That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
Google is facing a legitimate innovators dilemma here. It makes sense to have all this process when youre protecting a $4.5 trillion golden goose. The tragedy here is that one predictable outcome of this situation is google deciding to considerably cut research funding when they figure out it just serves to bootstrap future competitors.
This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.
Or maybe just have your R&D teams focused on doing R&D with zero corporate interference. Staff it with personal assistants whose only job is to ensure the researchers have whatever they need and are never bothered with meetings or other corporate shenanigans. The assistants could then be the proxies to management to provide feedback to management, but only on best effort and still staying the fuck out of the way of the researchers.
Easy peasy!
Easy peasy yet still impossible for them to do as R&D doesn't add to the bottom line, it is a cost center.
Easey peasy was said with a wink, although technically speaking it would be easy -- if they didn't have their heads up their ass.
A dear friend of mine was doing R&D at a startup where management poured on a bunch of low-level management work that took him away from his joy, which was developing new tools and approaches to solving customer problems. He left, and went to another gig that promised him complete freedom to invent and discover. That job is at a Fortune 500 company that is slowly starting to pull its head out of its ass.
Wasn't that what the whole Alphabet re-org was supposed to do?
Alphabet has Google with 99% of the profit through Ads, Search, Cloud, Gmail, Youtube etc
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
Google bloat gave us transformers. Apple bloat gave us a usable touchscreen only, pocket computer (famously an entire org within Apple had developed an iPod-based approach that was competing with what was released)
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
innovation requires monopoly is a Theil one liner -- probably true too
Probably not true
I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
That depends who you are firing. There are many job roles who's primary output is meetings and documents.
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
Is that you Musk? Twitter lost half its revenue, more than 80% of its valuation.
That was mostly because Elon told advertisers to fuck themselves at an advertising convention no?
It's impossible to disambiguate but advertiser tools, brand safety, targeting, reporting etc all need a lot of ongoing effort. If it gets harder to advertise effectively on Twitter, those dollars can very easily go elsewhere.
"what Elon did with Twitter after taking over."
You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?
Eh, what has X/Twitter delivered since the cull? It’s basically in maintenance mode. Which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but Google and Apple definitely don’t (and I’m glad for that)
> It’s basically in maintenance mode
Has been in more of a maintenance mode with a multiple of those people. If anything, the pace of the product has improved. Regardless of what you think about Musk, the company he bought was a bloated mess.
Features aside, it was making considerably more money before Musk’s cull.
He merged it with SpaceX, quickly created a few colossal datacenters for training runs and somehow turned that into a 3T company.
That has nothing to do with culling staff at Twitter though.
Working recommended feed
> Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
Google is competing with nvidia (TPU), AWS (GCP), Netflix (youtube), Tesla (waymo self driving), OpenAI (Gemini), Microsoft (Workspace), Apple (Android)....
Apple was doing effectively everything on that list, though the self driving car was cancelled and the AI is now gemini.
Err, maybe some of those, but there's a reason Apple is using GCP and TPUs for training their custom gemini model.