Discussion

Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package

spwa4: So what's the reason? Another massive layoff coming up for Google?

crop_rotation: Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

smt88: Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime.Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.

jcheng: Details: $2MM/year in salary, the rest in performance based incentives. The $692MM figure is based on hitting all of the maximums (200% of a few different targets) and is the total for three years.

varispeed: Regular IT workers should be grateful they earn substantially more than a teacher or a nurse /s. The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generates is probably one of the greatest scams pulled on working class.99% of his pay packet should be redistributed among workers.

ambicapter: > The fact that labour cost is disconnected from the value it generatesIt's not disconnected from its value in the market, I don't think. I think the great scam is telling people that capitalist values are in any way attached to human values.

pajamasam: > most of it is tied to performance, including new stock incentives linked to Waymo and its drone delivery venture Wing

dwa3592: >> Pichai has been a very poor CEO and then immediately follows with "but Google's position was so strong".Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?

geetee: You know what I don't understand? Rich people buying all these mega mansions. What's the point? I hardly have time to enjoy my middle class single family home. Is it just a dick measuring contest?

pinkmuffinere: > Pichai has been a very poor CEOWhy do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?

rybosworld: Sundar was at the helm when the decision to worsen search results for the sake of ad revenue was made.Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience.This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP).See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.

shevy-java: I kind of agree. Google's trajectory is going upwards. Unfortunately so.

shevy-java: Evil pays well.We need to find alternatives to Google - that giant is out of control now.

laborcontract: Can we please, please move past this generation of bean-counter CEOs. Google and Apple have done great things under Pichai and Cook, and yet I couldn't been less excited for what either is doing.Bring back experimental culture.

giwook: I agree with the sentiment.Experimental culture is inherently risky though, and risk is not something you want too much of as a public company as your shareholders can and will be very loud.They do still experiment but in their R&D divisions so as to shield their cash cows from risk as well as to be able to better conceal how much money they’re pouring into moonshots so as not to spook investors.Waymo is the most recent moonshot I can remember going out of Google X, and they’re arguably a leader in the space. There are other projects in the works, and many more failed ones.

mikert89: have you ever been in one of these mansions? my hot take is people seriously underestimate how great being rich is, and how enjoyable some ocean side mansions are

mlsu: Ah, that's why the lifetime earnings for a big tech CEO is about 50-100mm. It's enough to afford one of these mansions and a few additional properties around the world -- about as much wealth as any individual human being needs or could possibly spend in one lifetime.Right?

mountainriver: Pichai has been a terrible CEO, he almost lost the AI race before it started because he was too focused on Google’s consumer products.I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term

nilkn: I'm surprised people still think this. Google has the strongest position of any company in the world on AI. They have expertise and capability across the entire stack from chips to data centers to fundamental research to frontier models. Just because they weren't first-to-market with a chatbot doesn't mean they almost lost or made some terrible durable blunder.That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.

lateforwork: Poor CEO my abs. When ChatGPT came out Microsoft was singing victory songs, and predicted Google's imminent death. 3 years later Google has one of the best models and Microsoft is still borrowing OpenAI's model. Not only that, Google is running their models on their own hardware, not Nvidia's.

CuriouslyC: Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).

turzmo: I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.

pinkmuffinere: Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect?[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

delusional: You don't get to enjoy your single family home because you're at work all the time. The ultra-rich don't have that problem.

KellyCriterion: my bet is:- Google will be #1 because of sher data amount- Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future)- Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow

lateforwork: What data does Google have that OpenAI can't get at?

astrophage: the whole of youtube. (including the private stuff.) edit: +gmail/google docs/google drive

BeetleB: At least the article mentions that it is contingent on bonus targets. All too often articles skip that and say "Y was paid $$$".Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets.Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.

bombcar: I'm willing to fail as Intel's CEO for the low, low cost of $5m/year, and I can get it done in a year.

mitthrowaway2: Poor guy.

Someone1234: So, only $2M in full taxable income, then up to $230M/year is "lower tax rate than his secretary" income?

onlyrealcuzzo: No, shockingly, these are options, which are taxed as income upon payout (if that even occurs).He did not get custom stock now that will appreciate in value magically, if and only if he meets targets.Even if GOOG stock grew so much, that this ended up being a $3B pay package, he'd be taxed as ordinary income on the full amount at payout - not even the reduced capital gains on the extra ~$2.7B in growth between agreement and payout.

alephnerd: Enterprise Distribution thanks to GCP.

egl2020: I used to ask myself the same question, but then I realized that for these people it doesn't matter how much they spend. When you are worth billions of dollars, the difference between spending $10M or $50M on your home Does Not Matter. You still have many other $M to spend on other things. It's perfectly rational for them to spend what seems like a large amount of money for an apparently small marginal improvement.

kkfx: I honestly have NOTHING against that: they are a private company, their money, their choice. I have plenty of other bones to pick with them, regarding the harvesting of personal data from smart devices and cloud services, how it's used, and so on, but the salaries of their executives are their own money, so it's their business and I don't see any reason for controversy. In fact, if they happen to lose talents because of their policies or ruin themselves over certain massive salaries, that's their problem, all the better.Unfortunately, most people seem incapable of attacking what actually needs to be attacked, instead of getting hung up on things that are perfectly legitimate.

khazhoux: > they are a private companyThey are a public company

kkfx: Sorry I'm European, I mean "private" in the sense "not a Public Body", they are a company whose board has approved the remuneration using the company's own funds, meaning that the majority of shareholders are happy with this pay package.

Matticus_Rex: No, not at all. You're taxed on equity at fair market value when it vests. It's only after that when you get taxed at a lower rate on the capital gains.

KellyCriterion: e.g. years of tracking: Movement data etc., as simple & first example

andsoitis: > then up to $230M/year is "lower tax rate than his secretary" income?Why do you think that?

amelius: There's a strong smell coming out of that wealth gap now.

nashashmi: [delayed]

Imustaskforhelp: Well here are 8 search engines that I know that I did something recently with[0]1. DDG (Duckduckgo) 2. Kagi 3. Brave (Independent) 4. Ecosia (Looking to be independent with Qwant in future) 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia (Independent and creator is on HN) 7. Mojeek (Independent) 8. Yandex.ru (Russian, Independent)I personally use DDG (Duckduckgo). I think its a decent option fwiw, yes I know it uses Bing internally but it works really great.> Evil pays well.It isn't that Evil pays well although one can say that but rather that, Short term profits seem to pay well.Although Google now has a decent AI model, Their search engine which I don't use aside from some image search sometimes, is getting worse, (maybe because that somehow helps them short term) because fwiw, their stock price isn't really correlated anymore with how good their search is, because you can bet that if that was the case, Google would throw everything to become best search engine.These corporations are so locked in/monopolistic that unless you change your search engine/(In case of Microsoft operating system), they don't really care about how much worse their product becomes and sometimes even if people stop using their product, short term, they still don't care.[0]: what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47232986

bnchrch: 1. Proprietary Data (Youtube, docs, gmail, cloud logs, waymo, website analytics, ads, search, the list is huge)2. Commercial Datacenters (theyre ahead at least)3. Chip production (Google is manufactoring proprietary chips)4. Consumer OS (Chrome, Andriod)5. Consumer Hardware (Pixel)Basically google has access to data that OpenAI will never have access to, can lower costs below what OpenAI can, and is already a leader in all the places OpenAI will need massive capex to catch up.

tombert: Kagi is pretty decent, though I think they proxy to Google's index for at least some of their results.

KellyCriterion: I remember Pichai mainly for his "AI now first everything" in 2015, destroying Google search as a reliable channel to acquisit users somehow for free.

kingofmen: That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me.I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.

tombert: Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus.These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.

petcat: Isn't Google a trillion dollar company going gangbusters toward its next trillion dollars?

gotwaz: Well currently they make about 1500 bucks a year of every american household just selling ads. Make much less on the rest of the world. So it really just boils down to what the upper limit on ad sales to the american consumer is.

compiler-guy: The cloud business is also doing quite well. Waymo is generating revenue now as well. So not just ads.

zarzavat: I don't know about Pichai in particular but whenever rich people do things that don't make sense the answer is usually tax avoidance or financial engineering.If you have many shares concentrated in a particular company that you can't or don't want to sell for legal or tax reasons, you can borrow money to buy a house. As long as you service the interest you get a house without having to sell too many shares and trigger tax obligations.Home loans are also nice because they are a form of leverage that is secured against an asset but is not subject to margin calls if the value of that asset falls.

wil421: Android too.

computomatic: Sorry, we’re only considering applicants with a proven track record of failing as CEO

compiler-guy: These aren’t options, but you are otherwise correct.

semiinfinitely: worth it

gtowey: It's like when the Titanic struck the iceberg and the crew mostly thought the ship would be fine.Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.

ghywertelling: compare that behaviour with Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger. They wanted more money only to pursue their other interests. They succeeded in earning more money than imaginable.

rkomorn: The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless.I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.

tombert: Yeah, that's the thing; if he's acknowledging that it was his decision to do this, then maybe he shouldn't be getting bonuses and maybe be fired? Why are the regular schmucks the ones being punished for his terrible decisions and not him?

ajb: Shocking? Taxed on payout is a discount versus ordinary stiffs who get taxed every year. A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the end; as the former foregoes the opportunity to earn a return on the amount taxed earlier. This is quite significant over longer periods. (I learned that from one of Warren Buffet's annual letters - I think he was explaining why insurance is a great business to be in, because the same effect applies to long-horizon insurance policies).

avidiax: One of the things that a CEO drives is vision and innovation.Sundar misses the mark on these things. AI is a good example. Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use. It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.Cloud. Years late to the game. All it would have taken is a letter similar to the famous Bezos memo to eventually get all of Google's world-class scaled infra pointing externally and generating revenue. Instead, Google Cloud started late, and couldn't reuse much of the internal infrastructure.Stadia, another example. That architecture is probably the future. It's not clear how gamers in developing countries are going to afford thousands of dollars in hardware that sits idle 90% of the time.

JCharante: naive question: which product and service has gotten worse?Like they removed the youtube dislike buttonwhat else?Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.

raw_anon_1111: Is it profitable?

compiler-guy: Cloud is profitable. Waymo not, but is building. In any event, the grandparent was talking about revenue.

ryandrake: I'll do it for $1m/year. Come on, shareholders, you could save a fortune.

mcntsh: Every cost is disconnected from the value it generates. Do you pay the price for gasoline, electricity, or food based on the value it provides you?

weare138: So Sundar is an AI engineer in his spare time too?

turzmo: Google has succeeded in enshittifying their search in a way that the vast majority of users (not customers -- those are the advertisers) have not noticed.

pinkmuffinere: If the users aren’t bothered by the “enshittification”, does that reflect poorly on the CEO? The CEO is supposed to make money, and maybe has personal aspirations to improve the world. They’re not making art.

vasco: They are a public company.

tombert: Private in that they're not owned by the taxpayers or government. Amtrak would be an example of a "public" company in the sense that I believe that the poster was describing.

astral_drama: I'm pretty sure even chatgpt could have told the senior leaders at Google to invest heavily in AI. Not a difficult call to make.

usrusr: What if the CEO isn't just telling the company how much to invest, but also has influence on how that money is used? Google's relative success, if it exists, I'd rather not judge, isn't from investing more than everybody else. Because the money just keeps pouring into these things, for all contenders.

lateforwork: > investing more than everybody elseIf that's going to decide who wins, Zuckerberg will be the winner. He's been hiring researchers for $100 Million a piece. We'll see soon.

y0ssar1an: absolutely no one is smart or productive enough to justify $692m in pay. they could hire thousands of engineers for that money.

periodjet: That’s not for you to decide. It’s for the people with the $692m to decide.

philipallstar: If someone's actually willing to pay that for you, you should take the job. If no one is, then you are not even as good as Pat Gelsinger when he doesn't meet his objectives.

gdilla: ya i could hire 500 min wage baseball players to replace ohtani then.

Someone1234: But it never vests. They take out loans against it, then pass it down, and inheritance tax resets to clear the tax burden. Or donate it to a charity.It is taxed for the secretary example above, but not for the ultra-wealthy.

danillonunes: Can't risk hiring an amateur and he accidently succeeded.

plorkyeran: Getting a lump-sum payment at the end of three years is worse than getting paid incrementally, and is sort of the opposite of how insurance companies make money (which is taking frontloaded payments for long-term liabilities and investing the float).

jstummbillig: The market disagrees.

vitus: > if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision.Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.

option: What do you think happens with loans?

Someone1234: That they pay interest at a lower relative rate than the cost of the taxes that would be due, what do you think happens with the loans?

raw_anon_1111: Which is completely meaningless. Anyone can sell a bunch of one dollar bills for 50 cents

tasuki: Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off? I think that's why he got the bonus, actually! I'm sure the layoff was difficult for him as well: he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.

haunter: Isn't that the plot of Moneyball? You'll almost never find a single player with 30 stolen bases and 30 HR both, but you can find two players with 30 stolen bases and 30 HR alone for cheaper.

Someone1234: The IRS thinks that too. Stock grants, assuming they're EVER taxed (which isn't a given), are taxed at a lower rate than income. But as I indicated, most are never vested in the traditional sense, and are even lower than standard capital gains.

ahmedtd: Stock grants (RSUs, like Google gives out) are taxed as ordinary income at the moment they vest.If you sell them immediately, then you don't pay any additional capital gains tax, because there were no capital gains from the moment you got them to the moment you sold them.If you hold on to them, you will eventually pay capital gains on any increase in value from the moment they vested until the moment you sell them.Perhaps, once they are vested, you could take loans against them, to get some cash while avoiding selling them.But no matter what, they are taxed at the moment you receive them, and again at the moment they leave your possession.

compiler-guy: That was the proper takeaway during Amazon.com’s preprofit stages.

SilverElfin: Google has substantially caught up on AI and between their existing monopolies, capital, access to data, and ability to sell to existing cloud or Google apps customers, they’re going to become richer and more powerful than ever.This type of concentration makes it so that there’s no working competition element to the economy. Mega corps should be broken up and also charged absurdly high tax rates to fix this.

compiler-guy: You should probably read the filing. First, these aren’t options, it is straight up stock and it does vest.Second, even if they were options, they definitely vest, otherwise Pichai would never gain control to be able to use them as collateral for a loan.What you might be thinking is that they never get exercised, which is when the person uses the option to actually buy the share. But even that isn’t as straightforward as you seem to be making it out to be. The money to actually pay the interest on those loans and that is usually done by selling stock acquired this way. And then that income is almost certainly subject to AMT as well as other special taxes in California.

jcheng: > A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the endIt sounds like you're describing a hypothetical tax on unrealized gains? Do you have a link to the Buffet letter?

ajb: No; just the difference between someone who gets a fixed number of shares and has to sell them (and pay the tax on them) that year, versus someone who is allowed to accumulate the shares and pay the tax at the end.This may assume that there is more alpha in the shares than other investments you have access to, which is perhaps less true today. But it should probably be your position if you're CEO of the company...All the Buffett letters are online, but I don't remember what year it was. If I get time I may find it and report back.

impulser_: He runs the 2nd most valuable company in the world, and the company is most profitable company ever.Giving him 700m in stock to keep him around is worth it for both the investors and employees.

tombert: > Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off?It probably was the right decision to lay everyone off. What was not the right decision, and this should have been obvious, was hiring 10+k more employees than you actually need because you assume that this free money will last forever. He was almost certainly aware and signed off on this mass hiring. Other companies didn't make this mistake; Tim Cook didn't take a bonus that year to avoid mass layoffs.> he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.He probably did, because he's a bad CEO. He was right to lose goodwill.> No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google.No, there isn't a legal promise or anything, but people go to these BigCos primarily for stability. If you want an exciting job with lots of interesting new things, it's much easier to find that in a startup, but startups can be frustrating because they're inherently unstable. This is partly why startups tend to be made up of very young people; it's much easier to deal with volatility if you don't have a family.You're obviously not "entitled" to a job, but the people who run Google aren't complete idiots; they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable. They depended on that in order to do all this overhiring.

tasuki: > they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stableAnd after all this, people will think twice whether BigCo is stable. Just as well! If you want stability, look into small family-run companies.

tombert: This doesn’t absolve Google at all. They aren’t morons, they know that people joined because of that perceived stability.

jordanb: The only real competitor is bing (other search engines like DDG are just repackaged bing) and Microsoft is pursuing the same strategy as Google.

replooda: What about Kagi?

pinkmuffinere: No offense to Kagi, but they don’t rank in the top 6. They are behind even Baidu, which I had forgotten exists. I think they have good mind-share among power users, but probably not in the general population.

replooda: But the question is whether or not Kagi is a competitor — not just in regards to the market share it currently holds, but what it could come to hold. Let's see where it is next year.

pinkmuffinere: > But the question is whether or not Kagi is a competitor — not just in regards to the market share it currently holds, but what it could come to holdThe question is who’s a competitor now, right? It’s not “Who will be a competitor in n years”

est31: You can't train LLMs on proprietary data, at least not if you want to make that LLM as accessible as Gemini. Otherwise random people can ask it your home address.So it matters less than one would think. Also, ChatGPT can do 'internet search' as a tool already, so it already has access to say Google maps POI database of SMBs.And ChatGPT also gets a lot of proprietary data of its own as well. People use it as a Google replacement.

sillyfluke: >You can't train LLMs on proprietary data, at least not if you want to make that LLM as accessible as Gemini. Otherwise random people can ask it your home address.If this is your only criteria I think you have a misunderstanding of what proprietary data is and ways companies can mitigate the situation in the inference stage.

s1artibartfast: Why do you think they get to accumulate shares and pay tax at the end. If options Sundar will have the pay income when exercised, or if RSU, they will have to pay income taxes when granted.If you want to research the tax imlications, the relevant term is PSU (Performance Stock Units), which is the form almost all of these CEO incentives take.

fancyfredbot: Is this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have.I understand it's insulting to be paid less than other CEOs, and I get that it's a way of keeping score.All the same I think he's doing it for the power, the respect, the fame. Would he have walked away if the number was only $100m? Would that have been rational?

spwa4: Isn't Google famous for the investors and the employees both being entirely powerless?

ajb: (edited) My bad, I meant to type "options" not "shares". You get to choose when to exercise options. When tax is incurred will vary according to your jurisdiction.I'm fairly sure that Sundar Pinchai will have paid someone to research the tax implications before negotiating this deal.

smt88: Text search (without Gemini) and Gmail are much worse than they used to be. Android is less open, Chrome doesn't allow proper ad-blocking, YouTube has insane ads if you don't have Premium.

tsoukase: Companies structure is much more monarchic than almost all regimes in history. CEOs stand in the top position like Gods, having full power at will, and then all the others follow as his workers. He can easily earn multiple times more than the next highest in the company because his responsibility is elevated. So, the company can afford to pay huge sum to one person because he is the only one that is able to bring in multiples of this (eg fire people, increase the stock price, prepare for a sale off). Companies are not democracies, not even monarchies, they are machines with a single brain for strategy: the CEO's.

lateforwork: > Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use.That's how innovation works in this industry. If companies didn't allow researchers to publish their work it would set us back decades. Researchers building on each other's work is how this industry was built.> It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.So Google executed. Ability to execute is one of the things that makes a good CEO. Other CEOs have additional qualities such as vision, and getting others to believe in the vision. But not every CEO needs to be a Steve Jobs!Plenty of innovations are coming out of Google, just look at Nano Banana Pro for example.

fennecbutt: "Ability to execute"Lmao I love this. "Hey, engineers. Make something like that but better here's money, but only a fraction of what I'll make off it!"Yeah, being a CEO is reeeally hard. Even when they fail they still walk out with >10m.

jstummbillig: > Is this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have.I think the confusion stems from mapping normal people money usage on people, that have much more money than they can use on themselves: They don't do that. You can use excess money to make things happen as you see fit.Money enables you to do things in the world, and if you want to do things in the world, a few hundred million are very easily spent. I am sure most people around here would have no trouble allocating that amount of money towards something they would like to see happen or improved, and that's how a lot of money, that someone does not feel they need, is used.

raw_anon_1111: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

vasco: The meaning is the same in "European". I'm Portuguese.

vasco: These words have meaning already, and what they said makes no sense due to that. A public company has many obligations a private company doesn't, and more limitations on what it can do.

rkomorn: I'm French and the meaning is similar to what OP described in French "European".

turzmo: Like I said originally, I think the rise of ChatGPT is a partly a consequence of this. It’s not that people are choosing a different search engine, they’re not searching at all because LLMs will give a better answer faster.Also, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, five years is really not that long. Time will tell, but does it really seem like decreasing quality in the name of profits is such a good long-term strategy?

yablak: I forgot how to count that low...

s1artibartfast: The problem is it's quite a bit more challenging to agree on prices for exchange denominated in human values.There is no common currency.

ambicapter: We don't have to do it, I'm not arguing that market pricing should be changed.I just want people to stop pretending they're related.

compiler-guy: A more sophisticated analysis would involve checking available capital vs run rate and whether or not there is a viable business underneath.