This…isn’t true. Remote work is an option for most employees. The problem is that a significant number of people are deciding to work from office and then not actually using the desks. So you see entire buildings of empty desks. Google doesn’t want to continue leasing or building new offices just to house empty desks.

I think the motivations for the two companies differ. What would Google gain from releasing a chat bot ? Instead, Google likely aims to introduce LLM capabilities into their search engine in (most likely) subtle, measured and careful ways. Opting for incremental improvements in search backed by rigorous A/B experiments.

Whereas OpenAI gains a lot to release an awesome chat bot. They get to generate buzz and secure next rounds of funding.

This is not true. Google was always an information retrieval company, the pivot to an AI company happened with the founding of brain. Although search uses ML today, the first iteration clearly did not.

How is this different than what Waymo is doing. Waymos vision is universal autonomous driving. They are laser focused on creating an autonomous driver, not a car.

Tesla is interested in making an autonomous driving a feature for their car...and Tesla is an EV company. They gave up LIDAR and are intentionally hamstringing their sensor suite for ???? Reasons.

In the end autonomous driving is mostly a computer science (arguably a machine learning) problem.. and Google is all in on machine learning. From having another bet (deep mind) that is 100% focused on novel ML techniques to having a large, influential division focused mostly on NLP and understanding(Brain, headed by Jeff Dean) to creating their own silicon and super computers that do nothing but train ML models(TPU which win a bunch of MLPerf benchmarks).

So how is Tesla going to beat Google at this? Google has transformed into a ML company.. And Google is now the only company running autonomous car service without restriction in the public domain. Meanwhile Tesla is under safety investigations