The simplest is Google's caste of middle managers are more obstructive to the company than enabling it.

Caste is an accurate word to describe it.

ouch

But Google did discover the tech the current AI craze is based on.

Doesn't mean they know how to make it into a product.

A common failure mode for startups and a reminder of how universal those lessons are. Whether it would be the death knell of Google we'll have to wait a bit longer.

> Whether it would be the death knell of Google we'll have to wait a bit longer.

I don't understand the trope on HN that OpenAI is a competitor to Google. I do not think Google has the appetite or DNA to be purely an AI API vendor; I don't think selling APIs is as profitable as Google current business. Google investing in Anthropic is a good, cheap hedge against the low-probability (IMO) event that LLMs somehow displace the search results page and display ads.

Still not just "PR hype".

xerox as well invented computer mouse and GUI as we know it.

And you wouldn't accuse Xerox of doing "PR hype". Xerox did the exact opposite thing, they had not realized the value of research done in PARC.

Google engineers invented most of the primary innovations in NLP in the last decade, such as transformers and word2vec which started it all, that led to the current stack that OpenAI is built on. Their best public models certainly lag OpenAI, but it certainly isn't vaporware.

Researchers, not engineers.

Researchers are engineers in most industry jobs

You are telling me Google Assistant and Alexa aren't sentient ASI?

Let's not flatten the differences between ChatGPT and those (your humble source worked on Google Assistant and appreciates your kindness)