I wonder if Google is making Deepmind people switch from their cool original research to doing LLMs like everybody else. Having their scale in money and data, I would hire new teams of engineers who want to do LLMs and leave the Deepmind researchers do their thing. Not killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
Ironically I was just thinking earlier today how the most valuable Google products to me are YouTube and Android... and that's it.
I gave up on Chrome a decade ago, going back to Firefox. I don't use Google for search anymore, I do use Gmail but I also got Protonmail so could easily migrate the Gmail traffic there.
A lot of non-techies I know have complained for some time how Google search sucks, and while a lot use Chrome it seems to be mainly inertia.
Not saying Google is dying, but it seems vulnerable for disruption.
Is it really possible to even disrupt Youtube? It's been a constant in our lives for the past 20 years and is basically a historical record by now. By a rough estimate, they have to keep buying over 1% of the total world production of HDD drives just to stay on top of the new data being uploaded. Google has completely destroyed it, placing more ads than videos on it, making it unusable without an adblocker and people still use it, it's that core to everyone's lives. It's like a public utility.
I've been thinking about it. AI generated videos. It could be generating a DSL or IR for some sort of multimedia VM so there's only a tiny fraction of data. Just common textures and shapes in a CDN. Could be fully interactive.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of it was already tried in some form.
