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Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

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81–90 of 518 posts

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#81
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."

Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete.

Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? It would be a blessing (presumably, because things can always drift further into evil) but, so far at least, there is little to point to such an imminent disruption

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#82
post #40
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google tax. Why such patterns are not outlawed?

Why don’t you think through the implications of your question? You say outlawed. Ok then, write a hypothetical law that would outlaw this behaviour. Remember, this law should be general enough to apply to advertising or internet advertising in general. The more specific it gets (“search engine advertising firm beginning with G”) the less likely it’ll stand up to judicial scrutiny. It would only take a second for you…

To be fair to both of you, yes it's a ludicrous proposal but also yes governments might enact it anyways.

Most laws these days seem useless at best, Orwellian at worst.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#83
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's AI is on your phone. It unobtrusive. Recently I needed to quickly find a company's QR code which I had photographed and Photos search found it in an instance. I believe the iPhone automatically classifies photos based on who or what show up in them. Users can contribute to train classifiers, but the iPhone already works out of the box. The iPhone also creates theme-based photo albums from the photos you too…

> I'm not sure OCR counts as AI This is a great example of the AI effect where people would call something AI when it was a daunting research problem but give it another label once it’s working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect In this case, Apple’s modern OCR is a complex neural network system which I think most people would class as an AI tool. It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optim…

> It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optimized for business documents.

I'm not sure I agree, primarily because "better" is subjective.

A pipeline with template matching is extremely effective at extracting fixed form text in a standard layout, such as telephone numbers or credit cards, and computationally cheap as well.

But I presume a drop-in black box model which isn't bound to a low computational budget, can output plenty of false negatives and false positives, and can run on a single pipeline might be preferable at least from a product management point of view.

Also, neural networks looks good on resume while template matching doesn't. Just like statician/image analyst looks lukewarm but AI engineer looks superb.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#84
post #17

After trying out their adwords platform for a year combined with the fact that search in general has plummeted in quality i can't wait for them to crash completely. Adwords is such a scummy endeavour that squeezes more or less all companies using it, but more so smaller players. They are not a friendly company. They are a MegaCorp that is so monopolistic and dark (design) in its behaviours it's incredible that it's l…

>They are a MegaCorp that is so monopolistic and dark (design) in its behaviours

You mean the once self claimed most righteous Do No Evil company and now currently the 2nd most righteous company are monopolistic and employ dark design patterns?

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#85
I kind of feel they should be. I cannot remember what their last major customer-facing AI product launch after Google Assistant. Sure there is AI in photo tuning and many interesting features for the Pixel phone, and there is Gmail autocomplete but I remember I used to really following every Google product launch when I was a kid: there is Google Reader, Google Drive launch in those days. That excitement was kind of gone: all the new AI products feels like polished but conservative.

The GPTs and Whisper really get me excited again these days though. But Google pioneered this field.

I love their JAX, but in a way many people would love pytorch but not so much in the META company.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#86
post #44

> The demo for the chatbot search says Google will prioritize “getting facts right, ensuring safety and getting rid of misinformation,” This goes to the chaotic problem which is still to be decided. There is no consensus position on what facts are, what is safe and what is misinformation. Part of the success of modern democracy hinges on being able to switch the leadership out with people who have a different frame o…

You're talking about interpretation. Facts are facts.

Thing is, short of mathematical definitions, everything is subject to some bias, any sufficiently-complex statement is just an interpretation of various signals. Moreover, the threshold for "sufficiently-complex" isn't really so high.

In other words, there aren't really facts (in the sense of being "absolute truths") but just Justified True Beliefs, which means Google essentially has to solve the Gettier Problem (https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/).

Examples:

There is no medical fact that smoking is bad for you but there is medical consensus that smoking shortens your life expectancy. Of course, the consensus does not preclude that there might be some nonagenarian in Fiji or Japan who's smoked a pack a day since he was 20 and is still chopping woods for fuel.

I don't know what exactly GP is saying about Snowden but pre-Snowden, it's a justifiable belief that, among other things, your webcam will only turn on when you tell it to. Post-Snowden that belief might no longer be so justifiable.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#87

I don't understand why they freak out. Every single time I have used ChatGPT (which isn't many), it gave me an absolutely unusable answer completely off the mark. It's funny to see FAANG CEOs have FOMO over what is essentially smoke and mirrors.

Could you provide an example of what you're asking for? It appears to work well for me. I would estimate that 80% of the answers are very good, and 10% provide at least a glimpse of the information I was seeking.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#88
post #79

I would posit that it's more Microsoft freaking out over ChatGPT than Google. MSFT will never get that $10 billion back.

They could get multiples of that $10B back if they sold it to investors now. Remember, in today's world you don't even need a viable product to make loads of money.

> They could get multiples of that $10B back if they sold it to investors now.

Maybe so, but MSFT is not a mark-to-market / opportunistic trader.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#89

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete. Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic…

I remember that hope.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#90
post #60
post #47

Google is getting worse and worse. Today I searched for exact term “boat skipper b”. Google threw ton of trash at me. Ended looking through Bing results and found what I needed. 2/3 of my Google searches are not usable to me. Some advertisement and shady websites as results.

Search Tools > Verbatim I have that option preset in the googling shortcut I use. The URL parameter for that is "tbs=li:1", see https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-p... .

I wish we could use version numbers or just say "Use Google from 2010".
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