9 ms·

Can Demis Hassabis save Google?

133 points by laurex 3y ago

gafferongames 3y ago
No
fnord77 3y ago
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ijijijjij 3y ago
as bad as Google is becoming, does it need saving to survive?
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Anthropic (which Google owns a large stake in) and Gemini are 2 of the 3 best LLMs (both of which outperform GPT in at least some non-trivial tasks). Is it really that bad? Or is it just en vogue to trash?
  - aneutron 3y ago
    My opinion is quite simpler: GPT got the 1st mover's advantage from a marketing perspective, and until Google, Anthropic or another proposes something VASTLY revolutionary for the layperson, then it's unlikely they'll "catch up" (which is only a percetion ofc, perhaps a wrong one at that)
  - dkasper 3y ago
    Imo the criticisms are more cultural or philosophical than technical, ie the Gemini image search kerfuffle. Clearly Google and Anthropic have a lot of solid people.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    Gemini is painfully over censored. It is good at some niche tasks and probably the best commercial vision model though. I think people just don't want to spend time evaluating a model if it's mostly not great.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Google would fix that really quickly if it became a do or die situation. All they need to do is throw out all the overeager social justice people who wants to ruin the model by censoring it. Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of organizational changes already happened after the last debacle. Currently Google care more about PR with ad customers than market share but if things continue like this that will change really quick.
  - rileyphone 3y ago
    LLMs aren't nearly as monetizable (now) as search ads. Very possible that search collapses in the near future alongside the open web, and that whole line of revenue destroyed.
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  - ijijijjij 3y ago
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    - PunchTornado 3y ago
      I find Gemini the best. Paying the 20£ subscription for advanced. It's been almost 2 months since I opened chatGPT, gemini completely replaced it for me and I'm a happy customer. Everyone has their preference and maybe some people like you prefer chatGPT, but the way google makes deals with other companies like apple and samsung, I don't see openai competing in the future.
      - ijijijjij 3y ago
        > maybe some people like you prefer chatGPT not sure when I said that... that's news to me > I don't see openai competing in the future. I think you can see it in one of the branches of the possible future.
  - elorant 3y ago
    The problem isn't who has the best LLM, but how can you monetize a LLM the way you monetize search. Can you apply keyword auctions on LLMs and then have links? Will that work? We don't know, and I haven't read any concrete study on the issue.
    - mattlondon 3y ago
      I feel like if anything it will be easier to target ads with LLM queries. The user intent will be so much easier to identify, and it would be trivial to show ads based on it.
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- joloooo 3y ago
  Even if they're in a superior position from resources and talent, this feels like a case of innovators' dilemma with a hard shift of their existing business model and culture. It would almost make more sense for Alphabet to spin off an ML-centric company and focus growth there.
yinser 3y ago
The smaller the team Demis has leadership on the more he can absolutely achieve but I’m worried he’ll by hamstrung with steering a goliath.
neximo64 3y ago
If anyone has actually used Gemini and seen how good it is, Demis has probably already saved Google.
- fumar 3y ago
  I’ve slowly started to switch over to Gemini Advanced the paid tier from ChatGPT4. Longer conversations seem possible with Gemini and it has more recent information - at least for the topics I care about.
- loudmax 3y ago
  Google's problem isn't lack of engineering talent, it's the absence of competent management. Gemini could be far ahead of GPT-4 or whatever OpenAI comes out with next. It won't matter unless they actually build a profitable business around running an AI. This should be feasible, but so far there's no indication of this happening. The infrastructure is there. The institutional knowledge and engineering talent is there. Google can do this if they return to their core mission statement: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." This is in contrast to their current objective, which from the outside seems to be "To maximize next quarter's ad revenue." I would love to see a return of the old Google. No amount of engineering skill will make up for clueless management.
- browningstreet 3y ago
  I've spent this week re-writing a significant document, section by section, with Gemini Advanced. It had opinions (some were offered straight, and some with caveats given other statements in my document), and readily highlighted gaps in the passages. I was impressed. I'm still doing a good portion of the human-does-writing bits, but things I'd wanted to include, but have forgotten along the way -- or which are buried in notes I didn't give to Gemini, were brought to my attention again.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    What sort of prompts do you use for this process? "Please rewrite this: <ctrl-v>"?
vouaobrasil 3y ago
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danjl 3y ago
Terrible writing. Creates drama where it doesn't exist. The author makes statements about "problems at Google" and provides anecdotal evidence. Desperately tries to create a "knight on a white horse" storyline for no reason. Assumes Google makes its money off of products, when actually it makes money off of ads. So much bad.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  No products -> no ads?
  - danjl 3y ago
    No, search -> ads. It isn't like their ads come from Google Meet or GMail. Their ads come from search. Their search is still best with no challengers of note.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      GMail plays crucial role of making sure all search users are logged into google account and their searches can be tracked for ads targeting. But also, they have some other inventories: youtube, maps.
    - phillipcarter 3y ago
      Google makes money directly from several products. "Ads" is also an oversimplified way to describe it. Ads aren't a single revenue stream, they're a category of revenue stream with many different ways to tap in, grow, and evolve.
    - loudmax 3y ago
      LLMs are absolutely a challenger to Google's search. Google search is the still best option much of the time, but they're far from dominant like they were a year or two ago. There are many situations now where ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity gives more useful results than Google search. And the LLMs are improving rapidly. Far more rapidly than Google search. Google has tremendous engineering talent and Gemini is extremely powerful. But adapting their business to LLMs requires a level of talent and vision from the management side that we have not seen from Google's executive suite in a long time. I won't count out Google as a company, due to the potential that could be put to use by competent leadership. But I've given up on their current management. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
andy_xor_andrew 3y ago
Given his experience with AlphaGo/Star/Zero/etc, I'm sure if there's any way to apply tree search, or policy networks, to LLMs, Demis will find it. I've always found it strange that a LLM is basically an action/value model that scores all next possible actions (tokens), and yet we DON'T traverse it like a tree. Well, "beam search" exists, but that's kind of the most naive approach. Then again, I'm not smart, and lots of very smart people are thinking nonstop about LLMs, and no type of tree search has become widely used, so maybe there's really nothing there.
- dbmikus 3y ago
  I think part of the problem for LLMs is that they don't operate in an easily scoreable "game". We can make them work well for optimizing next token(s) log likelihood, but how do we judge quality of the output for the task it was made for? Then after that, there are other challenges, such as do LLMs have a world model that lets them think how to attain a reward? Wherever you can have an automated feedback mechanism, you can start to address the first problem and allow for the AI to explore more of the "tree". These are situations like coding (you can run the code and evaluate the output), or situations where you can let the LLM crowd-source user feedback. For models that have some actual world model, who can reason across modalities, and who can plan, LeCunn talks about this often. The videos/slides here[1] were good content. [1]: https://www.ece.uw.edu/news-events/lytle-lecture-series/ https://www.ece.uw.edu/news-events/lytle-lecture-series/
  - visarga 3y ago
    Yes, whatever is not written in any books, AI will have to learn directly from the feedback generated by the environment to its actions. AlphaZero discovered go from scratch, and beat us who invented the game and had thousands of years to practice it. This is how powerful a teacher can be the environment.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    > I think part of the problem for LLMs is that they don't operate in an easily scoreable "game". Unfortunately "social media" is the gamified environment for language.
intexpress 3y ago
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gradus_ad 3y ago
Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've found it complements it pretty well. Questions I never would have searched on Google because of length or complexity are well suited to ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always gone to Google for I continue to use Google for. Also when ChatGPT spits out a few paragraphs of answer for a complex question I'm not even sure may have an answer, I have some concrete directions to pursue which translate much better to Google search than general/fuzzy complex questions. At this point saving Google doesn't require replacing the golden goose of Search but rather wrapping it with Gemini/whatever that can decide whether to give an answer it's thought up or returning tailored search results. It's much more a UX question than a deep technical one. Google has all the pieces it needs, it just needs to package them into a seamless experience. You don't need a mind like Demis' for this...
- joshstrange 3y ago
  > Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've found it complements it pretty well. Questions I never would have searched on Google because of length or complexity are well suited to ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always gone to Google for I continue to use Google for. Agree, though there are things that I used to google (normally across multiple searches) that I now use ChatGPT for. For example, instead of looking up how to use 4 arguments of a cli tool and putting it together myself I just say "Write me a sed command that replaces X with Y" to ChatGPT. I've said this here a number of times but I've found a _crazy_ amount of value in having ChatGPT build bash one-liners or small scripts to process/parse data and give me actionable information. I know what's possible on the command line with cut/sed/awk/grep/sort/uniq/wc/etc but, with a few exceptions, I'm not proficient in writing it quickly. I can get there and in the past there were times I put in the effort to pipe together 4-10 commands to extract something important BUT I really needed to have a compelling reason or I needed to be sure it would bear fruit for me to spend that time. Nowadays I simply paste the raw logs/output/etc to ChatGPT and say "I need to extract ABC and XYZ from that string, get a count XYZ per ABC group, sort them and get a count" or similar. I can take logs and grab what I need out of the lines and quickly say "here is a breakdown by minute of how many times X happened in the logs". This may seem small to some of you or trivial but it's not for me and in the past I wouldn't have spent the time since I wouldn't be sure of the ROI (especially in the middle of a production issue) but now I can take 1-2min, get results, then decide if I should chase it further. Using this I've been able to go from "The data is in our logs" to "Here is an HTML/CSS/JS file visualizing the data in realtime (on refresh)". ChatGPT does a great job at writing the HTML/CSS/JS to graph data and in PHP I can have the PHP script run the one-liner that ChatGPT then "embed" that info for JS to read and graph. Yes, I'm aware of prometheus and friends and I use them but in the middle of an issue I'm not going to start writing a new prom file, write a grafana widget, and wait for new data to start rolling in especially if we have been logging it but just not sending it prometheus. Long-term I reach for prometheus but short-term I just need the data now and visualizing data in graph form can make thing obvious that no combing through logs is going to expose.
mugivarra69 3y ago
demis for ceo
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Simon_ORourke 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
rvz 3y ago
DeepMind was Google's life-line. This man (Hassabis) should be CEO of Google. We have given Sundar enough time and without DeepMind, Google would not have Gemini and he did not put DeepMind to use for a long time until now. Google AI that made 'Bard' is NOT DeepMind. You should be looking at Google DeepMind, which made breakthroughs like AlphaGo, AlphaCode, WaveNet, GraphCast, etc.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  I’m not sure Hassabis’s time would be well spent thinking about, I dunno, how to allocate headcount to the Google Cloud Enterprise Sales team. Or glad-handing with world leaders to convince them that ad tech can self-regulate.
  - objektif 3y ago
    This exactly. Job of a CEO includes doing lots of donkey work.
  - rvz 3y ago
    > I’m not sure Hassabis’s time would be well spent thinking about, I dunno, how to allocate headcount to the Google Cloud Enterprise Sales team. Exactly. There is a CEO of Google Cloud (Thomas Kurian) that should be doing that. That's called "delegation".
    - kevinventullo 3y ago
      Ok, so then evaluating whether Thomas Kurian is doing a good job, discussing and pressure testing the rationale behind his proposed targets and strategies, figuring out how they fit in with the broader company strategy and communicating this vision effectively, having a contingency plan if Thomas Kurian leaves or a better candidate for Cloud CEO appears on the radar. These are just off the top of my head. You seem to believe “Delegation” is a passive act; the reality is Hassabis would end up spending, generously, about 1/10 of the time he is now thinking about things like how to monetize LLM’s.
more_corn 3y ago
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zippothrowaway 3y ago
Demis "Infinite Polygon Engine" Hassabis? Please. Once a charlatan, always a charlatan.
- rhaps0dy 3y ago
  What's an "Infinite Polygon Engine"?
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Surprisingly hard to find information about this via Google. Seems related to Demis' game company Elixir and their game Republic: The Revolution [0] for which he made some claim that it supported an infinite level of detail/polygons. Just a cursory glance at the information though. Happy to be corrected or have more detail added. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic:_The_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic:_The_Revolution
    - astrange 3y ago
      That's not an impossible claim, UE5 Nanite does it.
      - ShamelessC 3y ago
        I believe this was in the late 90’s and in any case, they didn’t succeed at implementing the system they hyped so much - which is the real problem.
  - belter 3y ago
    The Internet never forgets...Pag 44: https://retrocdn.net/images/c/c7/Edge_UK_078.pdf https://retrocdn.net/images/c/c7/Edge_UK_078.pdf
  - zippothrowaway 3y ago
    It's an in-joke in the British gaming industry. Hassabis started out working for Pete 'Project Milo' Molyneux and learned how to hype himself very obviously from him (see the Edge article linked above). It's working out well for him but you can see the same breathless self-promotion from him now that we saw 20 years ago. Fair play, it's made him rich, but we're screwed if we think people like him are the solution to anything.
methuselah_in 3y ago
Google definitely needs saving. As Android will die and it's the only thing Google did right
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vlovich123 3y ago
> “I haven't heard that myself,” Hassabis says after I bring up the CEO talk. He instantly points to how busy he is with research, how much invention is just ahead, and how much he wants to be part of it. Perhaps, given the stakes, that’s right where Google needs him. “I can do management,” he says, ”but it's not my passion. Put it that way. I always try to optimize for the research and the science.” Sundar makes ~200M as the CEO of Google whereas DeepMind sold for ~400-650M. There's plenty of monetary incentive to take the job, not to mention more power to set the company direction through resource allocation. And it's clear that there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. Maybe Hassabis is a contender because he's been getting some pretty serious press since the beginning of the year (which is when the Sundar article grumblings started).
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. There has been mumblings of that for the whole time he has been CEO...
  - underdeserver 3y ago
    Google has been failing continuously in user experience under his leadership: 1. Search has become an ad-riddled, clickbait SEO infested mess 2. All those naming kerfuffles (how's Allo and GSuite doing?) 3. Cloud still significantly behind AWS and Azure 4. AI stuff behind at least OpenAI and Anthropic. Applied ML stuff well behind specialized startups. 5. Pixel still not selling very well. Android still feeling like it's trying to catch up to Apple, still fragmented. 6. Layoffs everyone believed wouldn't happen until the very last second they were announced. 7. Customer support story, including toward large cloud customers, still abysmal. Etc etc. Yes, ad revenue increased and with it the share price, but ad revenue comes from having had a good product 5 years ago. To sustain it you need good products and good engineers to build them. Google is trending downward. It needs a fresh CEO.
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mrkramer 3y ago
But what is the end goal of OpenAI? Be a non-profit AI R&D leader, convert to for-profit and then sell(license) its AI tech to other companies or get acquired and then eventually devoured by Microsoft? In this shape and form OpenAI is not a threat to Google; since Google is extremely versatile, taking in consideration how fast they adapted to iPhone threat with their alternative smartphone OS(Android) and taking in consideration lack of clear long-term vision of OpenAI's leadership.
- blueboo 3y ago
  OpenAI's "end goal" has OpenAI becoming a >$1T (100x their >$1B investment) company en route to its non-profit incarnation. Hardly benign
- pphysch 3y ago
  This is exactly right. AI is a multiplier for the services and data moats that Google already has; the absolute value of generative AI has been greatly overstated. The gold rush (OpenAI) will end and the shovel-sellers (NVIDIA) will hurt too.
- kadushka 3y ago
  OpenAI is not a threat to Google OpenAI + Microsoft is a threat to Google.
sys32768 3y ago
I just miss Picasa.
az226 3y ago
You talking about Sir Demis Hassabis?
nabla9 3y ago
Sometimes the most hyped research is not the most important. Demis Hassabis was doing good research applying ML to important scientific problems. Then Google became jealous about ChatGPT and they pulled Hassabis to work with that.
- tempaccount420 3y ago
  "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" We know how important LLMs are. We don't know the importance of things we haven't made yet.
VirusNewbie 3y ago
I would love to hear from some folks who have worked with him. The quote is interesting, that his prof would say he's "not a magician at any one thing". Does that mean he's not all that technical or struggles with math? Not sure how to read that.
- MattRix 3y ago
  I haven’t worked with him but it’s quite clear from his CV alone that he is very technical (ex. programming an entire commerical game at 17) and I doubt there are many things he struggles with. The quote you mentioned is just driving home the fact that he is an extremely high level polymath, a jack of all trades.
sandspar 3y ago
For what it's worth, Elon Musk recently retweeted a very flattering picture of Hassabis, perhaps throwing his support behind him.
wetpaws 3y ago
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YouWhy 3y ago
TL;DR: the expectation that a business can be "saved" by bolting AI onto an existing organization is unrealistic. Detail: My experience is that commercially viable AI requires a leadership that gets AI and can execute very careful tech/product development facing end-to-end business problems, obsess over data quality, pivot and and manage risks in a way that's subtler than shutting the whole thing down. None of these are possible when attempting to transform a pre-existing business. Consider AI and classic Google Search: in the best case scenario, AI will cannibalize on the search. In the worst case scenario, it will generate no lift. The middle ground is elusive at best. What does seem to work across pre-existing businesses is when AI is used to provide embellishments/optional upsells. But of course that's not the dramatic transformation that a lot of people not in the scene seem to be expecting.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  This analysis matches my current experience. I'm at a small startup and I've been trying my best to push them to invest in AI features. The company is willing to invest very trivial amounts of time/effort in AI embellishments but they are extremely slow to move on any kind of transformational technologies. I had a call with the CEO recently and he was saying that he wasn't interested in foundational AI technologies. I don't mean foundational models (as if a small B2B startup could even consider such a thing). I don't even mean medium/large scale fine-tuning work. I mean, he wasn't interested in investigating broadly applicable AI capabilities which could apply to multiple product features. I think of it like "dipping the toe into AI" strategies. You get a couple of days to try out some prompting and then spend the vast majority of the time bolting the LLM output onto an existing feature. What I believe we need are a few big companies to emerge where the new LLM stuff is at the very core of the business so it can show startups how it should be done. I can't even blame this company for being hesitant to invest - there is no proven track record to judge potential success against. At least old-school SaaS feature development work has some basis for projecting revenue. The margin for error on deep LLM features is completely unknown.
ksec 3y ago
Off Topic: >Google’s core business is thriving, but that almost seems beside the point. I have vidid memory of a scene in Private of the Silicon Valley, where Microsoft is winning, and Apple is losing. But Steve Jobs said they have the better products. And Bill Gate replied "It doesn't matter." The movie was 25 years ago at the time it finally strike me what I was so irritated about. No one gives a damn about quality, they only cares about the money. 25 Years later ( Well I thought Google were bad for more than a decade but I guess it is more accepted now. ) Google are making all the money but their products are absolutely crap. While not crap but degradation of quality is happening to Apple too. As many comments have already pointed out, AI wont save Google. Google has a leadership and culture problem along with Management issues. It is a bit like 2012 - 2017 when people were so certain Intel will continue to lead in SemiConductor with healthy profits and business. Until 2020 they realise Intel finally did fall behind and the culture and management couldn't turns things around. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ
edem 3y ago
Can somebody explain for the uninitiated? What does Google need saving from?

133 points by laurex 3y ago

gafferongames 3y ago

fnord77 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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ijijijjij 3y ago

as bad as Google is becoming, does it need saving to survive?

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Anthropic (which Google owns a large stake in) and Gemini are 2 of the 3 best LLMs (both of which outperform GPT in at least some non-trivial tasks). Is it really that bad? Or is it just en vogue to trash?
- aneutron 3y ago
  My opinion is quite simpler: GPT got the 1st mover's advantage from a marketing perspective, and until Google, Anthropic or another proposes something VASTLY revolutionary for the layperson, then it's unlikely they'll "catch up" (which is only a percetion ofc, perhaps a wrong one at that)
- dkasper 3y ago
  Imo the criticisms are more cultural or philosophical than technical, ie the Gemini image search kerfuffle. Clearly Google and Anthropic have a lot of solid people.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Gemini is painfully over censored. It is good at some niche tasks and probably the best commercial vision model though. I think people just don't want to spend time evaluating a model if it's mostly not great.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Google would fix that really quickly if it became a do or die situation. All they need to do is throw out all the overeager social justice people who wants to ruin the model by censoring it. Wouldn't surprise me if a lot of organizational changes already happened after the last debacle. Currently Google care more about PR with ad customers than market share but if things continue like this that will change really quick.
- rileyphone 3y ago
  LLMs aren't nearly as monetizable (now) as search ads. Very possible that search collapses in the near future alongside the open web, and that whole line of revenue destroyed.
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- ijijijjij 3y ago
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  - PunchTornado 3y ago
    I find Gemini the best. Paying the 20£ subscription for advanced. It's been almost 2 months since I opened chatGPT, gemini completely replaced it for me and I'm a happy customer. Everyone has their preference and maybe some people like you prefer chatGPT, but the way google makes deals with other companies like apple and samsung, I don't see openai competing in the future.
    - ijijijjij 3y ago
      > maybe some people like you prefer chatGPT not sure when I said that... that's news to me > I don't see openai competing in the future. I think you can see it in one of the branches of the possible future.
- elorant 3y ago
  The problem isn't who has the best LLM, but how can you monetize a LLM the way you monetize search. Can you apply keyword auctions on LLMs and then have links? Will that work? We don't know, and I haven't read any concrete study on the issue.
  - mattlondon 3y ago
    I feel like if anything it will be easier to target ads with LLM queries. The user intent will be so much easier to identify, and it would be trivial to show ads based on it.
deleted 3y ago
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joloooo 3y ago
Even if they're in a superior position from resources and talent, this feels like a case of innovators' dilemma with a hard shift of their existing business model and culture. It would almost make more sense for Alphabet to spin off an ML-centric company and focus growth there.

yinser 3y ago

The smaller the team Demis has leadership on the more he can absolutely achieve but I’m worried he’ll by hamstrung with steering a goliath.

neximo64 3y ago

If anyone has actually used Gemini and seen how good it is, Demis has probably already saved Google.

fumar 3y ago
I’ve slowly started to switch over to Gemini Advanced the paid tier from ChatGPT4. Longer conversations seem possible with Gemini and it has more recent information - at least for the topics I care about.
loudmax 3y ago
Google's problem isn't lack of engineering talent, it's the absence of competent management. Gemini could be far ahead of GPT-4 or whatever OpenAI comes out with next. It won't matter unless they actually build a profitable business around running an AI. This should be feasible, but so far there's no indication of this happening. The infrastructure is there. The institutional knowledge and engineering talent is there. Google can do this if they return to their core mission statement: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." This is in contrast to their current objective, which from the outside seems to be "To maximize next quarter's ad revenue." I would love to see a return of the old Google. No amount of engineering skill will make up for clueless management.
browningstreet 3y ago
I've spent this week re-writing a significant document, section by section, with Gemini Advanced. It had opinions (some were offered straight, and some with caveats given other statements in my document), and readily highlighted gaps in the passages. I was impressed. I'm still doing a good portion of the human-does-writing bits, but things I'd wanted to include, but have forgotten along the way -- or which are buried in notes I didn't give to Gemini, were brought to my attention again.
- pphysch 3y ago
  What sort of prompts do you use for this process? "Please rewrite this: <ctrl-v>"?

vouaobrasil 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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danjl 3y ago

Terrible writing. Creates drama where it doesn't exist. The author makes statements about "problems at Google" and provides anecdotal evidence. Desperately tries to create a "knight on a white horse" storyline for no reason. Assumes Google makes its money off of products, when actually it makes money off of ads. So much bad.

riku_iki 3y ago
No products -> no ads?
- danjl 3y ago
  No, search -> ads. It isn't like their ads come from Google Meet or GMail. Their ads come from search. Their search is still best with no challengers of note.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    GMail plays crucial role of making sure all search users are logged into google account and their searches can be tracked for ads targeting. But also, they have some other inventories: youtube, maps.
  - phillipcarter 3y ago
    Google makes money directly from several products. "Ads" is also an oversimplified way to describe it. Ads aren't a single revenue stream, they're a category of revenue stream with many different ways to tap in, grow, and evolve.
  - loudmax 3y ago
    LLMs are absolutely a challenger to Google's search. Google search is the still best option much of the time, but they're far from dominant like they were a year or two ago. There are many situations now where ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity gives more useful results than Google search. And the LLMs are improving rapidly. Far more rapidly than Google search. Google has tremendous engineering talent and Gemini is extremely powerful. But adapting their business to LLMs requires a level of talent and vision from the management side that we have not seen from Google's executive suite in a long time. I won't count out Google as a company, due to the potential that could be put to use by competent leadership. But I've given up on their current management. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

andy_xor_andrew 3y ago

Given his experience with AlphaGo/Star/Zero/etc, I'm sure if there's any way to apply tree search, or policy networks, to LLMs, Demis will find it. I've always found it strange that a LLM is basically an action/value model that scores all next possible actions (tokens), and yet we DON'T traverse it like a tree. Well, "beam search" exists, but that's kind of the most naive approach. Then again, I'm not smart, and lots of very smart people are thinking nonstop about LLMs, and no type of tree search has become widely used, so maybe there's really nothing there.

dbmikus 3y ago
I think part of the problem for LLMs is that they don't operate in an easily scoreable "game". We can make them work well for optimizing next token(s) log likelihood, but how do we judge quality of the output for the task it was made for? Then after that, there are other challenges, such as do LLMs have a world model that lets them think how to attain a reward? Wherever you can have an automated feedback mechanism, you can start to address the first problem and allow for the AI to explore more of the "tree". These are situations like coding (you can run the code and evaluate the output), or situations where you can let the LLM crowd-source user feedback. For models that have some actual world model, who can reason across modalities, and who can plan, LeCunn talks about this often. The videos/slides here[1] were good content. [1]: https://www.ece.uw.edu/news-events/lytle-lecture-series/ https://www.ece.uw.edu/news-events/lytle-lecture-series/
- visarga 3y ago
  Yes, whatever is not written in any books, AI will have to learn directly from the feedback generated by the environment to its actions. AlphaZero discovered go from scratch, and beat us who invented the game and had thousands of years to practice it. This is how powerful a teacher can be the environment.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  > I think part of the problem for LLMs is that they don't operate in an easily scoreable "game". Unfortunately "social media" is the gamified environment for language.

intexpress 3y ago

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gradus_ad 3y ago

Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've found it complements it pretty well. Questions I never would have searched on Google because of length or complexity are well suited to ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always gone to Google for I continue to use Google for. Also when ChatGPT spits out a few paragraphs of answer for a complex question I'm not even sure may have an answer, I have some concrete directions to pursue which translate much better to Google search than general/fuzzy complex questions. At this point saving Google doesn't require replacing the golden goose of Search but rather wrapping it with Gemini/whatever that can decide whether to give an answer it's thought up or returning tailored search results. It's much more a UX question than a deep technical one. Google has all the pieces it needs, it just needs to package them into a seamless experience. You don't need a mind like Demis' for this...

joshstrange 3y ago
> Rather than ChatGPT being a replacement for Google, I've found it complements it pretty well. Questions I never would have searched on Google because of length or complexity are well suited to ChatGPT while the sorts of things I've always gone to Google for I continue to use Google for. Agree, though there are things that I used to google (normally across multiple searches) that I now use ChatGPT for. For example, instead of looking up how to use 4 arguments of a cli tool and putting it together myself I just say "Write me a sed command that replaces X with Y" to ChatGPT. I've said this here a number of times but I've found a _crazy_ amount of value in having ChatGPT build bash one-liners or small scripts to process/parse data and give me actionable information. I know what's possible on the command line with cut/sed/awk/grep/sort/uniq/wc/etc but, with a few exceptions, I'm not proficient in writing it quickly. I can get there and in the past there were times I put in the effort to pipe together 4-10 commands to extract something important BUT I really needed to have a compelling reason or I needed to be sure it would bear fruit for me to spend that time. Nowadays I simply paste the raw logs/output/etc to ChatGPT and say "I need to extract ABC and XYZ from that string, get a count XYZ per ABC group, sort them and get a count" or similar. I can take logs and grab what I need out of the lines and quickly say "here is a breakdown by minute of how many times X happened in the logs". This may seem small to some of you or trivial but it's not for me and in the past I wouldn't have spent the time since I wouldn't be sure of the ROI (especially in the middle of a production issue) but now I can take 1-2min, get results, then decide if I should chase it further. Using this I've been able to go from "The data is in our logs" to "Here is an HTML/CSS/JS file visualizing the data in realtime (on refresh)". ChatGPT does a great job at writing the HTML/CSS/JS to graph data and in PHP I can have the PHP script run the one-liner that ChatGPT then "embed" that info for JS to read and graph. Yes, I'm aware of prometheus and friends and I use them but in the middle of an issue I'm not going to start writing a new prom file, write a grafana widget, and wait for new data to start rolling in especially if we have been logging it but just not sending it prometheus. Long-term I reach for prometheus but short-term I just need the data now and visualizing data in graph form can make thing obvious that no combing through logs is going to expose.

mugivarra69 3y ago

demis for ceo

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Simon_ORourke 3y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

rvz 3y ago

DeepMind was Google's life-line. This man (Hassabis) should be CEO of Google. We have given Sundar enough time and without DeepMind, Google would not have Gemini and he did not put DeepMind to use for a long time until now. Google AI that made 'Bard' is NOT DeepMind. You should be looking at Google DeepMind, which made breakthroughs like AlphaGo, AlphaCode, WaveNet, GraphCast, etc.

kevinventullo 3y ago
I’m not sure Hassabis’s time would be well spent thinking about, I dunno, how to allocate headcount to the Google Cloud Enterprise Sales team. Or glad-handing with world leaders to convince them that ad tech can self-regulate.
- objektif 3y ago
  This exactly. Job of a CEO includes doing lots of donkey work.
- rvz 3y ago
  > I’m not sure Hassabis’s time would be well spent thinking about, I dunno, how to allocate headcount to the Google Cloud Enterprise Sales team. Exactly. There is a CEO of Google Cloud (Thomas Kurian) that should be doing that. That's called "delegation".
  - kevinventullo 3y ago
    Ok, so then evaluating whether Thomas Kurian is doing a good job, discussing and pressure testing the rationale behind his proposed targets and strategies, figuring out how they fit in with the broader company strategy and communicating this vision effectively, having a contingency plan if Thomas Kurian leaves or a better candidate for Cloud CEO appears on the radar. These are just off the top of my head. You seem to believe “Delegation” is a passive act; the reality is Hassabis would end up spending, generously, about 1/10 of the time he is now thinking about things like how to monetize LLM’s.

more_corn 3y ago

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zippothrowaway 3y ago

Demis "Infinite Polygon Engine" Hassabis? Please. Once a charlatan, always a charlatan.

rhaps0dy 3y ago
What's an "Infinite Polygon Engine"?
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Surprisingly hard to find information about this via Google. Seems related to Demis' game company Elixir and their game Republic: The Revolution [0] for which he made some claim that it supported an infinite level of detail/polygons. Just a cursory glance at the information though. Happy to be corrected or have more detail added. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic:_The_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic:_The_Revolution
  - astrange 3y ago
    That's not an impossible claim, UE5 Nanite does it.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      I believe this was in the late 90’s and in any case, they didn’t succeed at implementing the system they hyped so much - which is the real problem.
- belter 3y ago
  The Internet never forgets...Pag 44: https://retrocdn.net/images/c/c7/Edge_UK_078.pdf https://retrocdn.net/images/c/c7/Edge_UK_078.pdf
- zippothrowaway 3y ago
  It's an in-joke in the British gaming industry. Hassabis started out working for Pete 'Project Milo' Molyneux and learned how to hype himself very obviously from him (see the Edge article linked above). It's working out well for him but you can see the same breathless self-promotion from him now that we saw 20 years ago. Fair play, it's made him rich, but we're screwed if we think people like him are the solution to anything.

methuselah_in 3y ago

Google definitely needs saving. As Android will die and it's the only thing Google did right

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vlovich123 3y ago

> “I haven't heard that myself,” Hassabis says after I bring up the CEO talk. He instantly points to how busy he is with research, how much invention is just ahead, and how much he wants to be part of it. Perhaps, given the stakes, that’s right where Google needs him. “I can do management,” he says, ”but it's not my passion. Put it that way. I always try to optimize for the research and the science.” Sundar makes ~200M as the CEO of Google whereas DeepMind sold for ~400-650M. There's plenty of monetary incentive to take the job, not to mention more power to set the company direction through resource allocation. And it's clear that there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. Maybe Hassabis is a contender because he's been getting some pretty serious press since the beginning of the year (which is when the Sundar article grumblings started).

londons_explore 3y ago
> there's been a PR campaign being set up to push out Sundar. There has been mumblings of that for the whole time he has been CEO...
- underdeserver 3y ago
  Google has been failing continuously in user experience under his leadership: 1. Search has become an ad-riddled, clickbait SEO infested mess 2. All those naming kerfuffles (how's Allo and GSuite doing?) 3. Cloud still significantly behind AWS and Azure 4. AI stuff behind at least OpenAI and Anthropic. Applied ML stuff well behind specialized startups. 5. Pixel still not selling very well. Android still feeling like it's trying to catch up to Apple, still fragmented. 6. Layoffs everyone believed wouldn't happen until the very last second they were announced. 7. Customer support story, including toward large cloud customers, still abysmal. Etc etc. Yes, ad revenue increased and with it the share price, but ad revenue comes from having had a good product 5 years ago. To sustain it you need good products and good engineers to build them. Google is trending downward. It needs a fresh CEO.
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mrkramer 3y ago

But what is the end goal of OpenAI? Be a non-profit AI R&D leader, convert to for-profit and then sell(license) its AI tech to other companies or get acquired and then eventually devoured by Microsoft? In this shape and form OpenAI is not a threat to Google; since Google is extremely versatile, taking in consideration how fast they adapted to iPhone threat with their alternative smartphone OS(Android) and taking in consideration lack of clear long-term vision of OpenAI's leadership.

blueboo 3y ago
OpenAI's "end goal" has OpenAI becoming a >$1T (100x their >$1B investment) company en route to its non-profit incarnation. Hardly benign
pphysch 3y ago
This is exactly right. AI is a multiplier for the services and data moats that Google already has; the absolute value of generative AI has been greatly overstated. The gold rush (OpenAI) will end and the shovel-sellers (NVIDIA) will hurt too.
kadushka 3y ago
OpenAI is not a threat to Google OpenAI + Microsoft is a threat to Google.

sys32768 3y ago

I just miss Picasa.

az226 3y ago

You talking about Sir Demis Hassabis?

nabla9 3y ago

Sometimes the most hyped research is not the most important. Demis Hassabis was doing good research applying ML to important scientific problems. Then Google became jealous about ChatGPT and they pulled Hassabis to work with that.

tempaccount420 3y ago
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" We know how important LLMs are. We don't know the importance of things we haven't made yet.

VirusNewbie 3y ago

I would love to hear from some folks who have worked with him. The quote is interesting, that his prof would say he's "not a magician at any one thing". Does that mean he's not all that technical or struggles with math? Not sure how to read that.

MattRix 3y ago
I haven’t worked with him but it’s quite clear from his CV alone that he is very technical (ex. programming an entire commerical game at 17) and I doubt there are many things he struggles with. The quote you mentioned is just driving home the fact that he is an extremely high level polymath, a jack of all trades.

sandspar 3y ago

For what it's worth, Elon Musk recently retweeted a very flattering picture of Hassabis, perhaps throwing his support behind him.

wetpaws 3y ago

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YouWhy 3y ago

TL;DR: the expectation that a business can be "saved" by bolting AI onto an existing organization is unrealistic. Detail: My experience is that commercially viable AI requires a leadership that gets AI and can execute very careful tech/product development facing end-to-end business problems, obsess over data quality, pivot and and manage risks in a way that's subtler than shutting the whole thing down. None of these are possible when attempting to transform a pre-existing business. Consider AI and classic Google Search: in the best case scenario, AI will cannibalize on the search. In the worst case scenario, it will generate no lift. The middle ground is elusive at best. What does seem to work across pre-existing businesses is when AI is used to provide embellishments/optional upsells. But of course that's not the dramatic transformation that a lot of people not in the scene seem to be expecting.

zoogeny 3y ago
This analysis matches my current experience. I'm at a small startup and I've been trying my best to push them to invest in AI features. The company is willing to invest very trivial amounts of time/effort in AI embellishments but they are extremely slow to move on any kind of transformational technologies. I had a call with the CEO recently and he was saying that he wasn't interested in foundational AI technologies. I don't mean foundational models (as if a small B2B startup could even consider such a thing). I don't even mean medium/large scale fine-tuning work. I mean, he wasn't interested in investigating broadly applicable AI capabilities which could apply to multiple product features. I think of it like "dipping the toe into AI" strategies. You get a couple of days to try out some prompting and then spend the vast majority of the time bolting the LLM output onto an existing feature. What I believe we need are a few big companies to emerge where the new LLM stuff is at the very core of the business so it can show startups how it should be done. I can't even blame this company for being hesitant to invest - there is no proven track record to judge potential success against. At least old-school SaaS feature development work has some basis for projecting revenue. The margin for error on deep LLM features is completely unknown.

ksec 3y ago

Off Topic: >Google’s core business is thriving, but that almost seems beside the point. I have vidid memory of a scene in Private of the Silicon Valley, where Microsoft is winning, and Apple is losing. But Steve Jobs said they have the better products. And Bill Gate replied "It doesn't matter." The movie was 25 years ago at the time it finally strike me what I was so irritated about. No one gives a damn about quality, they only cares about the money. 25 Years later ( Well I thought Google were bad for more than a decade but I guess it is more accepted now. ) Google are making all the money but their products are absolutely crap. While not crap but degradation of quality is happening to Apple too. As many comments have already pointed out, AI wont save Google. Google has a leadership and culture problem along with Management issues. It is a bit like 2012 - 2017 when people were so certain Intel will continue to lead in SemiConductor with healthy profits and business. Until 2020 they realise Intel finally did fall behind and the culture and management couldn't turns things around. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ

edem 3y ago

Can somebody explain for the uninitiated? What does Google need saving from?