I would read the hell out of a deep analysis of the many layers (internal, external, technical, personal, systemic, etc., etc.) that have combined to make early Google so arguably less dumb than early OpenAI.
It isn’t just rose colored glasses, right? There was no equivalent of the shareholder coup, the ScarJo voice thing, etc.?
@luis_in_brief The Google founders hired an “adult supervision” CEO pretty early, and he was a good pick. Sama thinks he is the adult supervision.
Also: Google has mostly entered established market segments (search, mail, maps, office suites, smartphones) with a better product. OpenAI is building something weird and new with a lot more uncertainties around risks and business opportunities.
@piki dunno, I think we forget how different Google was from the established search providers. There's a reason almost all the early search lawsuits were against Google and not AltaVista: they weren't the first search engine to do scraping, but they were the first to do it in a way that mattered.
(Great, great point about Eric Schmidt v. Sam Altman; especially their appointed roles relative to the founders—suspect Schmidt is jealous of Altman's freedom of action.)
@luis_in_brief google was wholesome in the beginning. it lasted for a long time. they used the idea of them being good stewards of the internet to ingrain themselves into the internet, and then ditched the ploy when it didn’t benefit them anymore. it was fun while it lasted though.
github had a similar arc
openai actually has a similar arc as well, but their needs are different. they’re embedding themselves into everyone’s concept of “AI”, which doesn’t necessarily mean being good stewards
@luis_in_brief The monetary stakes were a lot lower in tech? The one-two punch of the web 1.0 crash and 9/11 flatlined everyone’s stock charts for a while. Google seem like a cool little indie company that could be a refuge from big evil Microsoft. The dumbness may have existed but today’s tower of grift was busying itself with juicing up a housing bubble.
@migurski@luis_in_brief hard to overlook the impact of nearly two decades Ycombinator and Paypal mafia explicitly fomenting a culture of breaking the rules and disrespecting people as the key to success
@kellan@migurski which, to be fair to YC, had some of its cultural roots in Google's "we'll reinvent fair use law on the fly" tactics—and the success of those tactics. But yes, that culture has metastasized.
@kellan but to @migurski's point, my gut is that Google was expected to be a large company but not an MS-class behemoth. OpenAI seems to genuinely believe they're not just going to be an MS-sized behemoth, they're going to end the human race as we know it (after being very profitable first). Google's ambition was large, OpenAI's is literally unbounded.
@luis_in_brief@migurski I never really thought of YC and Google being that closely linked, founded by the crew out of Boston with major DNA injection from Sequoia and Yuri Milner
@kellan@migurski it's less a direct genealogy, more that every lawyer in the Valley (and I'm sure VCs and execs) watched Google combine broad claims + good lawyering + good user outcomes to create big wins—literally a law school textbook full of caselaw. Then in the game of telephone, everyone forgot the "good lawyering" part.
@migurski@luis_in_brief hard to remember at this late date that “Move fast and break things” and Theranos are down stream from PayPal mafia while most of the other fuckery in the valley is downstream from Ycombinator
@migurski@luis_in_brief I alluded to this in passing in a response to @simon but Microsoft’s Passport web SSO was killed within three years, while Sign In With Google was apparently fine with most people a few years later. How much of that was cool indie vs big brother?
@paulmison@migurski@simon v. "I already had a google account" - the main killer feature of gmail, from Google's perspective, ended up being simply "we all have an account, more or less".
@luis_in_brief I dunno, I think we used to be much less connected so a lot of weird shit flew under the radar. Nowadays with social media and a fast news cycle, companies like OpenAI are under a microscope
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