It's easy to look at Google's success in terms of fortunate-monopoly, but you'd discount how fantastic they have been at retaining top talent. At any other company, Jeff Dean would have left long ago. From Day 1 Sergey and team not only innovated on product, but on talent retention (remember all the perks!) and it still resonates.
Sergey Brin on the genius of Jeff Dean.
He credits Jeff’s early obsession with neural networks, back when they were “telling cats from dogs”, as the spark for everything.
TPU was Jeff’s idea. He calculated that if users spoke to Google for just three minutes a day, Google would have to double its CPU data centers. Instead of buying more CPUs, Jeff decided to build a new chip for AI.
What’s fascinating is that when AI was not as big as today, when it can only “tell cats from dogs,” Larry and Sergey were like, “Cool, let’s make a custom chip for it.”
That’s a huge show of confidence in deep tech and top-tier technical talent. It makes Google the only AI company that has the top models, top chips, and top data centers.
@edi_sf oh thats interesting. The only narrative I can come up with is that there are two pheonomons going on: typical recessionary unemployment in some sectors and an AI boom in others and what we see here is an average. This fits with GDP growth, which would be small if not for AI
there has never been a job market like this one
unemployment really only move two ways:
Quick rise (recession)
Slow fall (growth)
Since '23 its been neither: slow rise
anyone know why?
We are back!
just a few months ago the AI bubble chatter started, GPUs were aplenty and GPT5.x progress seemed to have stalled
now Gemini blows the doors open, a crop of neolabs gobbled up the GPUs and Nvidia is up
Thinking (test-time compute) in pixel space... 🍌
Pro tip: always peek at the thoughts if you use AI Studio. Watching the model think in pictures is really fun!
those who believed foundation models would become commodities weren't wrong, but they vastly underestimated the capital they would raise (buying time for other moats to emerge)