True, for some definition of first and some definition of modern. I’d say it builds extremely heavily on the works inside XTX (and prior to that, XFactor etc) on general purpose linear algebra tooling, and still doesn’t change the fact that it remains shallow, even including JAX. Google TPUs change this equation a bit, as they are starting to come to fruition; but for them to reach the level of depth of NVDA, or even DEC to SUN, they’d have to actually own it from silicon to apps… and they eventually might. But the bulk of work at Google is narrow end-user projects, and they don’t have (at large) a deep engineering excellence focus.
Waymo is an acquihire from ‘05 DARPA challenges, and I’d say Tesla got there too (but with a much stricter hardware to user stack, which ought to bear fruits)
I’d say Kubernetes would be impressive compared to 1970s mainframes ;) Jokes aside, it’s a neat tool to use crappy PCs as server farms, which was sort of Google’s big insight in 2000s when everyone was buying Sun and dying with it, but that makes it not deep, at least not within Google itself.
But this may change. I think Brin recognizes this during the Code Red, and they start very heavily on building a technical moat since OpenAI was the first credible threat to the user behavior moat.
You think that Tesla, which has not accepted liability for a single driverless ride, has "gotten there?" I'm not even going to look up how many Waymo does in a month, I'm sure it's in the millions now.
Come on, man.
> Google's TPUs change this equation a bit
Google has been using TPUs to serve billions of customers for a decade. They were doing it at that scale before anyone else. They use them for training, too. I don't know why you say they don't own the stack "from silicon to apps" because THEY DO. Their kernels on their silicon to serve their apps. Their supply chain starts at TSMC or some third-party fab, exactly like NVIDIA.
Google's technical moat is a hundred miles deep, regardless of how dysfunctional it might look from the outside.
Waymo is an acquihire from ‘05 DARPA challenges, and I’d say Tesla got there too (but with a much stricter hardware to user stack, which ought to bear fruits)
I’d say Kubernetes would be impressive compared to 1970s mainframes ;) Jokes aside, it’s a neat tool to use crappy PCs as server farms, which was sort of Google’s big insight in 2000s when everyone was buying Sun and dying with it, but that makes it not deep, at least not within Google itself.
But this may change. I think Brin recognizes this during the Code Red, and they start very heavily on building a technical moat since OpenAI was the first credible threat to the user behavior moat.