4 ms·

>also Gemini Pro (Google's best available model) Pretty sad for Google if their next big AI thing is already being beaten by a small company with a tiny fracti

>also Gemini Pro (Google's best available model) Pretty sad for Google if their next big AI thing is already being beaten by a small company with a tiny fraction of their resources.

margorczynski 3y ago
Google in general looks like they're lost their touch and are kinda on a downward spiral. Trying to squeeze out as much as they can from Youtube is I think a major sign of that, usually attempts like that start to pop up in burnt-out companies that are heading to their end. As for AI they have a lot of world-class talent but they somehow cannot transform that into a coherent product even though they did amazing stuff on the research side. It has been brought up many times on HN on how Google has a product-design problem and it seems to be true.
tomjen3 3y ago
Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for you and summerize the results is both way more expensive than normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown. Google can't do anything about it either - consumers will prefer the chat approach and will go where it is offered. Google has to offer it, or people will go to ChatGpt and Bing, but at the same time they lose a lot of money each time people opt for the chat summary. It is way expensive for Bing too, but they don't care because their market is growing and since the only thing people used to search Bing for was how to download Chrome and how to change the default browser, they aren't losing a lot this way.
- AaronFriel 3y ago
  Imagine a search engine that tries to persuade you a sponsored product is the answer to your problems, and it can use its knowledge about you to do so. I think search products will be OK - it will just be stranger than we expect.
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Big was used for porn. Don’t forget porn. Torrents too. Bing going legit and genuinely threatening google wasn’t on my bingo card for sure.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    And honest content. One order of magnitude more honest at least; Google is like asking the Kremlin for truth.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for you and summerize the results is both way more expensive than normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown But those ads would be compelling and more valuable. There is no reason to believe the current inference LLM architecture is the optimal one (as shown by Mistral's MoE) - future inference will likely be cheaper than it is currently. The sentiment that Google's goose is cooked I'm seeing in this thread seems like wish-fulfillment to me. Especially considering that the upstarts also don't have a clear road to profitability
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    OpenAI can raise a ton of more cash, so they may not have a road to profitability yet, but they have long time before they crash.
- danenania 3y ago
  One area Google has a big advantage is in its massive crawling and indexing infrastructure. As good as ChatGPT plus is, the search with Bing feature is so. damn. slow. It seems do be doing a normal search request in the background rather than using any kind of index, and multiple links are visited serially rather than concurrently. Did I mention that it’s slow? That’s a large and difficult problem obviously and one Google is clearly well-positioned for if they can ever catch up on the model front.
rmbyrro 3y ago
It does look like Google will be the Yahoo of 2030 Perhaps even sooner, given the pace tech is evolving nowadays comparing to when Google took over Yahoo's place.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  They deserve it. Google is one of the big reasons why the web is the way it is today - bloated, spammy, overly SEO-optimized.
  - sevagh 3y ago
    Not sure if it's a conspiracy theory or a known thing but I read it once and it stuck in my mind that Google's projects are a form of distraction and friction to prevent people catching up with them (e.g. HTTP3).
    - painted-now 3y ago
      I'm not sure I follow: what kind of Google projects are you talking about? Google internal ones or external ones? And depending on the answer, who should get distracted by it? ... aaaand then in the end, catching up to what?
      - sevagh 3y ago
        Example: Kubernetes, convincing 60% of the industry that they don't know how to run production workloads anymore.
    - jakub_g 3y ago
      Google is solving problems at Google scale, where improving something by 2% yields millions. Re: "distracting other companies", there's however this famous essay by Joel Spolsky (2002): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby.
GuB-42 3y ago
Google was once a small company beating some big players with a fraction of their resources.
ioulaum 3y ago
Google may have goofed by focusing too much on making it multimodal. Solid ambition, but it also makes the model bigger and harder to train.

>also Gemini Pro (Google's best available model) Pretty sad for Google if their next big AI thing is already being beaten by a small company with a tiny fraction of their resources.

margorczynski 3y ago

Google in general looks like they're lost their touch and are kinda on a downward spiral. Trying to squeeze out as much as they can from Youtube is I think a major sign of that, usually attempts like that start to pop up in burnt-out companies that are heading to their end. As for AI they have a lot of world-class talent but they somehow cannot transform that into a coherent product even though they did amazing stuff on the research side. It has been brought up many times on HN on how Google has a product-design problem and it seems to be true.

tomjen3 3y ago

Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for you and summerize the results is both way more expensive than normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown. Google can't do anything about it either - consumers will prefer the chat approach and will go where it is offered. Google has to offer it, or people will go to ChatGpt and Bing, but at the same time they lose a lot of money each time people opt for the chat summary. It is way expensive for Bing too, but they don't care because their market is growing and since the only thing people used to search Bing for was how to download Chrome and how to change the default browser, they aren't losing a lot this way.

AaronFriel 3y ago
Imagine a search engine that tries to persuade you a sponsored product is the answer to your problems, and it can use its knowledge about you to do so. I think search products will be OK - it will just be stranger than we expect.
jamiek88 3y ago
Big was used for porn. Don’t forget porn. Torrents too. Bing going legit and genuinely threatening google wasn’t on my bingo card for sure.
- eastbound 3y ago
  And honest content. One order of magnitude more honest at least; Google is like asking the Kremlin for truth.
sangnoir 3y ago
> Google is conflicted about AI. Having AI do searches for you and summerize the results is both way more expensive than normal searches and means way fewer ads are shown But those ads would be compelling and more valuable. There is no reason to believe the current inference LLM architecture is the optimal one (as shown by Mistral's MoE) - future inference will likely be cheaper than it is currently. The sentiment that Google's goose is cooked I'm seeing in this thread seems like wish-fulfillment to me. Especially considering that the upstarts also don't have a clear road to profitability
- tomjen3 3y ago
  OpenAI can raise a ton of more cash, so they may not have a road to profitability yet, but they have long time before they crash.
danenania 3y ago
One area Google has a big advantage is in its massive crawling and indexing infrastructure. As good as ChatGPT plus is, the search with Bing feature is so. damn. slow. It seems do be doing a normal search request in the background rather than using any kind of index, and multiple links are visited serially rather than concurrently. Did I mention that it’s slow? That’s a large and difficult problem obviously and one Google is clearly well-positioned for if they can ever catch up on the model front.

rmbyrro 3y ago

It does look like Google will be the Yahoo of 2030 Perhaps even sooner, given the pace tech is evolving nowadays comparing to when Google took over Yahoo's place.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
They deserve it. Google is one of the big reasons why the web is the way it is today - bloated, spammy, overly SEO-optimized.
- sevagh 3y ago
  Not sure if it's a conspiracy theory or a known thing but I read it once and it stuck in my mind that Google's projects are a form of distraction and friction to prevent people catching up with them (e.g. HTTP3).
  - painted-now 3y ago
    I'm not sure I follow: what kind of Google projects are you talking about? Google internal ones or external ones? And depending on the answer, who should get distracted by it? ... aaaand then in the end, catching up to what?
    - sevagh 3y ago
      Example: Kubernetes, convincing 60% of the industry that they don't know how to run production workloads anymore.
  - jakub_g 3y ago
    Google is solving problems at Google scale, where improving something by 2% yields millions. Re: "distracting other companies", there's however this famous essay by Joel Spolsky (2002): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby.

GuB-42 3y ago

Google was once a small company beating some big players with a fraction of their resources.

ioulaum 3y ago

Google may have goofed by focusing too much on making it multimodal. Solid ambition, but it also makes the model bigger and harder to train.