Finally a quite informed posts. There are a few points I do not necessarily agree though.
First of all, it is not necessary the same engineers/scientists. People leave the companies, new employees replace them. Google has massively increased, since it became Google, and the culture is quite different nowadays in virtually every aspect. However, that never was my point in that post, my point is that Googlers have actually a strong incentive to work hard: They are getting extremely high salaries. If you’re getting paid half a million (close to a million if you are staff/senior staff, and more as principal), then it is probably also expected to work 30-40 quality hours per week.
Second, I agree that the main problem is Google’s leadership and culture rather than the quality of employees. The culture nowadays is somewhere between just another corporate to rotten to the core, instead of the Google culture. Consequently, they have stopped becoming innovative and Pichai’s strategy is to put more adds everywhere cause that brings money. Until it won’t.
Third, I do not agree that they had the technology to do ChatGPT before OpenAI. Yes, Google discovered Transformers (I was in NeurIPS 17 where they were presented), but then everyone knew about Transformers. Their Bert system was never as good as early GPT versions. And frankly, it shows how far they have fallen that Gemini is still not as good as Claude or GPT-4. Until 2021 or so, DeepMind was the most reputable AI organization in the word. Google Brain was probably second. Google Research might have been third. And yet together they cannot make something as good as their tiny competitors (DeepMind even before the merge with Google Brain had more employees than OpenAI and Anthropic combined).
Fourth, since red signal of Pichai, AI teams had to work harder but definitely not startup hours. More like regular hours, with some highly recommended 3 days/week in office rather than basically little to no work with showing to the office the day where you want to do some massage and eat sushi. But it is still normal working hours, with a life-work balance and salary combo that you cannot get anywhere else, probably outside of Nvidia.
Finally, again I agree that the problem is Pichai’s leadership and the culture. He has basically transformed Google to Microsoft under Ballmer, and similar to how Google under Schmidt, Page (and Brinn) obliterated Microsoft, so are doing the other companies to Google. I think they still have top researchers and engineers (DeepMind has easily and by far the hardest FAANG interview), but when you have a rotten culture and bad managers, the engineers won’t be able to do much. In an individual manner, it is still an amazing place to work (amazing salary, chance to coast, great for resume) but for the organization, this is not great. The fact that Mistral in their first year of existence with a couple dozen staff was able to make something as good as Google, shows how deep are Google’s problem. Btw, I would have said the same for Meta until recently, where Zuck started bothering again and effectively made Meta’s employee work again.
