Probably the founders swooped in and told them they wanted to release whatever they had because they panicked. The engineers probably said it wasn’t ready, but upper management over ruled them. Of course they’re going to say they have something better but I’m doubtful. They looked really unconfident in their presentation of bard. It’s like they all knew they had a loser but we’re forced to throw a presentation together with a 72 hour notice.

I haven’t been too impressed with Google as a company in recent years. They seem really unfocused and like they’re always chasing after the latest tech fad.

There’s no 4d chess here. Bard is the best they have. That’s why Larry Page and Sergei Brin had to fly in for a “code red” emergency meeting. I don’t find it too surprising that a scrappy start up was able to outwit a Google. This has been the continual story in business. Google is a typical large company with too many committees and red tape. They got complacent and fell asleep at the wheel. Same thing that happened to IBM, GE, Blockbuster, Barnes and Noble, etc. Microsoft and Apple are incredibly rare examples of businesses that have managed to stay relevant and reinvent themselves.

I keep thinking about what AGI would do to the stock market. While it’s difficult to say who will be the winner or loser, I think it’s fair to say the broader market will grow like crazy as economic output skyrockets. I believe it was Nick Bostrom who stated in his Superintelligence book that if the AGI gave the same jump in economic output that the agricultural revolution or Industrial Revolution brought, the broad market would double every two weeks. That sounds crazy but then again the markets doubling about every 8 years would have sounded insane to anyone before the industrial era. Such growth would accelerate wealth inequality where anyone who doesn’t have a decent amount of their net worth in equities gets left behind with no chance of ever catching up.

That kind of world gets even scarier when AGI starts tackling aging. There’s always been differences in life expectancy among economic classes, but that difference could quickly widened.