A Monopolist CEO Loses His Cool: It Is Our AI, Gosh Darn It!
December 17, 2024
This blog post flowed from the sluggish and infertile mind of a real live dinobaby. If there is art, smart software of some type was probably involved.
“With 4 Words, Google’s CEO Just Fired the Company’s Biggest Shot Yet at Microsoft Over AI” suggests that Sundar Pichai is not able to smarm his way out of an AI pickle. In January 2023, Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, announced that Microsoft was going to put AI on, in, and around its products and services. Google immediately floundered with a Sundar & Prabhakar Comedy Show in Paris and then rolled out a Google AI service telling people to glue cheese on pizza.
Magic Studio created a good enough image of an angry executive thinking about how to put one of his principal competitors behind a giant digital eight ball.
Now 2025 is within shouting distance. Google continues to lag in the AI excitement race. The company may have oodles of cash, thousands of technical wizards, and a highly sophisticated approach to marketing, branding, and explaining itself. But is it working.
According to the cited article from Inc. Magazine’s online service:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said that “Google should have been the default winner in the world of big tech’s AI race.”
I like the “should have been.” I had a high school English teacher try to explain to me as an indifferent 14-year-old that the conditional perfect tense suggests a different choice would have avoided a disaster. Her examples involved a young person who decided to become an advertising executive and not a plumber. I think Ms. Dalton said something along the lines “Tom would have been happier and made more money if he had fixed leaks for a living.” I pegged the grammatical expression as belonging to the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” branch of rationalizing failure.
Inc. Magazine recounts an interview during which the interlocuter set up this exchange with the Big Dog of Google, Sundar Pichai, the chief writer for the Sundar & Prabhakar Comedy Show:
Interviewer: “You guys were the originals when it comes to AI.” Where [do] you think you are in the journey relative to these other players?”
Sundar, the Googler: I would love to see “a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s models and our models any day, any time. Microsoft is using someone else’s models.
Yep, Microsoft inked a deal with the really stable, fiscally responsible outfit OpenAI and a number of other companies including one in France. Imagine that. France.
Inc. Magazine states:
Google’s biggest problem isn’t that it can’t build competitive models; it’s that it hasn’t figured out how to build compelling products that won’t destroy its existing search business. Microsoft doesn’t have that problem. Sure, Bing exists, but it’s not a significant enough business to matter, and Microsoft is happy to replace it with whatever its generative experience might look like for search.
My hunch is that Google will not be advertising on Inc.’s site. Inc. might have to do some extra special search engine optimization too. Why? Inc.’s article repeats itself in case Sundar of comedy act fame did not get the message. Inc. states again:
Google hasn’t figured out the product part. It hasn’t figured out how to turn its Gemini AI into a product at the same scale as search without killing its real business. Until it does, it doesn’t matter whether the competition uses someone else’s models.
With the EU competition boss thinking about chopping up the Google, Inc. Magazine and Mr. Nadella may struggle to get Sundar’s attention. It is tough to do comedy when tragedy is a snappy quip away.
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2024
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