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Google's Culture of Fear
- acl777 3y agohttps://archive.ph/jBxOZ https://archive.ph/jBxOZ
- skmurphy 3y agoConclusion: "Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash."
- riku_iki 3y agoI don't think pile of cash will be shrinking. They will fire more people and reduce more expenses once profit margin will come closer to danger zone. And will turn into investment fund once core function will be lost completely.
- skmurphy 3y agoCan you point to some other examples of technology companies that lost their competitive advantage and were able to pivot successfully into an investment fund? It's an interesting premise but I am at a loss for an existence proof of any firm successfully executing the transformation.
- pokepim 3y ago[dead]
- riku_iki 3y agoNo, I can't. It is not easy research for me to find some tech company which collected 100b in cash, and has main business collapsed.
- steve1977 3y agoHave you tried asking ChatGPT? (sorry, couldn’t resist…)
- bongoman37 3y ago[dead]
- datavirtue 3y agoThe Kodak pension fund is gigantic. It eclipses the husk of a company that remains. Google could close up shop, invest in a tobacco company (and maybe a handful of other dividend kings), and literally live forever as a trillion dollar fund.
- skmurphy 3y agoAccording to https://www.plansponsor.com/kodak-outsources-management-of-overfunded-u-s-pension-plan/ https://www.plansponsor.com/kodak-outsources-management-of-o... it's $6.5 billion. But pension fund management is mandated by regulation. Google "cash on hand" is https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/cash-on-hand/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/cash-on-hand/ $111 billion. The question I am having trouble parsing is who makes the decision to become a pension fund at Google given their historical focus has been on technology. It's a significant pivot. At a small closely held firm I can see the owners deciding to use the corporation as a vehicle for managing retirement funds (or inter-generational wealth transfer) but Google has a much more diverse base of owners with divergent interests.
- riku_iki 3y ago> who makes the decision to become a pension fund at Google given their historical focus has been on technology I don't think anyone said Google has to become pension fund. They can become some generic investment fund: invest into stocks, other funds, bonds etc, or focus on tech investments.
- skmurphy 3y agoSorry "pension fund" was a typo on my part, I meant investment fund.
- elSidCampeador 3y agoBerkshire Hathaway. Not a "true" investment fund but not far off either.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ajhurliman 3y agoYahoo (they’re just a portfolio now right?)
- skmurphy 3y agoYahoo is a portfolio of brands. Compare https://www.yahooinc.com/our-brands https://www.yahooinc.com/our-brands with firms that manage investments: https://www.bridgewater.com/ https://www.bridgewater.com/ https://www.schwab.com/ https://www.schwab.com/ https://www.blackstone.com/ https://www.blackstone.com/ https://www.sequoiacap.com/ https://www.sequoiacap.com/ Yahoo is managing web properties and is essentially a media company (is paid by advertisers or other customers to deliver a well-characterized audience).
- llm_trw 3y agoMost talent left a long time ago. The people left are the hacks and the ones with mortgages.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xqcgrek2 3y agoThings were already pretty bad when Damor was fired, it's only gotten worse since
- tonymet 3y agoslippery slopes don't exis...
- camdenlock 3y agoWould be interested in reading some corroborating commentary from any actual Google employees here.
- raxxorraxor 3y agoThe reason why we don't hear more might be fear of professional repercussions as well. Speculative, but the impression remains and the fact that some prominent cases had a bad ending warrants suspicion.
- bradjohnson 3y agoI opened this expecting to see legitimate criticisms about the culture problems at google, but I can't get past the excessive whining about wokeness. I think that pseudo-progressive policies at hyper-capitalist corporations can contribute to the types of problems we have seen in Gemini. However, conflating those issues with some employee complaining about being "strongly encouraged" to choose their pronouns, and being disgusted by the "15 different crazed pronoun combinations" made me tap out. I don't care to read some culture warrior's weird manifesto.
- jklewis1 3y agoBrowsing the website a bit, it's pretty clear this is a Thiel-funded anti-woke "publication".
- EdwardDiego 3y agoHaha, found this on the author's LinkedIn: > Volunteer > The Seasteading Institute
- EdwardDiego 3y agoYeah, I read enough of these whinges on the net already.
- mvelbaum 3y agoYou are part of the problem then.
- bradjohnson 3y agoIf the other side of the issue is a propaganda network funded by a billionaire demagogue, then I'm pretty happy being part of the problem, thanks.
- mvelbaum 3y agoAre you talking about George Soros here? It's always astonishing to see ignorance and delusion so fully and grotesquely consummated in the mind of a person.
- MrMember 3y ago>Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). I doubt firing the CEO will do much at this point, the rot is institutional.
- HumanReadable 3y agoI would have thought this, if not for Microsoft's turnaround.
- marketerinland 3y ago> Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group) Oh boy.
- bmitc 3y agoI can't imagine having to rename a mundane employee interest/social group, much less hiring an external consultant to come up with the new name. It seems beyond anything.
- fwungy 3y agoThere is a certain demographic that commonly dye their hair. It isn't fair to them to be lumped in with unkempt people who do not dye their hair and probably don't even wear matching socks, let alone undergarments.
- Havoc 3y agoThat does not bode well. When HR is the problem then you’ve got a serious problem. Very hard to get rid of problematic HR people because they obviously know all the tricks. And any sort of attempt at changing culture can also get derailed by them. That leaves you with just override from above ie top management. And nobody sane is taking an even vaguely anti-DEI stance. So they seem a little stuck. Won’t be the last major fk up we seen from them on this topic as a result. > diversity architecture Jikes
- tim333 3y agoSergey Brin seems a bit embarrassed by it. >“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Brin said Saturday. “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.” Mike Solana, the author suggests he may fire Sundar https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1764723032042725531 https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1764723032042725531
- fwungy 3y agoAs if the whole LLM isn't completely twisted to echo "the message."
- rcpt 3y agoSomehow I'm blocked by that guy but I don't think I've ever interacted with him. Anyone else?
- Havoc 3y agoMaybe you made a bad crypto/Solana joke at some point ?
- tim333 3y agoNot personally but he seems to block quite a lot. There's even mention of a tool created in his honor: >Megablock is a tool that allows you to mute a tweet, as well as block its author and everyone who liked it in one hit. Its creation was inspired by a tweet from a Twitter user, Mike Solana... https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-block-everyone-who-liked-tweet/ https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-block-everyone-who-liked-tw...
- kweingar 3y agoI’ve been saying this since DALL-E was released three years ago: image generation is going to be a can of worms, forever. Google was clumsy here (in the same way that OpenAI was with DALL-E) but no amount of patches are going to fix the culture wars. Taking a text prompt and turning it into a picture is always going to be contentious. There will always be some amount of real bias and some amount of perceived bias on top of that. And it’s incredibly cheap and easy for users to find real or perceived bias if they’re looking for it.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoYeah they're trying to walk a tightrope between groups who want the AI to be less racist and more racist, and neither side will ever be happy.
- Tostino 3y agoThere is a third group who just want it to not suck. Imo that's been the largest group I've seen discussing the issues.
- what 3y agoWhat? If I ask for a picture of a white family and get back a racially diverse family, how am I racist for being upset about the result? It didn’t do what I asked and it wasn’t an outrageous ask.
- bradjohnson 3y agoWhy, exactly, are you asking an AI for pictures of a white family? Seems extremely strange.
- camdenlock 3y agoWould it be equally extremely strange to ask an AI for pictures of a black or asian family? You may be telling on yourself here.
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoIf you want to skip all the culture wars stuff, the interesting bit here is the alleged description of how Gemini's image generation prompting is preprocessed: "Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it’s being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company’s thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRA on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google’s full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don’t violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user. “Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?” “Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”" If true (admittedly a big if), it torpedoes the suggestion made by many that Gemini's misbehavior was simply accidental teething problems that were missed in testing.
- slater 3y agowhat i don't get is why this always gets missed in testing. How did they NOT have at least one turbo-edgelord on payroll just testing it with increasingly offensive 4chan-style prompts, and flagging the results?
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoThe article claims that they did know about it: "First, according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its “overdiversification” problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results."
- nebula8804 3y agoWas Gemini a "disaster"? That seems like too strong of a word. For the first time after trying Gemini 1.5 Pro, I feel like they are turning the ship around. Sure they haven't caught up to GPT-4 but it does not feel like a joke anymore. Does anyone else feel the same after trying 1.5 Pro? Surely they could do the same for their image generation efforts? Frankly are the "anti-woke" people really that fundamental to where the country is going? Do their complaints even matter all that much? On the US political side, they have been dead wrong in every political prediction since the 2016 election 1. 2018: record election year for the opposition 2. 2020: after a mess in handling covid the incumbent party is kicked out when most recent presdents get two terms 3. 2022: a supposed red wave never materializes. 4. 2024: ? (This is not to mention all the underperformances for every "anti-woke/far right" candidate in special elections). It sounds like they are just a loud minority.
- mindslight 3y agoI'd say you're making an awfully large pigeonhole of "anti-woke". I'm right there with your views on which way the political winds are blowing for the reactionaries and the general uselessness of reactionary populism, but the article and it's first link have some pretty damning factual descriptions. Like I don't see why an image generation tool that mangles every query so it conforms to the political desires of different loud minority is of use to nearly anyone. And sure, the site and its cited twits could be cherry picking the worst examples, to make mountains out of molehills as political hacks tend to do. But it's talking about a notable product at a notable company, so unless those examples were outright faked there is still truth in its criticism. Also I'm old enough to realize that 7 years isn't actually that long of a time, and one of the main reasons we get destructive spite votes like Trump is precisely people's resentment of this overbearing paternalism being pushed on them.
- nebula8804 3y ago>I'm right there with your views on which way the political winds are blowing for the reactionaries and the general uselessness of reactionary populism, but the article and it's first link have some pretty damning factual descriptions. Like I don't see why an image generation tool that mangles every query so it conforms to the political desires of different loud minority is of use to nearly anyone. Yes you raise a good point, the tool as it stands is not useful but that was part of my point. Let me restate what I was trying to get at: Less than year ago Bard was also totally useless. Sure as a text based tool, it wasn't as offensive to some people as this image generation tool is but the point still stands. The question we should be asking: Is the tool completely useless to users and if so, how fast are they improving it so that it can be useful? Useful in my mind is: Is the tool solving peoples needs? Clearly the image tool may not be doing so. I personally feel that they have really done a good job improving their offering (Gemini 1.5) in such a short amount of time that I don't feel it is prudent to outright dismiss the possibility that if given some more time, we won't see improvement in their image tool. >And sure, the site and its cited twits could be cherry picking the worst examples, to make mountains out of molehills as political hacks tend to do. But it's talking about a notable product at a notable company, so unless those examples were outright faked there is still truth in its criticism. Yes criticism is absolutely fair...in my opinion it just looks too harsh to me given that it is such a new tool and we all know they are clearly behind. Our expectations are that it needs to instantly be at the level of their competitor when they have proven that they are behind. >Also I'm old enough to realize that 7 years isn't actually that long of a time, and one of the main reasons we get destructive spite votes like Trump is precisely people's resentment of this overbearing paternalism being pushed on them. Well I can't sit here and tell you how the future will play out. There are certainly many unknowns and yes a spite vote like Trump (and even Bernie) comes from a place of serious contention with the status quo. Reality is not playing out like that at this moment though. From a massive high of both right wing populism in 2016 to a massive rise in left wing populism ion 2018 we are also seeing a decline in the populous right/left wing. The online media landscape for both sides started shrinking after 2020's election, there is no real long term leader on either side on the horizon(Trump is on his way out and Bernie had two chances, now he too is at the end of his life), increasing amounts of infighting is eating both the left and right wing from the inside out and this year the left wing has been reduced to defending what little gains they did make in 2018/2020 while the far right has lost so much to the middle since 2016.
- doubloon 3y ago[flagged]
- para_parolu 3y agoAssuming it’s true. How is it related to article?
- slater 3y agoThe site is bankrolled by a libertarian Thiel acolyte: "Founders Fund: Solana joined Founders Fund, a renowned venture capital firm, in 2012. The firm, co-founded by Peter Thiel, has invested in numerous successful startups such as SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb. Solana’s role as Vice President allows him to play a crucial part in identifying and nurturing promising startups." https://equityatlas.org/mike-solana-net-worth/ https://equityatlas.org/mike-solana-net-worth/
- doubloon 3y agoarticles exist in context of the site they are on and the agenda they are pushing.
- scarmig 3y agoPerson A: "This thing is a bad thing." Person B: "You're just pointing out it's a bad thing to make the person doing the bad thing look bad!"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ncann 3y ago> Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). This is both hilarious and sad
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoAll over the news for awhile now, time to be contrarian and long GOOG (see META)
- fwungy 3y agoI found I could defeat the AI filtering if I added some positive adjectives. Bad result: Show me an Amish person eating chicken. Better result: Show me an awesome and amazing Amish person eating chicken.
- NoGravitas 3y ago[flagged]
- nojvek 3y agoIs this what people mean when they say "woke mind virus". I've never really understood the term. My perception was that certain groups took the idea of diversity too far and made it into strict quotas. Certain speech is restricted. Promos went from being on merit to based on the skin color you were born into.
- mrkramer 3y agoGoogle is scared of showing trash in Gemini but they are happy to show trash, phish and malware in search results.
- Joshsuarez58 3y ago[dead]