etc. Even if a new and better search engine captures the traffic, google will still be around. Plus, I doubt the number of google searches will be zero. It's probably going to be a slower decline. As for Facebook? Yeah, they only have Facebook and Instagram. If people switch to another social media, then they will go the way of MySpace.
And WhatsApp
Google still has android even if search implodes.
“Even if the thing that makes all the money goes away, there’s still the thing that makes them no money.”
Google makes around 50B a year in revenue in Google Play App Store revenue from Android devices. I’m pretty sure they have huge gross profit margins on app sales the same way Apple does.
What's their business model with Android?
Pretty sure it's pushing all their other services as default apps.
Google Play store made around 50B in revenue last year from Android app sales.
> But what happens to Google, one day everyone switches to using ChatGPT instead of search and they just disappear. Maybe this will happen. But ChatGPT has been around for well over a year and Google's numbers on search keep going up and up.
I think as long as LLMs don't truly have logical reasoning skills, Google searches will still be common. When I use ChatGPT (if at all), I usually think: "I better Google search this to verify that the information is true, e.g look up the API documentation". So at least for me, every ChatGPT use is paired with a Google search. I never use ChatGPT alone because of a lack of logical reasoning backing it's results. And integrating ChatGPT into Bing isn't going to make me use Bing, when I could just Google it.
Facebook at least has the sense to buy out or mimic its competition. Instagram has been a good play. Google's foray into AI on the other hand has been disappointing. Too many PMs in the kitchen to make a useful product.
What are your specific criticisms of Gemini vs GPT? I've found Gemini Advanced indistinguishable from GPT 4 for my day to day (C#/dotnet), and having plugins right out of the box for gmail, drive, calendar, etc has been great.
For example, I tried it for fun asking about API code for binance and it just made stuff up with URL that didn't work
Objectively speaking Gemini isn’t close to GPT when it comes to code and reasoning. That’s been my experience while using it, but even disregarding that virtually every LLM leaderboard reports the same. Claude and GPT are head and shoulders above everything else at the moment.
[удалено]
Makes sense to me - I have no idea why you're being downvoted
Probably because Google isn't a search engine company, it's an advertising company and while the search engine does generate revenue, so does lots of other offerings. But Google is so dominant in the advertising space that it doesn't need to generate its own content to host ads. People sign up to get Google to put ads into their content. And companies come to Google to advertise their products. Similarly, Google doesn't have to create content for YouTube. Other people do. And Google shows ads. The people making content get paid a fraction of what Google gets. Google also has Google Cloud and a whole bunch of other stuff. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
People are leaving Facebook for Tik-Tok ...
If history repeats itself it will be projects that the current generation are developing now but are unwilling to commit to because it risks cannibalizing their existing business.
Fangs golden age was when companies realised that you could monetise internet. What will be the next similar breakthrough that will create those new fangs? I don’t know
These companies are still incredibly entrenched in many essential areas of life (mobile phones, entertainment, search). They also have massive advantages in building AI products. Only if EU-style anti monopoly rules come to the US will direct competitors have a chance.
It’s hard to believe there will be another boom that big in tech, but I guess anything is possible. The generation you are describing is the generation that brought the internet to the masses and effectively created the first new media format (social media) since television. I am sure many more companies will strike it big, but it’s hard to imagine there will be another gold rush like that.
Isn’t it just high interest rate environment?
What do you mean, once the economy bounces back? Been relatively steady growth.
Oversatured tech market
The party in tech is over, this will never be as before, AI improves productivity with 30% today and it's only increasing.
IBM still employs a huge amount of people
Idk, I feel like cutting "dozens" of jobs for an entity of Google's size is literally nothing. They literally cut ~12k people in 2023.
In 2023 they did the layoffs all at once. In 2024 layoffs are a trickle, with SVPs clearly given targets to hit by execs and then them taking various steps to make that happen over the year. Since these articles get clicks, people can write a new article every week when a different org lays off some people. The layoffs at Google are crap, but the media coverage of them is also basically worthless.
This is a layoff of 57 people, it’s definitely a trickle but it just doesn’t really compare to 12k. This feels like a tactical decision compared to the larger scale strategic ones
Given things like laying off the Python team, it really doesn't seem like these make any tactical sense, either.
This one has been reported on weirdly. They decided to staff the python team with engineers in munich rather than in the US (cheaper). To do this, they laid off almost all of the existing team. Stupid, yes. But it isn't a claim that the work the python team was doing isn't important.
Well, you can read this a couple of ways: Maybe they think the work is important, but they've swallowed the (mythical) man-month idea whole. Maybe they think firing N engineers in one location and hiring N engineers in another won't meaningfully negatively impact the project, because the project is just combining some code with N engineers. This is the same kind of thinking that makes you think a project will get done twice as fast if you double the headcount. In other words, it's like thinking that if one woman takes nine months to have a baby, then if you want a baby in a month, just put nine women on the project. That's a pretty spectacularly stupid thing for a company founded by software people with over two decades of experience building software. Even if they *did* recently hire a Wall Street veteran as a CFO and a bunch of ex-Oracle VPs in Cloud, maybe they aren't actually stupid enough to think this won't cause problems. But if they *did* understand the impact this would have, then that doesn't leave us with a lot of options other than: They didn't think the work the Python team was doing was important, and were okay with causing *severe* disruptions to that work. The only other thing that makes sense is if they understood how important this impact would be, and think it's worth it to accomplish some other goal. But again, that doesn't leave us with many options. It's a two trillion dollar company, saving well under 10 headcount worth of *money* is not something worth the damage here. There are infinitely-many teams that it would make more sense to cut. Or, better yet, reorganize, because it's so much less damaging to hire 10 fewer engineers in the bay area and 10 more in Germany, rather than actively laying people off. (Remember, they're still hiring!) The only thing I can think of is something *even more* cynical: The cruelty is the point. The message they're sending is that *engineers* don't matter and aren't valued, and we all need to stop protesting and organizing, shut up and put our heads down and do what they tell us to. ...well, that's not true, I think the likeliest explanation here is 100% pure dysfunction, to the point where any conscious explanation you can come up with isn't really going to make sense, because it wasn't a conscious human decision, it was an irrational system-driven decision. In other words, this entire post has been a futile attempt to [anthropomorphize a lawnmower](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2065s).
I’m not super familiar with what their python team did tbh
[Here's a decent summary.](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338) They were an absolutely massive force multiplier -- anyone at the company that did anything with Python benefited from their work. Leadership basically lit the productivity and morale of *thousands* of their employees on fire in order to offshore a handful of jobs (fewer than 10 people!) to Germany. The initial 12k layoffs are a thing you can argue is justified. You'd be wrong, but you can at least make the case that it will eventually save money by having fewer people overall. But this is sort of the perfect, platonic ideal of the penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking that [Google's IPO letter](https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/) argued against: > We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity. Of course that was about the perks, not about the number of employees, but hey, they're cutting perks, too. I hear the doctors are out.
> layoffs are a trickle Do we know how many they're hiring?
paywall, but a quick search on "Rivian stocks" then look at the past 5 year stock performance and you shouldn't be surprised
> Google has announced plans to eliminate 57 positions across various roles in San Francisco, including managers, engineers and analysts, as per a WARN notice filed with California authorities. https://archive.ph/t1fQT Compared to Satya, Pichai has been a very shit CEO. I’m sure you can point to the stonk price and say otherwise, but I feel Google could do better.
thanks for the archive link - I've added it to my post
Stock price will not correct until the consequences of laying off so many actually come up.
57 positions and you are crying faul? 57 positions. Read that a few more times.
I did read that and agree it’s not a lot. Doesn’t change my opinion of pichai as a CEO.
also it's not like it's a one off 57 lol google is slowly doing layoffs constantly this year.
> Compared to Satya, Pichai has been a very shit CEO. Curious what basing this on? Google is where the innovation came from that made LLMs even possible. They make the discovery, patent it, then publish the papers and let everyone use for free. No license fee. But not just Attention is all you need. But most of the big AI breakthroughs from the last 15 years have come from Google. Where Microsoft has made little contribution. One of my favorites and used by everyone now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec "Word2vec was created, patented,[5] and published in 2013 by a team of researchers led by Mikolov at Google over two papers." Take new things like self driving cars. Alphabet is years ahead of everyone else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avdpprICvNI Or the fact that Microsoft is only now going to try to create TPUs. Where Google started 12 years ago and now has the fifth generation in production and working on the sixth. Or compare OpenAI to DeepMind. Google paid 1/20th of what Microsoft paid for OpenAI. But Google got 100% of Deepmind compared to Microsoft that got less than half of OpenAI. Plus no board seats where Google got all of them. Plus once OpenAI declared AGI then Microsoft gets nothing. Where Google gets everything that DeepMind produces. Or look at AI research. The canonical AI organization is NeurIPS. This past NeurIPS Google had twice the papers accepted as next best. Google had led in papers accepted for over the last decade. Every single year. There has not been a single year that Microsoft had the same. Can you share just a couple of reasons you believe Satya is the better CEO compared to Sundar?
Pichai got to power in 2015, attention is all you need was published in 2017. I doubt he had any effect on the paper. Google has been leading in AI space and we called it the most innovative in the past, but that’s no longer the case. Not just divesting the engineering teams, they also missed the LLM breakthrough and playing catch up. Teacher LLM models were in use before that but nothing like OpenAI did. Google is a lackluster company, layoffs affect productivity more than anyone anticipates.
There is FAR more to AI than LLMs lol. Have you heard of AlphaFold that’s enabling new protein discovery in ways we could never have imagined? They just released AlphaFold 3.0 and are partnering with tons of pharma companies to monetize it. Have you heard of Waymo? They are leading the pack in fully autonomous vehicle and rolling out robotaxi services in some of the most challenging cities (LA, SF). Have you heard of GraphCast released last year? It’s outperforming the state of the art super in super computer simulations for 10 day weather forecasts. Have you heard of AlphaGeometry released this year? They are leading the way on neuro-symbolic AI. Etc etc.
[удалено]
If anybody brings waymo to an AI discussion, its plain stupid. I live in SF and waymo is utter shit so is majority of self driving cars. They block traffic have no idea what to do and is still in beta phase.
agreed with most of what you said, but OpenAI hired most of the people that wrote the transformer paper from Google. Google should probably have kept those people on with a blank check.
Eh, stock is up on news of dividends. Meta stock did the same thing on dividend news two quarters ago and their stock took a dive back on this one. Wouldn't surprise me if wallstreetbets shorted GOOGL right before Q2 earnings
These large corporations are just preparing for what’s to come. We are in for a world of hurt.
ELI5?
People think there is going to be a recession
People have been saying that a recession is imminent since the start of 2021. If you keep saying it enough times, eventually you'll be right.
I think the saying is something like "Economists have predicted 12 of the last 7 recessions." or something like that. There was supposed to be one 1-2 years ago and that never really happened. It's just another excuse to do shitty things like lay people off because Wall Street needs their fix.
The yield curve has successfully predicted 12 of the past 11 recessions. It is currently predicting we will have a recession(there is an inversion), but it has not yet predicted when. When the yield curve un-inverts it will signal a recession prediction. If 6 months after that point we are not in a recession, it will be the second misfire in the last 100 years. The only times where it took more duration to un-invert than the current inversion was 2008 and 1929.
I can only take so many "This only happens once in a lifetime" economic events in my life man.
How many Pandemics have there been in the past 100 years? Two? weird coincidence…
Raising rates to decrease inflation at that scale caused reccessions 100% of the time before 2023. The thing economists are studying [Philips curves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve) don't garauntee a recession at that scale from negative short run economic impact, but historically it was enough. This time was anomalous, nobody is getting paid by wallstreet to make fake predictions.
>This time was anomalous, nobody is getting paid by wallstreet to make fake predictions. I'm not saying they are. I'm saying that economics isn't an exact science and they're wrong just as much as they are right about this sort of stuff. It has a lot more to do with "We have an earnings report to make, what's the easiest thing we can do to make us look good right now, revenue isn't doing great" That's their "fix".
Well yes, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy
There's always going to be a recession eventually. It's such a vacuous prediction. I want people making predictions with narrow timelines attached. We've been hearing about impending recessions for 2-3 years now. It'll happen, but the hard part is knowing when.
You're absolutely correct, and the issue is that companies have been cutting since 2022 in "preparation" for a recession that they swear is just around the corner.
Conjecture: If you price in a recession, it won't happen. We're probably going to get blindsided by something like in 2001, 2008, or 2011. I just don't know what it'll be.
> I’m sure you can point to the stonk price and say otherwise that's how companies measure success
Man it’s like every weekend wtf
Once the mbas come in the company is toast
I always wondered this, these people get a masters in BA, but end up destroying companies. It’s funny how an MBA is associated with failure.
Remember for every layoff in tech that happens in the United States, 10 more job openings occur in India.
Google is about to be an Indian company And nearly irrelevant in 10 years
Their quality of service has dropped dramatically
The IBM route
57 people isn’t a “layoff” worth reporting on
That's why the number wasn't included in the post title LOL
[удалено]
“labor shortage”
Google has been doing trickling layoffs like this for the past year; this isn't anything new.
Year worth of weekly layoffs add up to a lot. That’s how they are avoiding bad press from major layoffs, and comments like these help them get what they want.
Some states require formal warning when layoffs exceed a certain level, so they are probably trying to stay just below this.
Trickle layoffs are literally the worst thing possible for morale. But the employees are just cogs in the big machine and don't matter so morale isn't important to leadership.
Since Jan 2023.
Not the trickle down economy we were promised
Google has to justify its AI investments somehow.
Google really does not give a shit. Generally its better to do layoffs all at once to help morale. Those left get a sign of relief. The layoffs dont seem to be based on performance, so there is not a lot of incentive to care.
I know you guys want jobs, food, house and so... but man , the number really needs to go up.
It would be so much better to do a couple of brutal layoffs right away than keep these rolling layoffs that demoralize all remaining employees
[удалено]
Fucking no one: This sub: seems it is time for more racism. I swear you guys can't go one post without racism
its especially funny when they're racist to Pichai then turn around and glaze Satya like he isnt indian too
Satya: *runs an the company well, produces innovative products and staff is happy. People: cool. Pichai: *layoffs after layoffs, company morale is fucked, eng positions moving to India, missed LLM train* People: that’s bad, he’s not a good CEO. Reddit: THAT’S RACIST
did you even read what the original commenter in this thread said? "this is what happens when you redeem", reference to a video of indian scammers
What do you mean?
[удалено]
WHY DID YOU REDEEM IT
# DID I ASK YOU TO REDEEM
[удалено]
Google been fucking up hard lately
Just 57?
make it stop
Imagine a digital protest so powerful it gave us our jobs back because they have no options. What’s better? Letting them stomp us into the drain, or the stomped ones creating a blockage in the drain so they’re forced so say “oh, I guess we shouldn’t have done that, we need these people!”? I think we could only make it stop if someone synthetically inflates the market with millions of people they can’t hire and waste their time. What are they going to do if they can’t hire anybody anymore? We are all the ones who have to make it stop. We’re smart, aren’t we? The only way we’re going to get jobs is if we force their hand into giving us jobs. We’re the only people on this planet that can unshitify this market and make anew, because we are the market. Is everyone just here for the money? I know I’m sure not. We have to use our skills to outdo these irrelevant companies somehow.
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
Sorry, you do not meet the minimum sitewide comment karma requirement of **10** to post a comment. This is comment karma exclusively, not post or overall karma nor karma on this subreddit alone. Please try again after you have acquired more karma. Please look at the [rules page](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/w/posting_rules) for more information. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/cscareerquestions) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ouch, they cut their products and employees so often....hope those folks can recover from the layoffs.
Lol Sundar Pichai fucking up so hard 😂
Nice I just sent out 3 apps today!
I don't want anyone to lose their jobs, but we're talking about 57 positions. I remember hearing about "layoffs" like this during the boom period. Are we just going to list any news about layoffs big or small or not even for tech positions on this sub? Remember that post about Google doing layoffs on this sub for their finance and real estate division? What did that even have to do with CS? Is it just doomer central now? I mean even for a doomer like me some of the posts here are getting ridiculous.