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Google just had its first negative cash flow quarter due to massive AI spending (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 39 points 3 months ago (15 children)

Feels like the innovative part of google does not exist any more.

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  • [+] 18 points 3 months ago (6 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    What about "Attention Is A You Need", the white paper that kick-started the whole generative AI and LLM thing? OpenAI's GPT models are built off of that architecture, like pretty much everything that came after it.

    Like sure, modern Google is notoriously bad at building the actual end products, but it publishes a lot of research and some of it pushes others forward quite a lot.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    The LLM page was published in 2019 right? 7 years ago!

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    2017, actually. But the search engine (supposedly the last innovation according to the previous comment) has seen most of its leaps forward in late 90s to early 2000s, which is a lot earlier.

    Also it's pretty hard to find a more clear example of Google sharing well done research than the white paper that started the current AI bubble. But they do publish a lot of stuff.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I think it was 2017.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Yea, and the main discovery being transformers (GPT predecessor). That allowed for the groundbreaking technology of AlphaFold to come into being, for which a Nobel prize was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (who just left Google DeepMind to join Anthropic).

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    They've actually been doing a lot of innovative research around AI, they just done hype it up like companies that NEED AI to work for their business. Their Alpha fold was revolutionary for gene folding, for example. it's like 98ish percent accurate for a fraction of the compute time.

    Now, as far as their customer products go, yeah, we haven't seen much lately, but I think their research arm is still doing a lot and they're publishing a lot of papers.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Let me start off by saying I think Google should be broken up. I really don’t like that company. But I and glad that the publicized research that they have done has lead to benefits for humanity. Like they discovered the underlying technology behind GPTs, being transformers back in 2017. And then an extension on that being AlphaFold. I think those applications are great, like some others for the use of AI. I don’t think that using AI to call people criminals and lock them out of their account is a good use of the technology, and then not budging when those people are found innocent (there are many news articles on that topic). Google needs to be broken up and their search made into a public utility.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Dude alphafold just happened what are you smoking

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Alphafold came out in 2018.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    In terms of research that is very little time.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Dude you could just admit you were wrong, it happens.

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