Recessions are good for markets.
They show us where the rot is, where the poor performers are.
This current one is no exception. It revealed that some of our Cloud Czars, the companies dominating the global economy with hyperscale datacenters paid for with cash flow, aren’t as clothed in gold as they seem. Some are downright naked.
Early this month, I identified one source of rot and urged Jeff Bezos to fire Amazon.Com CEO Andy Jassy. But it’s also time for two other founders to get back in the game. Larry Page and Sergey Brin need to push out Sundar Pichai.
Pichai is the kind of numbers-oriented manager Wall Street loves, but Silicon Valley should despise. He’s the kind of go along, get along guy who can make the trains run on time, but completely lacks vision. In technology this is a fatal flaw.
It’s obvious in how he dealt with artificial intelligence, the new hotness of 2023.
This is not about firing an ethicist. It’s a more basic failure to see where things were going, and deploy the necessary resources to get there.
Basically, Pichai siloed AI. He divvied up development along product lines, convenient for Google but ridiculous if you want to get the most out of something basic. Google knows AI is basic. It has been conducting research on it for a decade and published a 2017 paper describing its importance, albeit in esoteric terms.
What we’re talking about here “natural language models,” a direct translation between what’s in a computer and the way we use words. Its chief mover today is OpenAI. It was originally founded as a non-profit with help from Elon Musk but converted to for-profit status in 2019 (fortunately without him) to take $1 billion from Microsoft.
As anyone following the news knows, OpenAI’s chief product is ChatGPT. Its Version 2 was considered “too dangerous to release” but, again with Microsoft cash, version 3 is being slowly released into the wild. The idea of ChatGPT writing things has been around for 2 years.
The point is Pichai should have seen this coming, but he did nothing about it. When Microsoft announced the technology would go into its search engine (the heart of Google) he cobbled together something called Bard and did a public demonstration, which turned into a fiasco.
Google can come back from this, but it needs a visionary leader on top of its AI effort, and Pichai ain’t it. This has to be someone who can balance real ethical concerns with the need to offer real value based on sound data.
ChatGPT may just be a “bullshit generator” but Pichai got lost in the bullshit.
