The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
There is a reason why many big tech companies are investing heavily in AI. Meta launched Llama 3 two days back, claiming that its AI is faster and better than all other competitors. Creating these LLM-based Generative AI models is very expensive regarding research expenditure. All these AI programs need tremendous processing capacity. Only recently, Open AI and Microsoft announced that they are working on building an AI supercomputer project, Stargate, for 100 billion dollars. Open AI pays up to 10 million dollars annually to hire top AI talent. There is a talent war for AI talent, which ensures that companies pay well above market numbers to hire good talent. Therefore, infrastructure investments and the high cost of talent make it prohibitive for new companies to enter this space and make a significant impact. The big companies have a natural advantage in this space.
One company trying to make an impact in this space is Perplexity, founded by an IIT Madras alumnus and Berkeley PhD – Aravind Srinivas. He noted that he faces issues hiring top talent in the field as his company needs more servers and computing capacity to drive cutting-edge AI research. One of the key employees he tried to poach from Google was given a 300% hike by Google to keep him inside the company. Why are VCs funding these startups? What is their intent?
One of the biggest cash cows in industry is Google Search. Google still directs most of the world’s internet traffic, and ads are a massive source of revenue for Google, bringing in around 175 billion dollars a year. Most of this is pure profit, as Google Search has few overheads. All the investments have been made well in the past. The returns on the investments only get better year after year. Google pays Apple around 10 billion dollars to ensure that Google is the default search engine. Microsoft tried to dislodge the Google-Apple partnership but could not spend more money to replace Google. From the view of competitors, Google uses its cash cow, the search business, to force a monopoly on other businesses. Breaking the monopoly of Google is the aim of all companies, especially companies like Microsoft. This rivalry is why Microsoft has actively promoted and partnered with Open AI. It sees a golden chance to hurt Google and slowly sabotage the search business.
From a customer’s perspective, Google’s search results have worsened with time. With constant pressure to improve the top and bottom lines, the easiest way is to introduce more sponsored and paid results at the top of Google search results. Even when users skip these sponsored links, they still face the problem of clicking innumerable links to find the information they seek. Information a person wants is present in many places, and Google has yet to make it easy to find all the information together. Google wants you to keep searching and clicking on links. The more time a person spends navigating their page, the more data the company can gather about the user. Infamously, Google was also in the news for capturing user data in the incognito browser mode. In the end, Google has forgotten the reason people began to use Google in the first place – the ease of search.
In the 1990s, the search engines were Ask Jeeves, Altavista, etc. They were full of ads and pop-ups, and the results and links displayed had little correlation to the questions asked. The disappointment with these websites made people migrate to Google. Google promised no ads and a page rank algorithm that yielded meaningful search results. Nowadays, the questions asked are more complex than in the past. Users want quick and consolidated answers and not more homework to click dozens of links to find what one needs. The chatbots and LLMs promise users fast and easy results. It can also personalize the results, something Google has never done.
A recent interview with Marissa Meyer by a CNBC reporter and Cornell friend, Alex Kantrowitz highlights why Google refuses to improve the search experience. She mentioned that any program and project inside Google undergoes an interval evaluation. Any activity that tinkers with Google search or its revenues is immediately shot down. Nobody in Google wants to kill a golden goose. What has resulted is statis and deterioration. Slowly and surely, Google is becoming a dinosaur when it starts valuing profits over user experience.
There was a time when nobody could question the office organization inside Microsoft. Until Satya Nadella turned up, nobody knew how to fix that problem. This note was direct feedback from Microsoft executives when I interviewed at Microsoft. Google also needs a saviour. There are clear structural, leadership and HR issues at Google. Unless this is solved, more startups will keep taking bites like Orcas attacking a Blue Whale until the whale dies one day.
