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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

• 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.
  • jorvi 3y ago
    “ Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Straight from the horse’s mouth :)
    • Veuxdo 3y ago
      But Gemini is offering opinions and analysis (and they're often pretty terrible, to boot). It seems they've wandered pretty far afield from their mission.
• nerdo 3y ago
  No, perfectly sane. The party says there are five fingers.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• verticalscaler 3y ago
  [flagged]
• browningstreet 3y ago
  I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39527156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39527156 > I said they didn't want to be racist, what they haven't yet figured out is: 1) how to not be racist, while aligning with 2) how to be anti-racist. > They've also confused "racial" with "racist". Just because "people" want a thing doesn't mean the outcomes will be acceptable. Google is supposed to be excellent at figuring out this gap, with SMEs and product managers. And to add to all this, it feels like an undesirable extension of the "ethical AI team" debacles (search for Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell) of a couple of years ago. They haven't solved this internal conundrum yet, and the current example seemed like an easy one to foresee.
  • cmcaleer 3y ago
    It was easy to foresee, for sure. Was it easy to mention in meetings? Especially if you weren't from a minority background.
    • browningstreet 3y ago
      That culture demerit is worth.. oh, say.. $90B then. Esp for the Dirs, VPs+, and their awards.
• quintes 3y ago
  All that’s happening… make it seem trivial and of little consequence. I may be part of that idiot group then Edit: spelling
• nostromo 3y ago
  I think the culture shifted out from under Google and expectations around DEI have changed -- Google's culture is stuck in 2020.
  • candiddevmike 3y ago
    They probably didn't lay off their DEI team like the rest of tech did.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    Has the culture really shifted since 2020? I know I'm in a bubble, but I haven't seen any of that. What sort of changes have you seen?
• make3 3y ago
  I just think culture war crazies overreacted to this. a lot of people in a position of privilege are so blind to the situation of people who are not, & so scared of losing their privilege. the thing needs a bit of tuning, that's all. it's not such a huge deal.
  • renegat0x0 3y ago
    One of the biggest companies puts out a program that does not work. The stock reflects that. And yet this comment is about privilege? Are you serious?
    • freedomben 3y ago
      I don't know about GP specifically, but I know many people who would agree with them, and those people don't believe that it was anywhere near as bad as what people were saying. They say the same thing about it being overblown by culture warriors, even though there were plenty of people reporting it that have a pretty good history of not being culture warriors (like Nate Silver). To me it feels like a "I reject your reality, and substitute my own" type of response, but I don't see any way to break through that. Even on HN, the vast majority of people didn't even see this story because the first 7 to 10 submissions that started gaining traction got flagged into obscurity, even when it was a highly sympathetic publication mostly writing a defense.
      • renegat0x0 3y ago
        I am not sold on that. There are way too many articles about it just to dismiss it just like that. For me it looks more like that privilege culture warriors would like to deny reality.
  • mancerayder 3y ago
    How can you be simultaneously blind to privilege and 'scared' of losing it? Are you alluding to a psychoanalytic perspective of unconscious bias and attitudes?
• SilverBirch 3y ago
  I don't think that's really true - most smart people are capable of considering both of those values (amongst many, many other values) and come up with a reasonable balance where, for example a prompt for a founding father would be white, but maybe a prompt of a hero from the American Revolution was not. Just as an example. But Gemini is no where near smart enough to achieve that kind of nuance, so instead you can kind of have to tune it with pretty blunt pre-text. So, the engineering team saw previous complaints about image generators providing too "stereotypical" images in some contexts and pushed the generator more towards returning "diverse" results. But Gemini isn't a smart human, it's a blunt machine and so it doesn't know in which contexts "diversity" is appropriate. I think the underlying issue here is that until these AI tools genuinely are smarter than smart humans (and probably even after), the second they get released they're going to be under massive scrutiny. And no person, let alone some crappy AI is going to give perfect answers to 1,000,000 users asking questions attempting to trip it up. The solution to this is obvious though - you accept it's not perfect! The problem is that's not an acceptable solution for either Google's brand or Google's shareprice.
• balls187 3y ago
  > 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... I dont think you're crazy, but while "woke" vs "anti-woke" may have been the catalyst, the issue is really that AI can fail pretty spectacularly, and the law of unintended consequences when applied to AI is at best, funny, and at worst, extremely harmful.
• Closi 3y ago
  > Google did exactly what prevailing cultural attitudes demanded it do Google did exactly what their own perception of cultural attitudes led them to do. This model clearly isn’t exactly in tune with the actual cultural zeitgeist, otherwise they wouldn’t have this issue. IMO it doesn’t seem aligned with broad cultural attitudes - it appears in line with a specific cultural attitude (one often called ‘woke’ although I don’t think that’s a particularly useful term).
  • maxfurman 3y ago
    I'm not sure there's one single zeitgeist for them to align with. They could be in tune with the cultural attitude of the majority and still run afoul of millions of people
• lxgr 3y ago
  My baseline assumption: "Google fails to achieve X" in 2024 is evidence to the state of Google in 2024, not proof of the impossibility of X.
• rayiner 3y ago
  > Google did exactly what prevailing cultural attitudes demanded it do But the “prevailing cultural attitudes” don’t demand that—as evidenced by the mockery at Gemini’s expense. One of the highest rated shows on TV right now is “Young Sheldon,” where every single character is a white southerner. That’s a spin-off of Big Bang Theory, which reached #1 in its timeslot, in which every character except the token Indian was white. And how many Asians do you see on Univision? It’s a very small portion of the public that’s clamoring for contrived scenes where there’s one white, one Latino, one black person, and one Asian around a dinner table.
  • exodust 3y ago
    By your own reasoning, Raj from the Big Bang Theory wouldn't be a "token" Indian. If the show's creators didn't care about balancing the diversity scales, as you're implying, they wouldn't use token characters would they.
    • rayiner 3y ago
      You’re right. They’re just reflecting the reality of a university physics department.
  • nickpsecurity 3y ago
    They’re talking about things like this: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/oscars-2024-rules-explained-best-picture-diversity-inclusion-standards-1234962077/amp/ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/osc... Or what I wrote in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530386 The example you give may have some problem driving it. Likewise, all the shows and channels whose cast are almost all black, Latino, women, LGBT, etc. It’s also possible the roles just went to whoever they’re around the most or showed up. I’ve also been in groups that were mostly white who invited countless non-whites to visit or join. They just never did for who knows what reason. All that said, it’s anecdotal evidence. What’s more concrete is the huge number of companies, plus awards like Oscars, changing their criteria to require hiring non-whites, non-males, and non-straights. One criteria required the plot be designed to promote that group’s politics which often happens. The Mother being the last one I saw like that and director turned out to do movies to push feminism. Also, who you have sex with used to be irrelevant to hiring. Now, liberals reward LGBT practices with jobs and movie roles. They’re definitely doing it. They don’t have to but are just backing those like them. Their ideological partners in groups they favor. The way human corruption and sin has always worked, eh?
• schnable 3y ago
  The tech may be good but as Stratechery[1] point out, the failure modes here indicate a serious culture problem inside the company. They thought tuning the AI in this way was a good product. That's hard to fix. Ben compares it to Microsoft holding funerals for Blackberry and iPhone when they released the Windows phone. [1] https://stratechery.com/2024/gemini-and-googles-culture/ https://stratechery.com/2024/gemini-and-googles-culture/