I would posit that it's more Microsoft freaking out over ChatGPT than Google. MSFT will never get that $10 billion back.
ChatGPT will start charging for some features, I think MS will get that $10Bi in a shorter time than expected
Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
131–140 of 518 posts
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#132I 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…
Personally I've no interest in any new Google products because who knows when it may be discontinued with little or no notice. Most recently Optimize, but I've also been burned by Universal Analytics, Fusion Tables, goo.gl, and Google Site Search.
I did not know about the Google Optimize shutdown. That's a shame. Google Analytics might be the product they've bungled the most after chat (breaking upgrades, features moved out then moved back, enhanced ecommerce, etc.).
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#133If it's as privacy intrusive as the rest of its products I won't use it neither promote it. Its the main reason most non tech savys avoided buying Google home. But the product teams are tone deaf. Bring on a privacy first system/eco system!
You are not their target audience.
Apparently not a lot of others are either
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#134"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…
You know how better app for finding good restaurant can't find good restaurants of there are no good restaurants?
Search is dead, spammers killed it and Google was happy about it because it has become an answer machine where they can say the answer is whoever pays the most. Greatly deteriorated experience from what it used to be.
Now someone builds an answers machine with much much better user experience with all that data which Google can no longer surface.
I don't know if Google can quickly match that function but even if they do, are they going to be able to replicate the experience if the answers machine choose the answers by a bidding war?
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#135I've played with ChatGPT and see it as (at best) just complimentary to existing approaches. Unfortunately, I also see it as a vector of misinformation and potentially harmful. It appears highly knowledgeable on topics that I know little about, but otherwise it's replies are often riddled with errors and inaccuracies. It also seems unable to quote sources or references for such information. It seems reasonable to use…
ChatGPT is automated copywriting, what did you expect?
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#136After 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…
> combined with the fact that search in general has plummeted in quality Every time this comes up I am baffled. I have not noticed a single drop in the quality of results. Every time someone said that and shared their search methodology, it became very apparent that the problem was not with Google.
My example of lower quality is: Programming question searches recently dominated by sites with bot generated content aggregation taken from sources like stack overflow, instead of sources like stack overflow
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#137"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…
Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better. In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user e…
Pagerank (TM) was a Google innovation and the reason Google had much better results than the others and it took many years for the SEO spammers to catch up. That revolution, combined with the philosophy of the speedy, focused homepage and the elimination of irrelevant results by always using the ‘AND’ operator was why their popularity exploded.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#138Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course…
They don’t need to believe it, they just need to believe that other people will believe in it. Even CEOs can get a lot of pushback and since they’re looking to do drastic changes it helps to get as much buy in as possible.
Simon Sinek has a really great point about companies endlessly pandering to shareholders, basically being equivalent to sports teams endlessly pandering to fans. The objective of a truly good coach/leader should be to successfully accomplish a goal, and often that will require making some portion of your "fans" unhappy. If coaches acted the way modern CEOs do, they'd only ever run one play
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#139Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course…
They should be freaking out. Google is overwhelmingly dependent on a single revenue stream and AI like ChatGPT is a serious threat to their dominant position.
Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alternative. Google has some real challenging times ahead.
Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight
#140There's a surprisingly long and detailed blog post (https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyon...) which details some of what they have coming this year. It sounds like they're planning on taking some of the skunkworks/internal stuff and exposing it through products. Sidenote: I was surprised to see one of the charts even showing ChatGPT outperforming LaMBDA in one area.