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Google's Moonshot Factory Falls Back Down to Earth 25

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Alphabet's moonshot factory, X, is scaling back its ambitious projects amid concerns over Google's core search business facing competition from AI chatbots like ChatGPT. The lab, once a symbol of Google's commitment to innovation, is now spinning off projects as startups rather than integrating them into Alphabet. The shift reflects a broader trend among tech giants, who are cutting costs and focusing on their core businesses in response to the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Google's Moonshot Factory Falls Back Down to Earth More | Reply

Google's Moonshot Factory Falls Back Down to Earth

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  • To the moon... (Score:5, Informative)

    by joshuark ( 6549270 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @01:36PM (#64488225)

    To the moon Alice...or not.

    Cue the music from Futurama "We're landing on the moon..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Archived version of article (no paywall) https://archive.ph/2jwd2 [archive.ph]

    JoshK.

  • a broader trend among tech giants, who are cutting costs and focusing on their core businesses in response to the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

    Shoving AI into all their existing products because ... well ... all the other fat cats are doing it.

    If you get fired for going against the grain, you look like a rogue loser when you go job hunting.

    If you get fired for going WITH the grain, you look like a generic loser when you go job hunting, but all your competitors are also a generic loser, leveling the playing

    • Re:The other MeToo movement (Score:5, Interesting)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @02:15PM (#64488327)
      AI really does change the landscape for search - that is, for google. So often now you can get an answer more quickly by asking ChatGPT. And if you want it to base its answer on relevant web pages and link its response to where it found the answer, it'll do that, too.

      The biggest hope for google is that ChatGPT is an unsustainable business model, because it's not thoroughly infused with spam like google is. But if competing means google would have to dial back monetization to re-prioritize the user experience, that would be an extremely painful proposition for what has become a profit-bloated company.

  • More like failure factory (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Njovich ( 553857 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @01:47PM (#64488253)

    'X', the super original name loved by the world's richest, was a great exercise in proving that you can fix engineering challenges that everyone thought you could solve by throwing money at it... by throwing money at it. And because of the amount of money thrown at it you get impractical and expensive solutions that nobody really wants.

  • That's not why they are spinning off these as separate companies. Alphabet etc. know full well just how dangerous AI can be, and doing this limits them from liability if they are just acting as a holding company.

    • Re:cutting costs and focusing on their core busine (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @02:42PM (#64488403)
      That might sort of be a reason, but I think the main reason is that the X lab was predominately a recruiting tool for high-end engineers. About a decade ago, it was beaten in during the Google interview process you got to spend 20% of your time working on X lab pet projects. This proved incredibly successful at poaching engineers (mostly specialized software engineers at senior rank or above) from places like Apple, Oracle and Facebook. Once they had enough engineers (and now they have unlimited comp sci PhDs, MIT grads etc) they rolled back this perk. Now, after numerous rounds of layoffs, the coup d'grace for X labs is given. They no longer care about retaining these engineers, they want to slim down and depend on AI to do some of the work. If getting rid of this project causes people to leave, great. When they need to hire again, markets have changed for tech jobs so they no longer need to be so aggressive recruiting on perks. They can just offer the famous high Google salary with stock options and be fine. From a cold business perspective, the lab served its purpose.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        That might sort of be a reason, but I think the main reason is that the X lab was predominately a recruiting tool for high-end engineers. About a decade ago, it was beaten in during the Google interview process you got to spend 20% of your time working on X lab pet projects.

        I'm not 100% certain, but I suspect you're confusing X with the other moonshot team, Area 120 (which was gutted in January of 2023 [techcrunch.com]).

        As far as I know, X Development is organized as a separate company under Alphabet, which means that is not part of Google. I can't imagine you'd be able to do work for a different Bet as a 20% project. I could be wrong, but I'd be surprised, as the accounting overhead would be nontrivial.

        • You know I'm not actually sure either, but the Bloomberg article we're commenting on actually talks about the 20% time and while it technically exists, it's become nonexistent for new hires. But apparently X was spun off in 2023 into a separate alphabet entity, so perhaps that's just been part of the death spiral.. splinter it to Alphabet so it's not part of the 20% time anymore, then start spinning down projects.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            You know I'm not actually sure either, but the Bloomberg article we're commenting on actually talks about the 20% time and while it technically exists, it's become nonexistent for new hires. But apparently X was spun off in 2023 into a separate alphabet entity, so perhaps that's just been part of the death spiral.. splinter it to Alphabet so it's not part of the 20% time anymore, then start spinning down projects.

            Oh. My bad. I assumed it always was a separate bet. In that case, maybe it did attract some people, but I thought it was always kind of assumed that most people doing 20% projects would be doing things like contributing to open source, working on shared infrastructure, etc. It's not like X would have had the budget for an army of 20-percenters even back when it was under Google, presumably.

        • Regular Google employees didn't have anything to do with X. When he was more active, Brin would sometimes go around to offices talking about X projects; invariably he'd be asked how one could get into them as an engineer, and invariably the answer would be "you can't" (e.g. "What you do is important too")

      • By spinning the companies out it also means those in Google and other companies that can will invest personally in those companies diverting future income and share value to themselves. They have a good idea which ones will work. Also if they fail the main companies share price doesn't take a hit

  • In related news ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @03:41PM (#64488511)

    Google's Moonshot Factory Falls Back Down to Earth

    Google renames effort, "Blue Origin". :-)

  • It was never going to last (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @04:20PM (#64488615)
    US tax law brutally punishes companies for funding actual research. The golden age for US corporate research was the 1960s and 70s. Then we changed our tax laws to punish corporate research and all the company labs promptly shut down or shrank like crazy. Google labs was an outlier but now that it’s a mature company, those labs will be gone/reduced.

  • On that one project alone, I say shut it down! Shut it all down!

  • I don't know how many times I've seen this over the years. If you're a big company, you've reached that dangerous inertia for which there is no coming back - you management is too entrenched and there are too many obligations and policies to make the changes necessary to compete years later.
    You have one shot - that other departments free of overhead can innovate you out of your captive market hole. If you're lucky, it just might work.
    Tripling down on "core business" WTF does that mean. How did your "cor
    • It's idiot MBAs who think companies can only focus on one thing. That may be true for those MBAs themselves, but a lot of companies do just fine in multiple markets. For instance: making musical instruments, consumer electronics, factory equipment, motorcycles and marine engines. All under one brand as well (they don't care about that crap about "brand dilution" either). Meanwhile, Philips decided to divest lighting, consumer electronics and chip making equipment (ASML for instance), and focus on what t
      • By "focus on core business" I don't think they're talking about paying attention to things, but rather ceasing to dump money into what are essentially a bunch of startups. As independent enterprises, most will soon fail. To survive they would have to sell themselves to VC's all over again which is now much harder with higher interest rates.

      • Toshiba sold off every 'underperforming' division to focus on their core business.
        Until they sold off everything and were left with no core business to focus on.
        Philips went down the same path until they ended up with what they started with : electric shavers.

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