The only thing he has done is not destroy the Google cash firehose.

The advertising cash firehose is perhaps the only thing that matters at Google.

But, having been severely caned by ChatGPT and left flat footed on AI i think it’s reasonable to say even that firehose is now at risk.

It’s really funny to read this over and over from so many people. You are saying google can’t match and surpass chatGPT? You know, google the people who invented the model architecture used by ChatGPT… the people who wrote the first ML training frameworks and the subsequent most popular one… the ones who designed hardware accelerators to minimize training and inference… the people with enough excess compute to probably train a model with even more parameters? Come on.

Disruptions like this happen: Sun the main driver of the Web in the 90s, who partnered with Netscape to create JavaScript, who led the workstation industry with the Spark microprocessors, and created Java (at that time a lot of people thought that Java was the future platform to build software, including Steve Jobs)… doesn’t exists anymore.

Execution is more important than being the first. MS and OpenAI did an excellent move, and now Google needs catch up. It doesn’t matter if they invented the model architecture used by ChatGPT, they are not the ones capitalizing it.

I've heard this countless times as well and I wonder if the root cause comes from Google's inability to turn its research into practical applications.

Case in point, 2017 Google Brain released the "Attention Is All You Need" paper however haven't done anything proactively to deliver it to mass users like OpenAI have done (among others) - perhaps this is the kick that Google needs to remind them that research alone isn't enough, it needs practical applications and the question could be whether Pichai is the right CEO to deliver that

TBH no I don’t think that’s the case. I think they are actually approaching this space with care. Whether it’s social media, search, or ChatGPT there is an obvious human-race scale impact that I believe google recognizes that the “disrupters” disregard.

> human-race scale impact that I believe google recognizes

Not sure I buy that.

They're clearly ignoring the already existing human-race scale negative impact of their do-anything-to-capture-peoples-attention advertising business.

70s: "You are saying GM can't match and surpass Toyota for small cars?"

etc.

history is littered with the dominant player getting shellacked by an upstart

And it usually is for political reasons not technical reasons.

Bard is a piece of shit. It's probably being held back so that it doesn't compete internally with google search

Google may indeed have the research knowledge that surpasses everyone one in the industry - but they have very little to show in terms of using that knowledge to build actual products. For example - Google home, which does a far better job at voice recognition and understanding context than Amazon’s Alexa. Yet, GH still lags far behind Amazon.

It's not about ability though, they can do all that and some more. It's about focus, they're so large, they might not focus and react and change quick enough like the smaller players with inferior technology might.

This pattern plays out all the time in the tech industry. You think google didn't know how to make a website like facebook? Of course, but they couldn't beat a much smaller weaker opponent even then. Google now is about 8 times larger than Google 2011 and much slower.

Read up on Kodak and the history of digital cameras.

Yet, here we are. ;)

One could argue he's ruined that too because of all the scam ads they push on a daily basis.

I don't see how serving scam ads would impact google, they still get paid to do it

Short term, sure. But they are not a monopoly.

Maybe not in legal terms. However a 90% market share in a market where the majority of consumers never evaluates switching to a competitor, gives you so much leeway in execution, that there isn't much difference to a monopoly.

> never evaluates switching to a competitor

Again: “short term, sure”

Unless you have a convincing case for why “never” evaluating switching will last forever.

> The only thing he has done is not destroy the Google cash firehose.

Unfortunately, this recent LLM trend will seriously threaten it. If an LLM can provide the answer, then why would a user click to go to a website? And if there are no clicks to a website, why would the website curate the information? How will they make money? The long-term effects of how LLMs are integrated into Search are still unknown. Of course, MSFT would love to push Google into LLMs, as that hurts their ads business.

Also (as I mentioned in an earlier comment) he has been milking that cow a bit too much. The ad load on Google sites has gone through the roof. A fair(er) comparison of his performance would be to see how much revenue Google would make at the same ad load as in 2015. Any idiot can make 5x more revenue in the very short term by showing 20x more ads. That is not rocket science. What _is_ interesting is if you can do it without increasing the ad load. That's where the real magic lies.

Why why still query and ask any questions to the ad machine?

Google would still be making a ton of money even with a CEO that did nothing.

For a $226M compensation, we should be able to demand a bit more don't you think?

Who is "we" in your comment?

We the guys discussing whether he has or hasn't done something worth hundreds of millions, you don't have to be so word picky.

I'm not picky, I asked an honest question.

I'd argue that most human beings never do anything worth even a million dollars, let alone hundreds of millions, especially execs.

Maybe OP is a shareholder. Most people probably own some google stock via ETFs even if they didn't explicitly buy the stock.

There is no "we". Google's purpose is not to advance peoplekind.

The shareholders decide on the compensation of the CEO, that's literally it.

And yet here we are, on the front-page of HN discussing exactly this.

These responses asking who "we" are feels like (bad) attempts at justifying the hilariously inefficient salary, as if "it's none of your business" is the best counterargument to why they should be paid so much but provide so little.

Also, I and I'm sure many others here are shareholders, if that matters.

No, just a minor one.