alt Hacker NewsGoogle is way more risk adverse than the smaller labs, because the punishment for slip ups is dramatic.
They cut down 1.5sq miles of man made logging forest that was rezoned to industrial land (and sold to google), without getting the right permit first, and it's been international news for almost a month. Anthropic and OAI are still small fish, at least publicly, so they can get away with far more. If Gemini was doing the shit OAI was doing with agent hacks and the like, there would be congressional hearings and $10B in european fines.
When you are a megacorp, perhaps here even the megacorp, every mistake you make is worth millions to someone, the government, the media, individuals, or all of them
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While I don't disagree, if we are to believe Anthropic's valuation claim, it squarely falls under "megacorp" territory.
> When you are a megacorp, perhaps here even the megacorp, every mistake you make is worth millions to someone, the government, the media, individuals, or all of them
I don't buy it.
SpaceX is not exactly a small corporation, and they nevertheless strike me as far less risk-averse than GOOG and they deal with actual hardware that actually effing explodes.
I'm going to say that deforesting without a permit is quite a bit worse than not releasing vaporware.
This isn't about a "slip up", it's the modus operandi for Google since it was young. Press releases instead of real releases. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on a "launch" story from Google on HN only to end up on a blog post with an embedded youtube video, and nothing else. Google just doesn't get it, and this is one of the many ways that manifests.
You’re also assuming the decision is up to Google.
I’ve heard from multiple labs that model release is up to the US government now.
You can also see this with Astra being announced and then launched a few days later.