29 ms·

Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

261 points by retskrad 4y ago

ninethirty 4y ago
Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Social was able to achieve everything it was expected from it, most of the content on internet went behind walls unreachable by Google. Google missed out on that but didn't lose it's ground much or its losses were compensated by their success in mobile. The difference this time is, the new shiny thing goes directly into Google territory.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Google didn’t “succeed” in mobile financially. Android historical doesn’t bring that much of a profit in mobile compared to its popularity (that came out in the Oracle trial) and has to pay Apple close to $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Google Play Services is not that much of a money maker and it sells about as many phones in a year as Apple sells in a couple of weeks
    - twelve40 4y ago
      yeah but imagine if they didn't support Android, they would have been at complete mercy of apple! but currently Apple can't touch 70% of the phones, and it's an enormous financial incentive.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        I’m not saying that it wasn’t a decent defensive move. But the 70% of people who are buying Androids aren’t statistically the most desirable customers with the highest income and Google is completely absent in mobile in the worlds largest market - China.
- ricardo81 4y ago
  Always thought that social was Google's missing magic ingredient, just as much for associating content creators with identities. structured data/schema goes some way in addressing that. They're very good at measuring the intent of the searcher, perhaps not so good at measuring the intent of why a ranking page existed in the first place. Perhaps gets harder when more AI-like content will appear.
- p1mrx 4y ago
  AI scales better than social, because it works if you have no friends.
- xnx 4y ago
  Social was/is a threat because it puts lots of useful content/information for indexing behind a login that Google (and other competitors) can't access for training data.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  Google+ was good until google lost its mind and started shoving it everywhere- even I as a google+ user HATED this. It was to me the social network for grownups without the Facebook clickbait - I liked the circles model too (I did one for professional stuff one for personal) and great photos support. But then someone was put in charge who lost their mind and just started wrecking products (YouTube etc) with plus and it was chaos.
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    > It was to me the social network for grownups without the Facebook clickbait - I liked the circles model too (I did one for professional stuff one for personal) and great photos support. There was probably no viable business model for that as it was, closest is LinkedIn, which is rife with influencers, grifting and inspirational chain mail.
  - pks016 4y ago
    Same. I was avid Google+ user. Circles were great. I had made many friends with varied interests.
    - onphonenow 4y ago
      I thought there was going to be a slow build in users as folks got sick if Facebook etc. It was nicely contenty and bloggy feeling.
  - latency-guy2 4y ago
    Google+ was not popular though, the whole point of forcing everyone to have G+ was to get MAU explosion to rival FB. Without it, they would not compete in enough time. It was a poor decision, and I agree as a consumer that this time period sucked. But I understand why the push was made. G+ only bet was to get everyone to use at once and right away. I don't agree with the assessment of someone losing their mind in this ordeal, it was the only option they had to otherwise be second bitch at best for perpetuity.
- sytelus 4y ago
  Moving out of social will turn out to be their big mistake. They should have stayed persistent. The data is the new king and absolute differentiator in the world of AI. Facebook is fortunately sleeping at wheel. Musk is quickly realizing how important this is and have already turned off 3rd party access.
  - bagacrap 4y ago
    they are out of social? what is YouTube? To me it's almost indistinguishable from Instagram at this point. The only difference is that some of the content I consume on IG is from my friends, but those are not monetizable interactions and it's almost completely separate from the content creator content consumption I do there. So YouTube is basically IG minus the unprofitable part.
patientplatypus 4y ago
[dead]
CommanderData 4y ago
If it's as privacy intrusive as the rest of its products I won't use it neither promote it. Its the main reason most non tech savys avoided buying Google home. But the product teams are tone deaf. Bring on a privacy first system/eco system!
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  Apple has privacy in the forefront of its ecosystem.
  - m463 4y ago
    Apple has privacy in its marketing, but honestly they are intrusive in every way. Take a look at the processes or network traffic from any mac or iphone.
    - hdhrufjdi 4y ago
      Take a look at their messaging service that they marketed for years as E2EE while it was closed source and uploaded the chat messages readable by Apple to the cloud
      - agumonkey 4y ago
        weak encryption or clear format ?
        acdha 4y ago
        Encrypted with shared keys. This wasn’t accurately described in the comment you’re replying to: iMessage is fully E2E but the offload feature which allows you to save space on your phone wasn’t. That helps in the lost phone scenario but not if you’re worried about subpoenas under a hostile government. Prior to the recent advanced protection program, you could avoid that by not enabling backup for messages. Now you can choose whether data recovery is more important than E2E to you.
  - 4y ago
xiphias2 4y ago
It's funny that in another thread I was just talking about Jeff Dean or Dennis Hassabis being a much better Google CEO than Sundar. He shouldn't ,,present a solution''. He should take over incompetent leadership.
- xdavidliu 4y ago
  which "he" do you mean?
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    In the article it's Jeff Dean.
- KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
  Wasn't Jeff Dean the executive in charge of TensorFlow when it tanked?
paganel 4y ago
Related, and I'm most probably missing something, but is there a way to use/test ChatGPT without having to create an account on OpenAI?
- csomar 4y ago
  They are the least “open” company out there. They are also nosy about your business and always “afraid” you are doing something you shouldn’t be doing. Unless you are paying for the API of course. They went from very open to very closed and “private” to open up again because competition caught up with them (lookup mid-journey for example).
  - swyx 4y ago
    demonstrably untrue; between google announcing models but never releasing them and anthropic being invite only theres plenty of competition for that title
    - csomar 4y ago
      I would not have criticized if they started as a "private" AI company, or hey, just an AI company trying to figure it out in this market. Every one is. However, they took the higher morale ground and named themselves as such: OpenAI. And as soon as they had some good results (gpt-2 and gpt-3) they flipped instantly. I think, they thought, that they had a unique edge comparing to anyone else, and they'll own the market. They are wrong, and I think in the future, they'll be just another AI company out there.
  - d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
    WAR IS PEACE IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH FREEDOM IS SLAVERY … CLOSED IS OPEN
- blondin 4y ago
  no. there are a few restricted applications built on top of it. but if you want direct interaction, you need to create an account.
- 4y ago
adenozine 4y ago
I perceive google as a less stable company than most. An equally effective product in any of the areas they occupy, coupled with leadership and commitment to not shut the product down after six months isn’t that high of a bar to compete with, should someone else desire. The real issue is Google is in bed with the CIA and many other agencies and are willing to play ball for all kinds of kickbacks. Competing with their products has a technically feasible angle, but competing their position within the power structure of the non-separated tech and state? Impossible, at this point.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Google has lots of useful products that aren’t advertising-based, but they mostly seem to be loss leaders. It seems by their own making, too: they famously shut down everything after a long enough experiment phase of, “how might we leverage this to sell ads?” Something like 80% of Google’s revenue is advertising.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    > Google has lots of useful products that aren’t advertising-based, but they mostly seem to be loss leaders. which ones ? I lost track of google products in the recent years
    - blondin 4y ago
      youtube, GCP, android/pixel.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      The stuff they charge for that makes up the rest of their revenue: Cloud, Photos, Drive storage, YouTube Premium, etc.
      - agumonkey 4y ago
        I've been so used to them being builtin android google apps I forgot there were options.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kossTKR 4y ago
After trying out their adwords platform for a year combined with the fact that search in general has plummeted in quality i can't wait for them to crash completely. Adwords is such a scummy endeavour that squeezes more or less all companies using it, but more so smaller players. They are not a friendly company. They are a MegaCorp that is so monopolistic and dark (design) in its behaviours it's incredible that it's legal. Hope alternatives would be better.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > dark design I wonder how much of Google's revenue is from Foobarbazz Corp buying ads for Foobarbazz searches. The conversion rate for those searches is probably really high since the consumer was going there anyway. It is like a silent agreement between marketing folks and Google to pretend it is value for money.
  - flik 4y ago
    Google tax. Why such patterns are not outlawed?
    - nindalf 4y ago
      Why don’t you think through the implications of your question? You say outlawed. Ok then, write a hypothetical law that would outlaw this behaviour. Remember, this law should be general enough to apply to advertising or internet advertising in general. The more specific it gets (“search engine advertising firm beginning with G”) the less likely it’ll stand up to judicial scrutiny. It would only take a second for you to realise that the answer to your question is “it’s not done because it’s hard to formulate a law that’s fair, will pass judicial review, won’t be circumvented, won’t lead to unintended consequences and will achieve the intended effect”. All that before we get to lobbying. Because even if you formulate this perfect law, there’s still an open question of how you plan to enact this legislation.
      - psychphysic 4y ago
arlcode 4y ago
I wonder where Google ("improving quality to compete") and Open ai/Microsoft ("reducing quality to advertise") will end up meeting. If GPTSearch ends up as infested with spam and ads as Google it will be little more than a new input interface with embedded ads in the output. Part of the appeal right now (for me) is it's lack of SEO spam and over the top ads. That won't last (obviously), at least not for their mainstream implementation.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  I still would pay for good search without ads. Definitely google should make more than me clicking ads, which, in the past 20 years (or however long it is that google has apps), happened 0 times. I know why, but there must be a model that works like that?
  - berdon 4y ago
    Kagi.com - paid for, ad free, searching. I don’t work for Kagi, just a very, very happy user.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    I would do too but apparently big companies doing search right now aren't interested. To me at least there is no indication that AI will fundamentally change that (unfortunately).
grumpyprole 4y ago
I've played with ChatGPT and see it as (at best) just complimentary to existing approaches. Unfortunately, I also see it as a vector of misinformation and potentially harmful. It appears highly knowledgeable on topics that I know little about, but otherwise it's replies are often riddled with errors and inaccuracies. It also seems unable to quote sources or references for such information. It seems reasonable to use a statistical process to generate conversational chat and boilerplate, but as a source of truth, it appears not.
- RheingoldRiver 4y ago
  I think this is called Knoll's law of media accuracy [0] or wikipedia [1] - "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge". Interestingly enough, I tried asking ChatGPT what it was before googling it, and it confidently told me I was asking about "Confirmation Bias." But then when I told it what I was talking about was indeed Knoll's Law, it got the definition of the law completely wrong! > I apologize for any confusion. You are correct, what you're describing is known as "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy." It states that the accuracy of a story is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in its reporting, and the distance from the original source of information. In other words, the more people involved in reporting a story, the more likely it is to be inaccurate, and the further away the story is from the original source, the more likely it is to be inaccurate. This is one of the worst answers the bot has ever given me, and I've asked it a wide variety of prompts, from things I know to things I don't, including having it generate me fictional responses. [0] https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll
  - waterhouse 4y ago
    Approximately the same phenomenon is also known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It comes up on HN a lot, but for those who haven't encountered it before: > You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
clumsysmurf 4y ago
> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time). The more AI Google applies to my life, the more I want to escape it. I remember, when it was said people pay a premium for Apple products because they want privacy. I wonder if it will also become, people migrate to Apple to escape AI.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Apple still do plenty of AI, no? Eg the whole horse-detection thing. Maybe it’s something more specific that you dislike?
  - spiffytech 4y ago
    I'm with the OP. I sometimes like AI capabilities, but I don't like my phone making AI decisions or predictions on my behalf. E.g., if I open the share menu, whatever contacts and apps Google guesses are always wrong, and a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better. I also don't want any "smart" contextual behavior (widgets changing out throughout the day, etc.). The phone simply doesn't have enough context to know what I want from it at any given moment. I'd rather just tell it how to behave using my own judgement.
    - waisbrot 4y ago
      > a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better A decent AI system would include a heavy bias toward recent. Good "AI" should mostly feel like dumb heuristics. I think a good example is directions on my iPhone: when it's plugged into a car it always suggests driving directions. When there's something in my calendar soon it suggests going there. If there's not and I'm not at home it often suggests going home (it's right more than half the time). After that, it just offers a list of buttons for places I've told it about: home, work, school. I'd be annoyed if it tried to do something more clever (like suggesting the post office because I went there on this day last year). I think a key element is that I have an immediate and intuitive idea of why its suggestion is a reasonable one.
tjpnz 4y ago
20 new AI based products this year? We might need to order some headstones.
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  The trick is to capitalise on their inevitable early death!
roenxi 4y ago
> The demo for the chatbot search says Google will prioritize “getting facts right, ensuring safety and getting rid of misinformation,” This goes to the chaotic problem which is still to be decided. There is no consensus position on what facts are, what is safe and what is misinformation. Part of the success of modern democracy hinges on being able to switch the leadership out with people who have a different frame on life than the old group. Yesterday's misinformation can become tomorrows facts (consider, famously, the impact Snowden had on the conversation). Can a company as large as Google do this without splitting their own market along various political boundaries? Will they be forced to take religious, political and moral positions? Will they be out-competed by more neutral or more partisan chatbots? If chatbots become a big deal, will the target audience scale like search did or is it fundamentally fragmented?
- nprateem 4y ago
  You're talking about interpretation. Facts are facts.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    There are a vast many important and meaningful questions someone can type into Google that don't have a single factual answer. At that point, credibility, sourcing etc all matter a lot and misinformation is dangerous.
  - skytreader 4y ago
    Thing is, short of mathematical definitions, everything is subject to some bias, any sufficiently-complex statement is just an interpretation of various signals. Moreover, the threshold for "sufficiently-complex" isn't really so high. In other words, there aren't really facts (in the sense of being "absolute truths") but just Justified True Beliefs, which means Google essentially has to solve the Gettier Problem (https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/ https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/). Examples: There is no medical fact that smoking is bad for you but there is medical consensus that smoking shortens your life expectancy. Of course, the consensus does not preclude that there might be some nonagenarian in Fiji or Japan who's smoked a pack a day since he was 20 and is still chopping woods for fuel. I don't know what exactly GP is saying about Snowden but pre-Snowden, it's a justifiable belief that, among other things, your webcam will only turn on when you tell it to. Post-Snowden that belief might no longer be so justifiable.
lnsru 4y ago
Google is getting worse and worse. Today I searched for exact term “boat skipper b”. Google threw ton of trash at me. Ended looking through Bing results and found what I needed. 2/3 of my Google searches are not usable to me. Some advertisement and shady websites as results.
- layer8 4y ago
  Search Tools > Verbatim I have that option preset in the googling shortcut I use. The URL parameter for that is "tbs=li:1", see https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-power-search-url-request-parameters/ https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-p....
  - amelius 4y ago
    I wish we could use version numbers or just say "Use Google from 2010".
- M4v3R 4y ago
  I recently switched to Kagi and it’s the first time I don’t want to go back to Google. And I tried many other search engines in the past, none of them stuck with me.
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    Indeed for technical queries it really feels like a verbatim depth crawler and really makes me feel like a search 'power-user' again. For product search or regional results it's still not there but I specifically pay for Kagi for technical queries (after growing frustration with other engines) and I am very happy with that use-case.
    - M4v3R 4y ago
      Correct, for up-to-date and regional queries Kagi still is a bit lacking, it's the only reason I sometimes fire up Google.
- 4y ago
chinathrow 4y ago
They could have fixed search just fine but opted to focus too much on ads...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kgbcia 4y ago
Reading that mass firing email by Sundar, I noticed it was littered with reference to AI.
funstuff007 4y ago
I would posit that it's more Microsoft freaking out over ChatGPT than Google. MSFT will never get that $10 billion back.
- amelius 4y ago
  They could get multiples of that $10B back if they sold it to investors now. Remember, in today's world you don't even need a viable product to make loads of money.
  - funstuff007 4y ago
    > They could get multiples of that $10B back if they sold it to investors now. Maybe so, but MSFT is not a mark-to-market / opportunistic trader.
- Avalaxy 4y ago
  > MSFT will never get that $10 billion back Easily. By integrating it into their developer tools, office suite, Azure, Dynamics, etc. You can automate/support SO many tasks with the toolsuite that OpenAI offers. In addition to that, the way I understand it they can simply make money by licensing others to use those tools. They already started offering the OpenAI services through Azure.
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    I assume ChatGPT will cost around $1 per query for consumers. That's low enough to put human copywriters out of business, but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks. So eventually this is some sort complex of B2B product, and that is very difficult to execute.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You’re literally off by an order of magnitude. Each query costs around 1 cent from every article I’ve seen. > but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks. And “640K ought to be enough for anyone”. Of course this will get cheaper over time as compute gets cheaper and the cloud providers design custom chips optimized for it.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
I don't understand why they freak out. Every single time I have used ChatGPT (which isn't many), it gave me an absolutely unusable answer completely off the mark. It's funny to see FAANG CEOs have FOMO over what is essentially smoke and mirrors.
- wiihack 4y ago
  Could you provide an example of what you're asking for? It appears to work well for me. I would estimate that 80% of the answers are very good, and 10% provide at least a glimpse of the information I was seeking.
  - gmiller123456 4y ago
    One of the first things I asked it to do was to "write a program to compute the rise and set times of a star". It got a couple of pieces right, but was way off the mark. I asked it a few other astronomy related questions, and it would try to use a library like Astropy, but make API calls that don't exist. I tried things like "don't use Astropy", and it would just switch to a different library. It seems to do OK on things like the instructions for Fizz-Buzz.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  I would guess they are less concerned about where ChatGPT is today than where it will be in 5 years.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Even more convincing when it is wrong?
    - jerjerjer 4y ago
      ChatGPT lacks the ability to prove that output is factually correct (which is an interesting but distinct problem). However, as long as the answer is derivative of supplied information, ChatGPT shines. Even today it can already: - Write coherent short stories based on a prompt - Be a personal diary/assistant - Summarize and extract information from text. There's a lot of applications for that.
college_physics 4y ago
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete. Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? It would be a blessing (presumably, because things can always drift further into evil) but, so far at least, there is little to point to such an imminent disruption
- mansoon 4y ago
  I remember that hope.
- karamanolev 4y ago
  Search existed before Google. They also didn't invent adtech. Instead of a marginal improvement, they made it so much better that the previous option looked silly. If such a disruption happens again to the core technology (e.g. search through a ChatGPT-like entity), whether the financial backing is adtech will be irrelevant.
- quadcore 4y ago
  Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? I think the revenue assumption here lies on the fact that GPT generates content when the web wait for the user to provide the content. Generates congent, for lawyers or hospitals for example - pardon my lack of imagination. So a basic business model would be to charge per request I suppose.
- geoduck14 4y ago
  I'm using GPT3.x to make money at work
- svantana 4y ago
  Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of esoteric, "school assignment" type queries, but they're not really a threat for the high-value searches.
chazeon 4y ago
I kind of feel they should be. I cannot remember what their last major customer-facing AI product launch after Google Assistant. Sure there is AI in photo tuning and many interesting features for the Pixel phone, and there is Gmail autocomplete but I remember I used to really following every Google product launch when I was a kid: there is Google Reader, Google Drive launch in those days. That excitement was kind of gone: all the new AI products feels like polished but conservative. The GPTs and Whisper really get me excited again these days though. But Google pioneered this field. I love their JAX, but in a way many people would love pytorch but not so much in the META company.
- closewith 4y ago
  Personally I've no interest in any new Google products because who knows when it may be discontinued with little or no notice. Most recently Optimize, but I've also been burned by Universal Analytics, Fusion Tables, goo.gl, and Google Site Search.
  - xnx 4y ago
    I did not know about the Google Optimize shutdown. That's a shame. Google Analytics might be the product they've bungled the most after chat (breaking upgrades, features moved out then moved back, enhanced ecommerce, etc.).
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > I love their JAX For those out of loop: https://github.com/google/jax https://github.com/google/jax See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682507
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Interesting that the Jax page still says it's not an official google product (a recent Research publication said it was).
- kyrra 4y ago
  There is https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/, but sadly it's not consumer facing yet.
ivansavz 4y ago
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/3hAkR https://archive.is/3hAkR
sorenjan 4y ago
What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company. In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  My impression is that he's not a leader but a care taker. This article kind of shows the two founders swooping in for some emergency leadership. That's not a good look. I think they've been coasting on their past glory for a decade now. Yes they make money but otherwise they are just doing more of the same and just building out the stuff they've had for more than a decade (Search, Ads, Youtube, Maps, Android, etc.). All the attempts to enter new markets seem to be a succession of failures. They are still playing catchup to AWS, and lately Azure. Stadia came and went. Youtube paid accounts are nowhere close to competing with the likes of Netflix, or Spotify. They failed to compete with Whatsapp as well repeatedly as well. And now they are taking on OpenAI. Sure Google has smart people. But it takes more than that. MS had lots of smart people under Ballmer as well. But it took Satya Nadella to sort out the mess he left behind and make that work for MS. He put an end to the Windows on anything agenda. One of the first things he did was kill Windows Phone (dead in the water at that point) and then opened up the MS ecosystem to Linux in a big way. Fast forward a few years and they've had a successful Github acquisition, most of the OSS world runs on MS Github, they've built Github co-pilot with OpenAI, you can run MS SQl Server on Linux now, .Net runs on Linux, you can run Linux on Windows really seamlessly. See a pattern here? Gates and Ballmer pulled up their nose for OSS, Nadella made MS a leader in OSS and is reaping the rewards. That's vision and leadership. At the time Google was stealing MS' thunder. Now the roles are reversed and Google needs to call in the founders to come up with a plan because of OpenAI. Which of course has deep ties with MS. Google needs leadership and strategy. Right now it has neither. What are they going to do? Build another chat client? I think they've tried that a few dozen times already. They need a better plan than that. And I don't think Sundar Pichai is capable of coming up with that plan.
  - 4y ago
bachmeier 4y ago
> More important to Google, it looked as if it could offer a new way to search for information on the internet. I'd scratch "new" from that sentence. If it was simply another option for searching, Google would not be worried. They've been milking their monopoly on search for years to sell ads, trading off the quality of search results for years, to the point that Google's useless for a wide range of searches. Now they're looking at a competitor that actually gives users what they need and they know they're screwed.
pm90 4y ago
Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course not. Sundar doesn’t seem exceptionally promising. It seems like he is an ok leader when things are going well but not so good in tougher times.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  They don’t need to believe it, they just need to believe that other people will believe in it. Even CEOs can get a lot of pushback and since they’re looking to do drastic changes it helps to get as much buy in as possible.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Simon Sinek has a really great point about companies endlessly pandering to shareholders, basically being equivalent to sports teams endlessly pandering to fans. The objective of a truly good coach/leader should be to successfully accomplish a goal, and often that will require making some portion of your "fans" unhappy. If coaches acted the way modern CEOs do, they'd only ever run one play
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Simon Sinek is a LinkedIn influencer with very limited insight into anything beyond sounding smart and sellong self-improvement books.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        >is a LinkedIn influencer the fact that this is a thing just makes me sad
        4y ago
xnx 4y ago
There's a surprisingly long and detailed blog post (https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyond-language.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyon...) which details some of what they have coming this year. It sounds like they're planning on taking some of the skunkworks/internal stuff and exposing it through products. Sidenote: I was surprised to see one of the charts even showing ChatGPT outperforming LaMBDA in one area.
- sytelus 4y ago
  That is exactly the problem and indicates a lack of grand vision. Releasing hodgepodge of internal projects is not same as rebuilding AI-first products.
jb1991 4y ago
> Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products I actually laughed out loud at that one.
- speedylight 4y ago
  You’ll laugh even harder when they get shut down a few years later.
  - jb1991 4y ago
    No, I'm already laughing for that exact reason.
  - PessimalDecimal 4y ago
    Years as in plural?
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
Oh, sure, they are in trouble. :DDDD
franze 4y ago
Long long time ago at a conference I did hold a talk (about something that is now common knowledge) that SEO is not a product, it's a channel. And an ad based revenue model does not work based on SEO. As as soon as the revenue (which is coupled with traffic) goes down you are inclined to just ad more ads or make ads more agressive, which counteracts good UX which will lead to further traffic loss, which leads to more ads... Google is not dependend on SEO, but as a defacto monopolist in search in the western world on user traffic. User traffic to search will go down from now on. Thx to AI assistants. Ads will go up, in aggressiveness and quantity, so their mai product will get worse and worse, fast. So, Google is toast. If they go down this road. Or, they go the opposite way. Less ads, more focus on UX including AI Assistants. Revenue comes later. But as we all know, Google will not go down that way. They are an ad business with a halfway decent search engine attached.
- sseagull 4y ago
  Larry Page and Sergey Brin were on record as saying that quality search results and ads are at odds. So at first they were generally against ads. Here's somewhat of a mention: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-engine-bias/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-... Can't say I blame them, though. See how well you stick to your convictions when someone waves a few billion in front of you :)
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  Ad free results is not always the best experience for everybody, or at least not in todays context. I remember hearing a commentator on a podcast (I forget if they worked for goog or not) who pointed out that so much of online activity is economic so that ads (pay for placement) is a powerful relevance indicator. I think the example they gave was if someone searches for “Taylor swift tickets” then they are more likely to be interested in the paid results from someone who wants to sell tickets than in the million forum posts discussing tickets (even tho they have the same keyword match). And their data proves this. Maybe there are ways to be “smart enough” to avoid this indicator, but a lot of “relevance” is a guess on user intention so seems like a damned if you do damned if you don’t.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
eric4smith 4y ago
A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding. Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google. It truly saves a lot of time. Google is right to be quite worried. Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before. Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds? And worse I can ask the Ai to write a short couple of paragraphs about each one. Then I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style. What do I do? I do online marketing and programming to support online marketing activities. I write. I plan. I code. I hire. We just taught a junior employee who is not great as a writer to use ChatGPT to help her with a good start to writing. The training for her was how to formulate detailed and highly specific “prompts” and to use google as a backup to confirm facts in the AI generated output. It’s not there to replace people’s work. It’s there to make them much, much more efficient.
- kirsebaer 4y ago
  ChatGPT often makes up facts. It outputs stuff that looks like it could have been written by a human, not stuff that is correct. Don’t use ChatGPT for medical research.
  - bognition 4y ago
    Absolutely the case, but also people make up stuff online all the time, so google has this exact same problem.
    - memen 4y ago
      No. Google gives you the source. ChatGPT does not.
      - plaidfuji 4y ago
        It’s funny because when I was in high school the argument was always “books, published articles and other print media are actual source material, Google doesn’t give you that”
sixQuarks 4y ago
Word is ChatGTP is going to start charging $42/month for advanced access to their service. Google currently makes about $6 per user for search. It seems like the revenue model for AI search is better suited as a monthly payment, no ads. So Google could charge, say $15/month, for AI Search, no ads, and still keep their regular search business. I wouldn't count Google out just yet, as much as I wish they would be disrupted. Search has become a joke
epolanski 4y ago
I think the OpenAI argument is overblown. While I do agree that AI is going to bring a huge shake up to the search market, I still believe that Google is in the best position to fight this battle. Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so. And then they are the company that's best suited to have this AI driven search in Android and Google search thus limiting the impact of this whole problem. Sure, maybe Microsoft will deprive them of some developers that will look for information inside VS Code or their editor, and stuff like that, but overall I don't see Google going to suffer that much as long as they are able to answer the ChatGPT challenge in a meaningful time, something they should be easily able to do given their immense computational and data resources.
- sdrinf 4y ago
  This iteration of shake-up is not strictly about tech superiority, though. Google probably already has a repro of ChatGPT running in their datacenters. Fundamentally, it's about product, and expectation shift. I am presently routinely having conversations, and for the first time in the history of the Internet, getting straight answers to moderately complex questions, and their follow-ups, in real time, from ChatGPT. Google's entire business model is "giving people pages on the Internet that might contain those answers", and some of those being paid for the user's clicks. If I get the full answer, instantly, wrapped in 2 paragraphs of text.... where do the ads go? Editorials inside the answer? Why would I click them?
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  - layer8 4y ago
    How do you verify that ChatGPT’s answer is accurate (it often enough isn’t), if not by googling?
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      You could use any search engine, and just gather 'decent' results -- scrape the first 3 results and compare using a new instance of a language model to tell you what's inaccurate in the first one based off the fine tuning data.
aww_dang 4y ago
Google: Don't shovel AI generated content into our search results. Google: We need to focus on AI generated content.
voisin 4y ago
AI wouldn’t be the threat to Google of yesteryear that it is today. It’s a threat only because Google killed search with ads overtaking the genuine effort to “index the world’s information”. If they hadn’t sold their soul for more of that sweet addictive ad revenue, ChatGPT would be an interesting niche sideshow.
pelasaco 4y ago
"This is a moment of significant vulnerability for Google", maybe I'm being cynical or too simplistic, but I just read it as: "Our stakeholders are going to be sad because they are not profiting as they wanted".. I cannot imagine google being in danger, because they are not leading that topic.
flybrand 4y ago
“Google sucks,” “search doesn’t show real results anymore,” and many similar comments are common in my world of heavy industry / manufacturing / b2b sales. They’ve been harvesting profits rather than making a better product. They should be freaked out.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I think this is hitting the nail on the head. AI and ChatGPT isn't even the point. The scary part is that Google appears to have cannibalized their own offering in order to keep their numbers black to the extent where they have no ostensible way of dealing with a credible competitor. Ironically, the young Page and Brin predicted the inherent conflict of interest between search and advertisement. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a With gems such as "For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine."
ajdoingnothing 4y ago
Perhaps, Google can finally start focusing again on creating quality products instead of nonsense videos/hypes like "Demonstrating Quantum Supremacy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU). However, would people even trust their new products knowing Google's tendency to kill off these products within a short amount of time?
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emrah 4y ago
> Google’s approach to AI in recent years has been conservative compared to some rivals Well yes of course. They are the incumbent and they've been in cash generating mode for a while. With a large lead over "competitors", if we can even call them that, and a virtual monopoly status in the both the ad space and search space, it's perfectly normal for Google to move at a glacial pace. They have no external need or intrinsic motivation to do otherwise at this point in time. That is, until an actual threat shows up.. I honestly don't think ChatGPT is a real threat except they are getting a lot of attention and they are the new David to Google's Goliath so they are a psychological threat more than a technical one
- bagacrap 4y ago
  their market share in the total ad market is very far from a monopoly
nextstep 4y ago
I was working there when they freaked out about Facebook and made everyone integrate with Google+. I wonder if they learned anything from that mess.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/uvBUI https://archive.ph/uvBUI http://web.archive.org/web/20230122161859/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/technology/google-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230122161859/https://www.nytime...
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
Sundar's weakness is the cause of this, and unfortunately Page and Brin have never been extraordinarily effective executives. Google's early product and culture was fantastic for building one has emerged as one of the most powerful network effects in the web, but nobody can doubt the unbelievable mismanagement of Google X, Google Brain, DeepMind, countless other cancelled products. The answer is a new executive who gets it.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  indeed. Sundar has said that he takes responsibility for the mismanagement of the company's resources over the last few years, but it's not clear what that actually means. I have some faith in Ruth Porat but they need a c-suite member who has an equivalent eye for product.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
With all those smart trillion weights models, can't they figure out which page is a useless keyword trap (90% of what google search finds these days) and which is a genuine useful page? Would be a huge help.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  the web might just lack genuine, useful, reliable information for most queries. People here love to remark that they prefix every query with "reddit" but ime the only difference is that they've tricked themselves into thinking their results are worth something.
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can16358p 4y ago
Google's monopolistic search business is seriously challenged for the first time. Good. We need more competition.
- nmz 4y ago
  Not really, search is a solved problem, apart from the politics that eliminate search results. There really shouldn't be more than 2 search engines around.
broknbottle 4y ago
It speaks volumes about current leaderships abilities when a potential threat pops up and they have call upon the checked out founders.. It's like somebody mentioned Balmer being the most lackluster CEO and Sundar was like "hold my beer"
sytelus 4y ago
A decade ago, I had calculated that a startup would need at least $1B (but more likely $4B) of capex to match Google if trying to use conventional crawl/index tech. With conventional tech, quality upper bound is more or less fixed so you are forced to match breadth to compete which is super expensive. With model-based index, you need less than $100M capex to turn on the proverbial flywheel because you can now sacrifice breadth for very different notion of quality. This is a game changer because we will soon see dozen or so strong startups which will chip away the search share, each trying to leverage, cost optimize and improve this tech.
fbn79 4y ago
In the past many things have been considered a serius threat fo Google monopoly: - Facebook (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on Facebook) - Apple App Store (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on App store) - Reddit platform (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on Reddit) - Voice Assistant (on day people will do not search on Google, but will ask to a voice assistant and get just one right result) - ChatGPT (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly ask to chatGPT). Of all this threat chatgpt is probably the least dangerous because there is no way to always get a correct aswer (or the better answer internet can offer).
bg24 4y ago
Technology wise, ChatGPT is not a challenge for Google. It was a blessing that OpenAI is charging $42 for premium tier. Google very much can build a similar/better offering in a near term and would not have to worry about losing ad $$, as it will be compensated from a paid product. The challenge is execution. Most of the leadership have done amazingly great, but only when they had no competition. For FB, Cloud, Gaming, AR, self-driving cars - they could not do much. They did great on Android and Nest - both were founder led for a while. Right now, OpenAI is adding new features like crazy - they are a startup. Google may have better engineers, but they will lag behind in execution. Plus, changing a 20yr search+ad mindset in a month is hard.
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psychphysic 4y ago
I don't know how common this is but we have a massive disruptor (chatGPT) and economic problems at the same time. Every big tech company should be freaking out. It's fat trimmin' time.
mshaler 4y ago
Cory Doctorow called this with the formal notion well-described in this essay: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

261 points by retskrad 4y ago

Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.

mrtksn 4y ago
Social was able to achieve everything it was expected from it, most of the content on internet went behind walls unreachable by Google. Google missed out on that but didn't lose it's ground much or its losses were compensated by their success in mobile. The difference this time is, the new shiny thing goes directly into Google territory.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Google didn’t “succeed” in mobile financially. Android historical doesn’t bring that much of a profit in mobile compared to its popularity (that came out in the Oracle trial) and has to pay Apple close to $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Google Play Services is not that much of a money maker and it sells about as many phones in a year as Apple sells in a couple of weeks
  - twelve40 4y ago
    yeah but imagine if they didn't support Android, they would have been at complete mercy of apple! but currently Apple can't touch 70% of the phones, and it's an enormous financial incentive.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I’m not saying that it wasn’t a decent defensive move. But the 70% of people who are buying Androids aren’t statistically the most desirable customers with the highest income and Google is completely absent in mobile in the worlds largest market - China.
ricardo81 4y ago
Always thought that social was Google's missing magic ingredient, just as much for associating content creators with identities. structured data/schema goes some way in addressing that. They're very good at measuring the intent of the searcher, perhaps not so good at measuring the intent of why a ranking page existed in the first place. Perhaps gets harder when more AI-like content will appear.
p1mrx 4y ago
AI scales better than social, because it works if you have no friends.
xnx 4y ago
Social was/is a threat because it puts lots of useful content/information for indexing behind a login that Google (and other competitors) can't access for training data.
onphonenow 4y ago
Google+ was good until google lost its mind and started shoving it everywhere- even I as a google+ user HATED this. It was to me the social network for grownups without the Facebook clickbait - I liked the circles model too (I did one for professional stuff one for personal) and great photos support. But then someone was put in charge who lost their mind and just started wrecking products (YouTube etc) with plus and it was chaos.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  > It was to me the social network for grownups without the Facebook clickbait - I liked the circles model too (I did one for professional stuff one for personal) and great photos support. There was probably no viable business model for that as it was, closest is LinkedIn, which is rife with influencers, grifting and inspirational chain mail.
- pks016 4y ago
  Same. I was avid Google+ user. Circles were great. I had made many friends with varied interests.
  - onphonenow 4y ago
    I thought there was going to be a slow build in users as folks got sick if Facebook etc. It was nicely contenty and bloggy feeling.
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  Google+ was not popular though, the whole point of forcing everyone to have G+ was to get MAU explosion to rival FB. Without it, they would not compete in enough time. It was a poor decision, and I agree as a consumer that this time period sucked. But I understand why the push was made. G+ only bet was to get everyone to use at once and right away. I don't agree with the assessment of someone losing their mind in this ordeal, it was the only option they had to otherwise be second bitch at best for perpetuity.
sytelus 4y ago
Moving out of social will turn out to be their big mistake. They should have stayed persistent. The data is the new king and absolute differentiator in the world of AI. Facebook is fortunately sleeping at wheel. Musk is quickly realizing how important this is and have already turned off 3rd party access.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  they are out of social? what is YouTube? To me it's almost indistinguishable from Instagram at this point. The only difference is that some of the content I consume on IG is from my friends, but those are not monetizable interactions and it's almost completely separate from the content creator content consumption I do there. So YouTube is basically IG minus the unprofitable part.

patientplatypus 4y ago

[dead]

CommanderData 4y ago

If it's as privacy intrusive as the rest of its products I won't use it neither promote it. Its the main reason most non tech savys avoided buying Google home. But the product teams are tone deaf. Bring on a privacy first system/eco system!

imoverclocked 4y ago
Apple has privacy in the forefront of its ecosystem.
- m463 4y ago
  Apple has privacy in its marketing, but honestly they are intrusive in every way. Take a look at the processes or network traffic from any mac or iphone.
  - hdhrufjdi 4y ago
    Take a look at their messaging service that they marketed for years as E2EE while it was closed source and uploaded the chat messages readable by Apple to the cloud
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      weak encryption or clear format ?
      - acdha 4y ago
        Encrypted with shared keys. This wasn’t accurately described in the comment you’re replying to: iMessage is fully E2E but the offload feature which allows you to save space on your phone wasn’t. That helps in the lost phone scenario but not if you’re worried about subpoenas under a hostile government. Prior to the recent advanced protection program, you could avoid that by not enabling backup for messages. Now you can choose whether data recovery is more important than E2E to you.
- 4y ago

xiphias2 4y ago

It's funny that in another thread I was just talking about Jeff Dean or Dennis Hassabis being a much better Google CEO than Sundar. He shouldn't ,,present a solution''. He should take over incompetent leadership.

xdavidliu 4y ago
which "he" do you mean?
- xiphias2 4y ago
  In the article it's Jeff Dean.
KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
Wasn't Jeff Dean the executive in charge of TensorFlow when it tanked?

paganel 4y ago

Related, and I'm most probably missing something, but is there a way to use/test ChatGPT without having to create an account on OpenAI?

csomar 4y ago
They are the least “open” company out there. They are also nosy about your business and always “afraid” you are doing something you shouldn’t be doing. Unless you are paying for the API of course. They went from very open to very closed and “private” to open up again because competition caught up with them (lookup mid-journey for example).
- swyx 4y ago
  demonstrably untrue; between google announcing models but never releasing them and anthropic being invite only theres plenty of competition for that title
  - csomar 4y ago
    I would not have criticized if they started as a "private" AI company, or hey, just an AI company trying to figure it out in this market. Every one is. However, they took the higher morale ground and named themselves as such: OpenAI. And as soon as they had some good results (gpt-2 and gpt-3) they flipped instantly. I think, they thought, that they had a unique edge comparing to anyone else, and they'll own the market. They are wrong, and I think in the future, they'll be just another AI company out there.
- d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
  WAR IS PEACE IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH FREEDOM IS SLAVERY … CLOSED IS OPEN
blondin 4y ago
no. there are a few restricted applications built on top of it. but if you want direct interaction, you need to create an account.
4y ago

adenozine 4y ago

I perceive google as a less stable company than most. An equally effective product in any of the areas they occupy, coupled with leadership and commitment to not shut the product down after six months isn’t that high of a bar to compete with, should someone else desire. The real issue is Google is in bed with the CIA and many other agencies and are willing to play ball for all kinds of kickbacks. Competing with their products has a technically feasible angle, but competing their position within the power structure of the non-separated tech and state? Impossible, at this point.

Waterluvian 4y ago
Google has lots of useful products that aren’t advertising-based, but they mostly seem to be loss leaders. It seems by their own making, too: they famously shut down everything after a long enough experiment phase of, “how might we leverage this to sell ads?” Something like 80% of Google’s revenue is advertising.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  > Google has lots of useful products that aren’t advertising-based, but they mostly seem to be loss leaders. which ones ? I lost track of google products in the recent years
  - blondin 4y ago
    youtube, GCP, android/pixel.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    The stuff they charge for that makes up the rest of their revenue: Cloud, Photos, Drive storage, YouTube Premium, etc.
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      I've been so used to them being builtin android google apps I forgot there were options.

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kossTKR 4y ago

After trying out their adwords platform for a year combined with the fact that search in general has plummeted in quality i can't wait for them to crash completely. Adwords is such a scummy endeavour that squeezes more or less all companies using it, but more so smaller players. They are not a friendly company. They are a MegaCorp that is so monopolistic and dark (design) in its behaviours it's incredible that it's legal. Hope alternatives would be better.

rightbyte 4y ago
> dark design I wonder how much of Google's revenue is from Foobarbazz Corp buying ads for Foobarbazz searches. The conversion rate for those searches is probably really high since the consumer was going there anyway. It is like a silent agreement between marketing folks and Google to pretend it is value for money.
- flik 4y ago
  Google tax. Why such patterns are not outlawed?
  - nindalf 4y ago
    Why don’t you think through the implications of your question? You say outlawed. Ok then, write a hypothetical law that would outlaw this behaviour. Remember, this law should be general enough to apply to advertising or internet advertising in general. The more specific it gets (“search engine advertising firm beginning with G”) the less likely it’ll stand up to judicial scrutiny. It would only take a second for you to realise that the answer to your question is “it’s not done because it’s hard to formulate a law that’s fair, will pass judicial review, won’t be circumvented, won’t lead to unintended consequences and will achieve the intended effect”. All that before we get to lobbying. Because even if you formulate this perfect law, there’s still an open question of how you plan to enact this legislation.
    - psychphysic 4y ago

arlcode 4y ago

I wonder where Google ("improving quality to compete") and Open ai/Microsoft ("reducing quality to advertise") will end up meeting. If GPTSearch ends up as infested with spam and ads as Google it will be little more than a new input interface with embedded ads in the output. Part of the appeal right now (for me) is it's lack of SEO spam and over the top ads. That won't last (obviously), at least not for their mainstream implementation.

tluyben2 4y ago
I still would pay for good search without ads. Definitely google should make more than me clicking ads, which, in the past 20 years (or however long it is that google has apps), happened 0 times. I know why, but there must be a model that works like that?
- berdon 4y ago
  Kagi.com - paid for, ad free, searching. I don’t work for Kagi, just a very, very happy user.
- arlcode 4y ago
  I would do too but apparently big companies doing search right now aren't interested. To me at least there is no indication that AI will fundamentally change that (unfortunately).

grumpyprole 4y ago

I've played with ChatGPT and see it as (at best) just complimentary to existing approaches. Unfortunately, I also see it as a vector of misinformation and potentially harmful. It appears highly knowledgeable on topics that I know little about, but otherwise it's replies are often riddled with errors and inaccuracies. It also seems unable to quote sources or references for such information. It seems reasonable to use a statistical process to generate conversational chat and boilerplate, but as a source of truth, it appears not.

RheingoldRiver 4y ago
I think this is called Knoll's law of media accuracy [0] or wikipedia [1] - "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge". Interestingly enough, I tried asking ChatGPT what it was before googling it, and it confidently told me I was asking about "Confirmation Bias." But then when I told it what I was talking about was indeed Knoll's Law, it got the definition of the law completely wrong! > I apologize for any confusion. You are correct, what you're describing is known as "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy." It states that the accuracy of a story is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in its reporting, and the distance from the original source of information. In other words, the more people involved in reporting a story, the more likely it is to be inaccurate, and the further away the story is from the original source, the more likely it is to be inaccurate. This is one of the worst answers the bot has ever given me, and I've asked it a wide variety of prompts, from things I know to things I don't, including having it generate me fictional responses. [0] https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll
- waterhouse 4y ago
  Approximately the same phenomenon is also known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It comes up on HN a lot, but for those who haven't encountered it before: > You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

clumsysmurf 4y ago

> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time). The more AI Google applies to my life, the more I want to escape it. I remember, when it was said people pay a premium for Apple products because they want privacy. I wonder if it will also become, people migrate to Apple to escape AI.

dan-robertson 4y ago
Apple still do plenty of AI, no? Eg the whole horse-detection thing. Maybe it’s something more specific that you dislike?
- spiffytech 4y ago
  I'm with the OP. I sometimes like AI capabilities, but I don't like my phone making AI decisions or predictions on my behalf. E.g., if I open the share menu, whatever contacts and apps Google guesses are always wrong, and a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better. I also don't want any "smart" contextual behavior (widgets changing out throughout the day, etc.). The phone simply doesn't have enough context to know what I want from it at any given moment. I'd rather just tell it how to behave using my own judgement.
  - waisbrot 4y ago
    > a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better A decent AI system would include a heavy bias toward recent. Good "AI" should mostly feel like dumb heuristics. I think a good example is directions on my iPhone: when it's plugged into a car it always suggests driving directions. When there's something in my calendar soon it suggests going there. If there's not and I'm not at home it often suggests going home (it's right more than half the time). After that, it just offers a list of buttons for places I've told it about: home, work, school. I'd be annoyed if it tried to do something more clever (like suggesting the post office because I went there on this day last year). I think a key element is that I have an immediate and intuitive idea of why its suggestion is a reasonable one.

tjpnz 4y ago

20 new AI based products this year? We might need to order some headstones.

worthless-trash 4y ago
The trick is to capitalise on their inevitable early death!

roenxi 4y ago

> The demo for the chatbot search says Google will prioritize “getting facts right, ensuring safety and getting rid of misinformation,” This goes to the chaotic problem which is still to be decided. There is no consensus position on what facts are, what is safe and what is misinformation. Part of the success of modern democracy hinges on being able to switch the leadership out with people who have a different frame on life than the old group. Yesterday's misinformation can become tomorrows facts (consider, famously, the impact Snowden had on the conversation). Can a company as large as Google do this without splitting their own market along various political boundaries? Will they be forced to take religious, political and moral positions? Will they be out-competed by more neutral or more partisan chatbots? If chatbots become a big deal, will the target audience scale like search did or is it fundamentally fragmented?

nprateem 4y ago
You're talking about interpretation. Facts are facts.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  There are a vast many important and meaningful questions someone can type into Google that don't have a single factual answer. At that point, credibility, sourcing etc all matter a lot and misinformation is dangerous.
- skytreader 4y ago
  Thing is, short of mathematical definitions, everything is subject to some bias, any sufficiently-complex statement is just an interpretation of various signals. Moreover, the threshold for "sufficiently-complex" isn't really so high. In other words, there aren't really facts (in the sense of being "absolute truths") but just Justified True Beliefs, which means Google essentially has to solve the Gettier Problem (https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/ https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/). Examples: There is no medical fact that smoking is bad for you but there is medical consensus that smoking shortens your life expectancy. Of course, the consensus does not preclude that there might be some nonagenarian in Fiji or Japan who's smoked a pack a day since he was 20 and is still chopping woods for fuel. I don't know what exactly GP is saying about Snowden but pre-Snowden, it's a justifiable belief that, among other things, your webcam will only turn on when you tell it to. Post-Snowden that belief might no longer be so justifiable.

lnsru 4y ago

Google is getting worse and worse. Today I searched for exact term “boat skipper b”. Google threw ton of trash at me. Ended looking through Bing results and found what I needed. 2/3 of my Google searches are not usable to me. Some advertisement and shady websites as results.

layer8 4y ago
Search Tools > Verbatim I have that option preset in the googling shortcut I use. The URL parameter for that is "tbs=li:1", see https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-power-search-url-request-parameters/ https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-p....
- amelius 4y ago
  I wish we could use version numbers or just say "Use Google from 2010".
M4v3R 4y ago
I recently switched to Kagi and it’s the first time I don’t want to go back to Google. And I tried many other search engines in the past, none of them stuck with me.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  Indeed for technical queries it really feels like a verbatim depth crawler and really makes me feel like a search 'power-user' again. For product search or regional results it's still not there but I specifically pay for Kagi for technical queries (after growing frustration with other engines) and I am very happy with that use-case.
  - M4v3R 4y ago
    Correct, for up-to-date and regional queries Kagi still is a bit lacking, it's the only reason I sometimes fire up Google.
4y ago

chinathrow 4y ago

They could have fixed search just fine but opted to focus too much on ads...

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kgbcia 4y ago

Reading that mass firing email by Sundar, I noticed it was littered with reference to AI.

funstuff007 4y ago

I would posit that it's more Microsoft freaking out over ChatGPT than Google. MSFT will never get that $10 billion back.

amelius 4y ago
They could get multiples of that $10B back if they sold it to investors now. Remember, in today's world you don't even need a viable product to make loads of money.
- funstuff007 4y ago
  > They could get multiples of that $10B back if they sold it to investors now. Maybe so, but MSFT is not a mark-to-market / opportunistic trader.
Avalaxy 4y ago
> MSFT will never get that $10 billion back Easily. By integrating it into their developer tools, office suite, Azure, Dynamics, etc. You can automate/support SO many tasks with the toolsuite that OpenAI offers. In addition to that, the way I understand it they can simply make money by licensing others to use those tools. They already started offering the OpenAI services through Azure.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  I assume ChatGPT will cost around $1 per query for consumers. That's low enough to put human copywriters out of business, but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks. So eventually this is some sort complex of B2B product, and that is very difficult to execute.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You’re literally off by an order of magnitude. Each query costs around 1 cent from every article I’ve seen. > but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks. And “640K ought to be enough for anyone”. Of course this will get cheaper over time as compute gets cheaper and the cloud providers design custom chips optimized for it.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

I don't understand why they freak out. Every single time I have used ChatGPT (which isn't many), it gave me an absolutely unusable answer completely off the mark. It's funny to see FAANG CEOs have FOMO over what is essentially smoke and mirrors.

wiihack 4y ago
Could you provide an example of what you're asking for? It appears to work well for me. I would estimate that 80% of the answers are very good, and 10% provide at least a glimpse of the information I was seeking.
- gmiller123456 4y ago
  One of the first things I asked it to do was to "write a program to compute the rise and set times of a star". It got a couple of pieces right, but was way off the mark. I asked it a few other astronomy related questions, and it would try to use a library like Astropy, but make API calls that don't exist. I tried things like "don't use Astropy", and it would just switch to a different library. It seems to do OK on things like the instructions for Fizz-Buzz.
dpkirchner 4y ago
I would guess they are less concerned about where ChatGPT is today than where it will be in 5 years.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  Even more convincing when it is wrong?
  - jerjerjer 4y ago
    ChatGPT lacks the ability to prove that output is factually correct (which is an interesting but distinct problem). However, as long as the answer is derivative of supplied information, ChatGPT shines. Even today it can already: - Write coherent short stories based on a prompt - Be a personal diary/assistant - Summarize and extract information from text. There's a lot of applications for that.

college_physics 4y ago

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete. Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? It would be a blessing (presumably, because things can always drift further into evil) but, so far at least, there is little to point to such an imminent disruption

mansoon 4y ago
I remember that hope.
karamanolev 4y ago
Search existed before Google. They also didn't invent adtech. Instead of a marginal improvement, they made it so much better that the previous option looked silly. If such a disruption happens again to the core technology (e.g. search through a ChatGPT-like entity), whether the financial backing is adtech will be irrelevant.
quadcore 4y ago
Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? I think the revenue assumption here lies on the fact that GPT generates content when the web wait for the user to provide the content. Generates congent, for lawyers or hospitals for example - pardon my lack of imagination. So a basic business model would be to charge per request I suppose.
geoduck14 4y ago
I'm using GPT3.x to make money at work
svantana 4y ago
Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of esoteric, "school assignment" type queries, but they're not really a threat for the high-value searches.

chazeon 4y ago

I kind of feel they should be. I cannot remember what their last major customer-facing AI product launch after Google Assistant. Sure there is AI in photo tuning and many interesting features for the Pixel phone, and there is Gmail autocomplete but I remember I used to really following every Google product launch when I was a kid: there is Google Reader, Google Drive launch in those days. That excitement was kind of gone: all the new AI products feels like polished but conservative. The GPTs and Whisper really get me excited again these days though. But Google pioneered this field. I love their JAX, but in a way many people would love pytorch but not so much in the META company.

closewith 4y ago
Personally I've no interest in any new Google products because who knows when it may be discontinued with little or no notice. Most recently Optimize, but I've also been burned by Universal Analytics, Fusion Tables, goo.gl, and Google Site Search.
- xnx 4y ago
  I did not know about the Google Optimize shutdown. That's a shame. Google Analytics might be the product they've bungled the most after chat (breaking upgrades, features moved out then moved back, enhanced ecommerce, etc.).
ignoramous 4y ago
> I love their JAX For those out of loop: https://github.com/google/jax https://github.com/google/jax See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682507
- dekhn 4y ago
  Interesting that the Jax page still says it's not an official google product (a recent Research publication said it was).
kyrra 4y ago
There is https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/ https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/, but sadly it's not consumer facing yet.

ivansavz 4y ago

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/3hAkR https://archive.is/3hAkR

sorenjan 4y ago

What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company. In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
My impression is that he's not a leader but a care taker. This article kind of shows the two founders swooping in for some emergency leadership. That's not a good look. I think they've been coasting on their past glory for a decade now. Yes they make money but otherwise they are just doing more of the same and just building out the stuff they've had for more than a decade (Search, Ads, Youtube, Maps, Android, etc.). All the attempts to enter new markets seem to be a succession of failures. They are still playing catchup to AWS, and lately Azure. Stadia came and went. Youtube paid accounts are nowhere close to competing with the likes of Netflix, or Spotify. They failed to compete with Whatsapp as well repeatedly as well. And now they are taking on OpenAI. Sure Google has smart people. But it takes more than that. MS had lots of smart people under Ballmer as well. But it took Satya Nadella to sort out the mess he left behind and make that work for MS. He put an end to the Windows on anything agenda. One of the first things he did was kill Windows Phone (dead in the water at that point) and then opened up the MS ecosystem to Linux in a big way. Fast forward a few years and they've had a successful Github acquisition, most of the OSS world runs on MS Github, they've built Github co-pilot with OpenAI, you can run MS SQl Server on Linux now, .Net runs on Linux, you can run Linux on Windows really seamlessly. See a pattern here? Gates and Ballmer pulled up their nose for OSS, Nadella made MS a leader in OSS and is reaping the rewards. That's vision and leadership. At the time Google was stealing MS' thunder. Now the roles are reversed and Google needs to call in the founders to come up with a plan because of OpenAI. Which of course has deep ties with MS. Google needs leadership and strategy. Right now it has neither. What are they going to do? Build another chat client? I think they've tried that a few dozen times already. They need a better plan than that. And I don't think Sundar Pichai is capable of coming up with that plan.
- 4y ago

bachmeier 4y ago

> More important to Google, it looked as if it could offer a new way to search for information on the internet. I'd scratch "new" from that sentence. If it was simply another option for searching, Google would not be worried. They've been milking their monopoly on search for years to sell ads, trading off the quality of search results for years, to the point that Google's useless for a wide range of searches. Now they're looking at a competitor that actually gives users what they need and they know they're screwed.

pm90 4y ago

Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course not. Sundar doesn’t seem exceptionally promising. It seems like he is an ok leader when things are going well but not so good in tougher times.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
They don’t need to believe it, they just need to believe that other people will believe in it. Even CEOs can get a lot of pushback and since they’re looking to do drastic changes it helps to get as much buy in as possible.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Simon Sinek has a really great point about companies endlessly pandering to shareholders, basically being equivalent to sports teams endlessly pandering to fans. The objective of a truly good coach/leader should be to successfully accomplish a goal, and often that will require making some portion of your "fans" unhappy. If coaches acted the way modern CEOs do, they'd only ever run one play
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Simon Sinek is a LinkedIn influencer with very limited insight into anything beyond sounding smart and sellong self-improvement books.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      >is a LinkedIn influencer the fact that this is a thing just makes me sad
      - 4y ago

xnx 4y ago

There's a surprisingly long and detailed blog post (https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyond-language.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyon...) which details some of what they have coming this year. It sounds like they're planning on taking some of the skunkworks/internal stuff and exposing it through products. Sidenote: I was surprised to see one of the charts even showing ChatGPT outperforming LaMBDA in one area.

sytelus 4y ago
That is exactly the problem and indicates a lack of grand vision. Releasing hodgepodge of internal projects is not same as rebuilding AI-first products.

jb1991 4y ago

> Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products I actually laughed out loud at that one.

speedylight 4y ago
You’ll laugh even harder when they get shut down a few years later.
- jb1991 4y ago
  No, I'm already laughing for that exact reason.
- PessimalDecimal 4y ago
  Years as in plural?

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

Oh, sure, they are in trouble. :DDDD

franze 4y ago

Long long time ago at a conference I did hold a talk (about something that is now common knowledge) that SEO is not a product, it's a channel. And an ad based revenue model does not work based on SEO. As as soon as the revenue (which is coupled with traffic) goes down you are inclined to just ad more ads or make ads more agressive, which counteracts good UX which will lead to further traffic loss, which leads to more ads... Google is not dependend on SEO, but as a defacto monopolist in search in the western world on user traffic. User traffic to search will go down from now on. Thx to AI assistants. Ads will go up, in aggressiveness and quantity, so their mai product will get worse and worse, fast. So, Google is toast. If they go down this road. Or, they go the opposite way. Less ads, more focus on UX including AI Assistants. Revenue comes later. But as we all know, Google will not go down that way. They are an ad business with a halfway decent search engine attached.

sseagull 4y ago
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were on record as saying that quality search results and ads are at odds. So at first they were generally against ads. Here's somewhat of a mention: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-engine-bias/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-... Can't say I blame them, though. See how well you stick to your convictions when someone waves a few billion in front of you :)
therealdrag0 4y ago
Ad free results is not always the best experience for everybody, or at least not in todays context. I remember hearing a commentator on a podcast (I forget if they worked for goog or not) who pointed out that so much of online activity is economic so that ads (pay for placement) is a powerful relevance indicator. I think the example they gave was if someone searches for “Taylor swift tickets” then they are more likely to be interested in the paid results from someone who wants to sell tickets than in the million forum posts discussing tickets (even tho they have the same keyword match). And their data proves this. Maybe there are ways to be “smart enough” to avoid this indicator, but a lot of “relevance” is a guess on user intention so seems like a damned if you do damned if you don’t.
gremlinsinc 4y ago

eric4smith 4y ago

A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding. Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google. It truly saves a lot of time. Google is right to be quite worried. Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before. Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds? And worse I can ask the Ai to write a short couple of paragraphs about each one. Then I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style. What do I do? I do online marketing and programming to support online marketing activities. I write. I plan. I code. I hire. We just taught a junior employee who is not great as a writer to use ChatGPT to help her with a good start to writing. The training for her was how to formulate detailed and highly specific “prompts” and to use google as a backup to confirm facts in the AI generated output. It’s not there to replace people’s work. It’s there to make them much, much more efficient.

kirsebaer 4y ago
ChatGPT often makes up facts. It outputs stuff that looks like it could have been written by a human, not stuff that is correct. Don’t use ChatGPT for medical research.
- bognition 4y ago
  Absolutely the case, but also people make up stuff online all the time, so google has this exact same problem.
  - memen 4y ago
    No. Google gives you the source. ChatGPT does not.
    - plaidfuji 4y ago
      It’s funny because when I was in high school the argument was always “books, published articles and other print media are actual source material, Google doesn’t give you that”

sixQuarks 4y ago

Word is ChatGTP is going to start charging $42/month for advanced access to their service. Google currently makes about $6 per user for search. It seems like the revenue model for AI search is better suited as a monthly payment, no ads. So Google could charge, say $15/month, for AI Search, no ads, and still keep their regular search business. I wouldn't count Google out just yet, as much as I wish they would be disrupted. Search has become a joke

epolanski 4y ago

I think the OpenAI argument is overblown. While I do agree that AI is going to bring a huge shake up to the search market, I still believe that Google is in the best position to fight this battle. Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so. And then they are the company that's best suited to have this AI driven search in Android and Google search thus limiting the impact of this whole problem. Sure, maybe Microsoft will deprive them of some developers that will look for information inside VS Code or their editor, and stuff like that, but overall I don't see Google going to suffer that much as long as they are able to answer the ChatGPT challenge in a meaningful time, something they should be easily able to do given their immense computational and data resources.

sdrinf 4y ago
This iteration of shake-up is not strictly about tech superiority, though. Google probably already has a repro of ChatGPT running in their datacenters. Fundamentally, it's about product, and expectation shift. I am presently routinely having conversations, and for the first time in the history of the Internet, getting straight answers to moderately complex questions, and their follow-ups, in real time, from ChatGPT. Google's entire business model is "giving people pages on the Internet that might contain those answers", and some of those being paid for the user's clicks. If I get the full answer, instantly, wrapped in 2 paragraphs of text.... where do the ads go? Editorials inside the answer? Why would I click them?
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- layer8 4y ago
  How do you verify that ChatGPT’s answer is accurate (it often enough isn’t), if not by googling?
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    You could use any search engine, and just gather 'decent' results -- scrape the first 3 results and compare using a new instance of a language model to tell you what's inaccurate in the first one based off the fine tuning data.

aww_dang 4y ago

Google: Don't shovel AI generated content into our search results. Google: We need to focus on AI generated content.

voisin 4y ago

AI wouldn’t be the threat to Google of yesteryear that it is today. It’s a threat only because Google killed search with ads overtaking the genuine effort to “index the world’s information”. If they hadn’t sold their soul for more of that sweet addictive ad revenue, ChatGPT would be an interesting niche sideshow.

pelasaco 4y ago

"This is a moment of significant vulnerability for Google", maybe I'm being cynical or too simplistic, but I just read it as: "Our stakeholders are going to be sad because they are not profiting as they wanted".. I cannot imagine google being in danger, because they are not leading that topic.

flybrand 4y ago

“Google sucks,” “search doesn’t show real results anymore,” and many similar comments are common in my world of heavy industry / manufacturing / b2b sales. They’ve been harvesting profits rather than making a better product. They should be freaked out.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
I think this is hitting the nail on the head. AI and ChatGPT isn't even the point. The scary part is that Google appears to have cannibalized their own offering in order to keep their numbers black to the extent where they have no ostensible way of dealing with a credible competitor. Ironically, the young Page and Brin predicted the inherent conflict of interest between search and advertisement. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a With gems such as "For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine."

ajdoingnothing 4y ago

Perhaps, Google can finally start focusing again on creating quality products instead of nonsense videos/hypes like "Demonstrating Quantum Supremacy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU). However, would people even trust their new products knowing Google's tendency to kill off these products within a short amount of time?

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emrah 4y ago

> Google’s approach to AI in recent years has been conservative compared to some rivals Well yes of course. They are the incumbent and they've been in cash generating mode for a while. With a large lead over "competitors", if we can even call them that, and a virtual monopoly status in the both the ad space and search space, it's perfectly normal for Google to move at a glacial pace. They have no external need or intrinsic motivation to do otherwise at this point in time. That is, until an actual threat shows up.. I honestly don't think ChatGPT is a real threat except they are getting a lot of attention and they are the new David to Google's Goliath so they are a psychological threat more than a technical one

bagacrap 4y ago
their market share in the total ad market is very far from a monopoly

nextstep 4y ago

I was working there when they freaked out about Facebook and made everyone integrate with Google+. I wonder if they learned anything from that mess.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/uvBUI https://archive.ph/uvBUI http://web.archive.org/web/20230122161859/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/technology/google-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230122161859/https://www.nytime...

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

Sundar's weakness is the cause of this, and unfortunately Page and Brin have never been extraordinarily effective executives. Google's early product and culture was fantastic for building one has emerged as one of the most powerful network effects in the web, but nobody can doubt the unbelievable mismanagement of Google X, Google Brain, DeepMind, countless other cancelled products. The answer is a new executive who gets it.

bagacrap 4y ago
indeed. Sundar has said that he takes responsibility for the mismanagement of the company's resources over the last few years, but it's not clear what that actually means. I have some faith in Ruth Porat but they need a c-suite member who has an equivalent eye for product.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

With all those smart trillion weights models, can't they figure out which page is a useless keyword trap (90% of what google search finds these days) and which is a genuine useful page? Would be a huge help.

bagacrap 4y ago
the web might just lack genuine, useful, reliable information for most queries. People here love to remark that they prefix every query with "reddit" but ime the only difference is that they've tricked themselves into thinking their results are worth something.

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can16358p 4y ago

Google's monopolistic search business is seriously challenged for the first time. Good. We need more competition.

nmz 4y ago
Not really, search is a solved problem, apart from the politics that eliminate search results. There really shouldn't be more than 2 search engines around.

broknbottle 4y ago

It speaks volumes about current leaderships abilities when a potential threat pops up and they have call upon the checked out founders.. It's like somebody mentioned Balmer being the most lackluster CEO and Sundar was like "hold my beer"

sytelus 4y ago

A decade ago, I had calculated that a startup would need at least $1B (but more likely $4B) of capex to match Google if trying to use conventional crawl/index tech. With conventional tech, quality upper bound is more or less fixed so you are forced to match breadth to compete which is super expensive. With model-based index, you need less than $100M capex to turn on the proverbial flywheel because you can now sacrifice breadth for very different notion of quality. This is a game changer because we will soon see dozen or so strong startups which will chip away the search share, each trying to leverage, cost optimize and improve this tech.

fbn79 4y ago

In the past many things have been considered a serius threat fo Google monopoly: - Facebook (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on Facebook) - Apple App Store (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on App store) - Reddit platform (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on Reddit) - Voice Assistant (on day people will do not search on Google, but will ask to a voice assistant and get just one right result) - ChatGPT (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly ask to chatGPT). Of all this threat chatgpt is probably the least dangerous because there is no way to always get a correct aswer (or the better answer internet can offer).

bg24 4y ago

Technology wise, ChatGPT is not a challenge for Google. It was a blessing that OpenAI is charging $42 for premium tier. Google very much can build a similar/better offering in a near term and would not have to worry about losing ad $$, as it will be compensated from a paid product. The challenge is execution. Most of the leadership have done amazingly great, but only when they had no competition. For FB, Cloud, Gaming, AR, self-driving cars - they could not do much. They did great on Android and Nest - both were founder led for a while. Right now, OpenAI is adding new features like crazy - they are a startup. Google may have better engineers, but they will lag behind in execution. Plus, changing a 20yr search+ad mindset in a month is hard.

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psychphysic 4y ago

I don't know how common this is but we have a massive disruptor (chatGPT) and economic problems at the same time. Every big tech company should be freaking out. It's fat trimmin' time.

mshaler 4y ago

Cory Doctorow called this with the formal notion well-described in this essay: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys