4 ms·
Am I the only one who feels like Google is missing the mark in more than one way? First off, I have no idea what Google uses AI for today in any of its product
by lumb63 4y ago
Am I the only one who feels like Google is missing the mark in more than one way?
First off, I have no idea what Google uses AI for today in any of its products. Google today is about as useful (or useless, perhaps, since I’ve switched search engines) to me as it was 10 years ago. I don’t care, either. If I don’t find myself thinking “I really need AI in Google’s products to achieve this”, why should I care?
> But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding — like, “is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?”
I want my search engine to search the web for that information. I have no interest in it amalgamating that data for me and performing who-knows-what transformations to it before serving me the data with no traceability to primary sources and no way to validate it without redoing the job myself. I can’t be the only one who wants their search engine to search, can I?
> In 2018, Google was one of the first companies to publish a set of AI Principles.
Google was also one of the first companies to fire an AI researcher for what he said about the AI he developed. Google also has shown zero regard for ethics as it has exploited monopoly position in ad markets and consumed small companies to squash competition. I have no trust in Google.
- stoniejohnson 4y agoWhat search engine have you switched to? Maybe I've just been tuned to use Google effectively, but Bing/DuckDuckGo results are horrid except for very simple things, while Google gets me exactly what I want in the first ~5 results.
- lumb63 4y agoI switched to DuckDuckGo initially and had similar gripes over search results. The last straw was when I started to hear about censorship and suppression of sources on DuckDuckGo. I switched to Startpage and the results seem much better. It’s probably using a larger company’s (Google?) index, but I haven’t done that deep of a dive.
- icelancer 4y agoStartpage pays Google to use their search engine. It's on their wikipedia.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago> Google was also one of the first companies to fire an AI researcher for what he said about the AI he developed. If you are thinking of the guy who said the LLM was alive, Timnit Gebru was earlier and she was fired from their AI ethics team for levying fair criticism of their work in a research paper [1]. I find that situation more of an indictment of their compromised AI ethics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Exit_from_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Exit_from_Google
- lumb63 4y agoThanks for sharing. This is about what I would have expected from Google, so it’s nice to see my assessment was accurate. I’d say that focusing on racism after firing someone for their work on AI (un)ethics was tone deaf, but it sounds more like selective hearing.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoI am not sure whose focus on racism you are referring to. There is indeed a problem with white people in google management having "selective hearing' when people of color speak up, which in this day and age is considered a form of racism. It is the duty of those in power to unlearn their biases and treat everyone with respect and professionalism. We should not make excuses for powerful white people failing to respect the work of people of color. (I do not mean to suggest you are doing so, but I am uncertain what you mean by "selective hearing".) It is my personal opinion that a white researcher would not have been treated this way, and an examination of the role of race in this situation is certainly appropriate. The fact that Gebru was subject to racist harassment after this event is also worthy of examination as we consider the way that our society responds to people like her sharing their views.