Google: Is the Company Engaging in F-U-D?
July 3, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
When I was a wee sprout in 1963, I was asked to attend an IBM presentation at the so-so university I attended. Because I was a late-night baby-sitter for the school’s big, hot, and unreliable mainframe, a full day lecture and a free lunch. Of course, I went. I remember one thing more than a half century later. The other attendees from my college were using a word I was hearing but interpreting reasonably well.
The artistic MidJourney presents an picture showing executives struggling to process Google’s smart software announcements about the future. One seems to be wondering, “These are the quantum supremacy people. They revolutionized protein folding. Now they want us to wait while our competitors are deploying ChatGPT based services? F-U-D that!”
The word was F-U-D. To make sure I wasn’t confusing the word with a popular epithet, I asked one of the people who worked in the computer center as a supervisor (actually an underpaid graduate student) but superior to my $3 per hour wage, what’s F-U-D.
The fellow explained, “It means fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The idea is that IBM wants us to be afraid of buying something from Burroughs or National Cash Register. The uncertainty means that we have to make sure the competitors’ computers are as good as the IBM machines. And the doubt means that if we buy a Control Data system, we can be fired if it isn’t IBM.”
Yep, F-U-D. The game plan designed to make people like me cautious about anything not embraced by administrators. New things had to be kept in a sandbox. Really new things had to be part of a Federal research grant which could blow up and destroy a less-than-brilliant researcher’s career but cause no ripple in carpetland.
Why am I thinking about F-U-D?
I read “Here’s Why Google Thinks Its Gemini AI Will Surpass ChatGPT.” The write up makes clear:
“At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models,” Hassabis told Wired. “We also have some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting.”
I interpreted this comment in this way:
- Be patient, Google has better, faster, cheaper, more wonderful technology for you coming soon, really soon
- Google is creating better AI because we are combining great technology with the open source systems and methods we made available to losers like OpenAI
- Google is innovative. (Remember, please, that Google equates innovation with complexity.)
Net net: By Gemini, just slow down. Wait for us. We are THE Google, and we do F-U-D.
Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2023
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