[pigscantfly]

95% of those people have left Google because the ethics and safety teams prevented them from releasing any products based on their research. We have those ex-Googlers to thank for ChatGPT, Character.ai, Inceptive, ... which you'll notice are not Google products but rather competitors.

[panarky]

I, for one, appreciate a megacorp purposely sacrificing revenue when they're not confident that the negative externalities of that revenue would be minimized.

Google could have built a search engine where paid results were indistinguishable from organic results, but the negative externalities of that were too great.

Google could have remained in China, but the negative externalities of developing and managing a censorship engine were too great.

Google could have productized AI before the risks were controlled, but they sacrificed revenue and first-mover advantage to be more responsible, and to protect their reputation.

This behavior is so rare, it's hard to think of another megacorp that would do that.

Google's far from perfect, they've made ethical lapses, which their competitors love to yell and scream about, but their competitors wouldn't hold up well under the same scrutiny.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Google could have built a search engine where paid results were indistinguishable from organic results, but the negative externalities of that were too great.

Have you not used Google search in the past 5 years?