alt Hacker NewsCommercially viable for Google boils down to can they attribute ads behaviors to it or not.
Then there’s a second tier of things that just make those wheels turn and if they do or don’t make ads revenue is nominally immaterial.
The teams doing this stuff at Google are purely for show, none of this makes it into any real products.
There’s the narrow exception of stuff like gboard, that does use privacy preserving ML/fed learning, but this stuff isn’t in the same zone.
I find it a bit embarrassing when Google publishes this stuff to be honest.
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GCP exists, friend. Right now industries are locked out of AI tools due to privacy laws.
If Google Cloud can offer FHE-powered tools, a hospital can run Google’s AI diagnostic models on encrypted brain scans without violating privacy laws.
FHE effectively removes the primary regulatory barrier keeping enterprise customers off the cloud.
Autonomous driving was all show until Waymo happened AI research was all show until transformers happened. Quantum research is all show until ..
and now this.
Part of changing the world involves imagining a changed-world.
Sometimes I feel like 75% of their engineers are working on stuff that is purely for show. If their product doesn't generate enough profit very short term they stop it immediately. They have hunderds of cancelled projects, and those are only the ones which have existed. I wonder how many things they made internally and killed before ever showing it publicly.