18 ms·

Here's the weird thing though, as discussed yesterday [1], the Microsoft demo was totally broken as well. In the end, everyone is looking for a big platform shi

• ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Microsoft can botch their search without tanking the company. Google cannot.
  • npalli 4y ago
    Sure, but the narrative seems to be Microsoft has somehow cracked the puzzle and will leave Google behind which is not the case currently.
    • cma 4y ago
      Google search has gotten so degraded in the past few years that people want something to beat them.
      • jakzurr 4y ago
        Hmmm. Yeah, now I'm starting to believe it too - I hope it does beat them.
    • bioemerl 4y ago
      They don't have to, they only have to be relative equals. It's possible chat GPT is a "dreadnaught moment"
  • voytec 4y ago
    Adtech is their main business. The quality of search suggests that it became less important to them.
    • rightbyte 4y ago
      Lower quality of search mean more ad clicks. I believe the quality decrease is on purpose.
      • rchaud 4y ago
        The companies that can afford to pay for top billing in search results are also the ones that rank in the first or second places for 'organic' results. Maybe Google simply can't squeeze these customers any further than they already are, but at the same time can't turn back the clock to a time when SEO optimization didn't really exist.
  • r00fus 4y ago
    Bingo. Microsoft isn't likely to win the search battle against Google. However, they can (and seemingly already have) disrupted search as a go-to web destination/feature. Google was worried Facebook would disrupt their Adwords dominance by having social ads. ChatGPT, if successful (a large IF), will disrupt search and probably a dozen other business models. I'm awaiting the true counterstrike from Google, not this initial flub.
    • htrp 4y ago
      > I'm awaiting the true counterstrike from Google, not this initial flub. What if this was the best shot?
• segmondy 4y ago
  Nothing weird about it. It's called first mover's advantage. Wanna make electric cars, you have to beat Tesla. No matter how nice your car is. If your range is worse. Booo. If your self driving is equivalent or worse, Boo. Whatever Tesla has done, you must be better at. You need better design, cheaper price, better range, better reliability else no one would notice you.
  • matthewdgreen 4y ago
    The problem with this analysis is that first movers usually don't win.
    • mynameisvlad 4y ago
      In the long run, sure. In the short to medium term, though, they solidly dominate the field. We're still in that phase phase of both Tesla and Bing AI.
      • matthewdgreen 4y ago
        In the short term Google has an utterly dominant position in Search, and Bing AI is basically irrelevant to this. What people are worried about are the implications for the long term.
        • mynameisvlad 4y ago
          The comment you replied to makes no mentions of timelines, and everything they said applies up to the point the first mover falls, which is clearly not the long term per your own argument. The goal posts also aren't "search" they're "AI enhanced search", let's not muddy the waters by moving them. Google may certainly be dominating in search, but they are clearly trying to sprint from miles behind in the latter.
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
• muzz 4y ago
  There seems to be an inordinate amount of venom directed at Pichai relative to other CEOs
  • PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    Could it be part of the aftermath of the layoffs?
    • toyg 4y ago
      Aftermath of a poor period for Google overall. From the outside, Pichai's Google looks very much like Ballmer's Microsoft: a company still milking profits generated by yesterday's innovation, but unable to produce genuinely-new stuff.
    • muzz 4y ago
      The reaction to the layoffs is a good example of this. Lots of CEOs in the past have conducted layoffs pretty much the same way-- notify everyone at the same time (per local laws) and write an email blaming themselves as the cause. Yet the media ran article after article for almost 2 weeks with personal stories about how people felt particularly slighted by Google, when they did it pretty much the same way as other companies. Amongst 12,000 people at any point in time, they will be doing normal life things-- like feeding their baby at 2am-- when they got the email. Yet somehow this became the basis of so many "Google doesn't care about its employees" stories.
      • saagarjha 4y ago
        This is because Google immediately cut access to those people and treated them like personas non grata. It was a pretty bad layoff.
        • muzz 4y ago
          Immediately turning off access is common practice in a layoff
• brobdingnagians 4y ago
  The other weird thing is, if someone is looking to have an edge in these sorts of things for their business, they should replace the AI helpdesks and automated emails with real, well-trained and friendly humans who will be an instant improvement, surefire hit with their customers, and cheaper on the R&D side to boot. But Google, and other companies, are spending huge amounts on bots that answer questions incorrectly, while leaving their customers without anyone to contact for critical customer support functions. We live in a weird time.
  • layer8 4y ago
    If quality of support would raise the bottom line, support wouldn’t be so bad in everything mass market related. Unfortunately, AI will be the cheaper option to maintain a semblance of support.
    • GVIrish 4y ago
      The problem is that Google makes enough money from ad business that they don't care that they may be losing out on more revenue/profits by having better support. This fundamental belief is one reason Google has a hard time making inroads in the enterprise market. In that market, support absolutely matters and the perception that Google doesn't care about it makes it easier to exclude Google altogether when considering a cloud platform or office productivity suite.
      • layer8 4y ago
        What prevents good support is scale. For example, Microsoft is very entrenched in the enterprise space, yet support is quite lacking (unless you are a very large customer, maybe).
  • bentcorner 4y ago
    Oh, I see you've been on the receiving end of Google's poor support. It's almost as if the company is more concerned with investing in flashy AI and machine learning technologies than actually providing decent customer service. Sure, they might argue that these investments will pay off in the long term by creating a more efficient support system, but let's be real - if they can't even handle basic support requests now, what makes them think they'll be able to magically fix everything with a bunch of fancy algorithms? It's time for Google to stop ignoring their customers in favor of their shiny new toys. *written by chatgpt
• Spooky23 4y ago
  Google obviously is facing headwinds as the open web, and thus web search, has been slowly dying over time. Because they are milking it the whole way down, they aren't very clear (to be generous) about what their go-forward strategy is (or if it exists). But the bigger thing is that Satya Nadella also has the "it" factor - he has a way of communicating effectively. Even when Microsoft is fucking you over for the last few years, they come out smelling like roses. Sundar doesn't have that gravity and gets overshadowed in public by the Google Cloud guy. The markets hate the perception of weakness and punish it. Microsoft is taking Bing, a joke product, and it's repackaging of Chrome and pushing it from a place of strength. No different than stitching a bunch of random shit together created Teams, which made Slack instantly irrelevant and was the equivalent of flipping the bird at Google. They're dangerous to Google because of that.
• vidarh 4y ago
  I don't think it can (yet, anyway) replace current search, but I also think there are a whole lot of niches where it can perform better than regular search and it will take time for people to determine which niches can be served well by current models, and what type of queries they shouldn't even try to answer.
  • layer8 4y ago
    Big tech doesn’t like niches though. They want to serve the common case because that’s the easiest way to scale profits.
• _the_inflator 4y ago
  Google fears another Google+ moment I guess.
• dqpb 4y ago
  Who cares about the Microsoft demo? The ChatGPT release was epic.
• cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  [dead]
• i2infinity 4y ago
  Wasn't the first iPhone demo totally buggy as well? It doesn't matter. Users have seen what ChatGPT can do, and the community was excited that Bing will offer it for free soon and is eager to pivot to it.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    No the first iPhone demo went off without a hitch. In hindsight, we found out that the iPhone hardware and software was buggy during the demo and if SJ had deviated even slightly from the script it would have crashed.
  • layer8 4y ago
    At least they found the phone.
• tastyminerals2 4y ago
  Nope. I am somewhat in disbelief about the level people here downgrade the recent Bing upgrade. The chatbot feature is a such a time saver for jobs where you need to write tons of abstract surface-level content. Just yesterday, I tried compiling a monthly teachers working plan for some local school in Ukrainian language. What it spawned in a minute was at least a day of typing work for a human. This is especially useful when you don’t know the formal language. And the quality of this was good enough for bootstrapping.
  • thethimble 4y ago
    Fair, but the question isn’t whether it is useful but whether it will replace traditional search
    • rvnx 4y ago
      Yes it will replace search. The same way that cars replaced horses, and planes replaced zeppelins because they are had a significant speed advantage and allowed humans to spend time doing more productive activities that can't be automated. Then traditional search is going to become "raw index search" that you can query writing something like "intitle:"carbonara" source:"google_index"" or "give me all webpages containing carbonara in its title"
      • sumeno 4y ago
        And how Google Glass replaced smartphones, bitcoin replaced USD, Juicero replaced juicers, Segways replaced walking, and Second Life replaced life.
        • rvnx 4y ago
          I think it is something to reconsider, especially if you genuinely don't perceive the difference of value between Juicero and a product that has been adopted by 100 million users in its first 2 months. Really, you can believe me, outside Silicon Valley, nobody cares or cared about Juicero. This is very different for ChatGPT, and I'm sure that if you get interested to it you'll find interesting usages with it that can fit your daily workflow (or just fun! like with image generation models).
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  History shows us, time and again, that people will choose convenience over quality practically every time.
• dmw_ng 4y ago
  "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement"* This quote is 18 years old, and already by then it was established understanding that Google had extreme technical magic the rest of the world lacked. A rushed, bumbled tech demo in an area a company who for decades has invested billions in and widely enjoyed a perception of AI supremacy is a wildly different thing to a polished demo from a company nobody expects anything good to come from. They have constantly encouraged the belief in their technical dominance in their marketing and hiring for as long as I can remember. If that's the perception externally, imagine how much more scathing a defeat it must feel to current employees. * https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/10/17/news-121/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/10/17/news-121/
• gkoberger 4y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm convinced it's the opposite... I think in 5 years we'll look back and wonder why it wasn't more obvious to everyone. I think in 5 years, almost every single company that exists now will look radically different due to what we're starting to see now.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  It will not replace, but it may enhance and it also may save time clicking on links, just giving a direct answer. It also may produce bullshit. But it is worth exploring.
• la64710 4y ago
  The main problem is ChatGPT had already caught the public’s imagination. A somewhat lame announcement of an upcoming product feature was actually a significant letdown from Google.In retrospect it may have been better if they stayed quiet for a while and then unveil something that everyone could try out and feel for themselves.
• vnrao 4y ago
  > When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms. I really hope so. LLM for search seems like a big leap right now. It isn't even really search but just a UI change for interacting with the underlying search engine. The caveats being that the people who actually think and create don't gain the clicks that they would get today (with the accompanying ad revenue) and there are no citations. I really hope more companies realize that LLM for Wikimedia sites would be a vastly superior application of the technology. Could you imagine the impact this application would have given the sheer amount of knowledge and data that is on these sites? Learning and teaching would be changed from virtually the ground up. IMO, this is the killer app and not general search. Given the extreme verbosity and general un-readability of many technical pages on Wikipedia, a LLM that can summarize and answer questions correctly is a huge paradigm shift. Oh,don't know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is? Here you go. In whatever length of text you want. Want to know how this relates to Information Theory? Okay, here's a primer on that. The internet can once more become a place that people come to for learning rather than being fed total crap by an algorithm. I do have to commend Satya Nadella though. He and Microsoft know exactly what they are doing. They know Google and Sundar Pichai are on the backfoot and they really are making them "dance". Bing + ChatGPT isn't really scalable right now. Riding the hype wave and putting pressure on Google hoping they make poor decisions based on short-minded thinking is the best thing they can do right now. Looks like it's working out well for them.
  • saghm 4y ago
    > I really hope so. LLM for search seems like a big leap right now. It isn't even really search but just a UI change for interacting with the underlying search engine. To question the underlying premise: what makes you so sure that an improved interface for searching _isn't_ meaningful? From what I can tell, we're a lot closer to optimal collection/categorization of data in search engines than we are to optimal interfaces for searching that data. We've all seen stories like the grandmother typing in questions into google with "please" and "thank you" (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/16/grandmother-nan-google-praises-search-thank-you-manners-polite https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/16/grandmother-...), and the concept of having good "google-fu" shows that right now, being able to find the answer to your question is influenced not just by whether the answer exists but whether you're skilled at _asking_ the question. I don't think this improvement is limited to non-technical folks either. As an example from just the past couple of days for me, I recently have been running into issues with Linux gaming on my laptop due to abysmal power management, and from doing some research, it's somewhat of a known thing with my laptop brand and model. I decided to research what laptops are known for being good for gaming on Linux and also fit my specific preferences (at least 1440p, 16 GB or more RAM, and AMD CPU/GPU for good measure due to my issues being related to Nvidia's weirdness on Linux). I spent a good hour or two finding specific models that seemed promising, searching for mentions of them in places like /r/linux_gaming, looking up availability and prices, and while I found a few potentially decent options, I didn't have much confidence that I was finding all potential options. I found some options for laptop-specific searches that were purportedly able to let me select on whatever criteria I wanted (e.g. noteb.com, notebookcheck.net), but none of them let me pick the _exact_ critieria I wanted; some of them were too granular (e.g. making me search and select exact GPU models to check off instead of letting me just say something like "discrete AMD GPU from 2021 or later", or giving me a list of 30 or so different resolutions and making me manually check off the ones I wanted to include without enabling bulk checking with shift-click) and some of them were not granular enough (e.g. only letting me select a single resolution to search for at a time, or allowing me to require a discrete GPU but not specify the vendor). On a whim, I decided to open up a session with ChatGPT and present it with these criteria to see what it came up with. I needed to nudge it to prune a bit (occasionally it would give me a clearly incorrect option, e.g. one with an Nvidia GPU or only 1080p), but within a few messages, I was able to get it to generate dozens of options. Unfortunately, it only had knowledge up through 2021, and despite trying various roleplaying methods with it to circumvent the "I can't search the internet" policy based on things I saw back when it first became available, I wasn't able to get it to completely finish the job, so I only was able to use those options as a guide for looking up newer models and then finding reviews from people who had used them for Linux gaming. If/when a language model like that that has access to search current data is made generally available, it genuinely seems like that would be a game-changer.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• visarga 4y ago
  > When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms. Yes, and when we look again in 6 months, they will surpass Google already. It happened too many times in the last few years - something thought impossible was actually doable with a clever twist or two[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSQ495wpWXs&t=2148s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSQ495wpWXs&t=2148s
• ptero 4y ago
  An important difference, to me, is that a lot of people already have familiarity with ChatGPT; either directly or through friends, family or just news. Most of those folks (judging by my own friends) had very low expectations which ChatGPT blew out of the water. When they read "Microsoft search with ChatGPT" they are looking for integration of at least somewhat known quantity into a not so great (perception-wise) search. Win-win. If that bot stumbles in demo, no big deal. They already saw 100 examples, 95 good and 5 goofy; adding one to either bucket is not critical. Google AI bot is an unknown quantity. Google search is (again, just perception wise) the leader in the search. When the bot stumbles it is a big red flag. I really do not know why Google rushed it out instead of coming up with a friendly "hey, play with our toy first" approach. With this approach the bot can be iterated and made cool (hey, we can pair it with a stable diffusion-like painter for kids; or a lullaby composer; whaterver). Once cool, then it is "hey, you know, you can start leveraging it from the google search tomorrow". Screwups like this really make me think Google's rot is very broad. My 2c.
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    > instead of coming up with a friendly "hey, play with our toy first" approach. They have this. But it's internal. But with 200,000 employees, that's a plenty big enough pool of testers.
    • citizenkeen 4y ago
      Internal doesn't make it cool. It's not about testing, it's about developing familiarity.
  • Valgrim 4y ago
    Google search results have been decreasing in quality quite dramatically in the past few years for me. I need to spend more and more time crafting complex search queries tuned to my needs, and still most of the results are more or less irrelevant. Or sometimes it seems to completely ignore the syntax I give it. Basically, Google search does not understand what I'm asking. Sure AI hallucinates stuff, but at least the stuff it hallucinates is mostly relevant to what I'm asking. I'm not saying I'm ready to replace Google by ChatGPT or Bing AI. I'm saying this is a huge step in the right direction overall for human-computer interaction, and Google has been sleeping at the wheel for this one.
• TrevorJ 4y ago
  Here's the issue: whether you use a traditional index based search, or GPT...you are going to be consuming AI generated content. Either at the page level or the synthesis level, or both.
• thereddaikon 4y ago
  Microsoft's demo wasn't perfect but everyone worth listening to has been saying ChatGPT is fallible this whole time. It was well within expectations. Google however came in with a different expectation. I remember something about one of their execs disparaging OpenAI over inaccuracies before. If you are going to sling mud, you had better make sure you don't have the same problem. Or it makes you look like a fool.
• berniedurfee 4y ago
  The coming years of LLM/GPT hype and vaporware will be a good relief from the past years of blockchain hype and vaporware. Seems like it’ll be more interesting anyway.
• autoexec 4y ago
  > When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms. It's not just blind optimism for the future of AI. We need search to be better because it's a cesspool of SEO spam/content farms and AI generated garbage. Search engines have declined in effectiveness and utility. We've lost even basic functionality like the consistent ability say "-whatever" to filter out garbage. Google, even DDG, have really dropped the ball here. We're left looking for a savior and suddenly AI comes in and promises to be able to tell us whatever we need to know, it hints at a near future where AI is trained to see the spam and bring actual content to the top of search results again. We're so over dealing with the mess Google has made of their once awesome search engine that for a brief moment the entire internet was excited about fucking Bing! I have to admit, I'm disappointed that it doesn't appear that Sydney will be the hero we need, but these are still early days and I hope all the attention leads to advancement in our understanding of AI and that fear of competition gets these companies to put a little more effort into improving the search engines they have now.
• strangattractor 4y ago
  Let's ask ChatGPT what Pichai should do. "When an error is made by their AI during a demo, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, should take the following steps to address the situation: Acknowledge the error: The first step is to acknowledge the mistake and apologize for any inconvenience or confusion it may have caused. This helps to build trust with the audience and demonstrates that the company takes responsibility for their technology's shortcomings. Explain the cause of the error: Pichai should explain the technical details of what went wrong and how the error occurred. This helps to demonstrate transparency and honesty and can help to build credibility with the audience. Demonstrate the progress made in AI development: Despite the error, Pichai should showcase the progress made in AI development and highlight other successful demonstrations that have taken place. This helps to reassure the audience that the technology is making progress and that the company is committed to innovation and improvement. Outline the steps being taken to prevent future errors: Pichai should outline the steps that are being taken to prevent similar errors from occurring in the future. This can include a discussion of the company's testing and development processes and any additional measures being put in place to improve the reliability of their AI systems. By taking these steps, Pichai can demonstrate a commitment to transparency, innovation, and the improvement of their technology while also acknowledging the limitations and challenges of AI." There you go - problem solved.
  • andsoitis 4y ago
    often, no response is superior. the more things you put out there the more material for people to hang critique, rumor, etc. of off. but in these cases ego can make us blind. or the belief that just because someone asked a question we have to respond.
    • strangattractor 4y ago
      You'd have to argue that one with ChatGPT. Here's one of the many failures Jobs had during demos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxQOPFg2mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxQOPFg2mo
      • andsoitis 4y ago
• sva_ 4y ago
  People love the underdog, and even though M$ is huge, Bing/OpenAI are clearly the underdog here.