alt Hacker NewsI still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something.
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Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal.
This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high.
Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?
Yeah. Google was too impatient and forced BD to productize prematurely (Spot, Handle), then dumped them when it didn't work out immediately. AI just wasn't ready yet. Imagine if Google had let BD focus on research until DeepMind was ready with the AI side of things. I think with the right joint research program they could have already been deploying humanoids today.
2017 was shortly before Google stopped being afraid of being pegged as an AI killbot company.
There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company.
My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They've been very "GOFCT" and have only recently started to incorporate ML concepts.