7 ms·

Google has the tendency to do this when they aren't the first to set foot on new land. Don't get me wrong, they get a lot of things very right: Gmail works perf

Google has the tendency to do this when they aren't the first to set foot on new land. Don't get me wrong, they get a lot of things very right: Gmail works perfectly, I can't find a single reason to change my pixel for anything else, search, although there's been a lot of deterioration in the past couple of years, is still second to none. That said, self driving cars, google+, duo and all the other services they launched as competitors failed miserably. While some of them eventually managed to catch up in terms of functionality and even outperform the products they were competing with, they never really managed to catch up on the hype side of things. Most people are creatures of habit I guess..

ithkuil 4y ago
But AI is their turf! Google was always a ML company masquerading as a search engine. I guess that the art of "generating text" is not their kind of AI?
- hn_20591249 4y ago
  Sounds like after the last decade and a half of Google flexing their AI muscle, maybe they are a search company masquerading as an AI company?
  - akomtu 4y ago
    It's a Ad Exchange (AdX) with many tentacles to hoard PII. Search is one of those tentacles, just as Android and Chrome.
- zeven7 4y ago
  Right, my expectation was they had something better than OpenAI they were sitting on and afraid to release / didn't know how to make money with it and were essentially forced to show what they had once Chat GPT became a threat to search. I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe", but there's a reason for expectations to be high for Google here, and it really needs to clearly outperform Chat GPT in the same way GPT 4 clearly outperforms GPT 3.5.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe" Its explicitly a smaller model to save on compute costs for scaling up to more users; but that’s a questionable decision given the situation with OpenAI’s accessible models and, if you are going to do that, why also do a slow-roll waitlist? I think both are signs of the kind of caution that will hurt Google in this market, even though the tech is near to the heart of what they do, the product isn’t, and they’ve gone very established-corp-cautious on products outside of their core.
    - robwwilliams 4y ago
      DeepMind in their back pocket. LLMs need higher order supervisory logic and recursive attention/control systems. I suspect Hassabis and colleagues willl be able to wake LMMs from their semi-conscious dream states.
  - Palpatineli 4y ago
    I mean they may have a better base model but if there is no business case, there is no resource to do RLHF with mass human labeling.
  - muskmusk 4y ago
    In the olden days before Satya Nadella. Microsoft was a bloodsucking vampire of a company that couldn't execute anything of significance, but they had a pretty solid research department. Google could ofcourse sit on a much better version that isn't safe or economic, but they could also just be unable to do better. Good research department, but unable to execute anything significant. Time will tell I guess :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hbn 4y ago
  Google is an ad company. ML just happens to be good for targeting ads.
  - deltree7 4y ago
    Google's cloud revenue is almost same as Oracle. If Google Cloud was it's own company, it'd be a fortune 100 firm. But you keep doing you, living with outdated information and grandma tales. I bet you'd still be telling this joke to your grandkids too
    - logicchains 4y ago
      >Google's cloud revenue is almost same as Oracle. What about their profits?
- manojlds 4y ago
  The whole basis of current innovation is from Google, let's not forget.
- guardian5x 4y ago
  For me, Google was always an Ad company first. But don't get me wrong, they do some great research on the side for AI, like AlphaZero, AlphaGo, etc. But also been early with the Transformer models. There just seems to be a lack to put this into workable products lately.
dageshi 4y ago
Is anyone doing better than Google at self driving cars right now? I agree with the other products you mentioned but it seems like nobody has "won" self driving cars yet but google might be the furthest along?
- minutillo 4y ago
  Yes, many cars with various levels of self-driving are available. Almost every car maker now has basic lane following and adaptive cruise control. Some add navigation, lane changing, and the ability to obey traffic signals. GM has a system called Super Cruise that allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel. Mercedes has Drive Pilot which is the first level 3 self driving system. Google has not released anything.
  - pb7 4y ago
    Waymo is driving passengers around a real city without a driver in the car as a service. Automatically changing lanes is cute by comparison.
  - chewmieser 4y ago
    Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities (no person in the front seat at all). Honestly they seem quite advanced compared to the competition.
    - 1024core 4y ago
      > Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities Only 2: Phoenix and SF.
      - adt 4y ago
        + LA https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-rides-with-employees-in-los-angeles/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-r...
  - zeven7 4y ago
COMMENT___ 4y ago
> Gmail works perfectly Is this a joke? Gmail now is an awful email client. E.g., now you just can’t compose a rich text email when you need to copy paste lists from other emails. In certain cases, you can’t correctly format an email if you copy paste without formatting or plain text. And there is a lot of such annoying stuff, that makes my life painful. Perhaps, searching my mailbox with gmail is OK, but the part of composing emails is in bad state.
com2kid 4y ago
> I can't find a single reason to change my pixel for anything else, Fingerprint reader on the Pixel 7 works about half the time. I had to program one finger in 4 times to make it work that often. My Oneplus 6 (immediately previous phone) had a functional fingerprint reader. OnePlus used to have a better UI as well, minor improvements on the stock Android UI that made it just a little bit nicer in places. When I got my Pixel 7 though, I realized that for whatever reason, gboard on my oneplus 6 is unusually terrible. Like, 80% accurate typing terrible, and that gboard isn't always that bad. > Gmail works perfectly Gmail was the first good web email client. Everyone else realized they had to stop sucking, and now they are good. Gmail was realized in 2004 and is from a completely different era of Google.
- jvolkman 4y ago
  My Pixel 7's fingerprint reader works near 100% of the time. The only time I have problems is if my finger or the screen are wet.
  - com2kid 4y ago
    What finger do you use? I use my left thumb, pick up the phone, no go. It is a complete sad joke. After a few weeks I think I've been trained by the phone on exactly how to hold is to the fingerprint reader works more often, but the fact I can only have to use all the programming slots for fingers on just one finger is sad. Edit: OMG, I just read online that rebooting the phone after recording fingerprints improves recognition from 20-50% to almost 100%. I just got my phone a month ago and haven't rebooted it yet, after a reboot the sensor now works reliably. What an absurd and stupid bug.
    - jvolkman 4y ago
      I usually use my left thumb after taking it out of my left pant pocket. I also use a TPU screen protector, not glass. I've read that various glass protectors can interfere.
      - 4y ago
chatmasta 4y ago
There was an HN thread the other day where people were arguing ChatGPT would be nowhere without Google's AI research. That might be true, but clearly there is a significant gap in productization ability...
- LightBug1 4y ago
  Deproductization black belts.
pratikch1253 4y ago
From recent memory I don't recall a single Google product that has garnered mass appeal perhaps the cloud office suites but that's again debatable. Gmail was like 2004. Remember Stadia they axed that as well could have licensed the tech behind it to other companies but nope.
tonguetrainer 4y ago
Google must compete with ChatGPT though. Failure is not an option here. Microsoft has put Google in a corner and it is fight or die.
smadge 4y ago
I don’t know if it’s fair to say Google is just stepping into generative language models. They invented transformers!

ithkuil 4y ago

But AI is their turf! Google was always a ML company masquerading as a search engine. I guess that the art of "generating text" is not their kind of AI?

hn_20591249 4y ago
Sounds like after the last decade and a half of Google flexing their AI muscle, maybe they are a search company masquerading as an AI company?
- akomtu 4y ago
  It's a Ad Exchange (AdX) with many tentacles to hoard PII. Search is one of those tentacles, just as Android and Chrome.
zeven7 4y ago
Right, my expectation was they had something better than OpenAI they were sitting on and afraid to release / didn't know how to make money with it and were essentially forced to show what they had once Chat GPT became a threat to search. I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe", but there's a reason for expectations to be high for Google here, and it really needs to clearly outperform Chat GPT in the same way GPT 4 clearly outperforms GPT 3.5.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe" Its explicitly a smaller model to save on compute costs for scaling up to more users; but that’s a questionable decision given the situation with OpenAI’s accessible models and, if you are going to do that, why also do a slow-roll waitlist? I think both are signs of the kind of caution that will hurt Google in this market, even though the tech is near to the heart of what they do, the product isn’t, and they’ve gone very established-corp-cautious on products outside of their core.
  - robwwilliams 4y ago
    DeepMind in their back pocket. LLMs need higher order supervisory logic and recursive attention/control systems. I suspect Hassabis and colleagues willl be able to wake LMMs from their semi-conscious dream states.
- Palpatineli 4y ago
  I mean they may have a better base model but if there is no business case, there is no resource to do RLHF with mass human labeling.
- muskmusk 4y ago
  In the olden days before Satya Nadella. Microsoft was a bloodsucking vampire of a company that couldn't execute anything of significance, but they had a pretty solid research department. Google could ofcourse sit on a much better version that isn't safe or economic, but they could also just be unable to do better. Good research department, but unable to execute anything significant. Time will tell I guess :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hbn 4y ago
Google is an ad company. ML just happens to be good for targeting ads.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Google's cloud revenue is almost same as Oracle. If Google Cloud was it's own company, it'd be a fortune 100 firm. But you keep doing you, living with outdated information and grandma tales. I bet you'd still be telling this joke to your grandkids too
  - logicchains 4y ago
    >Google's cloud revenue is almost same as Oracle. What about their profits?
manojlds 4y ago
The whole basis of current innovation is from Google, let's not forget.
guardian5x 4y ago
For me, Google was always an Ad company first. But don't get me wrong, they do some great research on the side for AI, like AlphaZero, AlphaGo, etc. But also been early with the Transformer models. There just seems to be a lack to put this into workable products lately.

dageshi 4y ago

Is anyone doing better than Google at self driving cars right now? I agree with the other products you mentioned but it seems like nobody has "won" self driving cars yet but google might be the furthest along?

minutillo 4y ago
Yes, many cars with various levels of self-driving are available. Almost every car maker now has basic lane following and adaptive cruise control. Some add navigation, lane changing, and the ability to obey traffic signals. GM has a system called Super Cruise that allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel. Mercedes has Drive Pilot which is the first level 3 self driving system. Google has not released anything.
- pb7 4y ago
  Waymo is driving passengers around a real city without a driver in the car as a service. Automatically changing lanes is cute by comparison.
- chewmieser 4y ago
  Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities (no person in the front seat at all). Honestly they seem quite advanced compared to the competition.
  - 1024core 4y ago
    > Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities Only 2: Phoenix and SF.
    - adt 4y ago
      + LA https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-rides-with-employees-in-los-angeles/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/27/waymo-to-test-driverless-r...
- zeven7 4y ago

COMMENT___ 4y ago

> Gmail works perfectly Is this a joke? Gmail now is an awful email client. E.g., now you just can’t compose a rich text email when you need to copy paste lists from other emails. In certain cases, you can’t correctly format an email if you copy paste without formatting or plain text. And there is a lot of such annoying stuff, that makes my life painful. Perhaps, searching my mailbox with gmail is OK, but the part of composing emails is in bad state.

com2kid 4y ago

> I can't find a single reason to change my pixel for anything else, Fingerprint reader on the Pixel 7 works about half the time. I had to program one finger in 4 times to make it work that often. My Oneplus 6 (immediately previous phone) had a functional fingerprint reader. OnePlus used to have a better UI as well, minor improvements on the stock Android UI that made it just a little bit nicer in places. When I got my Pixel 7 though, I realized that for whatever reason, gboard on my oneplus 6 is unusually terrible. Like, 80% accurate typing terrible, and that gboard isn't always that bad. > Gmail works perfectly Gmail was the first good web email client. Everyone else realized they had to stop sucking, and now they are good. Gmail was realized in 2004 and is from a completely different era of Google.

jvolkman 4y ago
My Pixel 7's fingerprint reader works near 100% of the time. The only time I have problems is if my finger or the screen are wet.
- com2kid 4y ago
  What finger do you use? I use my left thumb, pick up the phone, no go. It is a complete sad joke. After a few weeks I think I've been trained by the phone on exactly how to hold is to the fingerprint reader works more often, but the fact I can only have to use all the programming slots for fingers on just one finger is sad. Edit: OMG, I just read online that rebooting the phone after recording fingerprints improves recognition from 20-50% to almost 100%. I just got my phone a month ago and haven't rebooted it yet, after a reboot the sensor now works reliably. What an absurd and stupid bug.
  - jvolkman 4y ago
    I usually use my left thumb after taking it out of my left pant pocket. I also use a TPU screen protector, not glass. I've read that various glass protectors can interfere.
    - 4y ago

chatmasta 4y ago

There was an HN thread the other day where people were arguing ChatGPT would be nowhere without Google's AI research. That might be true, but clearly there is a significant gap in productization ability...

LightBug1 4y ago
Deproductization black belts.

pratikch1253 4y ago

From recent memory I don't recall a single Google product that has garnered mass appeal perhaps the cloud office suites but that's again debatable. Gmail was like 2004. Remember Stadia they axed that as well could have licensed the tech behind it to other companies but nope.

tonguetrainer 4y ago

Google must compete with ChatGPT though. Failure is not an option here. Microsoft has put Google in a corner and it is fight or die.

smadge 4y ago

I don’t know if it’s fair to say Google is just stepping into generative language models. They invented transformers!