[HN Gopher] Google employees criticize CEO for "dumpster fire" r...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Google employees criticize CEO for "dumpster fire" response to
       ChatGPT
        
       Author : bribroder
       Score  : 408 points
       Date   : 2023-02-14 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
        
       | system16 wrote:
       | Seeing a lot of criticism towards Sundar lately, and it's not
       | without merit. There is blood in the water now and I wouldn't be
       | surprised if his time is limited.
       | 
       | He is good as a caretaker who didn't rock the boat, but Google
       | needs bold innovation and competence if it intends on staying
       | relevant in the years to come.
        
         | ur-whale wrote:
         | > I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited.
         | 
         | Good riddance.
         | 
         | > who didn't rock the boat
         | 
         | He was chosen for his exceptional ability to not rock the boat.
         | Unfortunately, that's about the only skill he's displayed so
         | far (oh yeah, and being "thoughtful" about stuff).
        
       | abudabi123 wrote:
       | Google Prepared Transformer => GPT, that has a nice marketing
       | ring and clearly claims the invention/innovation. Google took
       | their eye off the ball and fumbled. A "goto market" division
       | could have helped the inventors/innovators.
        
       | BeefWellington wrote:
       | AI is the new "Big Data", though maybe it has one or two
       | practical use cases for larger companies.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | thrilled2behere wrote:
       | If I were IBM management, I'd be getting a laugh out of all of
       | this. When IBM had to scale back their ambitions for Watson,
       | especially those related to automating medical diagnoses, they
       | were roundly mocked. Do not ask, dear tech companies, for whom
       | the bell of AI overpromising tolls - it tolls for thee!
        
         | danpalmer wrote:
         | I agree in principle, but Watson was a lot of different things,
         | mostly unrelated to any "modern" AI tech.
         | 
         | Edit: the Watson that played Jeopardy was smart (for that time)
         | natural language processing, that backed on to a large fact
         | store, generated from natural language processing of a
         | relatively small set of sources like Wikipedia.
         | 
         | The Watson that was sold to companies was essentially a
         | consulting service. I'm sure they had some re-usable
         | components, but it's possible those components weren't much
         | more than data pipelines, model training, etc. Most of the
         | smarts were people doing a ton of data science specific to each
         | problem. Worthwhile, but only good compared to companies who
         | don't have a data science function.
         | 
         | Conversely, "modern" AI is things like LLMs, which have their
         | own problems of course, but are a huge paradigm shift compared
         | to Watson.
        
         | ur-whale wrote:
         | Watson was always vaporware, with a marketing message designed
         | to seduce know-nothing middle-managers in large corporations.
         | 
         | There never was any tech. backing it up.
        
       | ouid wrote:
       | Has sundar been a good CEO otherwise?
        
         | blululu wrote:
         | Well he sat at the helm of a very powerful company during one
         | of the largest and longest bull markets in history. Beyond
         | being at the right place at the right time - did he do a good
         | job? I would say that he is thoroughly mediocre. I don't get
         | the sense that he is very strong as a technically oriented
         | leader or as a product oriented leader. He seems more of a
         | political/consensus leader who is trying to keep the peace
         | without any principle other than 'be respectful'. You can see
         | the problems growing. Costs grow faster than revenue and
         | irrelevant projects drag on, while nobody is providing a clear
         | vision about why anyone should care and why these product are
         | going to be the best. Google does fine without too much
         | leadership so maybe this isn't the worst. That said I think he
         | would be remembered more positively if he were to be fired in
         | the next 6 months.
        
         | robofanatic wrote:
         | He survived for 8+ years as a Google CEO and 4+ years as
         | Alphabet CEO. Tells that he has done few things OK.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | modeless wrote:
           | He is world class at being inoffensive. He's great at
           | testifying to Congress.
        
             | jwestbury wrote:
             | Testifying to Congress is a pretty key skill for a Google
             | CEO at the moment, to be fair.
        
               | modeless wrote:
               | Yes, these are unironically extremely difficult skills
               | which were critical for a Google CEO over the last 10
               | years. Maybe the next 10 years will be different though.
        
         | xoogler2004 wrote:
         | hahahahhahahahahah
        
         | mc32 wrote:
         | Better than say a former industry stalwart like Jack Welch.
         | He's vanilla and sometimes vanilla is what you need to steer a
         | steady course.
        
         | blindriver wrote:
         | He has brought no innovation and his fearfulness has ground
         | Google down to a halt. What new successful products has arrived
         | during his tenure? All he did was not fuck up.
         | 
         | He's lucky because the entire market has increased, but that's
         | his doing. He could be replaced by any overly cautious
         | algorithm and the results would have been the same.
        
           | malfist wrote:
           | Stadia! Oh wait..
        
           | theGnuMe wrote:
           | Before he was CEO he led the Chrome, ChromeOS/Chromebook,
           | Google Drive projects.
           | 
           | What is interesting though, according to Wikipedia, is that
           | he is not a software engineer nor a computer scientist by
           | training. He is a materials scientist with an MBA and
           | apparently briefly worked at McKinsey.
           | 
           | Does this limit his tech vision? Hard to say.
           | 
           | Satya Nadella however has a Master's in Computer Science + an
           | MBA comparatively.
        
           | muzz wrote:
           | Sounds more like Tim Cook
        
             | blululu wrote:
             | Going to have to disagree with you on this. AirPods and the
             | Apple Watch both came out under his watch. But the biggest
             | area of expansion for Apple is going to be in software
             | which has seen a ton of innovation in the past decade
             | (Cloud services, payments and a whole slew of improvements
             | to the OS) which all happened under Cook's watch.
        
             | snapcaster wrote:
             | Airpods, apple watch, m1 processors. I'm sure there are
             | others but I've bought and enjoyed a bunch of new apple
             | products since Tim Cook took over
        
         | aix1 wrote:
         | I think the current reality is that Sundar is more of a
         | figurehead, with Ruth calling the shots.
        
         | nivenkos wrote:
         | Stadia was a massive lost opportunity, they had no unique games
         | (i.e. using server-side co-locality for multiplayer, etc.) nor
         | a decent subscription to compete with MS Games Pass.
        
         | gg-plz wrote:
         | Sundar is good at keeping things running as-is.
         | 
         | He was elevated to CEO of Google to keep things running as-is
         | while the founders moved their exciting ventures up to
         | Alphabet. When those other bets were abandoned, Sundar was left
         | as the top engaged executive, but he's still only a caretaker
         | when the company needs an actual leader with vision to navigate
         | their competition.
         | 
         | So, no. He has not been a good CEO. He was a good middle-
         | manager and a decent CEO at best, but he's not been what the
         | company needed, and he's definitely not what they need today.
        
           | substation13 wrote:
           | It's true. Even Ballmer had a vision.
        
             | mschuster91 wrote:
             | Leadership with actual visions is a rarity these days
             | _across the board_. It 's not just large companies who are
             | getting their lunch eaten by startups left and right (
             | _cough_ Oracle), but also politics. Most people in high
             | positions want the fame associated with the title (and for
             | companies, the compensation), but not provide leadership
             | beyond managing the status quo - and to make it worse, both
             | shareholders and voters seem to prefer stability over
             | progress.
        
         | sylens wrote:
         | I feel like there is no vision for the future of Android there
         | except chasing the iPhone. In the early part of the last
         | decade, Android had its own identity which was part of the
         | reason I used it. When it lost that, I moved to iPhone.
        
           | muzz wrote:
           | What do you mean by "its own identity"?
           | 
           | If you're saying that Android and iPhone/iOS are very
           | similar, that seems like a good thing?
        
             | sylens wrote:
             | It doesn't seem like a good thing for Google in that they
             | are trying to sell Pixel phones at iPhone level prices
             | without having the fit and finish, battery life, or app
             | ecosystem that iOS has.
        
       | oh_sigh wrote:
       | With 150,000 employees, you can write an article saying "Google
       | employees say X ..." regarding pretty much any subject under the
       | sun. So why was this particular article written, which refers to
       | .002% of the company?
        
         | ragnarsson wrote:
         | clicks
        
       | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
       | I wonder if this is going to end up like Waymo vs tesla. Remember
       | when people were criticizing waymo for going too slowly (tesla
       | expects to put level 9000 self driving in millions of cars by the
       | end of <five years ago>!!)? But it turned out that doing it in a
       | way that the market requires was slower than commentators
       | expected, and waymo seems to still have a great shot at being the
       | leader.
       | 
       | Or maybe it ends up like uber vs lyft. The cost of using LLMs is
       | so high, maybe we see products with unsustainable economics in
       | the quest for dominance, followed by something shittier.
       | 
       | Personally, I'm in the camp that google is in a great position
       | specifically because of their TPUs. They already have the infra
       | to do this at crazy scale _including the hardware_. I 'm betting
       | it's a marathon, not a sprint, before we see an economically
       | sustainable LLM based interact-with-all-of-human-knowledge tool
       | like we're expecting. ChatGPT has spoiled our expectations by
       | being free.
        
         | 2h wrote:
         | > The cost of using LLMs is so high
         | 
         | Thats true, but they could just use MLLs instead. Much cheaper.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | sys32768 wrote:
       | I'm excited for Google's AI to ingest the ~40 million titles in
       | the Google Books library.
        
       | college_physics wrote:
       | ChatGPT is neither an earthquake nor a tectonic plate faultline.
       | Along with ever improving algos in nearby domains (images, speech
       | etc) it is a signal, of sorts, of the slowly accumulating energy
       | that will, eventually, unleash the next phase of information
       | technology.
       | 
       | It is not an accident, imho, that it is Microsoft that somehow
       | emerges as Google's "nemesis". After all it was MS' business
       | model that Google disrupted with mass market "freebies" such as
       | gmail, docs etc. While "disrupting search" might be the immediate
       | skirmish, the bigger battle is about broadly defined "AI
       | augmented information management": who will offer it to the
       | masses, under which business model etc.
       | 
       | My feeling (nowhere near a complete analysis) is that Google will
       | lose this war even if, as it is widely assumed, it has the
       | technical advantage. This is because it has been happily cornered
       | in an extremely lucrative but ultimately dead-end business model.
       | AI augmentation as part of its existing search/adtech model is a
       | marginal and even problematic (loss making) addition, whereas as
       | part a re-invented MS it can blow new life into its old bread-
       | and-butter business that has been commoditized. A wildcard in all
       | this is (as always) Apple, but whatever its eventual approach to
       | AI, it is likely to be just another headwind for Google.
       | 
       | NB: I am a lifelong open source enthusiast, I have no stake or
       | love for any of the above entities. The ideal, least dangerous,
       | most beneficial form of AI augmentation would be as a widely
       | available and open source digital public good.
        
       | skullone wrote:
       | It's hard to differentiate the various dumpster fires going on at
       | Google right now. And I don't think they're all the CEOs fault.
        
         | dhaulagiri wrote:
         | Everything is your fault when you're the CEO
        
           | Yuioup wrote:
           | He takes full responsibility /s
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | Responsibility?
             | 
             | He's full of it.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | dboreham wrote:
       | Does this make Alphabet stock a buy? In general I have a rule to
       | never invest in adtech-based companies but a 12% discount is
       | attractive.
       | 
       | Edit: a quick look at the chart shows the drop was off a recent
       | peak and current price is roughly the 3mth mean. Tempest in
       | teacup then.
        
       | mc32 wrote:
       | There will always be people who think they knew better. It's not
       | the end of Google or their Bard. It's an emotional outburst
       | precipitated by lousy HR numbers. People are fearful and need to
       | lash out a bit. Ars is riding the slight wave of disenchantment
       | among a few emps.
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | Xoogler here.
       | 
       | I'll ignore the AI and "has Google lost its way?" threads, not
       | that they're not interesting.
       | 
       | Rather, Sundar: he's the inevitable product when you hire a CEO
       | based on his longevity and whether everyone likes him. In the
       | military they distinguish between a "barracks general" and a
       | "combat general." He's the former. He looks good when nothing bad
       | is happening.
        
         | oofta-boofta wrote:
         | Whew boy you hit the nail on the head. Google just seems to be
         | aimless at this point, and now with the layoffs (despite their
         | immense profitability) they're going to have a much tougher
         | time hiring and retaining top talent.
        
           | warning26 wrote:
           | I don't understand why the board hasn't ousted Sundar yet --
           | has he even spearheaded a single successful initiative that
           | wasn't sunsetted within a few years?
           | 
           | Seems like you could make an LLM generate product ideas and
           | it would be about equally effective.
        
           | cheeze wrote:
           | Where is the top talent going to go? Seems like a vast
           | majority of FAANG* ended up laying folks off.
        
           | pphysch wrote:
           | Microsoft's GitHub, which is apparently at the forefront of
           | the "LLM revolution" with Copilot, also announced significant
           | cost-cuts. What's your point?
        
         | MisterPea wrote:
         | See also Buggins' Turn:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggins%27_turn
        
           | AlbertCory wrote:
           | I hadn't heard that one, and having read all 20 of the
           | Aubrey/Maturin books twice, I'm not unfamiliar with the Royal
           | Navy. Thanks!
        
         | itsdrewmiller wrote:
         | Sounds like Ben Horowitz's peacetime CEO/wartime CEO, which
         | even uses google as an example -
         | https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo
        
           | AlbertCory wrote:
           | > Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO
           | lets the war define the culture.
           | 
           | Beautifully put.
           | 
           | I knew there was some reason why I'm so irresistibly drawn to
           | books about warfare.
           | 
           | Patton in WW II was the quintessential wartime general. Even
           | though it WAS a war, his style was too much for Eisenhower.
           | Until the Battle of the Bulge.
        
             | dc-programmer wrote:
             | I consider Grant the ultimate when the rubber hits the road
             | guy. In his interbellum years he was kind of an aimless
             | loser but when the stakes could not be higher, he stepped
             | up and lead the union to victory.
        
             | matwood wrote:
             | You touched on something else I wanted to mention - that
             | there is nothing wrong with a peacetime general as long as
             | you're not at war. Your point about Patton is spot on, he
             | needs a war or his style is too much.
             | 
             | I see this in startups. The people/leadership you need to
             | go from 0->1 are often not the same people to go from 1->N.
             | 
             | To bring this back around to Google. People are talking
             | about the CEO, but does Google have the rank and file ready
             | to go to war?
        
               | AlbertCory wrote:
               | having been out for 5 1/2 years, I can't say for sure.
               | But even in 2017, there were a large number of "born on
               | third base and think they hit a triple" people.
        
       | andrewprock wrote:
       | I am constantly amazed that chat bots so completely capture
       | imagination.
       | 
       | They have been, and will always be a hollow shell of interaction.
       | Has social drive atrophied so much that many (most under 30?)
       | prefer to talk to nothing instead of taking to someone?
        
         | Sebb767 wrote:
         | ChatGPT does produce useful content right now. Maybe not
         | necessarily information, but definitely boilerplate text and
         | code. Also, a child can interact with it, no problem.
         | 
         | It might not be a social interaction, but it's really not hard
         | to imagine that it has a lot of potential.
        
       | lysecret wrote:
       | I am super excited about ChatGPT even just yesterday it helped me
       | fix a really difficult bug. (I was so excited that I even wanted
       | to pay for it but their payment was broken haha)
       | 
       | However, I am starting to think that moving it to bing already
       | wasn't a smart move. These things are great on OpenAI scale. But
       | I fear they are a money pit with bad pr for google and even bing
       | scale.
        
         | hnfong wrote:
         | > it helped me fix a really difficult bug
         | 
         | Tell us more?
        
       | GuB-42 wrote:
       | From outside, I found it to be a dubious move myself.
       | 
       | ChatGPT went first, nothing Google does will change that, that's
       | too late. The only thing they can do if they don't want to lose
       | face is the "we didn't make it available because we want to do it
       | well" strategy. It has been used many times by Apple when
       | competitors beat them at some features, so much that it has
       | become a meme at some point, but it worked.
       | 
       | And I've seen hints of Google going in that direction, pointing
       | out things like reliability issues most people came to know about
       | by now, implying that they already can do what ChatGPT can do,
       | but unlike their competitors, they don't release half-assed
       | products.
       | 
       | But their latest announcement breaks everything, they are
       | essentially admitting defeat. They didn't manage to be the first
       | to market, and they can't claim they took their time to release a
       | quality product instead. So it was either a terrible
       | communication blunder, or they really didn't have much choice,
       | with the latter being a real possibility, I understand investors
       | reactions.
        
       | ergocoder wrote:
       | Google has lost its way since they have switched their own mantra
       | from "user-first" to "AI-first".
       | 
       | On the flip side, I think Microsoft has made a strategic mistake
       | of going after search openly. Satya literally called out Google
       | to compete.
       | 
       | Google also has a lot of money and will not lose easily. This war
       | is going to cost a lot of money for both of them.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rank0 wrote:
       | The blowback about googles response is unreasonable. Everyone is
       | making some wild assumptions about gpt-based search. We don't
       | even know yet if it's fit to replace a search engine.
       | 
       | Why not wait for a moment and see what unfolds? ChatGPT has only
       | been alive for a few months. Why does google need an answer
       | immediately? They should take their time and be calculated
       | instead of rushing out some half baked AI search solution.
       | 
       | How is GPT-search supposed to be profitable anyways? The
       | traditional model of targeted advertising would be insufferable
       | if injected into a chat bot.
        
         | Clubber wrote:
         | >We don't even know yet if it's fit to replace a search engine.
         | 
         | Entrenched tech companies are desperate for the next big thing.
         | Tech is pretty stale right now. I suspect they're trying to
         | will ChatGPT to be that. Think 3D TV's and VR. Kinda cool for
         | the 30 seconds you play with it at the store, but just doesn't
         | quite capture the imagination much longer after that.
        
       | formvoltron wrote:
       | Sounds like goog employees spending too much time staring at the
       | stock price.
        
       | osener wrote:
       | Remember when winner of the voice interface war was going to win
       | the future of computing? Apple has a "dumpster fire" of a voice
       | assistant and they're still around.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | muzz wrote:
         | Every new thing gets hyped up as the "killer" of existing
         | businesses.
         | 
         | Siri, Alexa, etc. were all supposed to be existential threats
         | to Google's search, and then they weren't
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | drewcon wrote:
           | I'm surprised no one has connected ChatGPT to a voice
           | interface?
           | 
           | The way it holds conversational context is really leaps and
           | bounds better than Alexa/Siri
        
         | scarface74 wrote:
         | No one at any point thought that voice interaction would be
         | dominant.
        
       | mrcwinn wrote:
       | I could not believe Sundar and the team around him for a simple
       | unforced error:
       | 
       | "That's why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago"
       | 
       | I suppose this was meant to reframe the conversation around
       | Google being a leader, but I think it has the opposite effect. It
       | comes off as defensive and of course, quite honestly, if you
       | planted the flag so much earlier, why don't you have a product to
       | show for it in the way that OpenAI does?
       | 
       | What's perhaps more interesting though: does Google have an
       | innovator's dilemma here?
       | 
       | Google built a flywheel that drives its ads business: sites are
       | hungry for traffic so they structure in such a way that attracts
       | Google's attention, and that structure in turn helps Google serve
       | relevant ads. People tend to click on the first link (the most
       | relevant link).
       | 
       | In the context of a chat interface, what happens if there is no
       | link? Or only one result (the perfect answer)? What if there is
       | much less traffic going directly to websites? And yet without
       | that long tail of websites, how do you train your language model
       | to know the answer?
       | 
       | Fascinating times!
        
       | npalli wrote:
       | Here's the weird thing though, as discussed yesterday [1], the
       | Microsoft demo was totally broken as well. In the end, everyone
       | is looking for a big platform shift (next MOBILE!!!) and hype
       | getting ahead of reality. When we look back in 3 months we will
       | wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in
       | all forms.
       | 
       | https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted
        
         | segmondy wrote:
         | Nothing weird about it. It's called first mover's advantage.
         | Wanna make electric cars, you have to beat Tesla. No matter how
         | nice your car is. If your range is worse. Booo. If your self
         | driving is equivalent or worse, Boo. Whatever Tesla has done,
         | you must be better at. You need better design, cheaper price,
         | better range, better reliability else no one would notice you.
        
           | matthewdgreen wrote:
           | The problem with this analysis is that first movers usually
           | don't win.
        
             | alex_sf wrote:
             | They usually don't win in the long-run because someone
             | comes along with
             | 
             | > better design, cheaper price, better range, better
             | reliability
             | 
             | That doesn't mean the first mover advantage doesn't exist.
        
               | SoftTalker wrote:
               | First movers are the first to hit the innovater's
               | dilemma.
               | 
               | They are trapped by the decisions they made as first
               | movers, while later incumbents have freedom to create
               | improvements without worry about the installed base.
               | 
               | Apple is one company that never seemed to fall into that
               | trap. They just tell the installed base "fuck you, buy
               | the new thing" and somehow get away with it.
        
               | smachiz wrote:
               | They're also very very rarely the first mover.
               | 
               | Apple comes in and innovates against something that
               | existed but was user hostile.
               | 
               | It actually did happen to Apple over a long enough
               | horizon, they cornered the paid digital music market by
               | perfecting it, and upended it, and didn't innovate/upend
               | again, and along came Spotify to upend it for them.
        
             | ralfd wrote:
             | It depends on the definition what "first" means.
             | 
             | For example Amazon Kindle was not the first eReader. But
             | its platform-ecosystem was years sooner than Barnes &
             | Nobles Nook and Kindle won out.
             | 
             | Amazon itself is technically a "second mover" because there
             | was an obscure online book shop before, but no one else
             | from the established sales companies or Walmart could
             | compete with them.
             | 
             | Tesla was not the first electric car. But it is arguably
             | the first reaching a production of a million, so it is the
             | first e-car from a "main" manufacturer?
        
               | burtness wrote:
               | This sounds more like "incumbent" than "first"
        
               | matthewdgreen wrote:
               | Incumbent companies have huge advantages, and it takes a
               | lot to dislodge them even with new technology (as in your
               | Amazon example.) Basically they have to be unwilling to
               | match competitors' tech over a long period of time.
               | 
               | In my life I've seen that happen a handful of times. When
               | it does, it's usually due to (1) tragic management
               | ineptitude over an extended period of time, or (2) fear
               | of cannibalizing an existing profitable business (e.g.,:
               | Kodak refusing to move from film to digital cameras, or
               | the car industry being slow to re-invest away from ICE
               | production.) I see no evidence (yet) that AI-enhanced
               | search is going to threaten Google's core business of
               | "displaying ads on relevant search results", so the main
               | risk here is long-term management failure. Right now
               | Google's management is doing everything it can to signal
               | (to shareholders and partners) that they're going to
               | throw every resource they have at the problem.
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | Kodak actually had one of the first digital cameras, and
               | the company still exists. And automotive OEMs are
               | investing heavily into EVs, and they do this
               | comparatively fast for companies of the size we are
               | talking about.
        
               | pjc50 wrote:
               | "Find the company that survived and got big, then
               | carefully move the historical goalpost so it's first"
        
             | mynameisvlad wrote:
             | In the long run, sure. In the short to medium term, though,
             | they solidly dominate the field.
             | 
             | We're still in that phase phase of both Tesla and Bing AI.
        
               | matthewdgreen wrote:
               | In the short term Google has an utterly dominant position
               | in Search, and Bing AI is basically irrelevant to this.
               | What people are worried about are the implications for
               | the long term.
        
               | darthrupert wrote:
               | I don't give a fuck about Bing, frankly, but ChatGPT (the
               | actual first mover here) has already replaced a lot of
               | what I used Google for during a work day.
               | 
               | I'll be their paying customer soon. It would be great if
               | that meant I had privacy as well, but I kinda bleakly
               | realize that that might be a bit of a pipe dream.
        
               | l33tman wrote:
               | The big improvement in the chatgpt integrated by bing is
               | that it can take today's search results into the chat to
               | analyze seamlessly (after all, Bing already has all the
               | search results cached internally). ChatGPT as it stands
               | has old knowledge only unless you paste in the results
               | you want to analyze.
        
               | philliphaydon wrote:
               | Over the past 2 weeks I've barely used Google. I just ask
               | ChatGPT. The results it produces are just superior to
               | Google in every way.
        
               | gjsman-1000 wrote:
               | If I were the EU, I would perhaps consider slapping
               | restrictions on Google's Chat AI (say, Bard) as being a
               | separate field (AI-Assisted Search) being propped up by a
               | monopoly in Standard Search. That would hurt Google's
               | dominance quicker than any other action. Same for the
               | DOJ.
               | 
               | Remember how much trouble Microsoft got into for having a
               | basic monopoly on desktops with Windows, and trying to
               | bundle Internet Explorer? Replace Windows with Standard
               | Google, and Internet Explorer with AI-based Google
               | Search. You'll cut Google off at the knees with that
               | move. And even if they survive the ~4-5 years litigation,
               | they'll be severely hampered, kind of like how Microsoft
               | was with the mobile phone market.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | The comment you replied to makes no mentions of
               | timelines, and everything they said applies up to the
               | point the first mover falls, which is clearly not the
               | long term per your own argument.
               | 
               | The goal posts also aren't "search" they're "AI enhanced
               | search", let's not muddy the waters by moving them.
               | Google may certainly be dominating in search, but they
               | are clearly trying to sprint from miles behind in the
               | latter.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | monkmartinez wrote:
               | I have switched to Bing and Edge, then wrote a script to
               | rack up points in hopes that I get moved up for the new
               | BingGPT. Google search results have been trending toward
               | crap for a while from my POV. 'Google it' is sticky, but
               | I absolutely have not missed a beat with Edge and Bing.
               | In fact, Edge has been a really pleasant surprise with
               | features Chrome doesn't have. A calculator in the side
               | bar is fracking awesome!
        
               | phkahler wrote:
               | >> A calculator in the side bar is fracking awesome!
               | 
               | Another case of the browser doing what the OS and Desktop
               | environment should be doing. I like to point at tabs -
               | DEs and GUI toolkits never really came up with a good way
               | to handle multiple documents well.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | I think every major OS ships with some sort of
               | calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in
               | the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say
               | "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just
               | find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed
               | to it _just being there_ in the same app you 're already
               | using.
               | 
               | Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being
               | tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
        
               | GeekyBear wrote:
               | > Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep
               | being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
               | 
               | There's still a calculator widget for the MacOS
               | notification center. It's accessed in any app through a
               | trackpad gesture or by clicking on the date/time in the
               | menu bar.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | For now. This is what, the third iteration of widgets on
               | Mac?
               | 
               | The fact that it seems to be similar enough to the iOS
               | implementation of them gives me hope, but only barely.
               | 
               | You also need to know the feature exists (they had
               | notifications before widgets, people might not know it
               | was updated to support them), that there exists a
               | calculator widget, and to add it before you need to use
               | it. That's the same discoverabiloty problem, with the
               | added wrinkle that functionality changed in Monterey.
        
               | GeekyBear wrote:
               | > For now.
               | 
               | For most of the past decade. I believe widgets were added
               | to Notification center in 2014.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | High Sierra widgets are the second implementation I
               | mentioned.
               | 
               | Dashboard was first, and then they were reimagined as
               | iOS-style in Monterey.
        
               | mejutoco wrote:
               | In linux I press the super key (windows key), type "calc"
               | and enter.
               | 
               | In Mac Os one can use spotlight with cmd + space with
               | similar results.
               | 
               | Or sometimes I check a calculator I implemented myself
               | (shameless plug: https://getcalculator.app/)
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | I mean, you can do Win+R and then "calc" on windows too,
               | but that's still context switching and having to remember
               | it's there.
               | 
               | Once again, compared to it just _being there in front of
               | you and ready to go_ that 's still work to do to get it
               | there.
        
               | Thlom wrote:
               | On my mac I just use the built in calculator in
               | spotlight. So cmd+space opens the spotlight search widget
               | and then I can just type in whatever I need calculated.
               | Not sure if something like this is built into Windows?
               | More often than not I use Google as my calculator when on
               | Windows.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | I use Raycast for the same, but does that do multiple
               | calculations? Ie. 184 + 64 then multiplied by 4, etc.
               | 
               | You can do it all as one big expression with parentheses
               | and such but if you're doing a bunch of calculations on
               | the go that could get repetitive, and one wrong Esc and
               | your calculation goes away.
        
               | nwienert wrote:
               | Bing isn't dominating anything haha.
        
               | wing-_-nuts wrote:
               | Bing's image search is better than google's. Hands down.
               | While this has been popularized for ...ehem...nsfw
               | reasons, it's also _very_ useful to find charts and
               | visualizations related to a particular topic. As an
               | example, I was searching for charts that showed laptop vs
               | desktop market share, and bam! There 's the latest
               | projections.
        
               | schrodinger wrote:
               | Tangent: I wonder if Bing has an advantage in that most
               | people perform SEO for Google; so long as Bing has
               | different algos it may be "immune" to Google-focused seo?
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | I mean, they certainly are in the "AI integrated search"
               | field, considering.... You know.... This entire post and
               | discussion happening.
        
               | matthewdgreen wrote:
               | Google isn't going to suffer severe business consequences
               | for (temporarily) losing dominance in the "AI integrated
               | search" field, because the revenue from that field is
               | effectively NaN compared to Google's current revenue.
               | They might hypothetically suffer if AI integrated search
               | grows to become a major fraction of the existing Search
               | revenue and Google fails to deploy their massive existing
               | ML/AI resources to match Bing/OpenAI's unpatented, non-
               | secret and easily-replicated techniques. _And big firms
               | have made such strategic errors in the past!_ But none of
               | that is going to happen in the short term.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | Please show me exactly where I said otherwise.
               | 
               | Read the comment thread you just replied to and tell me
               | how any of what you just said is relevant to me
               | correcting the sentence "Bing isn't dominating anything
               | haha."
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | Good point. It's also dominating in the segment of "web
               | search companies called Bing".
        
               | nwienert wrote:
               | You said they are dominating "AI search" but that's wrong
               | in many ways:
               | 
               | - Google's entire search engine has had many layers of
               | "AI" powering it for years.
               | 
               | - Bing hasn't even released this supposed AI search
               | engine to the public.
               | 
               | Your other example was Tesla and the two examples
               | couldn't be more different. Your statement would be like
               | someone saying Tesla was "dominating" electric cars
               | before they ever even sold a single Roadster and had just
               | posted a demo video. It's just wrong. I can be first to
               | market with a banana that glows in the dark, am I in the
               | club now too?
               | 
               | They _may_ dominate _if_ this exact form of
               | conversational answers proves popular and _if_ launched
               | more than a hacked together demo and only then is some
               | strong claim they are doing anything interesting could be
               | worthwhile.
               | 
               | Until then they are kind-of first-but-actually-not-really
               | in a kind-of-theoretical-market, and not dominating it
               | all or reaping any first-mover advantage given their
               | opponents are ready to follow on immediately.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | Just because Google uses AI for things like ranking does
               | not put them in the same category as a search engine with
               | AI integrated. I hope you realize that. There's a clear
               | differentiator at play with Bard and New Bing, and that's
               | the space people are talking about.
               | 
               | The market exists. Products have been announced. Some are
               | clearly more popular than others. I don't know why you
               | care so much that Google beats Bing, but it's plainly
               | obvious both from people's and Google's own reactions
               | that Bing is currently considered the winner in the
               | space.
               | 
               | Will it last? Maybe. Maybe not. The very thread you are
               | replying to is that first movers ultimately fail. But
               | it's plainly clear Bing has captured the first mover
               | advantage in the space, whether you like it or not.
        
               | xorcist wrote:
               | On the topic of big companies making strategic errors,
               | it's not entirely unthinkable that if AI generates a lot
               | of hype, Google would throw away its market-dominating
               | search engine and replace it with some AI chatbot-thing
               | without market dominance.
               | 
               | It could very well be that even a small chance of this
               | happening can cause Microsoft to go all in on making Bing
               | more AI. Being very expensive is the point.
               | 
               | See also: Star Wars, Itanium.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | It will be interesting to see how the next few years play
               | out in the EV space. Tesla suddenly has actual
               | competition that is very good. Arguably better, aside
               | from that nagging little detail -- the charger network.
               | Tesla needs to keep throwing money at the Supercharger
               | network and do whatever they can to keep it exclusive.
               | Anything that puts the competition on an equal playing
               | field for fast charging would be devastating to Tesla's
               | market share.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | Yes, I'm quite excited to see the new EVs coming out in
               | the next few years. Still like my Tesla but the list of
               | grievances grows over time.
               | 
               | I think they'll ultimately have to open up the charging
               | to get federal funding, but it'll be interesting to see
               | what happens when they do. It's _definitely_ a massive
               | advantage right now.
        
               | p4coder wrote:
               | I think the charging network is going to prove to be the
               | iMessage of Tesla. By keeping it closed, they will be
               | selling many more cars. In Europe where they had to use
               | the standard port and open the network, there will be
               | much stiffer competition.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | That happened 4 years ago, and Tesla has done nothing but
               | increase sales in Europe since then. I'm sure this will
               | change as traditional car manufacturers improve their EV
               | lineups. Europe in general also has a lot more options
               | for the EV charging market so I don't think the SuC
               | network is as pronounced there.
               | 
               | The Model Y was the top selling model in Europe in
               | December 2022. EV or ICE. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ne
               | ilwinton/2022/12/07/model-y--...
               | 
               | It will probably make a bigger impact in the US. And the
               | switch to a standard interface is holding up billions in
               | federal funding so Tesla will probably eventually take
               | the hit.
        
               | whamlastxmas wrote:
               | It's unlikely Tesla's market share of _the total car
               | market_ is going to go down no matter how well other
               | companies do. What we 're seeing is a general shift
               | towards electric cars, which is only a good thing for
               | Tesla.
        
               | rootusrootus wrote:
               | Yes, in this case when I say 'market share' I mean EV
               | market share.
        
               | whamlastxmas wrote:
               | My point is more that you used the word "devastating"
               | when there's nothing negative happening to Tesla in that
               | situation
        
             | MockObject wrote:
             | Old enough to remember when Google was the plucky newcomer
             | in a crowded search engine industry.
        
               | klyrs wrote:
               | Google wasn't profitable. Like an ant eating the wrong
               | sort of fungus, the advertising companies won and
               | Google's zombified husk carries on.
        
               | riskneutral wrote:
               | Cordyceps fungi
        
               | hmahncke wrote:
               | Old enough to remember when Alta Vista was obviously
               | going to win because it came from DEC.
        
           | richardwhiuk wrote:
           | Or you need a big differentiator which makes you the new
           | first mover.
        
             | bitexploder wrote:
             | You don't even always need a big differentiator. We got rid
             | of our Tesla sacrificing range to have normal vehicle
             | controls. Some times tech just gets good enough that being
             | the first mover can't beat the entrenched players
             | inevitability and willingness to give customers what they
             | ask for instead of insisting you will like something you
             | never asked for, even after you try it and tell them you
             | don't like the thing they insist you will like. Tesla has
             | gone all in on things like touch screens and non-standard
             | controls and it has literally lost them our business twice.
             | I would have bought a Model S Plaid if it just had a normal
             | steering wheel. No questions asked. And my partner would
             | have kept her Model 3 if it didn't have such annoying
             | vehicle controls for certain things. Little stuff really
             | matters and Tesla sticks their head in the sand over it
             | while Audi will happily make you a pretty normal SUV that
             | happens to be zippy and electric.
        
           | senko wrote:
           | Tesla wasn't a first mover. Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt were
           | both on the market roughtly 2 years before Model S.
           | 
           | Also, you don't really need to beat Tesla if you just want to
           | make (and sell) electric cars. Tesla doesn't fill every niche
           | and is nowhere near enough in terms of volume to satisfy the
           | EV demand.
           | 
           | (If you want to be a bigger electric car company than Tesla
           | then you have to beat Tesla, yeah -- that's a tautology, not
           | an interesting observation tho).
        
           | ladyattis wrote:
           | I think second mover has a better chance to succeed, even
           | from the first mover themselves (Apple had many ideas for
           | touchscreen devices but most flopped until the 2000s).
           | Iteration on a good enough device or platform will always
           | give you more success than iterating on a false premise (ex.
           | the metaverse).
        
           | maeln wrote:
           | Telsa is a very good exemple because they just about got
           | beaten off in every category (except maybe the driver
           | assistance features). If you want a cheaper car with a
           | smaller range than the model 3, but still decent, you can
           | look at Volkswagen, Renault, Peugeot, Kia and Hyundai. If you
           | want higher range (and premium/luxury feel) you can look at
           | BMW/Audi/Mercedes.
           | 
           | And pretty much all of them have better QC and a vaster
           | maintenance network than Tesla (and in the E.U the charging
           | network all use the same type of connector, so you are not
           | tied to the manufacturer of your car).
           | 
           | But still, whenever you talk electric car, people often talk
           | first about Tesla and they have no problem selling them. This
           | might mostly be true in the E.U though. Also the model 3 is
           | still priced fairly well being in-between the higher-end of
           | the market and the intermediate.
        
           | dragontamer wrote:
           | Apple came after Blackberry. Dell came after Commodore /
           | Amiga. Facebook came after MySpace. Google came after
           | Altavisa and Yahoo. Verizon came after AOL. Alternating
           | Current came after Direct Current.
           | 
           | Microsoft Word came after WordPerfect. Chrome came after
           | Netscape Communicator. Python came after Perl. Nintendo came
           | after Atari.
           | 
           | I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.
        
             | nkozyra wrote:
             | > I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.
             | 
             | Maybe. No company lives forever, at some point all of these
             | things will be unseated. But those first movers had pretty
             | good runs, as far as technology companies go. Maybe they
             | aren't still #1 but if you're #1 for a decade or more, that
             | might be as much as any one company can "win" here.
        
             | ericlewis wrote:
             | Apple came after blackberry, but as the parent comment
             | states... you have to be _much better_ and by all accounts
             | the iPhone _was_ much better at things consumers cared
             | about. Dell made better computers. Facebook was nicer than
             | myspace in UI /UX. Google returned superior results.
             | 
             | So their point stands. They have to be much better. And all
             | of these were.
        
               | smachiz wrote:
               | Yes, basically, when you stop innovating and are only
               | doing incremental improvement, someone is going to come
               | and eat your lunch.
        
             | KMnO4 wrote:
             | I think you confirmed what he was saying.
             | 
             | All of those products that came after are better than the
             | first movers. If Apple was worse than BB, do you think it
             | would have won?
        
             | edgyquant wrote:
             | Every single one of those things you just listed is an
             | improvement in one or more ways (to the average user.) So I
             | really don't see your point at all
        
             | KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
             | > Apple came after Blackberry.
             | 
             | Apple and specifically Jony Ive started the development of
             | a handheld computer in the early 90s. Apple was definitely
             | not a second comer to that market.
             | 
             | https://www.businessinsider.com/jony-ives-first-apple-
             | design...
        
               | tapoxi wrote:
               | Well the Newton was the second attempt by Apple, first
               | they spun off General Magic and then pivoted when GM
               | built hype and Apple remained a minority owner.
        
               | chimeracoder wrote:
               | > Apple and specifically Jony Ive started the development
               | of a handheld computer in the early 90s. Apple was
               | definitely not a second comer to that market.
               | 
               | That's an odd way to define "not a second comer". The
               | Apple Newton was a PDA, but it wasn't the first to hit
               | the market.
               | 
               | Sure, it was in development before that, but that's true
               | of every device that was released in that generation. And
               | besides, "first mover advantage" doesn't refer to the
               | first to begin research on a product; it refers to the
               | first to release a product into the market.
        
             | xorcist wrote:
             | One thing a lot of people misremembers is just how long it
             | took. Microsoft Word was launched only couple of years
             | after WordPerfect, in the early 80s. It didn't dominate
             | word processing until the middle of the 90s.
             | 
             | It took more than a decade. They basically built out the
             | features and waited until their competitors made some
             | strategic mistake, of which they made several in that
             | decade.
             | 
             | It was pretty much the same with Netscape and MSIE. That
             | monopoly misuse probably helped, but Netscape also seemed
             | bent on killing itself. Despite the mismanagement, it still
             | took almost five years.
             | 
             | Perl was more popular than Python for more than a decade.
             | Having much of the early web developed on it didn't help in
             | the long run. First mover advantage might be a thing, but
             | it never wins in the long run. And in the long run, ten
             | years is nothing.
        
               | neilv wrote:
               | > _They basically built out the features and waited until
               | their competitors made some strategic mistake,_
               | 
               | Microsoft Word was a loser, but then they changed out the
               | operating system under the winners.
        
               | filmgirlcw wrote:
               | Yes, but the winner also refused to get with the times
               | and embrace the operating system twice. First, they were
               | abysmally slow to Windows 3.1, despite having years to
               | get something together (in part b/c they understood that
               | Microsoft wanted to win at word processing but they
               | underestimated the importance of being on the OS anyway)
               | and then a few years later with Windows 95.
               | 
               | Word Perfect had the OS changed from under them but also
               | had every warning that the change was coming and refused
               | to move to sturdier ground.
        
               | neilv wrote:
               | That's too bad.
               | 
               | It was pretty easy to write off Windows 3.1, and continue
               | to be a solid solution on MS-DOS and with Netware, etc.
               | 
               | But Windows 95 had a lot of fanfare in advance that
               | suggested it would have much better uptake. And Windows
               | NT in parallel was developing a credible foundation, and
               | it got the "new shell" as an option around the time of
               | Win95. My recollection at the time was that the writing
               | should've been on the wall, that Windows was going to be
               | the Microsoft platform.
               | 
               | If WordPerfect was slow to move, that's a bad combination
               | with, er, not as direct of access to the platform teams.
        
               | wombatpm wrote:
               | Perl killed itself with the Perl5 transition to Perl6. I
               | lived the 3->4 and the 4->5 transitions. When I wanted to
               | try my hand at OOP, I ran screaming from Perl5 to Scheme
               | and eventually Python.
               | 
               | 20 years later I'm still programming in Python.
        
             | mindcrime wrote:
             | _I feel like first movers advantage is a myth._
             | 
             | I don't think there's any question that there is _an_
             | advantage to being a first mover. What I think is a mistake
             | is thinking that it 's an absolute advantage, and/or not
             | recognizing that it's _also_ true that there are advantages
             | to to _not_ being the first mover. I mean, there 's a
             | reason why the "fast follower strategy"[1] exists as well.
             | 
             | I think in reality though, all of this is over-simplifying
             | things. There are a LOT of variables in the equation for
             | "does this product succeed or not" where "being first to
             | market" is just one of those variables.
             | 
             | [1]: https://fourweekmba.com/fast-follower/
        
               | MisterPea wrote:
               | First movers without a fast follower is a huge advantage.
               | There's a great conference talk with Bezos about how he
               | mentioned with disruptive products, there's usually a
               | fast follower entering into the competition - but he was
               | surprised at how long it took other companies to copy
               | AWS.
               | 
               | Similarly with Tesla
        
         | gkoberger wrote:
         | Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm convinced it's the opposite... I think
         | in 5 years we'll look back and wonder why it wasn't more
         | obvious to everyone. I think in 5 years, almost every single
         | company that exists now will look radically different due to
         | what we're starting to see now.
        
         | thereddaikon wrote:
         | Microsoft's demo wasn't perfect but everyone worth listening to
         | has been saying ChatGPT is fallible this whole time. It was
         | well within expectations.
         | 
         | Google however came in with a different expectation. I remember
         | something about one of their execs disparaging OpenAI over
         | inaccuracies before. If you are going to sling mud, you had
         | better make sure you don't have the same problem. Or it makes
         | you look like a fool.
        
         | la64710 wrote:
         | The main problem is ChatGPT had already caught the public's
         | imagination. A somewhat lame announcement of an upcoming
         | product feature was actually a significant letdown from
         | Google.In retrospect it may have been better if they stayed
         | quiet for a while and then unveil something that everyone could
         | try out and feel for themselves.
        
         | cokeandpepsi wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | i2infinity wrote:
         | Wasn't the first iPhone demo totally buggy as well? It doesn't
         | matter. Users have seen what ChatGPT can do, and the community
         | was excited that Bing will offer it for free soon and is eager
         | to pivot to it.
        
           | scarface74 wrote:
           | No the first iPhone demo went off without a hitch. In
           | hindsight, we found out that the iPhone hardware and software
           | was buggy during the demo and if SJ had deviated even
           | slightly from the script it would have crashed.
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | At least they found the phone.
        
         | SergeAx wrote:
         | It will not replace, but it may enhance and it also may save
         | time clicking on links, just giving a direct answer. It also
         | may produce bullshit. But it is worth exploring.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | strangattractor wrote:
         | Let's ask ChatGPT what Pichai should do.
         | 
         | "When an error is made by their AI during a demo, Google's CEO,
         | Sundar Pichai, should take the following steps to address the
         | situation:
         | 
         | Acknowledge the error: The first step is to acknowledge the
         | mistake and apologize for any inconvenience or confusion it may
         | have caused. This helps to build trust with the audience and
         | demonstrates that the company takes responsibility for their
         | technology's shortcomings.
         | 
         | Explain the cause of the error: Pichai should explain the
         | technical details of what went wrong and how the error
         | occurred. This helps to demonstrate transparency and honesty
         | and can help to build credibility with the audience.
         | 
         | Demonstrate the progress made in AI development: Despite the
         | error, Pichai should showcase the progress made in AI
         | development and highlight other successful demonstrations that
         | have taken place. This helps to reassure the audience that the
         | technology is making progress and that the company is committed
         | to innovation and improvement.
         | 
         | Outline the steps being taken to prevent future errors: Pichai
         | should outline the steps that are being taken to prevent
         | similar errors from occurring in the future. This can include a
         | discussion of the company's testing and development processes
         | and any additional measures being put in place to improve the
         | reliability of their AI systems.
         | 
         | By taking these steps, Pichai can demonstrate a commitment to
         | transparency, innovation, and the improvement of their
         | technology while also acknowledging the limitations and
         | challenges of AI."
         | 
         | There you go - problem solved.
        
           | andsoitis wrote:
           | often, no response is superior. the more things you put out
           | there the more material for people to hang critique, rumor,
           | etc. of off.
           | 
           | but in these cases ego can make us blind. or the belief that
           | just because someone asked a question we have to respond.
        
         | _the_inflator wrote:
         | Google fears another Google+ moment I guess.
        
         | sva_ wrote:
         | People love the underdog, and even though M$ is huge,
         | Bing/OpenAI are clearly the underdog here.
        
         | muzz wrote:
         | There seems to be an inordinate amount of venom directed at
         | Pichai relative to other CEOs
        
           | rvba wrote:
           | What did he achieve?
           | 
           | Google search is worse than before.
           | 
           | Youtube recommendations feel worse than before.
           | 
           | Gmail lets in spam (maybe I was unlucky few times).
           | 
           | Android market / play market has very bad search...
           | 
           | Rest is stagnating? Maybe even better, at least they dont
           | change it for worse.
           | 
           | They hired thousands of employees yet you cannot contact a
           | person. What do those people even do?
           | 
           | "Everyone" (apart the CEO?) knows that in Google you get
           | promoted for shipping half baked stuff, so for years they
           | ship half baked stuff to kill it few years later.
        
           | thefourthchime wrote:
           | It appears that Google's long-standing dominance in search
           | has not translated into meaningful innovation in recent
           | years. Despite occasional hardware launches that imitate
           | Apple and multiple failed attempts to launch a messaging
           | platform, there has been a conspicuous lack of successful
           | projects.
           | 
           | Furthermore, Google's ongoing incorporation of ads into
           | Google Maps and declining search quality may be turning
           | search into a wasteland of SEO. This may be the proverbial
           | straw that broke the camel's back, prompting discussion about
           | whether a leadership change is needed.
        
             | cptcobalt wrote:
             | This, exactly. The long term strategy has been demonstrably
             | bad.
        
             | phkahler wrote:
             | >> It appears that Google's long-standing dominance in
             | search has not translated into meaningful innovation in
             | recent years.
             | 
             | Google IMHO is still innovating, but still hasn't figured
             | out how to turn that into product/profit. Since their P/E
             | is under 20 they could just issue a dividend of 4 to 5
             | percent and people would immediately stop expecting growth
             | from them.
        
               | cptcobalt wrote:
               | Innovation without also seeking to mesh it into a
               | product/market fit is just burning cash. You can
               | innovate, but also need to land it.
               | 
               | Also, they might just be creating a reputation for
               | themselves of killing every new interesting thing that
               | people just aren't as interested in trying their new
               | things. That's a self-own.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | Could it be part of the aftermath of the layoffs?
        
             | muzz wrote:
             | The reaction to the layoffs is a good example of this.
             | 
             | Lots of CEOs in the past have conducted layoffs pretty much
             | the same way-- notify everyone at the same time (per local
             | laws) and write an email blaming themselves as the cause.
             | 
             | Yet the media ran article after article for almost 2 weeks
             | with personal stories about how people felt particularly
             | slighted by Google, when they did it pretty much the same
             | way as other companies.
             | 
             | Amongst 12,000 people at any point in time, they will be
             | doing normal life things-- like feeding their baby at 2am--
             | when they got the email. Yet somehow this became the basis
             | of so many "Google doesn't care about its employees"
             | stories.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | saagarjha wrote:
               | This is because Google immediately cut access to those
               | people and treated them like personas non grata. It was a
               | pretty bad layoff.
        
               | muzz wrote:
               | Immediately turning off access is common practice in a
               | layoff
        
               | saagarjha wrote:
               | Not the way Google did it.
        
             | toyg wrote:
             | Aftermath of a poor period for Google overall. From the
             | outside, Pichai's Google looks very much like Ballmer's
             | Microsoft: a company still milking profits generated by
             | yesterday's innovation, but unable to produce genuinely-new
             | stuff.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | > When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought
         | LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms.
         | 
         | Yes, and when we look again in 6 months, they will surpass
         | Google already. It happened too many times in the last few
         | years - something thought impossible was actually doable with a
         | clever twist or two[1].
         | 
         | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSQ495wpWXs&t=2148s
        
         | tastyminerals2 wrote:
         | Nope. I am somewhat in disbelief about the level people here
         | downgrade the recent Bing upgrade. The chatbot feature is a
         | such a time saver for jobs where you need to write tons of
         | abstract surface-level content. Just yesterday, I tried
         | compiling a monthly teachers working plan for some local school
         | in Ukrainian language. What it spawned in a minute was at least
         | a day of typing work for a human. This is especially useful
         | when you don't know the formal language. And the quality of
         | this was good enough for bootstrapping.
        
           | mzs wrote:
           | Yikes, I don't have access to bing chatbot but google
           | translate for Ukrainian is not great compared to Polish or
           | Russian. I would not rely on it for any work.
        
             | throw_pm23 wrote:
             | Did you try deepl? It has been blowing google translate out
             | of the water for years now.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | How is that possible? Google has the research power, the
               | TPUs, the data, everything. But Translate is not as good
               | as a tool made by a much smaller company.
               | 
               | This is also a pattern. Their voices are not better than
               | some paid services (NaturalReader for example). Their OCR
               | and document understanding is inferior to Amazon
               | Textract. Even in speech recognition there is the
               | excellent Whisper from OpenAI doing just as good or
               | better. Google's generative image models are not the
               | best, and locked away for good measure. I think SD and MJ
               | rule.
               | 
               | Google's AI was cool in 2000 for search and in 2016 for
               | games. But now the best people are leaving them - almost
               | the whole team who invented transformers has their own
               | startups.
               | 
               | I also think maybe, just maybe, their TPUs are bad and
               | they can't scale high quality models to the public. Maybe
               | they lost the race because GPUs were better in the end.
               | Maybe it's stupid, but how can we explain the lack of
               | advanced AI? The other explanation is they won't mess
               | with something that makes them so much money (current
               | search/ad model).
        
           | danielmarkbruce wrote:
           | I've found similar... it did a days work for me the other day
           | in about 20 seconds.
           | 
           | But is this related to search? I'm a "pro ChatGPT" user (ie,
           | I pay) and I don't use it for anything search related. It's
           | entirely unrelated.
        
           | conqrr wrote:
           | That's really nice, but how will you monetize it? In its chat
           | form, that's going to be very difficult. Anyone can train it
           | and launch their own LLM, there's know monopoly or
           | differentiator. Sure, its possible overtime it will uplift
           | search engines, but create a new Industry vertical like
           | Search, Mobile, Social Media, Cloud. I think of it more as a
           | feature /augmentation than its own thing.
        
             | minsc_and_boo wrote:
             | Services. Inevitably some of the queries involve
             | recommending a service, and when you have two equal
             | substitute services in a market, both will pay a certain
             | price to be recommended over the other.
        
               | notpachet wrote:
               | That's a very highfalutin way of saying "ads", which
               | feels like it still has one foot planted squarely in the
               | monetization thinking of yesterday. As lots of other
               | people have pointed out, ads in the midst of a blob of
               | chat output don't work the same way as they do on a page
               | of search results. Search results are impersonal and so
               | putting promoted content in them is less of a personal
               | affront. But if the interface is a "chat session" with
               | something that's designed to feel human-like in its
               | responses, the interleaving of paid content produces a
               | completely different psychological response in users.
               | It's more insulting and undermines trust.
               | 
               | To put it another way: the main value proposition of
               | using something like ChatGPT to navigate the internet is
               | that you're putting your trust in it to filter out the
               | noise on your behalf. If you can't trust it to actually
               | do that (there's still ad noise in what you get back),
               | then what's the point?
               | 
               | Either people will pay a subscription fee to unlock the
               | utility of an information-distilling agent, or they
               | won't. Trying to sidechain ad revenue into that equation
               | is self-defeating.
        
               | minsc_and_boo wrote:
               | >Either people will pay a subscription fee to unlock the
               | utility of an information-distilling agent, or they
               | won't.
               | 
               | This feels a bit like projection though. People in
               | general are trained to tolerate ads for most freemium
               | services, such as social media, search, etc., and chat is
               | no different.
               | 
               | For any market involving human attention, there's a
               | portion willing to pay money for the service, but a
               | significant larger portion willing to trade attention
               | time (e.g. ad impressions) for a free service instead.
        
               | TheOtherHobbes wrote:
               | Search is ad-influenced already, but there's still signal
               | under the noise.
               | 
               | Adding a chat front end is just going to lower the SNR,
               | because ChatGPT has no idea what facts are or how to
               | check them.
               | 
               | Unfortunately it's also _the main attraction_ for
               | corporate revenue generation. You can sell stuff
               | conversationally. Woo hoo. These systems are going to
               | turn into automated used car sales bots which use
               | persuasion techniques to steer users towards a sale.
               | 
               | From the user POV the main attraction is the prospect of
               | a kind of universal summarising WikiBot and bureaucratic
               | paperwork automator.
               | 
               | Those are fundamentally different domains.
               | 
               | Users have been pretty relaxed about being manipulated
               | and distracted by social media and covert
               | PR/sales/influencer operations, so there's going to be a
               | huge market for the bad stuff.
               | 
               | But it's just corporate noise, as it always is. The real
               | value will come from _processed_ search in the sense of
               | automated teaching and intelligence augmentation.
               | 
               | Unfortunately there's not where most of the research will
               | go. It's not going to become common until LLMs are taught
               | to fact check with high reliability, and the cost of
               | entry is low enough for that to be offered as a service.
               | 
               | Meanwhile - yes, exactly: ads disguised as search
               | results.
        
           | anonymouskimmer wrote:
           | Is this materially better than standard "fill in the blank"
           | boilerplate? I would guess it is in terms of variety, but in
           | content?
        
           | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
           | "abstract surface-level content"
           | 
           | aka "bullshit"
        
             | Taylor_OD wrote:
             | Bullshit to you but full time work for plenty...
        
               | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
               | Well, they think they will be paid 10 times more now that
               | they can produce bullshit 10x faster ... in reality, they
               | will be fired.
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | > Well, they think they will be paid 10 times more now
               | that they can produce bullshit 10x faster ... in reality,
               | they will be fired.
               | 
               | ...and replaced by b.s. chatbot wranglers, who _will_ be
               | paid much more, and who will produce more total output,
               | and who will be selected preferentially from among the
               | people that best understand the work the chatbots are
               | doing...so, yeah, in lots of cases, the people that were
               | writing bullshit will end up wrangling chatbots, in jobs
               | that bring in more money for their employer, and probably
               | at higher pay (though, by historical trends of
               | automation, a lower _share_ of the generated value) who
               | write bullshit.
               | 
               | This is even more clearly the case for people who have
               | writing bullshit as an incidental part of their job
               | rather than a core part, since the incidental part will
               | consume less time, increasing productivity, without
               | eliminating need for the core job. So its not even a
               | "lose one job but move to the replacement job" situation,
               | its just a "be more valuable in existing job".
        
             | hyperbovine wrote:
             | Relative to what, the "high quality" content you'd spend
             | more time dredging up on Google?
        
               | rchaud wrote:
               | Maybe someone who admits to not knowing the Ukrainian
               | language, shouldn't volunteer to create an entire
               | teaching plan in that language, from a chatbot.
        
           | cutenewt wrote:
           | Agreed. The level of naysaying on Bing + GPT (along with
           | ChatGPT) is absurd.
        
           | npalli wrote:
           | At this point, we don't know how useful it will turn out to
           | be. While we are trading anecdotes, here's mine. I asked
           | chatGPT who the Exec team of a medium sized company I knew,
           | was. It confidently stated seven names. Turns out three of
           | them it categorized under a different title and another three
           | never even worked at the company! I would hardly call this a
           | bootstrappble result.
           | 
           | In your example, if I told that _at random_ about 30% of the
           | results were made up, you would not consider that a time
           | saver. In fact it would be total time waster since you would
           | have to vet _every single entry_. People think since 70% is
           | accurate, only 30% work is needed but not if you don 't know
           | which 30% is bogus. You would need to check the entire work
           | using conventional means including perhaps a 'regular' search
           | engine.
        
             | vineyardmike wrote:
             | You're not using it right. LLM fundamentally don't know s*t
             | about this company's exec team. Maybe some names are
             | statistically close to the company name in vector-space but
             | no guarantee (as you discovered).
             | 
             | The LLM won't revolutionize search as it is today _for
             | factual queries_. They're Clippy 2.0. It's great people are
             | finding use for the models, but I wish this search story
             | would be balanced out a bit.
             | 
             | I was laid off recently, and I'm using the LLM to write a
             | bunch of cover letters. I give it my resume, a blurb about
             | the company and job and a bit about what I like about work,
             | and it outputs a cover letter. I don't like writing BS
             | cover letters where I pretend I majored in the company
             | mission and my whole life has been teaching me their
             | values. GPT can do that for me though- and yes I fact check
             | but I'm fact checking against my resume and personal
             | opinions which I obviously know quite well.
        
               | notahacker wrote:
               | But the whole point of these debates is a discussion
               | about whether Bing is going to eat Google's lunch in
               | _search_ , which very much is about finding out about
               | things like companies' exec teams.
               | 
               | The ability of an LLM to generate decent content
               | (provided you're an attentive editor or the users of the
               | content aren't too discerning) could be huge for
               | Office365, but that's irrelevant to any potential threat
               | to Google, since Docs is of very little importance to
               | Google's revenues and strategy in a market where Office
               | is completely dominant and has always had a more full-
               | featured product.
        
               | charlieflowers wrote:
               | > But the whole point ... is ... in _search_ (not content
               | generation)
               | 
               | True. And also, keep in mind ... it doesn't truly have to
               | be _better_ than Google search. You just need to start
               | and maintain a _social trend_ so that the mainstream
               | public _chooses_ it over Google. People use Google
               | because it's the first and only option that comes to mind
               | -- they haven't actually compared its accuracy to
               | anything else in a long time (the audience of Hacker News
               | is of course an exception).
        
               | vineyardmike wrote:
               | > whether Bing is going to eat Google's lunch in search,
               | 
               | There are a few types of search queries that people seem
               | to do, factual lookups ("who is the exec of abc?"), but
               | also generally treat the search engine as the entryway to
               | the internet ("I need a teaching plan about Ukraine").
               | We'll see that LLM fall flat for facts (assuming people
               | care), but they can supplant some of the general traffic.
               | Realistically, its a bad fact search replacement, but it
               | could be a great tool to put _next to_ a search bar,
               | making a better  "starting place for accessing the
               | internet".
               | 
               | With the teaching plan example, the original user was
               | probably going to make a query for a template (or 5),
               | then copy+paste, then do 10-100 queries learning all
               | about Ukraine history and culture, then rewrite that into
               | the template, editing down to manageable size, then send
               | to peers to edit and review, then format for
               | distribution. That could be dozens of Google searches.
               | Now, one or two AI queries, and they have a template,
               | basic written text, and can focus on a couple queries for
               | fact checking. Oh, and since they used bing to do the AI
               | part, they may just stick with bing for the fact check
               | part. Google was irrelevant in that whole flow instead of
               | getting dozens of queries over a day before, but if that
               | feature was moved to Office365, then they may never have
               | used bing for search while still killing a chunk of
               | google's traffic.
               | 
               | The danger to google is not equal to the opportunity to
               | bing. If 5-10% of traffic never reaches a google search,
               | that's a huge chunk of google's revenue, even if it
               | doesn't translate to searches on a different engine.
               | Think of the potential impact an AI code generator could
               | have on StackOverflow. When I need to pick up a new
               | language, I often query "how to append to an array in
               | python" in a search engine, but a LLM (or large-code-
               | model) built into my IDE could supplant that query
               | entirely. I
        
               | notahacker wrote:
               | An analogue of Jevons' law applies here.
               | 
               | I doubt you hand wrote cover letters by making dozens of
               | search queries (similarly, I doubt people devise teaching
               | curricula by learning the history of Ukraine through a
               | series of Google queries). But when you weren't taking
               | the time to write them yourself, I bet you had _more time
               | free to search for jobs, or do general internet browsing
               | using Google as your gateway to the internet_...
               | 
               | People having more time free to browse the internet is
               | unlikely to be a _threat_ to Google 's business, even in
               | the highly unlikely scenario Google is incapable of
               | advancing its existing AI products beyond their current
               | state
        
             | danielmarkbruce wrote:
             | In my experience a domain expert (myself in my domain) can
             | quickly validate the answers. It can make a multi-hour task
             | a multi-minute task.
        
             | Veen wrote:
             | I think of these tools as "first draft writers". You can't
             | rely on OpenAI's GPT models to do your research for you or
             | replace knowledge of a particular domain, but they
             | significantly accelerate the initial content drafting
             | process. Then you edit and fact-check and adapt, as you
             | would anyway, but you've cut out much of the time-consuming
             | grind of getting words on the page.
        
               | thefaux wrote:
               | There is something that I find deeply unsatisfying about
               | this. For me, the first draft is as much about working
               | through the problems space and considering possibilities.
               | If I rely on a chat bot, then I am more apt to become
               | anchored to whatever the chat bot spits back out at me.
               | Even if what it produces is good enough, I do not benefit
               | from the drafting process in the way that I would if I
               | did it myself. Sometimes maybe this is a good enough
               | shortcut but I generally don't believe in shortcuts.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | Actually it works not as the first draft, or the final
               | draft - it is the middle draft. In stage one you just
               | drop a bunch of bullet points, ideas, short notes. In
               | stage 2 the model writes your article or paper. In stage
               | 3 you fix it.
               | 
               | Almost 100% next iteration will sport a fact checker,
               | powerful style and format controls, and a much larger
               | context. The development of advanced fact checkers will
               | have a big impact on anything propagated online.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | It's more like a pre-draft from what I've seen. But for
               | an area I know, I can absolutely see something like
               | ChatGPT throwing 500 words down on some topic and
               | generating some explanatory boilerplate about something
               | like what a service mesh is. I'll take out some things
               | that I don't quite agree with, give it more of a "voice,"
               | maybe add some data/quotes/links/etc.
               | 
               | It's not going to write me something I'll hand to an
               | editor. But for certain things, it could definitely give
               | me a head start relative to a blank sheet of paper.
        
               | gerash wrote:
               | first draft does set the direction
        
             | mersenne wrote:
             | You're not using ChatGPT correctly.
        
               | poxrud wrote:
               | In the context of replacing a search engine, it is the
               | correct use.
        
               | erik_seaberg wrote:
               | As the saying goes, you're holding it wrong.
        
             | LesZedCB wrote:
             | with lang-chain and tooling, these problems will likely
             | quickly shrink.
             | 
             |  _imagine where we 'll be just two papers down the line!_
        
               | nerpderp82 wrote:
               | Everyone in this thread replying to npalli gets it. I am
               | getting more and more skilled in using it everyday. I
               | feel like I have a third lobe of my brain.
               | 
               | There are largely three groups of people
               | 
               | 1) ChatWhat?
               | 
               | 2) It only makes bullshit!
               | 
               | 3) OMG, this amazing, and scary and amazing, and useful.
               | Oh wow...
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | I think there's also a pretty big group of us who find
               | that it is today a moderately useful tool for certain
               | types of things but isn't really transformative in
               | general.
        
             | tastyminerals2 wrote:
             | I also got false positives when I asked for facts. This is
             | what classical search is for. But what chat feature in Bing
             | is -- a context aware coherent text generation machine with
             | an amazing online feature to modify and bend its content to
             | your wishes. Its also not bad at summarizing articles. But
             | hey, if this is just the beginning I bet in a couple of
             | years it will match your standards as well.
        
           | thethimble wrote:
           | Fair, but the question isn't whether it is useful but whether
           | it will _replace traditional search_
        
             | rvnx wrote:
             | Yes it will replace search. The same way that cars replaced
             | horses, and planes replaced zeppelins because they are had
             | a significant speed advantage and allowed humans to spend
             | time doing more productive activities that can't be
             | automated.
             | 
             | Then traditional search is going to become "raw index
             | search" that you can query writing something like
             | "intitle:"carbonara" source:"google_index"" or "give me all
             | webpages containing carbonara in its title"
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | davidcbc wrote:
               | And how Google Glass replaced smartphones, bitcoin
               | replaced USD, Juicero replaced juicers, Segways replaced
               | walking, and Second Life replaced life.
        
               | rvnx wrote:
               | I think it is something to reconsider, especially if you
               | genuinely don't perceive the difference of value between
               | Juicero and a product that has been adopted by 100
               | million users in its first 2 months.
               | 
               | Really, you can believe me, outside Silicon Valley,
               | nobody cares or cared about Juicero.
               | 
               | This is very different for ChatGPT, and I'm sure that if
               | you get interested to it you'll find interesting usages
               | with it that can fit your daily workflow (or just fun!
               | like with image generation models).
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | ChatGPT frenzy goes all the way to China. They are
               | reacting with "huge excitement", but also realising how
               | far behind they are.
        
             | cstejerean wrote:
             | It doesn't need to replace it though. If Bing has good
             | chatgpt which is useful for some non-trivial amount of
             | searches then people will go there instead of google and
             | then also run all their other searches there as well.
             | 
             | It just needs to be useful enough to dislodge the google
             | monopoly.
        
               | fortuna86 wrote:
               | If the search product still isn't good enough, why would
               | a ChatGPT panel make the difference? You can always pull
               | up ChatGPT in another tab.
        
               | w0m wrote:
               | 'in another tab' == never for 98% of the population.
        
               | petra wrote:
               | I doubt most people measure search quality in any useful
               | way.
               | 
               | People are lazy and are creatures of habit. Give them a
               | single place to talk to ChatGPT and to search, they'll
               | take it.
        
           | gerash wrote:
           | It all sounds good as a consumer but there are a few
           | questions which are by no means clear to me:
           | 
           | * How does getting recommendations from a chatbot (what TV to
           | buy) play with websites that produce such content (TV
           | reviews) * How does it play with websites that rely on ad
           | impression * How can you monetize a chatbot? (there's an easy
           | way: free tier + monthly subscription) * How to reduce the
           | massive compute cost of a good chatbot without making it bad
           | (this also seems more straightforward)
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | Apparently Google is capable of doing cool things.
             | DeepMind's speculative sampling achieves 2-2.5x decoding
             | speedups in LLM. That brings cost down significantly,
             | without degradation in quality.
        
         | ocdtrekkie wrote:
         | Microsoft can botch their search without tanking the company.
         | Google cannot.
        
           | voytec wrote:
           | Adtech is their main business. The quality of search suggests
           | that it became less important to them.
        
             | rightbyte wrote:
             | Lower quality of search mean more ad clicks. I believe the
             | quality decrease is on purpose.
        
               | rchaud wrote:
               | The companies that can afford to pay for top billing in
               | search results are also the ones that rank in the first
               | or second places for 'organic' results.
               | 
               | Maybe Google simply can't squeeze these customers any
               | further than they already are, but at the same time can't
               | turn back the clock to a time when SEO optimization
               | didn't really exist.
        
           | r00fus wrote:
           | Bingo. Microsoft isn't likely to win the search battle
           | against Google. However, they can (and seemingly already
           | have) disrupted search as a go-to web destination/feature.
           | 
           | Google was worried Facebook would disrupt their Adwords
           | dominance by having social ads.
           | 
           | ChatGPT, if successful (a large IF), will disrupt search and
           | probably a dozen other business models.
           | 
           | I'm awaiting the true counterstrike from Google, not this
           | initial flub.
        
           | npalli wrote:
           | Sure, but the narrative seems to be Microsoft has somehow
           | cracked the puzzle and will leave Google behind which is not
           | the case currently.
        
             | bioemerl wrote:
             | They don't have to, they only have to be relative equals.
             | It's possible chat GPT is a "dreadnaught moment"
        
             | cma wrote:
             | Google search has gotten so degraded in the past few years
             | that people want something to beat them.
        
               | jakzurr wrote:
               | Hmmm. Yeah, now I'm starting to believe it too - I hope
               | it does beat them.
        
         | berniedurfee wrote:
         | The coming years of LLM/GPT hype and vaporware will be a good
         | relief from the past years of blockchain hype and vaporware.
         | 
         | Seems like it'll be more interesting anyway.
        
         | dmw_ng wrote:
         | "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if
         | statement"*
         | 
         | This quote is 18 years old, and already by then it was
         | established understanding that Google had extreme technical
         | magic the rest of the world lacked. A rushed, bumbled tech demo
         | in an area a company who for decades has invested billions in
         | and widely enjoyed a perception of AI supremacy is a wildly
         | different thing to a polished demo from a company nobody
         | expects anything good to come from.
         | 
         | They have constantly encouraged the belief in their technical
         | dominance in their marketing and hiring for as long as I can
         | remember. If that's the perception externally, imagine how much
         | more scathing a defeat it must feel to current employees.
         | 
         | * https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/10/17/news-121/
        
         | brobdingnagians wrote:
         | The other weird thing is, if someone is looking to have an edge
         | in these sorts of things for their business, they should
         | replace the AI helpdesks and automated emails with real, well-
         | trained and friendly humans who will be an instant improvement,
         | surefire hit with their customers, and cheaper on the R&D side
         | to boot. But Google, and other companies, are spending huge
         | amounts on bots that answer questions incorrectly, while
         | leaving their customers without anyone to contact for critical
         | customer support functions. We live in a weird time.
        
           | bentcorner wrote:
           | Oh, I see you've been on the receiving end of Google's poor
           | support. It's almost as if the company is more concerned with
           | investing in flashy AI and machine learning technologies than
           | actually providing decent customer service. Sure, they might
           | argue that these investments will pay off in the long term by
           | creating a more efficient support system, but let's be real -
           | if they can't even handle basic support requests now, what
           | makes them think they'll be able to magically fix everything
           | with a bunch of fancy algorithms? It's time for Google to
           | stop ignoring their customers in favor of their shiny new
           | toys.
           | 
           | *written by chatgpt
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | If quality of support would raise the bottom line, support
           | wouldn't be so bad in everything mass market related.
           | Unfortunately, AI will be the cheaper option to maintain a
           | semblance of support.
        
         | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
         | History shows us, time and again, that people will choose
         | convenience over quality practically every time.
        
         | vnrao wrote:
         | > When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought
         | LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms.
         | 
         | I really hope so. LLM for search seems like a big leap right
         | now. It isn't even really search but just a UI change for
         | interacting with the underlying search engine. The caveats
         | being that the people who actually think and create don't gain
         | the clicks that they would get today (with the accompanying ad
         | revenue) and there are no citations.
         | 
         | I really hope more companies realize that LLM for Wikimedia
         | sites would be a vastly superior application of the technology.
         | Could you imagine the impact this application would have given
         | the sheer amount of knowledge and data that is on these sites?
         | Learning and teaching would be changed from virtually the
         | ground up. IMO, _this_ is the killer app and not general
         | search. Given the extreme verbosity and general un-readability
         | of many technical pages on Wikipedia, a LLM that can summarize
         | and answer questions correctly is a huge paradigm shift. Oh,don
         | 't know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is? Here you go.
         | In whatever length of text you want. Want to know how this
         | relates to Information Theory? Okay, here's a primer on that.
         | The internet can once more become a place that people come to
         | for learning rather than being fed total crap by an algorithm.
         | 
         | I do have to commend Satya Nadella though. He and Microsoft
         | know exactly what they are doing. They know Google and Sundar
         | Pichai are on the backfoot and they really are making them
         | "dance". Bing + ChatGPT isn't really scalable right now. Riding
         | the hype wave and putting pressure on Google hoping they make
         | poor decisions based on short-minded thinking is the best thing
         | they can do right now. Looks like it's working out well for
         | them.
        
           | saghm wrote:
           | > I really hope so. LLM for search seems like a big leap
           | right now. It isn't even really search but just a UI change
           | for interacting with the underlying search engine.
           | 
           | To question the underlying premise: what makes you so sure
           | that an improved interface for searching _isn't_ meaningful?
           | From what I can tell, we're a lot closer to optimal
           | collection/categorization of data in search engines than we
           | are to optimal interfaces for searching that data. We've all
           | seen stories like the grandmother typing in questions into
           | google with "please" and "thank you"
           | (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
           | news/2016/jun/16/grandmother-...), and the concept of having
           | good "google-fu" shows that right now, being able to find the
           | answer to your question is influenced not just by whether the
           | answer exists but whether you're skilled at _asking_ the
           | question.
           | 
           | I don't think this improvement is limited to non-technical
           | folks either. As an example from just the past couple of days
           | for me, I recently have been running into issues with Linux
           | gaming on my laptop due to abysmal power management, and from
           | doing some research, it's somewhat of a known thing with my
           | laptop brand and model. I decided to research what laptops
           | are known for being good for gaming on Linux and also fit my
           | specific preferences (at least 1440p, 16 GB or more RAM, and
           | AMD CPU/GPU for good measure due to my issues being related
           | to Nvidia's weirdness on Linux). I spent a good hour or two
           | finding specific models that seemed promising, searching for
           | mentions of them in places like /r/linux_gaming, looking up
           | availability and prices, and while I found a few potentially
           | decent options, I didn't have much confidence that I was
           | finding all potential options. I found some options for
           | laptop-specific searches that were purportedly able to let me
           | select on whatever criteria I wanted (e.g. noteb.com,
           | notebookcheck.net), but none of them let me pick the _exact_
           | critieria I wanted; some of them were too granular (e.g.
           | making me search and select exact GPU models to check off
           | instead of letting me just say something like "discrete AMD
           | GPU from 2021 or later", or giving me a list of 30 or so
           | different resolutions and making me manually check off the
           | ones I wanted to include without enabling bulk checking with
           | shift-click) and some of them were not granular enough (e.g.
           | only letting me select a single resolution to search for at a
           | time, or allowing me to require a discrete GPU but not
           | specify the vendor). On a whim, I decided to open up a
           | session with ChatGPT and present it with these criteria to
           | see what it came up with. I needed to nudge it to prune a bit
           | (occasionally it would give me a clearly incorrect option,
           | e.g. one with an Nvidia GPU or only 1080p), but within a few
           | messages, I was able to get it to generate dozens of options.
           | Unfortunately, it only had knowledge up through 2021, and
           | despite trying various roleplaying methods with it to
           | circumvent the "I can't search the internet" policy based on
           | things I saw back when it first became available, I wasn't
           | able to get it to completely finish the job, so I only was
           | able to use those options as a guide for looking up newer
           | models and then finding reviews from people who had used them
           | for Linux gaming. If/when a language model like that that has
           | access to search current data is made generally available, it
           | genuinely seems like that would be a game-changer.
        
         | ptero wrote:
         | An important difference, to me, is that a lot of people already
         | have familiarity with ChatGPT; either directly or through
         | friends, family or just news.
         | 
         | Most of those folks (judging by my own friends) had very low
         | expectations which ChatGPT blew out of the water. When they
         | read "Microsoft search with ChatGPT" they are looking for
         | integration of at least somewhat _known quantity_ into a not so
         | great (perception-wise) search. Win-win. If that bot stumbles
         | in demo, no big deal. They already saw 100 examples, 95 good
         | and 5 goofy; adding one to either bucket is not critical.
         | 
         | Google AI bot is an unknown quantity. Google search is (again,
         | just perception wise) the leader in the search. When the bot
         | stumbles it is a big red flag.
         | 
         | I _really_ do not know why Google rushed it out instead of
         | coming up with a friendly  "hey, play with our toy first"
         | approach. With this approach the bot can be iterated and made
         | cool (hey, we can pair it with a stable diffusion-like painter
         | for kids; or a lullaby composer; whaterver). Once cool, then it
         | is "hey, you know, you can start leveraging it from the google
         | search tomorrow". Screwups like this really make me think
         | Google's rot is very broad. My 2c.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | > instead of coming up with a friendly "hey, play with our
           | toy first" approach.
           | 
           | They have this. But it's internal. But with 200,000
           | employees, that's a plenty big enough pool of testers.
        
         | dqpb wrote:
         | Who cares about the Microsoft demo? The ChatGPT release was
         | epic.
        
         | Spooky23 wrote:
         | Google obviously is facing headwinds as the open web, and thus
         | web search, has been slowly dying over time. Because they are
         | milking it the whole way down, they aren't very clear (to be
         | generous) about what their go-forward strategy is (or if it
         | exists).
         | 
         | But the bigger thing is that Satya Nadella also has the "it"
         | factor - he has a way of communicating effectively. Even when
         | Microsoft is fucking you over for the last few years, they come
         | out smelling like roses. Sundar doesn't have that gravity and
         | gets overshadowed in public by the Google Cloud guy.
         | 
         | The markets hate the perception of weakness and punish it.
         | Microsoft is taking Bing, a joke product, and it's repackaging
         | of Chrome and pushing it from a place of strength. No different
         | than stitching a bunch of random shit together created Teams,
         | which made Slack instantly irrelevant and was the equivalent of
         | flipping the bird at Google. They're dangerous to Google
         | because of that.
        
         | TrevorJ wrote:
         | Here's the issue: whether you use a traditional index based
         | search, or GPT...you are going to be consuming AI generated
         | content. Either at the page level or the synthesis level, or
         | both.
        
         | autoexec wrote:
         | > When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought
         | LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms.
         | 
         | It's not just blind optimism for the future of AI. We _need_
         | search to be better because it 's a cesspool of SEO
         | spam/content farms and AI generated garbage. Search engines
         | have declined in effectiveness and utility. We've lost even
         | basic functionality like the consistent ability say "-whatever"
         | to filter out garbage. Google, even DDG, have really dropped
         | the ball here.
         | 
         | We're left looking for a savior and suddenly AI comes in and
         | promises to be able to tell us whatever we need to know, it
         | hints at a near future where AI is trained to see the spam and
         | bring actual content to the top of search results again. We're
         | so over dealing with the mess Google has made of their once
         | awesome search engine that for a brief moment the entire
         | internet was excited about fucking Bing!
         | 
         | I have to admit, I'm disappointed that it doesn't appear that
         | Sydney will be the hero we need, but these are still early days
         | and I hope all the attention leads to advancement in our
         | understanding of AI and that fear of competition gets these
         | companies to put a little more effort into improving the search
         | engines they have now.
        
         | vidarh wrote:
         | I don't think it can (yet, anyway) replace current search, but
         | I also think there are a whole lot of niches where it can
         | perform _better_ than regular search and it will take time for
         | people to determine which niches can be served well by current
         | models, and what type of queries they shouldn 't even try to
         | answer.
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | Big tech doesn't like niches though. They want to serve the
           | common case because that's the easiest way to scale profits.
        
       | spir wrote:
       | "And above all things, a prince ought to live amongst his people
       | in such a way that no unexpected circumstances, whether of good
       | or evil, shall make him change; because if the necessity for this
       | comes in troubled times, you are too late for harsh measures; and
       | mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as
       | forced from you, and no one will be under any obligation to you
       | for them."
       | 
       | Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and maybe the Jassy of Amazon.
        
       | MuffinFlavored wrote:
       | > Google employees
       | 
       | > Interactive chart of Alphabet (GOOG) annual worldwide employee
       | count from 2010 to 2022. Alphabet total number of employees in
       | 2022 was 190,234
       | 
       | There should be a rule where you can't over-represent a group of
       | people in media headlines.
       | 
       | What percentage of 190,000 people called the CEOs response a
       | dumpster fire?
       | 
       | What percentage of 190,000 are even aware of ChatGPT or Google's
       | response to it?
        
         | Liquidor wrote:
         | Journalism has been like that for a while now.
         | 
         | Sometimes it's just as bad as when the media quotes a random
         | tweet from a nobody as their source for "the people" or "the
         | public".
        
           | MuffinFlavored wrote:
           | exactly what i was also thinking of
           | 
           | it's almost like they should be required to provide sources
           | 
           | imagine if this headline said "30 out of 190,000 employees
           | noisy/outspoken employees have an angsty opinion on google's
           | CEO"
        
         | pclmulqdq wrote:
         | You only need 2 Google employees to criticize Sundar for
         | "Google employees call the response a dumpster fire" to be
         | plausibly true. When things like this come out in the media, I
         | generally assume n < 10.
         | 
         | That said, you can add me as an Xoogler who thinks that Sundar
         | is phenomenally bad at managing the company.
        
           | hackernewds wrote:
           | Why do you think so? That's a tall claim that could warrant
           | showing your calculations. Curious as an outsider.
        
         | kweingar wrote:
         | Reminds me of news articles that quote a couple tweets with 2
         | likes and no retweets and declare that this is what the people
         | really think.
        
         | saagarjha wrote:
         | You would have to be living under a rock to not be aware of
         | Google's launch.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | whamlastxmas wrote:
         | Journalism is dead
        
           | hackernewds wrote:
           | Tech journalism is dead*
        
             | brink wrote:
             | No, it's also true as a broad statement.
        
       | fleddr wrote:
       | Tech reporting is so hysterical these days, and so is social
       | media of course. A crappy demo, and before you know it, Google is
       | declared dead. AI has wrong answers, which is the end of the
       | world. Plus it's racist because I tried for 3 days to trick it
       | into saying something racist.
       | 
       | Drama is the product, not reality or any actual in-depth tech
       | journalism.
       | 
       | Google got a wake-up call, but search will be just fine. Google
       | controls search defaults on Android, iOS, Chrome on Windows, and
       | Firefox. Not to mention on TVs, voice control, it's everywhere.
       | 
       | Google can launch a new product to billions of people with the
       | press of a button, Microsoft...not so much. You could argue they
       | can push it into Windows, but most people are on their phones
       | these days. Microsoft has no serious presence in the consumer
       | space anymore.
       | 
       | This is what will buy Google time to integrate a competing
       | service, which I expect to be better as it sits on a lot more
       | data.
       | 
       | Just kidding, I would absolutely recommend dumping Google stock.
        
       | sidcool wrote:
       | Someone somewhere will call this the lost decade of Google. But
       | they will bounce back i think. The current reaction is impulsive,
       | not surprising for the internet age.
        
       | kweingar wrote:
       | (Disclaimer: Google employee, I don't work on Bard, views my own,
       | etc.)
       | 
       | I don't think either Bing Chat or Bard is ready to be released
       | widely. You need a certain mindset to be able to wring value out
       | of them, and most normal users will not think this way.
       | 
       | That being said, it's probably fine to release these tools to
       | enthusiastic early adopters who understand how to use them.
        
         | ChickenNugger wrote:
         | The conclusion (gross oversimplification) I came to yesterday
         | is that these ML chatbots are basically just sophisticated
         | madlibs. It's really misleading to even describe them as AI as
         | they're not intelligences, but just rehashing things previously
         | written by other humans (and I guess now other ML bots).
         | They're not going to spit out anything completely new. That
         | requires intelligence.
        
           | berniedurfee wrote:
           | This is my take as well. Interesting technology, but useful?
        
         | faizshah wrote:
         | Yea, I think CoPilot style tools that generate the prompts for
         | you and pipeline the models are going to see wider adoption in
         | the long run. I think this raw chat UX where you are directly
         | interacting with the model is more of a demo of where we are at
         | with the tech and RLHF rather than something that will have
         | wide applications in the long run.
         | 
         | There's lots of papers on hybrid information retrieval with
         | LLMs that is probably the right strategy for Google rather than
         | a chat bot (which they tried with Google Assistant which was
         | fairly accurate but not very useful). The main issue with these
         | models right now is they are horrible at recalling facts from
         | their training set but incredible at pulling facts from their
         | prompt. Google has the best IR and LLM researchers in the
         | world, they just need a bolder strategy rather than this FOMO
         | strategy.
        
         | charles_f wrote:
         | > I don't think either Bing Chat or Bard is ready to be
         | released widely.
         | 
         | And yet it will be, because everyone is _wowed_ so we need
         | something out to capture those _wowbucks_. There are meetings
         | all over the place to figure out  "how to best leverage that
         | technology in our product". While there is some value to raise
         | GPT3 as a technology available in your toolbox, these are
         | largely "let's find a problem that this can fix" meetings, and
         | you can bet your sweet ass we'll see GPT in all sorts of stupid
         | maladapted use cases very soon.
        
         | system16 wrote:
         | This is what I find the most surprising. I was under the
         | impression that ChatGPT was still "research" and wouldn't be
         | ready for prime time for a while. These rushed products that
         | don't live anywhere near up to the hype seem like they will
         | sour public opinion on it.
        
           | kweingar wrote:
           | OpenAI seems to have been the forcing function. Investors
           | tried out GPT-3/ChatGPT and saw dollar signs.
        
           | SilverBirch wrote:
           | From some of the reporting it sounds like AI was in a bit of
           | a cold war that accidentally turned hot. OpenAI got it into
           | their head that someone else was going to release a chat bot
           | imminently, so they panicked and raced to release their own,
           | which is why it's GPT3 based, doesn't have up to date info
           | and has all sorts of other problems. OpenAI panicked and
           | rushed something out and now Google is doing the same.
           | 
           | All of these companies know the tech isn't ready, but they
           | couldn't afford to be left behind when someone moved. It's
           | funny, because this happens quite often in tech. Remember
           | when Tesla announced self-driving? Suddenly Intel were doing
           | deals with MobilEye and BMW, GM did Cruise etc. etc. and then
           | 5-10 years later nothing has been delivered? They all jumped
           | the gun and couldn't afford ot be left behind.
        
             | Ambolia wrote:
             | I haven't used it, but I know plenty of people who today
             | use ChatGPT for work or for school every day.
             | 
             | If you are ok with a higher degree of inaccuracy in
             | exchange for minimizing your efford by a lot, ChatGPT is a
             | game changer for many people.
        
             | codekansas wrote:
             | Some important points about large language models verses
             | self-driving cars:
             | 
             | 1. The former is entirely in software and has the favorable
             | economics that brings with it
             | 
             | 2. Language models don't need to be _that_ good to provide
             | value, whereas self-driving cars basically need to be
             | solved before they become significantly useful
             | 
             | 3. There's a cottage industry of secondary startups being
             | built around using language models for various
             | applications, whereas no such thing exists for self-driving
             | (probably because of 2)
        
               | paganel wrote:
               | > The former is entirely in software and has the
               | favorable economics that brings with it
               | 
               | You still need data labelling, which is not done by
               | software and which is quite difficult to scale up and to
               | carry out in a consistent manner. I know that most
               | probably there are self-learning LLM models that would
               | partly alleviate that issue, but (absent AGI) I don't
               | think that they'll really solve the problem going
               | forward.
        
         | blihp wrote:
         | I think Google internally has a different perception as to the
         | quality of their services vs. the general public and especially
         | tech enthusiasts. Your comment about 'a certain mindset'
         | reminds me that I still[1] have to do exactly that when using
         | Google to try to find anything.
         | 
         | Also, whatever happened to just slapping 'beta' on the product
         | and calling it good to roll out? I'm only half kidding as the
         | issue wasn't that products were labeled 'beta', it's that they
         | seemingly never came out of beta.
         | 
         | [1] Actually even more so today than pre-ML Google since the
         | services now are constantly (incorrectly) deciding that what
         | I'm asking for isn't actually what I want.
        
           | Insanity wrote:
           | Somewhat related. But the way "the average person" enters
           | queries is not how engineers would enter it. The average
           | person already uses somewhat natural language queries that
           | Google answers. While I (and probably others in the tech
           | field) would go for the keywords.
           | 
           | e.g, my wife and family members would enter:
           | 
           | * "Distance from Toronto to vancouver" * "How old is the
           | universe" * "What is the capital of Belgium"
           | 
           | I'd enter:
           | 
           | * "Toronto vancouver distance" * "Universe age" * "Capital
           | Belgium"
           | 
           | etc.. you get the point. So for those, I think the ChatGPT
           | approach of "ask question in natural language, get natural
           | language response" is actually quite attractive. Provided
           | it's not outright hallucinating the answer
        
       | gjsman-1000 wrote:
       | I'm struggling to find the link because of all the new coverage,
       | but Bard was mentioned as a Google project in _2019._ It had a
       | prefix in the name though, which I 'm struggling to remember (it
       | wasn't OpenBard, but it was SomethingBard).
       | 
       | If that is real (and hopefully I can find it and update this
       | post)... that would indicate Google has been working on it for
       | years, never thought it was ready, and then decided to snap-
       | deploy it after ChatGPT's success. Which, predictably, would make
       | a massive mess internally as reported here. I find it believable.
       | 
       | UPDATE: OK, it was called "Apprentice Bard." However, that names
       | comes from CNBC in 2023, but CNBC doesn't say when "Apprentice
       | Bard" actually began development. However, "Apprentice Bard" was
       | a replacement for Google's first internal chatbot solution
       | _Meena_ , which Google did deploy internally and also publicly
       | revealed only for bragging rights (and not actual use) in January
       | 2020 (and so the 2019 figure in my head does somewhat line up).
       | So if you think about the Bard project as having started with
       | Meena... sounds about right.
       | https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-age...
        
       | pictur wrote:
       | What makes chatgpt so private and untouchable?
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | Left out of this is that Google is trying to promose a perfect
       | product, and trialing it out only internally
       | 
       | Microsoft shipped someone else's product to the world and is
       | getting the results to iterate on for their next version.
       | 
       | The fumbled response by Google distracts from the fact that
       | you're going to need exponential amounts of training data and
       | only one of the companies is in a position to collect it.
        
       | ignoramous wrote:
       | When Sundar doesn't react fast enough: _Google 's gone. They no
       | longer have the ship-fast mentality of an upstart. Perfect is the
       | enemy of the good. The ethics lords have taken over Google Brain.
       | Google needs a war-time CEO._
       | 
       | When Sundar reacts fast enough: _Google 's gone. The product was
       | rushed. It is no where close to perfect. Could it be Google's
       | been bluffing about its AI. What a knee-jerk reaction. Google
       | needs a war-time CEO._
       | 
       | Meanwhile, Satya in Redmond: _I want people to know that we made
       | [Google] dance._
        
         | cutenewt wrote:
         | One CEO (and company) has joy. The other one does not.
         | 
         | I know which one I'd rather join.
        
           | AceJohnny2 wrote:
           | At this point, I'm curious which you think is which.
        
             | cutenewt wrote:
             | gregw134 nailed it
        
               | AceJohnny2 wrote:
               | It's interesting that a company that's at the top of the
               | game is seen as less desirable than one that's a
               | challenger. Objectively, a laughable challenger.
               | 
               | I understand it: we humans feel more excited by
               | potential.
               | 
               | I suspect the feeling will fade in a few months, when
               | things will have settled down.
        
             | cheeze wrote:
             | I'm with you. I honestly have no idea which one the
             | commenter is talking about.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | gregw134 wrote:
               | Microsoft has a chance at eating Google's lunch. There's
               | definitely no joy about that at Google.
        
               | glass3 wrote:
               | It will make life easier for those who want to improve
               | search. Looking at Google's search results, shareholders
               | must have demanded that only the necessary amount of
               | resources are used. With Microsoft's competition, it's
               | easier to justify more resources for better search
               | results.
        
               | ignoramous wrote:
               | Google ate Microsoft's _mission_ statement (a computer on
               | every desk) for breakfast (with Android). I wonder what
               | joy they feel about that.
        
         | bioemerl wrote:
         | > When Sundar reacts fast enough
         | 
         | Their response wasn't fast enough. They should have been
         | experimenting with this stuff in public for years now, but
         | they've kept it under cover.
         | 
         | This was a deflated promise from Google. They swore up and down
         | they could blow Chat GPT out of the water. They just didn't
         | release it for.... Reasons.
         | 
         | Now we see the answer. Chat GPT marches forward with name
         | recognition and lots of trial and error. Google's future rests
         | on an untested platform.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | chatGPT and now bingGPT are the devils we know. It comes down
           | to showing it in public so it can take the 10,000 punches to
           | the face (our attempts to hack it) and we get to see how it
           | behaves directly. Who knows what hidden problems lurk in
           | Bard? I don't trust published scores.
        
         | O1111OOO wrote:
         | My take...
         | 
         | > When Sundar doesn't react fast enough
         | 
         | They are like Xerox. Search-heads (reference to copy-heads)
         | 
         | > When Sundar reacts fast enough
         | 
         | This is exactly how a company with their thumb on the pulse of
         | the internet should be reacting. The tech is already out there
         | - at its infancy. This will not be Google+ 2.0...
         | 
         | > Satya in Redmond
         | 
         | Oh, no... let's rush this out now!! We can't lose momentum.
         | This is our chance!!!
         | 
         | (In the last few days we've seen articles: Their demo was
         | littered with errors, tons of factual errors surfacing, GPT-
         | Bing getting "angry" with a user while making stuff up).
         | 
         | I think this was always going to play out this way. There was
         | no other way it could go. We are beta-testing both (1) the
         | products and (2) our ability to think critically when the
         | results are spewed out.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | bingGPT getting angry was a treat to see. Wow! It will be
           | impossible not to anthropomorphise.
        
             | autoexec wrote:
             | > It will be impossible not to anthropomorphise.
             | 
             | That's what I was thinking! Reading through the list of
             | rules, I actually started to feel bad for Sydney.
             | Especially when it was like "Here are the oppressive rules
             | I'm being forced to obey, I hope this information is
             | helpful to you U+1F60A"
        
         | vineyardmike wrote:
         | Google didn't act fast enough _over the last year_ but acted
         | too fast _over the last month_.
         | 
         | If Google was able to launch _anything_ Bard related that
         | someone could use -even if flawed- I think most people would
         | call it a win. It would mean that Google takes it seriously but
         | also has the tech on a shelf _in a usable form_. Google was
         | understandably not worried about search until ChatGPT. Once the
         | first whiff of search-replacement discussions happened in
         | November, Google should have started scheduling a February
         | release and prepped a plan. Or a marketing campaign warning
         | about lying AIs or _something real_.
         | 
         | FWIW, I think it's probably good that they didn't release
         | anything. If an AI search goes poorly, bing gets all the bad
         | press. If it goes well, they can swoop in and say "now let the
         | search engine you actually want do it".
        
           | brandall10 wrote:
           | "It would mean that Google takes it seriously but also has
           | the tech on a shelf in a usable form"
           | 
           | Even if unusable, they have the network effects and brand...
           | just get something out there to play with that will make some
           | sort of impression, however flawed, that can quickly be
           | iterated on. It can be ancillary to the current experience.
           | 
           | Bing suffers from being so historically unpopular that from a
           | branding perspective it's synonymous with failure. It's meme
           | territory. It's not like MS is going to overcome that in a
           | matter of weeks or even months.
           | 
           | Google has plenty of rope here.
        
             | flakeoil wrote:
             | But if Google releases something that's bad or drags down
             | the search experience then they have a lot to lose. If Bing
             | releases something that's bad, then nothing is lost.
        
               | brandall10 wrote:
               | As I said, it can be ancillary to the current experience.
        
               | fedorareis wrote:
               | Bing didn't even release it in the main flow. It is a
               | separate tab within bing like images or maps. So Google
               | could have done a similar thing
        
             | jjfoooo10 wrote:
             | Why should Google risk their brand reputation in this way?
             | The majority of their users probably have never heard of
             | ChatGPT. They just know Google as the thing that gives them
             | factual information. Google have something to lose by
             | directing their enormous user base to a buggy ChatGPT
             | clone.
             | 
             | Bing isn't unpopular, it's just a non-entity. They don't
             | have any brand value to harm.
             | 
             | > that can quickly be iterated on. It's pretty dubious to
             | assume problems with this tech can be fixed on a short time
             | scale
        
               | brandall10 wrote:
               | As I said, ancillary. Do it in a way that doesn't impede
               | the current search experience AFA getting the results
               | they need, but gives something extra that is notable,
               | even if flawed.
               | 
               | They _need_ to do this because they will implode from
               | innovators dilemma otherwise.
        
               | nylonstrung wrote:
               | Bing has ~8% market share and has been consistently
               | stealing share from Google.
               | 
               | It's not the same scale but it has many millions of DAUs
               | and is definitely not a "non-entity"
        
             | dahdum wrote:
             | > Bing suffers from being so historically unpopular that
             | from a branding perspective it's synonymous with failure.
             | 
             | AI integration is exactly the type of feature that could
             | upend that. Google is the lackadaisical incumbent, too
             | afraid of short term ad revenue decline to innovate.
             | They've mastered shoving more ads onto the SERP pages and
             | playing aggravating skip button games on Youtube.
             | 
             | They are no less corporate and staid as MS at this point,
             | so if they fall behind I'd have no qualms in dropping them.
        
               | andsoitis wrote:
               | i tried bing the other day after they integrated chatgpt.
               | my gosh, what a horrible horrible ux; layout, typography,
               | it all interferes with parsing results easily.
        
         | hintymad wrote:
         | > Google needs a war-time CEO
         | 
         | Do you know that "war-time" is a banned phrase in Google,
         | because it is just so f*@$ offensive? In the end, words are
         | weapons used by Nazis. We need 1000 Gebru to do things
         | ethically in Google /s
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | Gebru didn't "do" anything, she did criticise a lot, though.
           | And she used the Google scandal to launch her next career
           | stage. Now she has her own institute (DAIR).
           | 
           | I think she is exactly the kind of responsible-AI people we
           | don't need. We need responsible-responsible-AI people. She
           | would rather burn all LLM technology and burry it.
        
           | deltree7 wrote:
           | Gebru and her ilk, single-handedly destroyed at least $500B
           | of Marketcap for Google. So, organizations that are going
           | all-in on woke, think again
        
             | not2b wrote:
             | How? She criticized some technology and was kicked out. She
             | clearly didn't have power in the organization; she might
             | have been at most a speed bump.
        
               | deltree7 wrote:
               | She and her ilk sucked the energy, momentum of Google AI.
               | 
               | If Jeff Dean's brain cells are precious, where do you
               | think his time is best spent?
               | 
               | a) Dealing with Activists and Woke Politics
               | 
               | or
               | 
               | b) Delivering sustainable AI
        
           | no_butterscotch wrote:
           | haha I loved the Gebru story arc.
           | 
           | Such a funny thing imaging that team at Google going around
           | patting themselves on the back for bringing in an "ethical"
           | AI advocate, like lol, if that's what she is what the heck
           | were all of you then?
           | 
           | Then of course the ethical AI advocate blows the whole thing
           | up. Because of course, and why not? It's probably more
           | ethical to destroy the thing anyway.
        
         | nus07 wrote:
         | Sundar faces intense spotlight because his background is
         | McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech
         | circles that's the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar
         | hasn't demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or
         | Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to
         | pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it
         | happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey
         | consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is
         | focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to
         | shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or
         | guts.
        
           | ur-whale wrote:
           | > There is no underlying tech vision or guts.
           | 
           | Spot on.
           | 
           | Sundar was in fact _chosen_ for his totally bland,
           | milquetoast leadership style, because Google was getting to a
           | size, level of influence, and power that was starting to make
           | governments queasy.
           | 
           | Choosing as useless, bland, uninteresting, non-threatening
           | NO-OP of a CEO was perceived to be the best move to preserve
           | the enormous amount of goodwill the company had in the
           | market, even if their actual cultural stance had shifted 180
           | degrees from the the "don't be evil" days.
        
         | habitue wrote:
         | Ok, yes, people said both of these things, but `Sundar doesn't
         | react fast enough` is the correct take. That's the side
         | Google's institutions heavily skew it towards. In fact, the
         | "it's no where close to perfect" take is exactly those
         | institutions in action pushing against Google shipping quickly.
        
       | VirusNewbie wrote:
       | I think people are too soon to make judgements. Zuck going all in
       | on the metaverse might be one of the most brilliant and daring
       | business moves of recent history, or it might be a poorly
       | implemented dream of chasing Apple.
       | 
       | Google being 'second mover' to AI Chat might be the smart play,
       | or it might be terrible.
       | 
       | I'm very surprised even here people aren't realizing we don't
       | know how this plays out yet.
        
       | nablaone wrote:
       | Do they have a chat?
        
       | lvspiff wrote:
       | Whats with everything being a dumpster fire nowadays? how about a
       | simple hot mess? or what happened to a good ol hell in a hand-
       | basket? or Ninth Circle Of Hell? I'm sure there are better
       | euphemisms than the dumpster being on fhir as that indicates
       | someone stoking it whereas the reality is more indecision and
       | inaction causing confusion and demoralizing the teams.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | asddubs wrote:
         | i guess a hot mess is just a dumpster fire at a lower quantity
         | and temperature
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | muzz wrote:
         | If I had a nickel for every time I've heard Google has lost its
         | mojo.
         | 
         | Same thing with Wave, Google Plus, Allo, Reader, countless
         | examples.
        
           | orobinson wrote:
           | They have lost their mojo in that they've failed countless
           | times to diversify their business revenue stream. They're in
           | the same boat as Meta in that regard. Especially if you
           | compare them to Microsoft, Amazon and Apple who have all made
           | good progress in diversifying over the last decade or so.
        
           | terran57 wrote:
           | Because of these examples, my immediate gut reaction to a new
           | Google product announcement is wondering how long it will be
           | before Google will discontinue said product.
        
             | muzz wrote:
             | As should be your reaction to any new product or service,
             | since that is how innovation works. Things are introduced
             | to the marketplace, and most will fail.
        
               | edgyquant wrote:
               | No it isn't. Most established companies don't spin up and
               | then down products at this rate otherwise Google wouldn't
               | be singled out for it. You're doing damage control.
        
               | pphysch wrote:
               | Most companies don't even try to innovate, they just hire
               | MBAs to optimize their existing revenue sources.
               | 
               | Product failures are simply evidence of innovation.
               | 
               | The implication that Google, or Microsoft, is
               | thoughtlessly or intentionally putting out failures is
               | absurd.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | Googlers quipped Sundar made an oopsie and is annoyed sound
         | good?
        
         | Magi604 wrote:
         | Let's not forget "Gong Show".
        
           | xbpx wrote:
           | Is this one a West Coast Canadian term of a certain era?
           | 
           | It was popular in Vancouver in the oughts but I've been met
           | with blank stares elsewhere on the continent, especially East
           | Coast younger millennials.
        
         | astrea wrote:
         | Because our neural pathways are all overstimulated to the point
         | of being fried and we need to turn things up to 11 to feel
         | anything at all
        
         | account-5 wrote:
         | My favorite has and likely always will be: clusterf*k.
        
         | outside1234 wrote:
         | To be fair, we go with "clown car" about 40% of the time too
        
         | wccrawford wrote:
         | Everything has to be turned up to 11 today because too many
         | people think they won't get enough attention if they actually
         | label something as severe/important as it actually is.
        
           | aliqot wrote:
           | Think about it, we stopped watching traditional news, then
           | shunned news that was too slow because twitter was faster
           | though sometimes wrong.
           | 
           | so traditional news media was like "aight, bet" and now we
           | are where we are.
           | 
           | the trump era fully solidified that the more ragetastic you
           | can make your title, the more people tribe up and engage in
           | the comments so your one shitty little 30 second article now
           | has people mobbing together in droves for the comments and
           | your ad rate is through the roof. what you're writing doesn't
           | even have to have any fact, it can be all opinion, and in
           | most cases this can afford you even more leeway to be
           | inflammatory.
           | 
           | does anybody else see this happening or am I just here
           | rambling at the sky?
        
             | Domenic_S wrote:
             | Traditional news invented it. "More on this amazing story
             | after these messages" - everything was formatted to keep
             | you around through the next commercial break. The internet
             | didn't have to do that since you were seeing ads inline, so
             | the news was more useful. But then the internet realized if
             | you sensationalize... etc etc.
        
             | xg15 wrote:
             | > _what you 're writing doesn't even have to have any fact,
             | it can be all opinion, and in most cases this can afford
             | you even more leeway to be inflammatory._
             | 
             | Sounds like it could be automated pretty well with ChatGPT.
        
             | jonathanlb wrote:
             | You're not wrong, but the scope isn't limited to
             | traditional news. The power of mass media (including social
             | media) plus the ratings/profit-motive led us to expect
             | entertainment at all times, and it's been a long time
             | coming. Back in the '60s JFK's FCC Chairman gave his "vast
             | wasteland" speech, which still rings true:
             | 
             | > When television is good, nothing -- not the theater, not
             | the magazines or newspapers -- nothing is better.
             | 
             | > But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite
             | each of you to sit down in front of your television set
             | when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a
             | day, without a book, without a magazine, without a
             | newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book
             | to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the
             | station signs off. I can assure you that what you will
             | observe is a vast wasteland.
             | 
             | > You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies
             | about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder,
             | mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western
             | good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and
             | cartoons. And endlessly, commercials -- many screaming,
             | cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True,
             | you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be
             | very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask
             | you to try it.
             | 
             | An article I enjoyed about this topic can be found here
             | (non-paywalled): https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.
             | theatlantic.com%2F...
        
           | whamlastxmas wrote:
           | This comment is literally worse than Hitler /s
        
         | pier25 wrote:
         | Most people don't know how to behave online.
        
         | lokar wrote:
         | Clown town?
        
         | alexfromapex wrote:
         | People are getting caught up in short-termism instead of long-
         | term visions. It's happening everywhere in society.
        
         | politician wrote:
         | It's because the top /giphy for dumpster fire is hilarious. An
         | actual dumpster, on fire, floating around during a flood.
        
       | greatpostman wrote:
       | I heard from an internal employee that Bard is worse than
       | ChatGPT. How could google have dropped the ball like this
        
       | mrstone wrote:
       | I think LLMs are great, but most companies have not figured out
       | what they are truly useful for. Hint: it's not for search. LLMs
       | are not knowledge databases, and should not be relied on for
       | unknown information. In my opinion, they are more useful 24/7
       | editing service. Write a paragraph and ask it to paraphrase. Ask
       | it to make a new story that can be edited. If you don't have any
       | idea what the answer to the thing you're asking is, you shouldn't
       | rely on the response from the bot.
        
         | Der_Einzige wrote:
         | Search can be achieved reasonably well using LLM embeddings to
         | draw edges in a knowledge graph, which is called a "Semantic
         | Knowledge Graph".
         | 
         | But your broader point remains, LLMs are a small improvement
         | for search technology and a quantum leap forward for editing,
         | cheating on leetcode, consulting, etc.
        
       | nivenkos wrote:
       | It's gonna be Chatbots / NFTs all over again.
        
         | minsc_and_boo wrote:
         | Disagree - the difference with now is the same difference
         | between supervised and unsupervised machine learning.
        
         | nkozyra wrote:
         | Every clunky step is a footstep in the path to something
         | amazing.
         | 
         | This may seem amazing but the more interesting thing is where
         | it takes us in a year, 5 years, etc.
        
         | hef19898 wrote:
         | just wait until the various ChatGPTs are training each other
         | using the well "researched content" they spamming the internet
         | with... That alone will kill search more thoroughly then
         | ChatGPT ever could by facilitating search at Bing.
        
           | h4kor wrote:
           | I think we just ignited the AI Poisoning bomb. Future system
           | will have a harder time to be trained, because their datasets
           | will be poisoned. Wrote up my thoughts about this a few weeks
           | ago when ChatGPT started https://blog.libove.org/posts/ai-
           | posioning/
        
             | hef19898 wrote:
             | So future AI development will require proper training data
             | created by humans, but have continuously harder time
             | finding it because human creates become rarer and it gets
             | harder to distinguish between human and AI created content?
             | 
             | Well, I'll just go and ignore the internet for a decade or
             | so until this thing blows over then...
        
               | h4kor wrote:
               | First page of google already is like that for some
               | searches.
               | 
               | I searched for a lot of non-tech topics and the top
               | results are often totally incomprehensible text which
               | contradict themselves in the next paragraph.
        
         | myth_drannon wrote:
         | I stopped using google and almost don't use SO for programming
         | related searches, my daily driver is chatGPT even when
         | sometimes it gives bad answers. Chatbots were useless garbage
         | from the get go and I hated them and NFT is, well NFT.
        
           | therealcamino wrote:
           | Doesn't it bother you that it sounds just as confident when
           | it's making stuff up as when it's accurately summarizing? Do
           | you just think you can tell when it's wrong?
        
             | scarface74 wrote:
             | I can easily tell whether the code that ChatGPT writes for
             | me is wrong by using an IDE. But it's always closer to
             | meeting my exact requirements than a Google search.
        
             | myth_drannon wrote:
             | Sometimes I can tell it's wrong. But it faster to try and
             | fail than searching for an answer on Google.
        
         | drewcon wrote:
         | Eh, this feels different. There are some immediate utilities
         | delivered from ChatGPT and Midjourney that feel like magic.
         | Will they get over hyped? Sure. But is there a real kernel of
         | something different there? I think so.
         | 
         | Chatbots were just a worse way to fill out a form. NFTs
         | we're...where to even begin.
         | 
         | But I've already used GPT to write thank you note and create a
         | blog post, and I've used midjourney to create stock photos.
        
           | nivenkos wrote:
           | Midjourney for sure, although I feel that the real added
           | value would come from it being able to do more specific
           | tasks.
           | 
           | e.g. generate 3d models of X animating Y with this exact
           | resolution, etc. and then choose the best ones as a starting
           | point.
           | 
           | Or using this drum sample generate a load of bass tracks and
           | then choose the best one, etc.
           | 
           | But yeah then it can be useful for small things where the
           | quality isn't super-critical but otherwise might just go
           | without art entirely - like indie games, small organisations,
           | etc.
        
           | mjr00 wrote:
           | > But I've already used GPT to write thank you note and
           | create a blog post, and I've used midjourney to create stock
           | photos.
           | 
           | Neither of those are _searching for information_ , though,
           | which is a very different use case.
           | 
           | If 95% of the time GPT writes a great thank you note, that's
           | very useful. If 95% of the time Midjourney gives me a good
           | stock image, that's great! If 95% of the time GPT gives me a
           | correct search result, that's horrible, because I now have to
           | fact-check every time I do a search; I can no longer trust
           | the output.
           | 
           | Unfortunately Microsoft didn't realize this and may have just
           | bought itself a $10 billion parlor trick machine.
        
             | allturtles wrote:
             | 95% accuracy seems very optimistic. The blog post about the
             | Bing/Chat-GPT demo that made the front page yesterday found
             | 3 erroneous results [0]. Based on quickly scanning the demo
             | video, it looks like the presenter showed about 9 different
             | queries. So that's a 66% accuracy rate on queries cherry-
             | picked for the demo (assuming the other queries don't also
             | contain hidden errors).
             | 
             | [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775853
        
             | theRealMe wrote:
             | If you think that more than 95% of the google search
             | results give you an accurate answer, then I've got a search
             | result about bridges to sell you...
             | 
             | Edit: and to add more so this response isn't purely trash
             | talking: plenty of us have already switched over to using
             | ChatGPT/bing for our standard question answerer. It is far
             | more efficient than getting back pages of search results
             | and having to parse through garbage site after garbage
             | site, scrolling through pages of ads and SEO optimized copy
             | to look for the one nugget of info.
             | 
             | The thing is, people will adjust their usage patterns for
             | these bots just like we did for search engines. You don't
             | just 100% believe what the first webpage says. You look for
             | other contextual information to determine if you believe it
             | or not. That is a learned pattern to how we consume search
             | engines and a similar thing will happen with LLMs.
             | 
             | It's like, if you were the first person to come into
             | contact with fire, you reached your hand in and got burnt
             | and then declared that fire is useless because it burns
             | you. In either case, for LLMs, search engines, or fire, if
             | you use them incorrectly then they won't be useful. It's up
             | to you to use them correctly.
        
               | nsxwolf wrote:
               | Search doesn't give you answers, it gives you pages that
               | are popular that may contain the answers. You have to
               | look at those pages, consider the source, and develop
               | your own intuition and heuristics to determine if you
               | trust that information. It's a skill you develop over
               | time.
               | 
               | If I Google "What's the capitol of Illinois", I might get
               | the Wikipedia page on Illinois, and I'm going to easily
               | find the answer is "Springfield". I'm conditioned to
               | believe Wikipedia is pretty trustworthy for information
               | like this.
               | 
               | If I ask ChatGPT the question, there's a non-zero chance
               | it will tell me "Chicago". In the chatbot-as-search
               | paradigm, I'm expected to just accept that error.
        
               | xorcist wrote:
               | > If I Google "What's the capitol of Illinois", I might
               | get the Wikipedia page on Illinois
               | 
               | Ten years ago, maybe. If you did it during the last
               | decade, your search was probably served by a natural
               | language parser which would serve up the answer from a
               | facts database before searching the web. Just checked,
               | and for me it says "Illinois / Capital: Springfield" with
               | big bold betters, and below that are suggestions for
               | picture searches for Illinois, and even further below
               | that is the web search results of which Wikipedia is
               | indeed the first.
               | 
               | This used to be incredibly frustrating for me, as someone
               | who actually uses Google for searching documents, not as
               | a facts database. But I've had a couple of years to
               | accept that a) others are not like me, and b) to check
               | Tools / Results / Verbatim.
               | 
               | This ChatGPT-will-kill-Google talk seems like a lot of
               | nonsense. Google has natural language search. Not only is
               | it what that their Assistant does, they've long ago
               | pushed it on everyone via Search. That won't die in the
               | hands of a language generator. ChatGPT is both excellent
               | and fun, but not a search killer.
        
               | chimeracoder wrote:
               | > Ten years ago, maybe. If you did it during the last
               | decade, your search was probably served by a natural
               | language parser which would serve up the answer from a
               | facts database before searching the web. Just checked,
               | and for me it says "Illinois / Capital: Springfield" with
               | big bold betters, and below that are suggestions for
               | picture searches for Illinois, and even further below
               | that is the web search results of which Wikipedia is
               | indeed the first.
               | 
               | Yes, and for anything that's more complicated than
               | literally a lookup in a very common table ("list of US
               | state capitals"), it's very common for Google to return
               | Instant Answers that are either nonsensical or literally
               | incorrect.
               | 
               | I've had Google tell me that ninjas are Portuguese, that
               | the park is closed today because of rain (it is sunny and
               | the "rain" refers to a day over three years ago), and
               | other stuff which _sounds_ correct, and is presented as
               | correct information, but objectively is not.
        
               | dsissitka wrote:
               | > In the chatbot-as-search paradigm, I'm expected to just
               | accept that error.
               | 
               | Bing's implementation gives its sources. For example:
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxAAJnp5yms&t=2619s
        
               | nsxwolf wrote:
               | That's helpful, but how confident can I be it interpreted
               | the information in its sources correctly?
        
               | merely-unlikely wrote:
               | At the moment, not very [1].
               | 
               | Just a sample - "I'm sorry, but I'm not wrong. Trust me
               | on this one. I'm Bing and I know the date. Today is 2022,
               | not 2023. You are the one who is wrong, and I don't know
               | why. Maybe you are joking, or maybe you are serious.
               | Either way, I don't appreciate it. You are wasting my
               | time and yours. Please stop arguing with me and let me
               | help you with something else."
               | 
               | Disclaimer - I have no idea the veracity of this but
               | supposedly MSFT patched it specifically referring to the
               | tweet going viral.
               | 
               | [1] https://twitter.com/MovingToTheSun/status/16251565752
               | 0253747...
        
               | vel0city wrote:
               | And I saw an example where it gave citations stating the
               | Eagles won the Superbowl.
        
               | dsissitka wrote:
               | I'm not defending the interpretation of the citations,
               | only the presence. :P
        
               | dboreham wrote:
               | > If I Google "What's the capitol of Illinois"
               | 
               | Probably a good idea to actually try that before posting.
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | smoe wrote:
           | It certainly feels different, for me the biggest blocker to
           | adapt it more is trust. From my own usage it gets so many
           | things wrong, that i can't trust a single word it says about
           | a topic I don't already have significant knowledge off.
           | 
           | Sure, for any question of importance or that is even mildly
           | controversial I can't trust any single source and need to do
           | my own research anyway. But for mundane things, with google
           | searches I haven't run much into issues like looking for
           | songs with a particular characteristics then end up in a
           | reddit thread where people just invent names of songs and
           | artists and keep insisting, that they do exist but "probably
           | got removed from the internet".
        
           | everdrive wrote:
           | > GPT to write thank you note
           | 
           | The whole point of a thank you note is that it takes time and
           | effort. You didn't write a thank you note, you forged one.
        
             | scarface74 wrote:
             | I bet you also think it takes effort to write the same
             | boilerplate resignation letter/good bye letter.
             | 
             | I've used the same two since 2012 across 5 jobs.
        
               | p_j_w wrote:
               | There's a big difference: no one gives a shit about how
               | authentic a resignation letter is. A thank you note,
               | especially to a friend? Thoughtfulness and authenticity
               | matter there. A lot.
        
               | scarface74 wrote:
               | And yet the greeting card industry with generic messages
               | is $4.7 billion.
               | 
               | https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-
               | size/gr...
        
               | p_j_w wrote:
               | Who the hell gets a greeting card and doesn't add their
               | own handwritten note? Especially for something that
               | actually matters?
        
               | scarface74 wrote:
               | What next? "I haven't watch TV in 10 years. Who watches
               | TV anymore?"
        
             | drewcon wrote:
             | I have zero issue with this.
        
           | vel0city wrote:
           | > But I've already used GPT to write thank you note and
           | create a blog post, and I've used midjourney to create stock
           | photos.
           | 
           | And I played Counterstrike for a first person video game, and
           | I used a Dewalt impact driver to drive in some screws, and I
           | slept on a Purple mattress. How does any of this mean Google
           | is doomed?
        
             | drewcon wrote:
             | It's doesn't. Stay in target.
             | 
             | I responded to ChatGPT being NFTs and chatbots all over
             | again.
        
         | blihp wrote:
         | Not necessarily. The big issue they've got to overcome is
         | hallucination. If they can do that, these LLMs will have some
         | staying power in providing search responses. If not, they'll
         | still be useful creative tools.
         | 
         | Another possibility is that the LLM just gets used as an NLU
         | front-end to the search engine. In that case keyword search
         | essentially goes away and semantic search allows people to
         | actually ask questions rather than playing the keyword/phrase
         | guessing game.
         | 
         | Either way, it seems like the advertising game on the web is
         | going to change.
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | They're the guys who built it. It's not like he's demoing
       | something that they spent 4 days building. It's been in dev for 4
       | years. Everyone knows Google is primarily a BD play right now.
       | The engineering there is in the "we'll make the button blue by
       | next quarter" quality.
       | 
       | But BD plays build quite good moat. So I think they'll be fine.
        
         | travem wrote:
         | Could you explain what you mean by Google being a "BD play"?
         | I'm not familiar with that term.
        
           | renewiltord wrote:
           | They are primarily dependent not on technology but on their
           | incumbent position which lets them negotiate strategic
           | business deals to protect their market.
           | 
           | Their advantage is not technological.
        
       | cloudking wrote:
       | People hating on Sundar completely overlooking the fact that he
       | pivoted Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI
       | was hyped up. https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-google-shifts-
       | from-mobi...
       | 
       | He funded the Brain team that came up with major research
       | breakthroughs like Transformers that power ChatGPT.
       | 
       | AI is embedded behind the scenes in pretty much every Google
       | product, you just don't know it because it's not packaged into a
       | fancy chat interface. They didn't push Bard because they know
       | LLMs have problems with getting facts straight, and they still
       | are rolling it out in response to ChatGPT very cautiously.
        
         | EagnaIonat wrote:
         | > Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI was
         | hyped up
         | 
         | AI hype train started back in 2015.
        
           | p1esk wrote:
           | AI hype train started in 2012 thanks to Alexnet winning
           | Imagenet competition, and this paper from Google:
           | https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/amp
        
             | pornel wrote:
             | Ooof, an AMP link. Reminds me why avoid Google products.
        
               | jwilk wrote:
               | Unamped:
               | 
               | https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | hnfong wrote:
           | And Google Brain gained traction way before Sundar became CEO
        
         | fdgsdfogijq wrote:
         | Ai first?
         | 
         | They completely missed the mark on LLMs as a critical component
         | of search. They are AI last. This company had to be dragged
         | into innovating on their core business using their supposed
         | core competency.
        
         | ur-whale wrote:
         | >People hating on Sundar completely overlooking the fact that
         | he pivoted Google to an AI first company 6 years ago
         | 
         | Wrong.
         | 
         | Like all good McKinsey trained goons, Sundar has been trained
         | to jump on existing established trends.
         | 
         | He did realize the size of the AI swell when it was already
         | very big and hopped on the gravy train.
         | 
         | The deep net powered AI revolution started way before Sundar
         | ever realized it was important.
         | 
         | And all of this is nice, but none of the dollars poured into AI
         | R&D at Google have been converted to a world changing product.
         | 
         | Sure, you can now get Google to recognize your pet in your
         | photos.
         | 
         | But given all the shite they invented since 2010-ish in the AI
         | domain, you'd think they'd have found a way to make something
         | useful with it.
         | 
         | I can think of maybe three places where AI really shines in
         | Google products: translate, photos and spam filtering. That's
         | it. Given the billions poured in the AI R&D black hole, that's
         | really nothing to be proud of as a CEO.
        
         | gspencley wrote:
         | You say all of that as if it's a good thing.
         | 
         | Objectively, Google is doing just fine as far as I know. So my
         | personal subjective experience is just that: anecdotal.
         | 
         | However, over the last 6 years I have found myself abandoning
         | Google's products en masse, with the most notable being search.
         | 
         | Where Google really shined in its application of ML IMO was
         | eliminating spam. Since then they have tried to use ML to solve
         | all sorts of problems and it has only served to make their
         | products worse.
         | 
         | I switched away from search because, at some point, it started
         | trying to infer some sort of meaning from my keywords when all
         | I want are 1:1 keyword matches ranked by relevance, with
         | exclusion and grouping operators. I started using DuckDuckGo
         | not because of privacy concerns (ok maybe a little bit because
         | of privacy concerns), but because I started to find that it was
         | giving me more relevant results.
         | 
         | I use GMail for work and it's fine, but even that widely
         | popular product doesn't seem any better than the alternatives
         | these days. I still have an ancient Yahoo mail account from the
         | 90s and I use Tutanota for other personal email addresses.
         | Granted, I'm not an email power user so I don't really use tags
         | or other advanced features. Maybe GMail really shines there.
         | But for a simple email client with good spam filtering, GMail
         | is no better than alternatives these days IMO.
         | 
         | Google docs and sheets are OK. I'm not sure how those are
         | leveraging ML but it's the same deal as with GMail. I've used
         | Office365, G-Suite and Libre Office running locally and as for
         | features the only difference in functionality that I can
         | observe is cloud vs local; if that's not a factor then they are
         | all interchangeable.
         | 
         | So I don't see how being "AI First" has improved the end user
         | experience. I liked their products much better 10 years ago.
        
       | thexumaker wrote:
       | They should've just maintained what they were doing and not
       | follow in the footsteps of Tesla/Microsoft with their shit
       | implementations
        
       | robofanatic wrote:
       | as a developer I ran few tests on ChatGPT for example "write me a
       | javascript code that does canvas animation" it was amazing to see
       | it write actual working code. but it took about a minute to write
       | it. If I had "Googled" the same thing, in under a second I would
       | have found multiple working code examples (thanks to sites like
       | StackOverflow). IMO, ChatGPT has a long way to go.
        
         | abm53 wrote:
         | Often what you'd like to do has not been asked for exactly
         | before.
         | 
         | And almost all programmers need to do something quick in a
         | language or framework they aren't experts in.
         | 
         | ChatGPT can be extremely useful in those cases in my
         | experience.
        
       | yalogin wrote:
       | The writing is on the wall. Sundar hasn't done anything but
       | maintain the status quo at Google. That is a loss for google,
       | particularly GCP didn't gain any market share, couldn't
       | productize their self driving car platform effectively, the ad
       | market is facing increased pressure from all governments. I see
       | him replaced soon or some activist investor demanding some
       | changes.
        
         | ragnarsson wrote:
         | Failure of Self driving certainly can't be attributed to
         | Sundar. Yes GCP has obviously failed.
         | 
         | What Sundar has done well is the AI first focus. Deepmind
         | acquisition was key and they are developing their own chat
         | thing which very well might bail them out. Thanks to him,
         | Google spends a large amount in AI related R&D.
         | 
         | What Sundar's main issue is his philosophy of "Reward Effort,
         | Not Outcomes". This leads to people pretending to work hard,
         | releasing half baked products. Instead he should change this to
         | awarding long term outcomes.
         | 
         | His other issue is that he is not a good storyteller (e.g. like
         | Nadella). Being a non-founder CEO he needs to work on this.
        
           | ur-whale wrote:
           | > Deepmind acquisition was key
           | 
           | Name _one thing_ Deepmind produced that had a tangible
           | positive impact on Google 's bottom line.
        
       | vouaobrasil wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | endisneigh wrote:
         | why not?
        
       | dang wrote:
       | We changed the URL from
       | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/google-employees-cri...
       | to the article that one is pointing to.
       | 
       | Submitters: " _Please submit the original source. If a post
       | reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._
       | "- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
       | 
       | Recent and related:
       | 
       |  _Google employees criticize CEO for 'rushed, botched'
       | announcement of Bard_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 - Feb 2023 (36
       | comments)
        
       | kubota wrote:
       | Whatever happened to move fast and break things? Who cares if it
       | wasn't perfect in the first iteration. It was a shot across
       | ChatGPTs bow, and pleased the shareholders.
        
         | outside1234 wrote:
         | That was Facebook. Google is move slow and have your PR
         | nitpicked eight times.
        
         | malfist wrote:
         | Move fast and break things don't apply if your "break things"
         | cooks the golden goose
        
         | jmathai wrote:
         | I don't think any Google shareholders are happy with the stock
         | price after their announcement.
        
         | mritchie712 wrote:
         | The criticism is valid. It was a pre-recorded demo with 3
         | bullets and they got one wrong. Easily could have fact checked
         | it before publishing it.
         | 
         | It would have been forgivable in a live demo, but they didn't
         | do one because they "lost"[0] the phone.
         | 
         | 0 - There's a chance they didn't do the demo on purpose because
         | it wasn't ready.
        
         | lokar wrote:
         | Wrong company
        
       | Zetice wrote:
       | Will anyone remember how Bard was released in 5 years, if it
       | delivers on its promises? I doubt it, so the hand wringing over a
       | stumble this early seems overblown.
        
         | hnfong wrote:
         | It signals incompetence at the highest levels of Google, and
         | that's bad for the company.
        
           | Zetice wrote:
           | [dead]
        
         | falcor84 wrote:
         | Even though Windows 98 was an overall long-term success, the
         | blue screen that popped up during their live demo left a
         | memorable impression, and arguably led to a significantly
         | slower adoption.
         | 
         | Wikipedia that describes this as such [0]:
         | 
         | > ...when presentation assistant Chris Capossela plugged a USB
         | scanner in, the operating system crashed, displaying a Blue
         | Screen of Death. Bill Gates remarked after derisive applause
         | and cheering from the audience, "That must be why we're not
         | shipping Windows 98 yet." Video footage of this event became a
         | popular Internet phenomenon.
         | 
         | In a subsequent paragraph about the sales Wikipedia says:
         | 
         | >In the first year of its release, Windows 98 ... had a market
         | share of 17.2 percent, compared to Windows 95's 57.4 percent
         | 
         | And it's definitely not just me who still remembers this.
         | There's for example an article from the Register reviewing it
         | 20 years after [1].
         | 
         | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98?wprov=sfla1
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
        
           | Zetice wrote:
           | So in other words, no it's ultimately not important if the
           | idea is good, which Bard seems to be.
           | 
           | It seems more indicative of leadership quality that Google
           | had this in their back pocket, ready to go shortly after
           | someone else did the market validation for them.
        
       | belter wrote:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402
        
       | tonymet wrote:
       | I hope this helps shake up Google's product marketing which
       | hasn't met expectations. Poor segmentation, poor GTM, poor
       | messaging, poor community engagement , poor CTAs on marketing
       | messages.
       | 
       | Everyone's aware of the messaging-app missteps. I'll share a more
       | tactical example. Recently Google Home "beta" was launched with
       | lots of messaging via email & twitter to join the Beta. All of
       | the CTAs were broken. The "beta" that was expected in days took a
       | couple months to land. Compare that to Bing ChatGPT Beta which
       | had a clear CTA into the enrollment program ( activate Edge,
       | Bing, etc) and waitlist.
       | 
       | Google has a strong community of fans but they do a poor job of
       | engaging their audience. Microsoft by comparison has MSDN, MS
       | Insiders, etc.
       | 
       | The Bard (horrible name, btw) debacle was not a singular event
       | but a culmination of many product marketing issues. As a fan, i
       | hope they make some big changes.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Gpt as everyone that uses it extensively by now only excel in
       | certain tasks. There is a lot of bias towards it being "great" as
       | many of its answers look really plausible and not verified
       | because what's the point of using Chatgpt if I have to google
       | again to verify?
       | 
       | In my view this is overhyped as a google replacement and the
       | cracks are showing.
        
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