10 ms·

Google's Gemini Headaches Spur $90B Selloff

88 points by donsupreme 3y ago

Handprint4469 3y ago
Remember that while "$90B selloff" sounds like a big, scary number, GOOGL (Alphabet) is still up 52% compared with one year ago. 2023-02-27: $89.87 2024-02-27: $137.17
- rvz 3y ago
  Yes. I certainly remember 1 year ago: "Good! Hope it falls further below $97 or $95 then I will just buy some Google stock." [0] "I can confidently say that this stock drop is a typical over-reaction from the markets." [1] Now looking back, that was certainly an overreaction by Wall St due to Google messing up their Bard presentation and they got over it. Now it is recovered and is up 52% up since then. Not as good as Meta's >300% recovery but it wasn't exactly over for Google. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34749912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34749912
- verticalscaler 3y ago
  Buy some stock then.
- glimshe 3y ago
  As TFA says: "Alphabet stock is down 1% year-to-date, trailing the S&P’s 7% gain and tech-heavy Nasdaq’s 8% rally, as well as the double-digit gains of rivals like Microsoft and Meta." If Microsoft and Meta are better investments, this isn't good for Google irrespective of how much GOOG went up.
- sackfield 3y ago
  Thank god for index funds. Having said that a disaster is one classification and rebalance away.
ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
The incidence makes me wonder what percentage of people at Google spend their time in counterproductive ways. If this is rooted too deeply in Google's culture by now, they might take very long to recover. Like decades long. Has anybody else here seen how the UIs of Google Adsense and Google Ads have evolved during recent years? They are a mess. Another indicator that something is wrong. I witnessed firsthand, how SMBs tried to put ads on Google Ads in the latest version and simply gave up. Because they couldn't figure out the interface. Did Google lose their ability to bang out useful software?
- Veuxdo 3y ago
  Other than search, what would you consider Google's best software?
  - ralphist 3y ago
    Maps is still good. GMail still works. Most of their big products aren't awful. It's funny that Search seems to be going down faster than the others, given that this one actually makes most of their money. I'd have thought they would put the best people on it and been very conservative about changing it.
    - Xirgil 3y ago
      Search is going downhill at least in part because they're dealing with an entire industry that's adversarial to them. SEO companies are spending billions of dollars and countless man-hours with the explicit goal of making search worse. The fact that they've gotten even better tools in the form of GenAI for manipulating search hasn't helped.
      - nwienert 3y ago
        I'd argue a much bigger part is their various nerfs. Reddit and SO are barely recommended. Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites. During Trump they decided allowing anything except for MSNBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/etc on the first five pages of anything remotely news related were the only allowable results. This mirrors exactly the Gemini/OpenAI nerfs for PC. Given 90% of my searches are for questions about what people think about things, code/food/drugs/health/medicine/etc, and topical events, it's become completely useless without adding "reddit" or something after.
gipp 3y ago
Am I crazy, or is everyone taking all the wrong lessons from this whole thing? This doesn't really seem like an AI problem, or even a Google problem. Gemini did exactly what Google told it to do, and Google did exactly what prevailing cultural attitudes demanded it do. All that's happening here, it seems to me, is that this episode is casting a bright light on the fact that the cultural values of (a) inclusive representation, and (b) avoiding "harmful" representations of protected categories, are mutually contradictory. But nobody's even attempting to acknowledge this possibility except the idiot "go woke go broke" crowd, which is not exactly a good faith discussion.
- Veuxdo 3y ago
  > This doesn't really seem like an AI problem It can be many problems, but I think it is certainly an AI problem. A big one. It really shows that asking a computer for something is fundamentaly a bad idea. Computers are for, well, computing. They are not for answering history questions or whatever.
  - booleandilemma 3y ago
    On the one hand I want to agree with this, but on the other hand, it seems like a short-sighted view. Imagine if earlier people had told themselves "computers aren't for making music", "computers aren't for connecting with friends", "computers aren't for watching movies", etc. Computers can be whatever we want them to be for, we just need to figure out how.
  - pruetj 3y ago
    > It really shows that asking a computer for something is fundamentally a bad idea No, that is not what it shows at all. Everything you do on a computer is "asking a computer for something." Do you think computers are computing things that no one asked for?
    - Veuxdo 3y ago
      They're computing things they've precisely been programmed to compute. Number crunching, in the end, with extremely low error rates caused by hardware faults. LLM error rates are comparatively astronomical.
fardo 3y ago
I think part of the disdain is people’s recognition of Google’s inability to make and maintain new products. Separate from recent poor generations, I’d be reluctant to use any Google AI, as if for some reason I’d liked it, the odds are too high it’ll get shut down or replaced by some worse internal competitor.
- javchz 3y ago
  Yes. I love many of Google's products, but there is always the fear that if you add them to your workflow, they could be removed tomorrow for no good reason. Disclaimer: I'm still salty about Google Reader, Domains and Play Music.
  - sickofparadox 3y ago
    The loss of play music to Youtube music was such a massive, significant downgrade. If I didn't get grandfathered in with my plan from the old Youtube Red days (it includes YT premium alongside YT music) I would have dropped the whole thing by now.
    - joquarky 3y ago
      With YT music, you still can't add a song to the same playlist more than once. It's like they unnecessarily chose sets rather than lists. This stuff should be easy.
      - javchz 3y ago
        It's the CurrentYear™, and we still don't have play counts (like personal ones, not the youtube global count). Play Music had it, even my iPod shuffle from 2006 had it, but YT Music for some reason don't.
  - quitit 3y ago
    Adobe have the same problem - it then becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, as people won't adopt the new software because they can't risk losing years of their work or their skills becoming irrelevant. The only way both can stop this is by sticking to a product, for better or for worse, and then actually innovate, not sit still once they've wrangled competitors. The pattern from a business perspective is so repetitive as to be tiring: Get involved with anything that threatens their core revenue source, suffocate or buy out competitors, then barely push the needle forward ensuring that disruption never comes from within. I believe that if Google weren't so against self-disruption that much of the latest AI innovation would be entirely theirs to own.
slenocchio 3y ago
DAE think this whole fiasco might've been intentional? Seems like such a glaring flaw in the system. The public reaction was predictable, as well as the stock reaction....
- suddenclarity 3y ago
  On the contrary, I think they completely misjudged it. The AI initially worked as intended and that's why the product manager defended the flawed results on Twitter. What they didn't expect was that people would start generating Nazis to show how flawed it was. This caused backlash from people and organisations that they actually cared about. I doubt the patched model will fix the underlying issue. They'll just apply exceptions to a few noteworthy historical keywords. They've been vocal about their filtering of image search for years and this is in line with that.
Zetobal 3y ago
I really don't think anything happens to C-Suites anymore. As long as the numbers go up, the boards don't care. They don't even care that they could have made a lot of money from the AI gold rush in the last year. They just sit it out with a steady increase in their comp. Maybe after G+ they are all just to risk averse to do good work.
esoterica 3y ago
Google needs to stop allowing themselves to be bullied by brainrotted culture warriors on both sides. Someone screams at them for not being woke enough and they panic and overcompensate. Someone else screams at them for being too woke and again they start running around like headless chickens trying onto appease the last person that yelled at them. None of this matters at all in the real world.
gorbachev 3y ago
Time to lay off some engineers! /s
- tmaly 3y ago
  If they had good PR maybe this story will be used to justify more layoffs. Forbes was pretty famous for being able to manipulate for SEO purposes.
- indy 3y ago
  why the sarcasm tag? laying off some Google engineers (and a lot of Google managers, ethicists, trust and safety employees, HR etc) would actually be good for both Google's share price and their products
benopal64 3y ago
Honestly, I think this whole thing is blown over. Gemini has a huge reach, so they played it safe by doing the same thing OpenAI has been doing (system instructions for their AI services like GPT-4) and tried to max out diversity. This decision is juicy bait for anyone who believes that America is in some culture war. This is unsurprising if you live in America and are subjected to extremely high levels of marketing and polarizing headlines. Please note: I think it is clear that the Gemini models still need work to be historically representative and accurate, however, I do not think there is any real danger in airing with the side of caution and trying to fight the innate biases in the training data. It seems like this was Google's goal.
- rayiner 3y ago
  I don’t think you need to lean into some “culture war” to think it’s deeply weird that Google engineered their AI product to change what you type into the prompt so it changes the races of people depicted in the results. That displays an unhealthy fixation with race. I ran this by my 70-year old immigrant parents—who are Democrats and by no means culture-war people—and they found this very cringeworthy (not that they even know what “cringe” is—that’s the closest translation of their reaction in English).
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Don't feel obligated to share if you're not comfortable, but what country/ethnicity are your parents from?
    - hollerith 3y ago
      Bangladesh.
      - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
        You have two accounts, or you're posting a reply for someone else?! Do they know you're sharing personal info?!
chucke1992 3y ago
The current Google is basically lives and dies by ad revenue. Google can produce cool scientific research but it is basically IBM of this era.
didip 3y ago
Sundar is the CEO during peace time, not the CEO for war time. Google seemed to lag further behind its magnificent seven peers.
cyanydeez 3y ago
it's so bad, if I were a conservative hat wearer in liberal clothing, I'd say someone purposefully overturned the guardrails on this thing to do a self fulfilling prophecy of "go woke, go broke" to back up my claim, id cite a few of those incel culture stories Google has had over the last decade suggesting they have some of that "libertarian" strain indistinguishable from fascism or "states rights" ideology.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
""The issue for the stock is not the debate [over Gemini] itself, it is the perception of truth behind the brand," Melius Research analysts Ben Reitzes and Nick Monroe wrote in a Monday note to clients."

88 points by donsupreme 3y ago

Remember that while "$90B selloff" sounds like a big, scary number, GOOGL (Alphabet) is still up 52% compared with one year ago. 2023-02-27: $89.87 2024-02-27: $137.17

rvz 3y ago
Yes. I certainly remember 1 year ago: "Good! Hope it falls further below $97 or $95 then I will just buy some Google stock." [0] "I can confidently say that this stock drop is a typical over-reaction from the markets." [1] Now looking back, that was certainly an overreaction by Wall St due to Google messing up their Bard presentation and they got over it. Now it is recovered and is up 52% up since then. Not as good as Meta's >300% recovery but it wasn't exactly over for Google. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34749912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34749912
verticalscaler 3y ago
Buy some stock then.
glimshe 3y ago
As TFA says: "Alphabet stock is down 1% year-to-date, trailing the S&P’s 7% gain and tech-heavy Nasdaq’s 8% rally, as well as the double-digit gains of rivals like Microsoft and Meta." If Microsoft and Meta are better investments, this isn't good for Google irrespective of how much GOOG went up.
sackfield 3y ago
Thank god for index funds. Having said that a disaster is one classification and rebalance away.

ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago

The incidence makes me wonder what percentage of people at Google spend their time in counterproductive ways. If this is rooted too deeply in Google's culture by now, they might take very long to recover. Like decades long. Has anybody else here seen how the UIs of Google Adsense and Google Ads have evolved during recent years? They are a mess. Another indicator that something is wrong. I witnessed firsthand, how SMBs tried to put ads on Google Ads in the latest version and simply gave up. Because they couldn't figure out the interface. Did Google lose their ability to bang out useful software?

Veuxdo 3y ago
Other than search, what would you consider Google's best software?
- ralphist 3y ago
  Maps is still good. GMail still works. Most of their big products aren't awful. It's funny that Search seems to be going down faster than the others, given that this one actually makes most of their money. I'd have thought they would put the best people on it and been very conservative about changing it.
  - Xirgil 3y ago
    Search is going downhill at least in part because they're dealing with an entire industry that's adversarial to them. SEO companies are spending billions of dollars and countless man-hours with the explicit goal of making search worse. The fact that they've gotten even better tools in the form of GenAI for manipulating search hasn't helped.
    - nwienert 3y ago
      I'd argue a much bigger part is their various nerfs. Reddit and SO are barely recommended. Product reviews used to go to higher quality blogs, Reddit, Consumer Reports now are now just all content filler sites. During Trump they decided allowing anything except for MSNBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/etc on the first five pages of anything remotely news related were the only allowable results. This mirrors exactly the Gemini/OpenAI nerfs for PC. Given 90% of my searches are for questions about what people think about things, code/food/drugs/health/medicine/etc, and topical events, it's become completely useless without adding "reddit" or something after.

gipp 3y ago

Am I crazy, or is everyone taking all the wrong lessons from this whole thing? This doesn't really seem like an AI problem, or even a Google problem. Gemini did exactly what Google told it to do, and Google did exactly what prevailing cultural attitudes demanded it do. All that's happening here, it seems to me, is that this episode is casting a bright light on the fact that the cultural values of (a) inclusive representation, and (b) avoiding "harmful" representations of protected categories, are mutually contradictory. But nobody's even attempting to acknowledge this possibility except the idiot "go woke go broke" crowd, which is not exactly a good faith discussion.

Veuxdo 3y ago
> This doesn't really seem like an AI problem It can be many problems, but I think it is certainly an AI problem. A big one. It really shows that asking a computer for something is fundamentaly a bad idea. Computers are for, well, computing. They are not for answering history questions or whatever.
- booleandilemma 3y ago
  On the one hand I want to agree with this, but on the other hand, it seems like a short-sighted view. Imagine if earlier people had told themselves "computers aren't for making music", "computers aren't for connecting with friends", "computers aren't for watching movies", etc. Computers can be whatever we want them to be for, we just need to figure out how.
- pruetj 3y ago
  > It really shows that asking a computer for something is fundamentally a bad idea No, that is not what it shows at all. Everything you do on a computer is "asking a computer for something." Do you think computers are computing things that no one asked for?
  - Veuxdo 3y ago
    They're computing things they've precisely been programmed to compute. Number crunching, in the end, with extremely low error rates caused by hardware faults. LLM error rates are comparatively astronomical.

fardo 3y ago

I think part of the disdain is people’s recognition of Google’s inability to make and maintain new products. Separate from recent poor generations, I’d be reluctant to use any Google AI, as if for some reason I’d liked it, the odds are too high it’ll get shut down or replaced by some worse internal competitor.

javchz 3y ago
Yes. I love many of Google's products, but there is always the fear that if you add them to your workflow, they could be removed tomorrow for no good reason. Disclaimer: I'm still salty about Google Reader, Domains and Play Music.
- sickofparadox 3y ago
  The loss of play music to Youtube music was such a massive, significant downgrade. If I didn't get grandfathered in with my plan from the old Youtube Red days (it includes YT premium alongside YT music) I would have dropped the whole thing by now.
  - joquarky 3y ago
    With YT music, you still can't add a song to the same playlist more than once. It's like they unnecessarily chose sets rather than lists. This stuff should be easy.
    - javchz 3y ago
      It's the CurrentYear™, and we still don't have play counts (like personal ones, not the youtube global count). Play Music had it, even my iPod shuffle from 2006 had it, but YT Music for some reason don't.
- quitit 3y ago
  Adobe have the same problem - it then becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, as people won't adopt the new software because they can't risk losing years of their work or their skills becoming irrelevant. The only way both can stop this is by sticking to a product, for better or for worse, and then actually innovate, not sit still once they've wrangled competitors. The pattern from a business perspective is so repetitive as to be tiring: Get involved with anything that threatens their core revenue source, suffocate or buy out competitors, then barely push the needle forward ensuring that disruption never comes from within. I believe that if Google weren't so against self-disruption that much of the latest AI innovation would be entirely theirs to own.

slenocchio 3y ago

DAE think this whole fiasco might've been intentional? Seems like such a glaring flaw in the system. The public reaction was predictable, as well as the stock reaction....

suddenclarity 3y ago
On the contrary, I think they completely misjudged it. The AI initially worked as intended and that's why the product manager defended the flawed results on Twitter. What they didn't expect was that people would start generating Nazis to show how flawed it was. This caused backlash from people and organisations that they actually cared about. I doubt the patched model will fix the underlying issue. They'll just apply exceptions to a few noteworthy historical keywords. They've been vocal about their filtering of image search for years and this is in line with that.

Zetobal 3y ago

I really don't think anything happens to C-Suites anymore. As long as the numbers go up, the boards don't care. They don't even care that they could have made a lot of money from the AI gold rush in the last year. They just sit it out with a steady increase in their comp. Maybe after G+ they are all just to risk averse to do good work.

esoterica 3y ago

Google needs to stop allowing themselves to be bullied by brainrotted culture warriors on both sides. Someone screams at them for not being woke enough and they panic and overcompensate. Someone else screams at them for being too woke and again they start running around like headless chickens trying onto appease the last person that yelled at them. None of this matters at all in the real world.

gorbachev 3y ago

Time to lay off some engineers! /s

tmaly 3y ago
If they had good PR maybe this story will be used to justify more layoffs. Forbes was pretty famous for being able to manipulate for SEO purposes.
indy 3y ago
why the sarcasm tag? laying off some Google engineers (and a lot of Google managers, ethicists, trust and safety employees, HR etc) would actually be good for both Google's share price and their products

benopal64 3y ago

Honestly, I think this whole thing is blown over. Gemini has a huge reach, so they played it safe by doing the same thing OpenAI has been doing (system instructions for their AI services like GPT-4) and tried to max out diversity. This decision is juicy bait for anyone who believes that America is in some culture war. This is unsurprising if you live in America and are subjected to extremely high levels of marketing and polarizing headlines. Please note: I think it is clear that the Gemini models still need work to be historically representative and accurate, however, I do not think there is any real danger in airing with the side of caution and trying to fight the innate biases in the training data. It seems like this was Google's goal.

rayiner 3y ago
I don’t think you need to lean into some “culture war” to think it’s deeply weird that Google engineered their AI product to change what you type into the prompt so it changes the races of people depicted in the results. That displays an unhealthy fixation with race. I ran this by my 70-year old immigrant parents—who are Democrats and by no means culture-war people—and they found this very cringeworthy (not that they even know what “cringe” is—that’s the closest translation of their reaction in English).
- freedomben 3y ago
  Don't feel obligated to share if you're not comfortable, but what country/ethnicity are your parents from?
  - hollerith 3y ago
    Bangladesh.
    - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
      You have two accounts, or you're posting a reply for someone else?! Do they know you're sharing personal info?!

chucke1992 3y ago

The current Google is basically lives and dies by ad revenue. Google can produce cool scientific research but it is basically IBM of this era.

didip 3y ago

Sundar is the CEO during peace time, not the CEO for war time. Google seemed to lag further behind its magnificent seven peers.

cyanydeez 3y ago

it's so bad, if I were a conservative hat wearer in liberal clothing, I'd say someone purposefully overturned the guardrails on this thing to do a self fulfilling prophecy of "go woke, go broke" to back up my claim, id cite a few of those incel culture stories Google has had over the last decade suggesting they have some of that "libertarian" strain indistinguishable from fascism or "states rights" ideology.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

""The issue for the stock is not the debate [over Gemini] itself, it is the perception of truth behind the brand," Melius Research analysts Ben Reitzes and Nick Monroe wrote in a Monday note to clients."