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Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

287 points by colesantiago 4y ago

Just watched the 'Google Live from Paris' event and it looked like a non-event to me. It seems that the livestream event was set private after it ended. (It was unlisted to begin with) They even forgot the phone used to demonstrate multisearch. This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT.

operatingthetan 4y ago
This quote from Nadella going around today is pretty humorous on light of the video: "This new Bing will make Google come out and dance, and I want people to know that we made them dance."
- draw_down 4y ago
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nunodonato 4y ago
I was watching... meh all the time and then suddenly it goes blank and disappears. Like, wtf Google. After yesterday's Microsoft presentation, this was such an underwhelming event. And it gets real tiring on how much Google tries to create an idea on how advanced their AI is.. (and it might be) but the fact is, nobody can access it or try it. So until we actually are able to put our hands on something, I'm calling vaporware. At least with OpenAI we get to experiment and build actual products with it.
- XzAeRosho 4y ago
  I think this is the big take away from all this ChatGPT vs. Google. Non-tech people could experiment first hand how scaringly powerful a well crafted AI can be.
  - tarsinge 4y ago
    I can totally see why ML researchers that were expecting end-user products being notebook like and targeting data engineers were took off guard by the sudden discovery of the how a chat interface is powerful and usable by anyone.
- hugoromano 4y ago
  The moment was just weird; "goes blank and disappears", for a moment, I thought it was my connection.
- foogazi 4y ago
  When did it go blank? I just watched and it arrived at an end point with the presenter signing off
jurmous 4y ago
Google felt stumbling repeating many previously announced AI features in other spaces or small improvements to distract that their version of conversational search is behind. Google did not have the source links below the Bard chatbot responses. They also did not show recent news results like Bing did yesterday. And their presenter felt stumbling at moments too and lacking confidence. And the demo phone was "stolen". So also in execution the event felt lacking... Microsoft said in their interview with The Verge that they were working on a raw version of their new Prometheus model since mid 2022 which also shows those sources. And they showed the nice compose and website summarise conversational tool integrations for within Edge. There were no hints of integrations of Bard within Chrome. So it feels that including training time + product development time that Microsoft is at least a year ahead.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Was incredulous the phone was stolen for a moment before remembering this is in Paris.
HaZeust 4y ago
Wow, they really are in disarray. Maybe the (ex-)Googlers in recent AI HackerNews articles are wrong in proclaiming that Google will come on top of the AI wars, due to their immense contributions to its lead-up. I look forward to see what new Bing amounts to the industry, as well as Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI for Bing, Azure, and whatever else is planned. This is an exciting tectonic shift.
- passwordoops 4y ago
  My wife, who uses whatever default is offered unless I provide a compelling enough argument, said she'd actively switch to Bing if it incorporated ChatGPT even in its current form.
  - HaZeust 4y ago
    I’m heavily considering it myself. I know folks that are so subservient to Google that, despite Google’s objective deterioration in results as of recent, believe that something not shown on Google must mean it’s no longer accessible. Millions of people believe in the Dead Internet theory because of it, when all they need to do is try a new search engine. I look forward to seeing if Bing’s ChatGPT integration will be enough of a selling proposition to have the masses consider new alternatives for Search.
    - shubb 4y ago
      Suit at work today showed us a spreadsheet of business things he'd been working on. "See how each row has a description column so Pele who aren't familiar can understand it? I used chat gpt for those, saved me like 3 days". As devs, communicating specific ideas tersly to computers, I feel like we can miss how much this benefits other people. This feels like an excel moment for people who need to produce copy about widely known things and aren't super sensitive to quality, even now. And yes a lot of people. From mailshots to HR.
      - HaZeust 4y ago
        No doubt! It’s how AI is marketed in all places right now, “talk and ask for things as if it’s a human”. Soon gone are the days where you have to render a raw thought into a mish-mash of Search engine-friendly keywords and synonyms in order to get the most relevant results - you can ask for things from AI as if it’s your receptionist!
drcongo 4y ago
Maybe they just laid off everyone who knows how to run an event?
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Blatantly.
guardiangod 4y ago
I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. I remember when the iPhone was first announced, BB scrambled to put out press releases saying they have competing products in development. 2 years later the Bold(EDIT: Storm) was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. >Used to work for BB/RIM
- figassis 4y ago
  It would be interesting if after the massive layoffs, this was actually Google's greatest risk, and maybe firing a single CEO would be a better decision than laying off 20% staff?
- htrp 4y ago
  > 2 years later the Bold was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet. Unless Microsoft completely botches their "newBing" launch, this is probably the most potential they've had in search since MSN was launched.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Google can’t compete with Microsoft without having a huge revenue hit. The large majority of Google’s revenue comes from search ads. Chat gpt doesn’t have search results, per se. So how do you keep the high ad revenue linking to other sites? I’m not sure they can compete within their existing brand/company structure.
    - cma 4y ago
      You ask it a fashion question, "what goes with this?" and it responds with the answer and mentions a company where you can order something like it (sponsored).
amrb 4y ago
Given the track record of products, could we see googles management change in the next three to six months?
- loudmax 4y ago
  Google is years overdue for a change in management. Google has been coasting on the strength of its engineering talent, but their execution on rolling out new products has been one disaster after the next. Hopefully this is a wake up call for the board of directors at Alphabet.
htrp 4y ago
Did anyone snag a copy of the event?
- dmw_ng 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 Responses on Twitter are horrific: https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920 https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920 This is the first non-technical Google presentation I've felt compelled to archive I think folk are unestimating the scale of the change in medium that ChatGPT represents, it's not simply a problem of popping out a compelling clone for Google, they must also preserve or replace the lost ad revenue which represents 80% of their income, otherwise things quickly start to look grim. In contrast, ads are only 36% of Microsoft's income. If it turns out that llms are only economical as a subscription offering, Microsoft are already better placed to e.g. bundle NewBing with its 365 subscriptions. I think subscription based search might be the scariest outcome, it would be something like an iPhone moment, where the entire medium becomes stratified into commodity/ad supported/low income user vs. premium/ad free/high value users. Imagine Google's legacy as the spam riddled search engine low income folk use, filled with ads for payday loans, used car dealers and predatory personal injury lawyers
  - dmw_ng 4y ago
    Just to add the cost-per-query may not be a temporary blip. ChatGPT's cost per query is based on a static base model trained over a year ago. Imagine the energy and compute that might be required to add meaningful personalization or an up to date index, or if there were to be a repeat of something like the search engine document count wars of the late 90s/early 00s. Training ChatGPT is estimated to cost between $2-$12 million per run ( https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hwfjej/d_the_cost_of_training_gpt3/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hwfjej/d_t... )
afavour 4y ago
ChatGPT as a search engine sounds amazing but also really quite problematic. It's an extension of the issue with Google's "instant answers" (or whatever they're called): right now the creators of the content Google/ChatGPT scrapes are usually paid via the advertisements on their pages. When no-one clicks though any more, no-one gets paid. I know, I know, the ad banner-funded web is a mess and I wouldn't mourn its demise either. But it worries me that it's an entirely open ended question for what actually replaces it.
- arbitrage 4y ago
  The question for what actually replaces the WWW as we currently know it isn't really open-ended. Many of the people who post on HN and similar sites remember what the web was like before it became an ad-funded mess. I would enthusiastically welcome a web that isn't based on firehose-advertising and outright deception/lies.
  - afavour 4y ago
    > I would enthusiastically welcome a web that isn't based on firehose-advertising and outright deception/lies. I would too but I don't see how it happens. The awesome web that used to be was built on the backs of unpaid volunteers. Maybe that could return but even if it did all that wonderful volunteer work would get funneled through Google or OpenAI so investors can make a fat profit from it. Feels fundamentally wrong to me.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  right now the creators of the content Google/ChatGPT scrapes are usually paid via the advertisements on their pages Are you saying Google pays them per scrape or they get paid only when users click through?
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    Google does not pay site owners and I thought the big complaint was that users rarely if ever click through. The instant answers keep users and their potential page impressions in Google-land.
taubek 4y ago
Watched it. Seemed like a panic reaction to me. Like they need to get out something quickly out. Presented features look OK, but the event it self seemed like internes presenting what were they doing during the summer break. When it ended I was like "that's it?!?".
- deleted 4y ago
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_jplc 4y ago
> This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT. Is there a term like premature ejaculation but for believing in disruption?
- nunodonato 4y ago
  premature disruption syndrome (PDS)
throwaway29303 4y ago
Here's a mirror of the event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0
- meltyness 4y ago
  Seems like a disjointed attempt to convince that Google is already an AI provider, which probably isn't wrong. Here's kind of the "touchstones" from the 4 or 5 speakers. - Highlighting the bleedover between search and conversational AI. - Highlighting the widespread deployment of Translate across Google services. - Highlighting "Google Lens" (coming soon? I thought this has been integrated for a decade?). - Feature announcement, "multisearch" multi-modal search such as with an image and associated text. - Feature announcement, "Bard" -> "But" -> "Further conditions..." - Upgrades to the "expert answer recommendations" that is actually enabled by "Generative AI" -- (what were they doing before throwing darts?! when the hell was "do dogs dream?" https://www.popisms.com/TelevisionCommercial/101945/Google-App-Commercial-Dream-2014 https://www.popisms.com/TelevisionCommercial/101945/Google-A...) - Feature announcement, "Next month", Generative Language APIs "onboarding developers, creators, and enterprises" - "Responsible AI/ AI Principles" (https://ai.google/principles https://ai.google/principles) -Feature tease, Google Maps eye-candy / novel interface overlays using NeRF - Google Maps AR demonstration that also looks like something from a decade ago that didn't get adopted / basically what Glass did - Proper EV charging stations support (it doesn't already do this?) - "Project Air View" to collect data about infrastructure's effect on air quality to benefit city planning? No idea what this is about. - Google Arts and Culture (chrome experiments) / the blobs from 8 years ago revisited, I guess "Google Books" archival is just "arts and culture" now, AR application for an image viewer still very 2012, It abruptly ends. This was all very out-of-touch.
- beastman82 4y ago
  wow this is pretty hard to watch tbh
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Original with better video quality - https://www.youtube.com/live/yLWXJ22LUEc https://www.youtube.com/live/yLWXJ22LUEc
m3kw9 4y ago
[flagged]
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Google has the resources to do almost anything, well, the financial resources to do so. Time will tell if they have the intellectual and managerial resources to find a path out of the hole they've put themselves in.
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    It just seem like they are in a bit of a panic. Microsoft partnering and releasing a search product so fast caught them sleeping a bit. MS did a master stroke in prioritizing the release and they know google was gonna get caught if they can pull it
AraceliHarker 4y ago
No need to watch it because it was an introduction to existing Google Lens features.
ttoinou 4y ago
Why wouldn't Google be able to compete with their own version of ChatGPT ? I don't understand this underlying assumption behind all comments here
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  Wishful thinking? I think it's quite hard to make any prediction, and people are very biased for "political" reasons. It's entertaining to read, but I wouldn't take too much values from these comments.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    How is Google competing with ChatGPT different than Facebook competing with Snapchat stories? Much of LLM research was pioneered at Google...
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Because Google owns the search marker and all its profits currently. Anything Google does to compete will cause them to make less money than they do now. Product managers are going to be very scared and angry.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ActionHank 4y ago
  Having the technology or know how is still miles away from a product that is live. Google have the former, Microsoft handed over bags of cash for the latter. It's especially awkward for them because as market leader in search they can't really afford to fumble this, which anecdotally they seem to be.
  - ttoinou 4y ago
    Once the technology is ready and developed by others people, how much time are they really lagging behind Microsoft ? 6 months ?
xwdv 4y ago
Google is finished. The market has been ripe for disruption and it has finally come. It’s just amazing they never saw it coming. Or maybe they did and underestimated the threat. Too late now, they just fired a bunch of people and have bred a culture of laziness funded by their cash cow advertising products. They don’t know how to innovate anymore.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  i was at google half a decade ago. Multiple SVPs expressed in private a concern of search revenue growth and search being disrupted. That was likely the reason for all the now dead products, to attempt to diversify revenue. Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery. They preached 10x but refused to pursue 10x ideas. They tried to create an accelerator, a120 which focused too much on me too products. It was clear to me then that google was repeating the same mistakes of Yahoo, IBM, HP and other prior tech giants. When it was brought up, nobody listened. I can only think that the reason for this was Sundar, Urs and other executive leadership. They need to be replaced if google is to excel in the future.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery That has nothing to do with any of this. Google's doom was due to their total lack of empathy for their end users and customers. They launched stuff, then when those things did not immediately produce gigantic profits like the search ads, they just shut them down on the users' face. One can do it once, twice, the third time people wont even bother to use that company's products. Such is the case with Google. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... The level of distrust in public can be gauged from how the executives of Gcloud are trying to win customer trust by giving all sort of guarantees. And yet failing to do so.
    - xwdv 4y ago
      I’ve done consulting at Google and know many Xooglers and I can confidently say Google considers users as nothing more than cattle to be shuffled into products where they can be milked for profit. They have no more empathy for a user than they would have for an animal destined to the slaughterhouse. Remember that next time you use a google product.
logicchains 4y ago
Any other GCP customers feeling nervous? Is GCP stand-alone profitable now, or if Google takes an e.g. 50% hit in advertising revenue are we going to see services being killed off?
- neysofu 4y ago
  Killing GCP would be so stupendously, incredibly short-sighted. I hope there's no truth to the reports and internal leaks from 2019.
  - stuaxo 4y ago
    That would be on brand.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Gcp isn’t stand alone profitable. They stated such in their earnings that Cloud (including workspaces with a low operating cost) is not profitable
- jsnell 4y ago
  You've got it the wrong way around, no? If ads revenue takes a hit, non-ads businesses like Cloud become more important, not less.
  - jldugger 4y ago
    And as a GCP customer, you might be worried that GCP prices will go up to make those all important revenue targets, or that some of the lowest engagement GCP services will be EOL'd.
    - dr_kiszonka 4y ago
      Or that the quality of, e.g., customer support will decrease, like it has been the case with Google Fi, in my experience.
slac 4y ago
The audio was horrible... Something wrong with the microphones i think.
gardaani 4y ago
Maybe related to that failed event: Google stock price is falling, it's currently -7%.
- echelon 4y ago
  I'm ready to buy more puts soon. I don't think the true cost of this mistake will sink in with investors until later this year, though. I've been pretty good at eventual sentiment prediction, but never been great at timing it.
- meltyness 4y ago
  ... most of the NASDAQ is sailing by on a flywheel stock buybacks and a financials-advertising pricing bubble that's causing services inflation. During the State of the Union the president advocated to applause a considerable increase in federal taxes on those purchases. Don't follow my advice though, I thought the Apple Car mirage would have poofed days after Tesla got decimated.
gumby 4y ago
I hope that some contrarians bring back keyword searching. I fear that the expanded DWIM of these “conversational” searches will make the results even worse.
- deleted 4y ago
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jpalomaki 4y ago
I think the bigger problem is how does something like ChatGPT fit into Google's business model for search. Conversational interface and/or giving immediate answers may not be the best option in terms of ad revenue. Users re-iterating their search queries gives more opportunities to show ads. When users are scanning the page for best results, they might be more likely to click on the ads with clever wording.
- verdverm 4y ago
  It's not an either or. If you saw the clips of Bing with ChatGPT, the chat and traditional search results are next to each other. It's not a replacement, it's an addition
- Adrig 4y ago
  I agree with you, but Google is also a leading player in the conversational interface ("Ok Google")and in business software. Two areas where language models could have a huge impact. Is Google deliberately slowing down any major improvements in these areas because they are petrified about the idea of losing revenue in their ad business?
- ajross 4y ago
  > I think the bigger problem is how does something like ChatGPT fit into Google's business model for search. Alternatively, how does ChatGPT fit into the usage model for search? I know it's taken on faith in this forum that somehow Google[1] search is bad or failing or about to be killed or whatever. But... it's actually just fine? It does what the market wants, more or less perfectly. Everyone uses it to find the 99% of stuff that everyone searches for (commercial products, news, sites-you-forgot-the-name-of, etc...). What exactly is AI going to do better when all I want to know is where the Steam page for Skyrim is, or how much a pour-over coffee filter goes for? The truth as I see it is that "search" simply isn't a market that's disruptable in the way posters here want it to be disrupted. Find 10 people on the street and ask them whether they can find stuff on the internet and they'll say "yes, duh?". This is like asking how AI is going to disrupt freight rail or high intensity agriculture. Those too are stable, already-optimized industries without a lot of room for genuine improvement except on cost (and recognize that training and running models of this scale is still significantly more expensive than crawling the web!). Now, none of that is to say that there isn't an application for a generalized text model that can answer questions in the market somewhere. I think there probably is. I just don't see how it has anything to do with "search". Having a personal butler to do your research doesn't get you to the Skyrim forums any faster. [1] Disclosure: I work there, but on firmware and nowhere near search. Opinions entirely my own.
jeppester 4y ago
The reaction to this compared to the MS presentation yesterday really shows the difference a good presentation can make. It will be interesting how well the products work when we get to use them for real.
- lolinder 4y ago
  One key advantage Microsoft has is they get to say "we're going to incorporate that fun new tool/toy you've been playing with for a couple months now". We already have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Google is left saying "we have one too, and ours is even cooler", which in the absence of a viable demo isn't very compelling.
post_break 4y ago
Wow what a train wreck. Didn't have the phone to show it off in real time. So much filler stuff. This is incredible. They are scrambling to head off Microsoft. I've never seen a presentation by Google like this before.
meindnoch 4y ago
This is where you start shorting GOOG.
jaggs 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 If this was a startup, they would be dead in the water. Nothing of substance, awful sound, 9:45 mins in they don't have a key piece of live demo equipment (the phone)/ As someone else said, it's like they asked a couple of interns to rush something out in 24 hours. No wonder the stock price is tanking. Awful display from Google.
- pellucide 4y ago
  I am in the minority here. But for me, google's presentations were always like this. The presentation always seemed so rehearsed with artificial excitement.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Damn that was painful to watch. They seem utterly disconnected from how people actually use their phones in real life. Finding elevators and atms with AR ? Is that the future google is selling ? Who's buying. If google maps was the equivalent of the invention the printing press that would be the invention of scented toilet paper
  - jaggs 4y ago
    I've got to say it was one of the most painfully bad presentations I've ever seen, from any company or organization. Spectacular fail.
    - ProfessorLayton 4y ago
      Yeah... For those who haven't seen it: At one point they were unable to demo because there was no phone to demo on (~9:35).
      - deleted 4y ago
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  - singularity2001 4y ago
marricks 4y ago
Important to note that both companies don’t have a public demo yet. Microsoft’s “demo” only answers select questions which is… not an actual demo. That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  >That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation. They are the company the produces Powerpoint after all...of course they know presentations! :D I didn't see the Microsoft presentation but I hope it had a powerpoint!
justinzollars 4y ago
They lost 100 Billion in value, because of a bad demo. OMG
stephencoyner 4y ago
The MSFT event yesterday was impressive. To see them bring GPT to scale, real-time, with citations and other new features is very cool. The new products look genuinely very helpful - they solve real jobs to be done. Surely Google will catch up, but this was a blunder worse than I would have expected. The race is truly on Edit: one more thought. After listening to talks from Kevin Scott and others at MSFT, it seems like their vision is copilot for everything. Kevin made it sound like they have dozens of these experiments happening right now. I think this is a winning formula and we’ll be seeing all kinds of other new launches this year.
- seydor 4y ago
  yeah watching the keynote was certainly inspiring. Not only have they thought out the GPT integration, they also have the policing in order. And this was NOT a search company. It was also thought provoking about how the future of predictive policing will work, because language models are very good at understanding our intentions , perhaps better than we think
seydor 4y ago
I couldnt watch all of it what was it about? it seemed lame and apparently some demo did not work. Google maps immersive sounded pretty much like street view. You can apparently use your phone to find nearby cafes. These are nice features to have in 2013
fatjokes 4y ago
Schedule a huge announcement after a disruptive technology from a competing company right after mass layoffs when morale is probably at an all time low and everyone is one foot out the door. Clearly good decisions here.
aaron695 4y ago
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spicyramen_ 4y ago
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smm11 4y ago
The only futuristic thing Google did was calling themselves Alphabet. I'm pretty sure they didn't think search would be the thing they'd fail on, though. Wonder if anything else they have will keep them around another five years?
candyman 4y ago
I don't think Google Corporate had any idea this was going on and that way more people were interested in it than normal and many were reporters and investors. It had a feel like a local Google dev group meeting which is informal. I stopped using Google Search months ago because it was totally unusable. For some things it's still good and I use search within Google Maps often. I think this will make voice-based UI viable (finally!) which is great. It's going to definitely eat into traditional Google ad revenue since clicking around and "impressions" are going to go way down.
- justinzollars 4y ago
  This little meetup moved the market!
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  Google isn't a retail store that has 'stores' and 'corporate offices'. It's all corporate, but you are absolutely right that the 'mothership' in Mountain View is very distinct from offices that are 'remote'. I don't know if Google has internal lingo to describe this but at SV companies I've been at we called it '{city where the main office is}' vs 'remote office'. So if you are at an Oracle office in New Jersey I would imagine you would say something like "I have to get up early to meet with Redwood City."
- stingrae 4y ago
  The main presenter is SVP of Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments. So I assume corporate was aware it was happening.
- mcast 4y ago
  Prabhakar reports directly to the CEO of Alphabet (Sundar). This was not a local dev group event.
jowday 4y ago
For people in this thread convinced that Google is scrambling to come up with a ChatGPT competitor - that’s only true on the product side. Internally, LamDA has been available with a chatGPT style interface for years (maybe more like 18 months).
- lolinder 4y ago
  The product side is all that matters here. If Google cannot productize it, then all they did was do other people's homework for them. And it increasingly looks like Google has zero plan for productizing it.
- sergiotapia 4y ago
  Product is all that matters. You can have the world's best AI but if it's horrible to use who cares, right?
- deleted 4y ago
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- mmahemoff 4y ago
  To compete, Google has to disrupt its own product, which happens to be one of the most lucrative flywheels in history. It has everything to lose while MS has everything to gain by augmenting Bing and indeed its other products. That’s what makes it such a challenge for Google, despite being one of the few companies who can actually pull it off at a technical level. Both companies will also face legal issues, reputation risk (see MS’s Tay bot), and challenges scaling this tech to billions of non-paying users. MS has been more willing to march forward, Google had to be dragged into it by the competition.
- kolinko 4y ago
  Did anyone outside of Google really have a chance to play with it?
karaterobot 4y ago
Since there is no corresponding article to read, could we get a more helpful headline? What does "Private/Deleted Immediately" mean? Did they delete it, or just make it private?
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
For all the folks saying "Google is getting disrupted", I'm glad to see what's going on but I wouldn't hold my breath. Most importantly, by all accounts Google does have better (or at least as-good-as) tech internally that can match ChatGPT. They have been slow to release because of reputational risk, and having to deal with internal (and external) pressure about amplified bias. I think the best analogy here is when Microsoft fought tooth and nail to win the original browser wars with IE, then sat on their laurels and did nothing for years, then Chrome finally came along and ate their lunch. Definitely remains to be seen whether other companies will end up eating Google's search lunch, but I do think if Google can get their shit together organizationally that they'll still be able to compete.
- nightski 4y ago
  Does better tech matter that much if you can't execute? Microsoft has always gone with good enough instead of striving for perfection. It's taken them pretty far.
- lolinder 4y ago
  > if Google can get their shit together organizationally that they'll still be able to compete. This is a really big if, and I think it's what has so many calling it against Google already. Google as an organization has been dysfunctional for years, and everything we're seeing so far indicates that the organization does even worse under pressure than it does when it's coasting. I don't doubt that they have really good tech, but I have no confidence in Google's present ability to execute anything.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Excellent point. Perhaps Google will have (is having?) the equivalent of the Apple-pre-Jobs-return years or the Microsoft-under-Ballmer years, where they just fumbled around for close to a decade before things were broken enough that they went into it with more of a "what do we have to lose at this point?" mentality.
- jatins 4y ago
  > by all accounts Google does have better (or at least as-good-as) tech internally that can match ChatGPT ... I keep hearing claims of better tech. What's the source/proof of that?
bluecalm 4y ago
I wonder if Google is going to be as successful as Intel selling their "turn around" story when their monopoly was threatened by AMD. Intel managed to make media run with it even though it was based on nothing and turned out to be nothing. It might not be as simple this time as people don't understand CPUs well but everyone can see that ChatGPT is something new and special while Google search is deteriorating every year.
hintymad 4y ago
> This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT. Even if Google is not getting disrupted, this suggested that Google is finally at the stage where its culture is hindering its progress and causing subpar performance. I hope I'm wrong, though. Google is such an admirable company. Its search engine has forever changed the world. The launch of Gmail with its 1GB inbox was a game-changer that shocked competitors, and Yahoo! played catch-up for over two years. Google Maps revolutionized the world of electronic maps and started a movement frontend development, as Google showed the world its amazing application of AJAX. Chrome dethroned Internet Explorer and Firefox to become a dominant browser, and the company's three seminal systems papers (GFS, MapReduce, and BigTable) spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry. Additionally, Google's advances in machine learning just keeps pushing the industry forward. The list can go on...
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  All that to create a privacy destroying, massively fraudulent ad tech moat. Yeah, admirable...
  - flangola7 4y ago
    Technologically impressive is maybe a better way of putting it. I.e. a Death Star would be very technologically impressive.
  - hckrnrd 4y ago
    tell us how you __really__ feel
  - pphysch 4y ago
    It could be worse (Oracle)
    - BasedInfra 4y ago
      What’s the worst thing Oracle has done aside egregious enterprise pricing?
paulpan 4y ago
For what it's worth, Google should be taking a page out of Netflix's playbook in pivoting their search business: not by improving/adding LLM features to existing search algorithm and results, but instead fork into a new site and starting from scratch. Netflix had spun out their DVD mail-in business to focus on streaming but had maintained ownership of both. This would allow them to innovate quickly on the new tech without worrying about the baggage and backend migrations required for the first approach. Otherwise it could slow things to a crawl and risk of being leapfrogged by Microsoft. We saw a similar scenario play out for YouTube Shorts - it took 2-3 years of beta testing to avoid disrupting the core YouTube content but that allowed TikTok to firmly entrench itself.
- isoprophlex 4y ago
  When was the last time Google delivered something that was actually good/lasted longer than an afternoon? They have had search, maps and gmail since forever. To me, it seems they don't know how to innovate anymore, let alone deliver. It'll be the story of YouTube Shorts, (stadia, ... you name it) over and over, until they fade into obscurity.
  - MaxDPS 4y ago
    Android? Chromebook?
    - thefurdrake 4y ago
      Android: 2003 Chromebook: 2011 I feel like there have to be better examples.
      - MaxDPS 4y ago
        Chromecast, Android Auto, Wear OS I'd personally give Google Colab an honorable mention since it seems like the go to notebook for sharing ML research/projects.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
You know, whatever the merits (and it sounds as if there were very few) of Google's presentation (or Pinchai's recent non-statement) might be, I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search. If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understand these models' currently unsolved problem with lying and fabulation. And yet when I read the comments, I see this sort of calm acceptance that of course this technology is going to take over search. Why is everyone so confident? The performance of these models is simultaneously jaw-dropping and absurd. With no proposed solutions to the problems that they fundamentally face, why this level of belief that their ascendance is inevitable?
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I'd like to have more discussion about the attribution problem, specifically. We now have a couple of the players saying they're working on, or having demos. But from what I can see, all of these don't _actually_ attribute the source. They're just able to find _a_ source that fits to the output, working backward from it. Often the attributed source fits, but is actually disagreeing with the original output in specific details. In other words, it's not backing the output at all. At most it's a "you could check out these links and compare yourself and it might help you judge our accuracy". Is there any indication real attribution is coming?
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > Is there any indication real attribution is coming? I wouldn't hold my breath. Showing attributions allows people to reverse engineer how the prompt was made, and identifies weaknesses in the model. Bad for business!
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      I feel like all of the interesting stuff when it comes to search+LLM is in real hybridization that's still a few steps out from what's happening right now in terms of productization. For example: (a) Addressing the recency problem by making a model generate instructions to a browser as output token stream, so it can, well, Google for you and incorporate latest info into output by adding it to the "internal prompt". (b) Doing something similar where you teach models how to drive computational engines to make actual, computed facts and figures, not guess them from statistics over training data. (c) Maybe running a traditional search and then using LLMs to summarize over them. etc. etc. It feels increasingly clear that "complete prompt from a stale training data set" is a neat trick but doesn't solve any particular problem well enough. This also seems intuitively true: If you ask your friend a difficult question, you often don't expect them to be able to answer it on the spot. You probably expect them to have relevant experience and a rough understanding of the topics and the tools to look up or figure out the rest. Similarly, it feels intuitively wrong to expect a LLM to come ready-made with all knowledge baked in. It feels more like we'd want something with the working knowledge/method to plan and execute fact discovery and computation. It's fun to play around a bit with ChatGPT yourself and try to approximate what a more complex pipeline might be. For example, instead of asking it to answer a question, ask it to re-state the question or make a list of questions prompted by the original question, then let it "contemplate" those or propose a method for how to go after answering them, etc. It runs aground pretty often, but sometimes the results take you a lot further than the direct approach.
faangiq 4y ago
Love to see legions of corporate managers panicking. Love to see it.
emddudley 4y ago
The video is not private or deleted. Isn't this it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLWXJ22LUEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLWXJ22LUEc
- nonfamous 4y ago
  The original link was to https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920 https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920, which originally embedded a private video in the Google Europe youtube account. Looks like that has since been redirected to the official video.
1-6 4y ago
Where's the showmanship? There's no need to get into details, just get excited about the product while you're showcasing.
deleted 4y ago
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mlboss 4y ago
ChatGPT will kill Google in 2 main ways * Creating a better search experience without wading through the plethora of BS articles. * By enabling marketers to write BS articles faster which will further ruin Google results.
- schleck8 4y ago
  No it won't. Google's Bard (aka Lambda with search results input) performs almost identically to it from what I've heard and it's already being tested internally.
  - mlboss 4y ago
    They have the technology but do they have business model. I am not able to see a way Google can maintain their dominance in search. They have to eat up their current revenue if they want to play this new game. ChatGPT like interface means that they cannot show banner ads for their advertisers. I don't think Google can move fast and realign their whole business overnight.
    - gorbypark 4y ago
      I don’t see why ads can’t be displayed on the side, like they are now in a regular search, and updated as the conversation happens. AFAIK, the cost of an AI conversation far outweighs the cost of a search, so Microsoft/ChatGPT will have to figure out monetization at some point, too.
neets 4y ago
Gotta play cover for blocking other streams
steakscience 4y ago
I think there's too much doom and gloom about Google not being fast enough to respond to Bing + ChatGPT We know from history that being first means nothing in the long run. If anything, being first often means losing to something more polished and more considered. Don't worry, most people will still use Google, and Google will eventually release their own version. This doom and gloom reminds me of all the "Apple is over" because Samsung came out with a tablet and smartwatch before Apple did.

287 points by colesantiago 4y ago

operatingthetan 4y ago

This quote from Nadella going around today is pretty humorous on light of the video: "This new Bing will make Google come out and dance, and I want people to know that we made them dance."

draw_down 4y ago
[dead]

deleted 4y ago

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nunodonato 4y ago

I was watching... meh all the time and then suddenly it goes blank and disappears. Like, wtf Google. After yesterday's Microsoft presentation, this was such an underwhelming event. And it gets real tiring on how much Google tries to create an idea on how advanced their AI is.. (and it might be) but the fact is, nobody can access it or try it. So until we actually are able to put our hands on something, I'm calling vaporware. At least with OpenAI we get to experiment and build actual products with it.

XzAeRosho 4y ago
I think this is the big take away from all this ChatGPT vs. Google. Non-tech people could experiment first hand how scaringly powerful a well crafted AI can be.
- tarsinge 4y ago
  I can totally see why ML researchers that were expecting end-user products being notebook like and targeting data engineers were took off guard by the sudden discovery of the how a chat interface is powerful and usable by anyone.
hugoromano 4y ago
The moment was just weird; "goes blank and disappears", for a moment, I thought it was my connection.
foogazi 4y ago
When did it go blank? I just watched and it arrived at an end point with the presenter signing off

jurmous 4y ago

Google felt stumbling repeating many previously announced AI features in other spaces or small improvements to distract that their version of conversational search is behind. Google did not have the source links below the Bard chatbot responses. They also did not show recent news results like Bing did yesterday. And their presenter felt stumbling at moments too and lacking confidence. And the demo phone was "stolen". So also in execution the event felt lacking... Microsoft said in their interview with The Verge that they were working on a raw version of their new Prometheus model since mid 2022 which also shows those sources. And they showed the nice compose and website summarise conversational tool integrations for within Edge. There were no hints of integrations of Bard within Chrome. So it feels that including training time + product development time that Microsoft is at least a year ahead.

stuaxo 4y ago
Was incredulous the phone was stolen for a moment before remembering this is in Paris.

HaZeust 4y ago

Wow, they really are in disarray. Maybe the (ex-)Googlers in recent AI HackerNews articles are wrong in proclaiming that Google will come on top of the AI wars, due to their immense contributions to its lead-up. I look forward to see what new Bing amounts to the industry, as well as Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI for Bing, Azure, and whatever else is planned. This is an exciting tectonic shift.

passwordoops 4y ago
My wife, who uses whatever default is offered unless I provide a compelling enough argument, said she'd actively switch to Bing if it incorporated ChatGPT even in its current form.
- HaZeust 4y ago
  I’m heavily considering it myself. I know folks that are so subservient to Google that, despite Google’s objective deterioration in results as of recent, believe that something not shown on Google must mean it’s no longer accessible. Millions of people believe in the Dead Internet theory because of it, when all they need to do is try a new search engine. I look forward to seeing if Bing’s ChatGPT integration will be enough of a selling proposition to have the masses consider new alternatives for Search.
  - shubb 4y ago
    Suit at work today showed us a spreadsheet of business things he'd been working on. "See how each row has a description column so Pele who aren't familiar can understand it? I used chat gpt for those, saved me like 3 days". As devs, communicating specific ideas tersly to computers, I feel like we can miss how much this benefits other people. This feels like an excel moment for people who need to produce copy about widely known things and aren't super sensitive to quality, even now. And yes a lot of people. From mailshots to HR.
    - HaZeust 4y ago
      No doubt! It’s how AI is marketed in all places right now, “talk and ask for things as if it’s a human”. Soon gone are the days where you have to render a raw thought into a mish-mash of Search engine-friendly keywords and synonyms in order to get the most relevant results - you can ask for things from AI as if it’s your receptionist!

drcongo 4y ago

Maybe they just laid off everyone who knows how to run an event?

stuaxo 4y ago
Blatantly.

guardiangod 4y ago

I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. I remember when the iPhone was first announced, BB scrambled to put out press releases saying they have competing products in development. 2 years later the Bold(EDIT: Storm) was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. >Used to work for BB/RIM

figassis 4y ago
It would be interesting if after the massive layoffs, this was actually Google's greatest risk, and maybe firing a single CEO would be a better decision than laying off 20% staff?
htrp 4y ago
> 2 years later the Bold was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet. Unless Microsoft completely botches their "newBing" launch, this is probably the most potential they've had in search since MSN was launched.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Google can’t compete with Microsoft without having a huge revenue hit. The large majority of Google’s revenue comes from search ads. Chat gpt doesn’t have search results, per se. So how do you keep the high ad revenue linking to other sites? I’m not sure they can compete within their existing brand/company structure.
  - cma 4y ago
    You ask it a fashion question, "what goes with this?" and it responds with the answer and mentions a company where you can order something like it (sponsored).

amrb 4y ago

Given the track record of products, could we see googles management change in the next three to six months?

loudmax 4y ago
Google is years overdue for a change in management. Google has been coasting on the strength of its engineering talent, but their execution on rolling out new products has been one disaster after the next. Hopefully this is a wake up call for the board of directors at Alphabet.

htrp 4y ago

Did anyone snag a copy of the event?

dmw_ng 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 Responses on Twitter are horrific: https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920 https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920 This is the first non-technical Google presentation I've felt compelled to archive I think folk are unestimating the scale of the change in medium that ChatGPT represents, it's not simply a problem of popping out a compelling clone for Google, they must also preserve or replace the lost ad revenue which represents 80% of their income, otherwise things quickly start to look grim. In contrast, ads are only 36% of Microsoft's income. If it turns out that llms are only economical as a subscription offering, Microsoft are already better placed to e.g. bundle NewBing with its 365 subscriptions. I think subscription based search might be the scariest outcome, it would be something like an iPhone moment, where the entire medium becomes stratified into commodity/ad supported/low income user vs. premium/ad free/high value users. Imagine Google's legacy as the spam riddled search engine low income folk use, filled with ads for payday loans, used car dealers and predatory personal injury lawyers
- dmw_ng 4y ago
  Just to add the cost-per-query may not be a temporary blip. ChatGPT's cost per query is based on a static base model trained over a year ago. Imagine the energy and compute that might be required to add meaningful personalization or an up to date index, or if there were to be a repeat of something like the search engine document count wars of the late 90s/early 00s. Training ChatGPT is estimated to cost between $2-$12 million per run ( https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hwfjej/d_the_cost_of_training_gpt3/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hwfjej/d_t... )

afavour 4y ago

ChatGPT as a search engine sounds amazing but also really quite problematic. It's an extension of the issue with Google's "instant answers" (or whatever they're called): right now the creators of the content Google/ChatGPT scrapes are usually paid via the advertisements on their pages. When no-one clicks though any more, no-one gets paid. I know, I know, the ad banner-funded web is a mess and I wouldn't mourn its demise either. But it worries me that it's an entirely open ended question for what actually replaces it.

arbitrage 4y ago
The question for what actually replaces the WWW as we currently know it isn't really open-ended. Many of the people who post on HN and similar sites remember what the web was like before it became an ad-funded mess. I would enthusiastically welcome a web that isn't based on firehose-advertising and outright deception/lies.
- afavour 4y ago
  > I would enthusiastically welcome a web that isn't based on firehose-advertising and outright deception/lies. I would too but I don't see how it happens. The awesome web that used to be was built on the backs of unpaid volunteers. Maybe that could return but even if it did all that wonderful volunteer work would get funneled through Google or OpenAI so investors can make a fat profit from it. Feels fundamentally wrong to me.
jimbob45 4y ago
right now the creators of the content Google/ChatGPT scrapes are usually paid via the advertisements on their pages Are you saying Google pays them per scrape or they get paid only when users click through?
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Google does not pay site owners and I thought the big complaint was that users rarely if ever click through. The instant answers keep users and their potential page impressions in Google-land.

taubek 4y ago

Watched it. Seemed like a panic reaction to me. Like they need to get out something quickly out. Presented features look OK, but the event it self seemed like internes presenting what were they doing during the summer break. When it ended I was like "that's it?!?".

deleted 4y ago
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_jplc 4y ago

> This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT. Is there a term like premature ejaculation but for believing in disruption?

nunodonato 4y ago
premature disruption syndrome (PDS)

throwaway29303 4y ago

Here's a mirror of the event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0

meltyness 4y ago
Seems like a disjointed attempt to convince that Google is already an AI provider, which probably isn't wrong. Here's kind of the "touchstones" from the 4 or 5 speakers. - Highlighting the bleedover between search and conversational AI. - Highlighting the widespread deployment of Translate across Google services. - Highlighting "Google Lens" (coming soon? I thought this has been integrated for a decade?). - Feature announcement, "multisearch" multi-modal search such as with an image and associated text. - Feature announcement, "Bard" -> "But" -> "Further conditions..." - Upgrades to the "expert answer recommendations" that is actually enabled by "Generative AI" -- (what were they doing before throwing darts?! when the hell was "do dogs dream?" https://www.popisms.com/TelevisionCommercial/101945/Google-App-Commercial-Dream-2014 https://www.popisms.com/TelevisionCommercial/101945/Google-A...) - Feature announcement, "Next month", Generative Language APIs "onboarding developers, creators, and enterprises" - "Responsible AI/ AI Principles" (https://ai.google/principles https://ai.google/principles) -Feature tease, Google Maps eye-candy / novel interface overlays using NeRF - Google Maps AR demonstration that also looks like something from a decade ago that didn't get adopted / basically what Glass did - Proper EV charging stations support (it doesn't already do this?) - "Project Air View" to collect data about infrastructure's effect on air quality to benefit city planning? No idea what this is about. - Google Arts and Culture (chrome experiments) / the blobs from 8 years ago revisited, I guess "Google Books" archival is just "arts and culture" now, AR application for an image viewer still very 2012, It abruptly ends. This was all very out-of-touch.
beastman82 4y ago
wow this is pretty hard to watch tbh
Rebelgecko 4y ago
Original with better video quality - https://www.youtube.com/live/yLWXJ22LUEc https://www.youtube.com/live/yLWXJ22LUEc

m3kw9 4y ago

[flagged]

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Google has the resources to do almost anything, well, the financial resources to do so. Time will tell if they have the intellectual and managerial resources to find a path out of the hole they've put themselves in.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  It just seem like they are in a bit of a panic. Microsoft partnering and releasing a search product so fast caught them sleeping a bit. MS did a master stroke in prioritizing the release and they know google was gonna get caught if they can pull it

AraceliHarker 4y ago

No need to watch it because it was an introduction to existing Google Lens features.

ttoinou 4y ago

Why wouldn't Google be able to compete with their own version of ChatGPT ? I don't understand this underlying assumption behind all comments here

yodsanklai 4y ago
Wishful thinking? I think it's quite hard to make any prediction, and people are very biased for "political" reasons. It's entertaining to read, but I wouldn't take too much values from these comments.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  How is Google competing with ChatGPT different than Facebook competing with Snapchat stories? Much of LLM research was pioneered at Google...
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Because Google owns the search marker and all its profits currently. Anything Google does to compete will cause them to make less money than they do now. Product managers are going to be very scared and angry.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ActionHank 4y ago
Having the technology or know how is still miles away from a product that is live. Google have the former, Microsoft handed over bags of cash for the latter. It's especially awkward for them because as market leader in search they can't really afford to fumble this, which anecdotally they seem to be.
- ttoinou 4y ago
  Once the technology is ready and developed by others people, how much time are they really lagging behind Microsoft ? 6 months ?

xwdv 4y ago

Google is finished. The market has been ripe for disruption and it has finally come. It’s just amazing they never saw it coming. Or maybe they did and underestimated the threat. Too late now, they just fired a bunch of people and have bred a culture of laziness funded by their cash cow advertising products. They don’t know how to innovate anymore.

bushbaba 4y ago
i was at google half a decade ago. Multiple SVPs expressed in private a concern of search revenue growth and search being disrupted. That was likely the reason for all the now dead products, to attempt to diversify revenue. Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery. They preached 10x but refused to pursue 10x ideas. They tried to create an accelerator, a120 which focused too much on me too products. It was clear to me then that google was repeating the same mistakes of Yahoo, IBM, HP and other prior tech giants. When it was brought up, nobody listened. I can only think that the reason for this was Sundar, Urs and other executive leadership. They need to be replaced if google is to excel in the future.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery That has nothing to do with any of this. Google's doom was due to their total lack of empathy for their end users and customers. They launched stuff, then when those things did not immediately produce gigantic profits like the search ads, they just shut them down on the users' face. One can do it once, twice, the third time people wont even bother to use that company's products. Such is the case with Google. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... The level of distrust in public can be gauged from how the executives of Gcloud are trying to win customer trust by giving all sort of guarantees. And yet failing to do so.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    I’ve done consulting at Google and know many Xooglers and I can confidently say Google considers users as nothing more than cattle to be shuffled into products where they can be milked for profit. They have no more empathy for a user than they would have for an animal destined to the slaughterhouse. Remember that next time you use a google product.

logicchains 4y ago

Any other GCP customers feeling nervous? Is GCP stand-alone profitable now, or if Google takes an e.g. 50% hit in advertising revenue are we going to see services being killed off?

neysofu 4y ago
Killing GCP would be so stupendously, incredibly short-sighted. I hope there's no truth to the reports and internal leaks from 2019.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  That would be on brand.
bushbaba 4y ago
Gcp isn’t stand alone profitable. They stated such in their earnings that Cloud (including workspaces with a low operating cost) is not profitable
jsnell 4y ago
You've got it the wrong way around, no? If ads revenue takes a hit, non-ads businesses like Cloud become more important, not less.
- jldugger 4y ago
  And as a GCP customer, you might be worried that GCP prices will go up to make those all important revenue targets, or that some of the lowest engagement GCP services will be EOL'd.
  - dr_kiszonka 4y ago
    Or that the quality of, e.g., customer support will decrease, like it has been the case with Google Fi, in my experience.

slac 4y ago

The audio was horrible... Something wrong with the microphones i think.

gardaani 4y ago

Maybe related to that failed event: Google stock price is falling, it's currently -7%.

echelon 4y ago
I'm ready to buy more puts soon. I don't think the true cost of this mistake will sink in with investors until later this year, though. I've been pretty good at eventual sentiment prediction, but never been great at timing it.
meltyness 4y ago
... most of the NASDAQ is sailing by on a flywheel stock buybacks and a financials-advertising pricing bubble that's causing services inflation. During the State of the Union the president advocated to applause a considerable increase in federal taxes on those purchases. Don't follow my advice though, I thought the Apple Car mirage would have poofed days after Tesla got decimated.

gumby 4y ago

I hope that some contrarians bring back keyword searching. I fear that the expanded DWIM of these “conversational” searches will make the results even worse.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jpalomaki 4y ago

I think the bigger problem is how does something like ChatGPT fit into Google's business model for search. Conversational interface and/or giving immediate answers may not be the best option in terms of ad revenue. Users re-iterating their search queries gives more opportunities to show ads. When users are scanning the page for best results, they might be more likely to click on the ads with clever wording.

verdverm 4y ago
It's not an either or. If you saw the clips of Bing with ChatGPT, the chat and traditional search results are next to each other. It's not a replacement, it's an addition
Adrig 4y ago
I agree with you, but Google is also a leading player in the conversational interface ("Ok Google")and in business software. Two areas where language models could have a huge impact. Is Google deliberately slowing down any major improvements in these areas because they are petrified about the idea of losing revenue in their ad business?
ajross 4y ago
> I think the bigger problem is how does something like ChatGPT fit into Google's business model for search. Alternatively, how does ChatGPT fit into the usage model for search? I know it's taken on faith in this forum that somehow Google[1] search is bad or failing or about to be killed or whatever. But... it's actually just fine? It does what the market wants, more or less perfectly. Everyone uses it to find the 99% of stuff that everyone searches for (commercial products, news, sites-you-forgot-the-name-of, etc...). What exactly is AI going to do better when all I want to know is where the Steam page for Skyrim is, or how much a pour-over coffee filter goes for? The truth as I see it is that "search" simply isn't a market that's disruptable in the way posters here want it to be disrupted. Find 10 people on the street and ask them whether they can find stuff on the internet and they'll say "yes, duh?". This is like asking how AI is going to disrupt freight rail or high intensity agriculture. Those too are stable, already-optimized industries without a lot of room for genuine improvement except on cost (and recognize that training and running models of this scale is still significantly more expensive than crawling the web!). Now, none of that is to say that there isn't an application for a generalized text model that can answer questions in the market somewhere. I think there probably is. I just don't see how it has anything to do with "search". Having a personal butler to do your research doesn't get you to the Skyrim forums any faster. [1] Disclosure: I work there, but on firmware and nowhere near search. Opinions entirely my own.

jeppester 4y ago

The reaction to this compared to the MS presentation yesterday really shows the difference a good presentation can make. It will be interesting how well the products work when we get to use them for real.

lolinder 4y ago
One key advantage Microsoft has is they get to say "we're going to incorporate that fun new tool/toy you've been playing with for a couple months now". We already have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Google is left saying "we have one too, and ours is even cooler", which in the absence of a viable demo isn't very compelling.

post_break 4y ago

Wow what a train wreck. Didn't have the phone to show it off in real time. So much filler stuff. This is incredible. They are scrambling to head off Microsoft. I've never seen a presentation by Google like this before.

meindnoch 4y ago

This is where you start shorting GOOG.

jaggs 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 If this was a startup, they would be dead in the water. Nothing of substance, awful sound, 9:45 mins in they don't have a key piece of live demo equipment (the phone)/ As someone else said, it's like they asked a couple of interns to rush something out in 24 hours. No wonder the stock price is tanking. Awful display from Google.

pellucide 4y ago
I am in the minority here. But for me, google's presentations were always like this. The presentation always seemed so rehearsed with artificial excitement.
lm28469 4y ago
Damn that was painful to watch. They seem utterly disconnected from how people actually use their phones in real life. Finding elevators and atms with AR ? Is that the future google is selling ? Who's buying. If google maps was the equivalent of the invention the printing press that would be the invention of scented toilet paper
- jaggs 4y ago
  I've got to say it was one of the most painfully bad presentations I've ever seen, from any company or organization. Spectacular fail.
  - ProfessorLayton 4y ago
    Yeah... For those who haven't seen it: At one point they were unable to demo because there was no phone to demo on (~9:35).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- singularity2001 4y ago

marricks 4y ago

Important to note that both companies don’t have a public demo yet. Microsoft’s “demo” only answers select questions which is… not an actual demo. That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation.

nebula8804 4y ago
>That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation. They are the company the produces Powerpoint after all...of course they know presentations! :D I didn't see the Microsoft presentation but I hope it had a powerpoint!

justinzollars 4y ago

They lost 100 Billion in value, because of a bad demo. OMG

stephencoyner 4y ago

The MSFT event yesterday was impressive. To see them bring GPT to scale, real-time, with citations and other new features is very cool. The new products look genuinely very helpful - they solve real jobs to be done. Surely Google will catch up, but this was a blunder worse than I would have expected. The race is truly on Edit: one more thought. After listening to talks from Kevin Scott and others at MSFT, it seems like their vision is copilot for everything. Kevin made it sound like they have dozens of these experiments happening right now. I think this is a winning formula and we’ll be seeing all kinds of other new launches this year.

seydor 4y ago
yeah watching the keynote was certainly inspiring. Not only have they thought out the GPT integration, they also have the policing in order. And this was NOT a search company. It was also thought provoking about how the future of predictive policing will work, because language models are very good at understanding our intentions , perhaps better than we think

seydor 4y ago

I couldnt watch all of it what was it about? it seemed lame and apparently some demo did not work. Google maps immersive sounded pretty much like street view. You can apparently use your phone to find nearby cafes. These are nice features to have in 2013

fatjokes 4y ago

Schedule a huge announcement after a disruptive technology from a competing company right after mass layoffs when morale is probably at an all time low and everyone is one foot out the door. Clearly good decisions here.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

spicyramen_ 4y ago

[dead]

smm11 4y ago

The only futuristic thing Google did was calling themselves Alphabet. I'm pretty sure they didn't think search would be the thing they'd fail on, though. Wonder if anything else they have will keep them around another five years?

candyman 4y ago

I don't think Google Corporate had any idea this was going on and that way more people were interested in it than normal and many were reporters and investors. It had a feel like a local Google dev group meeting which is informal. I stopped using Google Search months ago because it was totally unusable. For some things it's still good and I use search within Google Maps often. I think this will make voice-based UI viable (finally!) which is great. It's going to definitely eat into traditional Google ad revenue since clicking around and "impressions" are going to go way down.

justinzollars 4y ago
This little meetup moved the market!
ltbarcly3 4y ago
Google isn't a retail store that has 'stores' and 'corporate offices'. It's all corporate, but you are absolutely right that the 'mothership' in Mountain View is very distinct from offices that are 'remote'. I don't know if Google has internal lingo to describe this but at SV companies I've been at we called it '{city where the main office is}' vs 'remote office'. So if you are at an Oracle office in New Jersey I would imagine you would say something like "I have to get up early to meet with Redwood City."
stingrae 4y ago
The main presenter is SVP of Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments. So I assume corporate was aware it was happening.
mcast 4y ago
Prabhakar reports directly to the CEO of Alphabet (Sundar). This was not a local dev group event.

jowday 4y ago

For people in this thread convinced that Google is scrambling to come up with a ChatGPT competitor - that’s only true on the product side. Internally, LamDA has been available with a chatGPT style interface for years (maybe more like 18 months).

lolinder 4y ago
The product side is all that matters here. If Google cannot productize it, then all they did was do other people's homework for them. And it increasingly looks like Google has zero plan for productizing it.
sergiotapia 4y ago
Product is all that matters. You can have the world's best AI but if it's horrible to use who cares, right?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mmahemoff 4y ago
To compete, Google has to disrupt its own product, which happens to be one of the most lucrative flywheels in history. It has everything to lose while MS has everything to gain by augmenting Bing and indeed its other products. That’s what makes it such a challenge for Google, despite being one of the few companies who can actually pull it off at a technical level. Both companies will also face legal issues, reputation risk (see MS’s Tay bot), and challenges scaling this tech to billions of non-paying users. MS has been more willing to march forward, Google had to be dragged into it by the competition.
kolinko 4y ago
Did anyone outside of Google really have a chance to play with it?

karaterobot 4y ago

Since there is no corresponding article to read, could we get a more helpful headline? What does "Private/Deleted Immediately" mean? Did they delete it, or just make it private?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

For all the folks saying "Google is getting disrupted", I'm glad to see what's going on but I wouldn't hold my breath. Most importantly, by all accounts Google does have better (or at least as-good-as) tech internally that can match ChatGPT. They have been slow to release because of reputational risk, and having to deal with internal (and external) pressure about amplified bias. I think the best analogy here is when Microsoft fought tooth and nail to win the original browser wars with IE, then sat on their laurels and did nothing for years, then Chrome finally came along and ate their lunch. Definitely remains to be seen whether other companies will end up eating Google's search lunch, but I do think if Google can get their shit together organizationally that they'll still be able to compete.

nightski 4y ago
Does better tech matter that much if you can't execute? Microsoft has always gone with good enough instead of striving for perfection. It's taken them pretty far.
lolinder 4y ago
> if Google can get their shit together organizationally that they'll still be able to compete. This is a really big if, and I think it's what has so many calling it against Google already. Google as an organization has been dysfunctional for years, and everything we're seeing so far indicates that the organization does even worse under pressure than it does when it's coasting. I don't doubt that they have really good tech, but I have no confidence in Google's present ability to execute anything.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Excellent point. Perhaps Google will have (is having?) the equivalent of the Apple-pre-Jobs-return years or the Microsoft-under-Ballmer years, where they just fumbled around for close to a decade before things were broken enough that they went into it with more of a "what do we have to lose at this point?" mentality.
jatins 4y ago
> by all accounts Google does have better (or at least as-good-as) tech internally that can match ChatGPT ... I keep hearing claims of better tech. What's the source/proof of that?

bluecalm 4y ago

I wonder if Google is going to be as successful as Intel selling their "turn around" story when their monopoly was threatened by AMD. Intel managed to make media run with it even though it was based on nothing and turned out to be nothing. It might not be as simple this time as people don't understand CPUs well but everyone can see that ChatGPT is something new and special while Google search is deteriorating every year.

hintymad 4y ago

> This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT. Even if Google is not getting disrupted, this suggested that Google is finally at the stage where its culture is hindering its progress and causing subpar performance. I hope I'm wrong, though. Google is such an admirable company. Its search engine has forever changed the world. The launch of Gmail with its 1GB inbox was a game-changer that shocked competitors, and Yahoo! played catch-up for over two years. Google Maps revolutionized the world of electronic maps and started a movement frontend development, as Google showed the world its amazing application of AJAX. Chrome dethroned Internet Explorer and Firefox to become a dominant browser, and the company's three seminal systems papers (GFS, MapReduce, and BigTable) spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry. Additionally, Google's advances in machine learning just keeps pushing the industry forward. The list can go on...

fabrice_d 4y ago
All that to create a privacy destroying, massively fraudulent ad tech moat. Yeah, admirable...
- flangola7 4y ago
  Technologically impressive is maybe a better way of putting it. I.e. a Death Star would be very technologically impressive.
- hckrnrd 4y ago
  tell us how you __really__ feel
- pphysch 4y ago
  It could be worse (Oracle)
  - BasedInfra 4y ago
    What’s the worst thing Oracle has done aside egregious enterprise pricing?

paulpan 4y ago

For what it's worth, Google should be taking a page out of Netflix's playbook in pivoting their search business: not by improving/adding LLM features to existing search algorithm and results, but instead fork into a new site and starting from scratch. Netflix had spun out their DVD mail-in business to focus on streaming but had maintained ownership of both. This would allow them to innovate quickly on the new tech without worrying about the baggage and backend migrations required for the first approach. Otherwise it could slow things to a crawl and risk of being leapfrogged by Microsoft. We saw a similar scenario play out for YouTube Shorts - it took 2-3 years of beta testing to avoid disrupting the core YouTube content but that allowed TikTok to firmly entrench itself.

isoprophlex 4y ago
When was the last time Google delivered something that was actually good/lasted longer than an afternoon? They have had search, maps and gmail since forever. To me, it seems they don't know how to innovate anymore, let alone deliver. It'll be the story of YouTube Shorts, (stadia, ... you name it) over and over, until they fade into obscurity.
- MaxDPS 4y ago
  Android? Chromebook?
  - thefurdrake 4y ago
    Android: 2003 Chromebook: 2011 I feel like there have to be better examples.
    - MaxDPS 4y ago
      Chromecast, Android Auto, Wear OS I'd personally give Google Colab an honorable mention since it seems like the go to notebook for sharing ML research/projects.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

You know, whatever the merits (and it sounds as if there were very few) of Google's presentation (or Pinchai's recent non-statement) might be, I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search. If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understand these models' currently unsolved problem with lying and fabulation. And yet when I read the comments, I see this sort of calm acceptance that of course this technology is going to take over search. Why is everyone so confident? The performance of these models is simultaneously jaw-dropping and absurd. With no proposed solutions to the problems that they fundamentally face, why this level of belief that their ascendance is inevitable?

sho_hn 4y ago
I'd like to have more discussion about the attribution problem, specifically. We now have a couple of the players saying they're working on, or having demos. But from what I can see, all of these don't _actually_ attribute the source. They're just able to find _a_ source that fits to the output, working backward from it. Often the attributed source fits, but is actually disagreeing with the original output in specific details. In other words, it's not backing the output at all. At most it's a "you could check out these links and compare yourself and it might help you judge our accuracy". Is there any indication real attribution is coming?
- rchaud 4y ago
  > Is there any indication real attribution is coming? I wouldn't hold my breath. Showing attributions allows people to reverse engineer how the prompt was made, and identifies weaknesses in the model. Bad for business!
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    I feel like all of the interesting stuff when it comes to search+LLM is in real hybridization that's still a few steps out from what's happening right now in terms of productization. For example: (a) Addressing the recency problem by making a model generate instructions to a browser as output token stream, so it can, well, Google for you and incorporate latest info into output by adding it to the "internal prompt". (b) Doing something similar where you teach models how to drive computational engines to make actual, computed facts and figures, not guess them from statistics over training data. (c) Maybe running a traditional search and then using LLMs to summarize over them. etc. etc. It feels increasingly clear that "complete prompt from a stale training data set" is a neat trick but doesn't solve any particular problem well enough. This also seems intuitively true: If you ask your friend a difficult question, you often don't expect them to be able to answer it on the spot. You probably expect them to have relevant experience and a rough understanding of the topics and the tools to look up or figure out the rest. Similarly, it feels intuitively wrong to expect a LLM to come ready-made with all knowledge baked in. It feels more like we'd want something with the working knowledge/method to plan and execute fact discovery and computation. It's fun to play around a bit with ChatGPT yourself and try to approximate what a more complex pipeline might be. For example, instead of asking it to answer a question, ask it to re-state the question or make a list of questions prompted by the original question, then let it "contemplate" those or propose a method for how to go after answering them, etc. It runs aground pretty often, but sometimes the results take you a lot further than the direct approach.

faangiq 4y ago

Love to see legions of corporate managers panicking. Love to see it.

emddudley 4y ago

The video is not private or deleted. Isn't this it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLWXJ22LUEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLWXJ22LUEc

nonfamous 4y ago
The original link was to https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920 https://twitter.com/googleeurope/status/1623251768099409920, which originally embedded a private video in the Google Europe youtube account. Looks like that has since been redirected to the official video.

1-6 4y ago

Where's the showmanship? There's no need to get into details, just get excited about the product while you're showcasing.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mlboss 4y ago

ChatGPT will kill Google in 2 main ways * Creating a better search experience without wading through the plethora of BS articles. * By enabling marketers to write BS articles faster which will further ruin Google results.

schleck8 4y ago
No it won't. Google's Bard (aka Lambda with search results input) performs almost identically to it from what I've heard and it's already being tested internally.
- mlboss 4y ago
  They have the technology but do they have business model. I am not able to see a way Google can maintain their dominance in search. They have to eat up their current revenue if they want to play this new game. ChatGPT like interface means that they cannot show banner ads for their advertisers. I don't think Google can move fast and realign their whole business overnight.
  - gorbypark 4y ago
    I don’t see why ads can’t be displayed on the side, like they are now in a regular search, and updated as the conversation happens. AFAIK, the cost of an AI conversation far outweighs the cost of a search, so Microsoft/ChatGPT will have to figure out monetization at some point, too.

neets 4y ago

Gotta play cover for blocking other streams

steakscience 4y ago

I think there's too much doom and gloom about Google not being fast enough to respond to Bing + ChatGPT We know from history that being first means nothing in the long run. If anything, being first often means losing to something more polished and more considered. Don't worry, most people will still use Google, and Google will eventually release their own version. This doom and gloom reminds me of all the "Apple is over" because Samsung came out with a tablet and smartwatch before Apple did.