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

nytimes.com

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

#151

Post by eric4smith »

A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding.

Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google.

It truly saves a lot of time.

Google is right to be quite worried.

Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before.

Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds?

And worse I can ask the Ai to write a short couple of paragraphs about each one.

Then I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style.

What do I do?

I do online marketing and programming to support online marketing activities.

I write. I plan. I code. I hire.

We just taught a junior employee who is not great as a writer to use ChatGPT to help her with a good start to writing.

The training for her was how to formulate detailed and highly specific “prompts” and to use google as a backup to confirm facts in the AI generated output.

It’s not there to replace people’s work. It’s there to make them much, much more efficient.

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

#152

Post by scarface74 »

mrtksn wrote: post #120
ninethirty wrote: post #108

Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.

Social was able to achieve everything it was expected from it, most of the content on internet went behind walls unreachable by Google. Google missed out on that but didn't lose it's ground much or its losses were compensated by their success in mobile. The difference this time is, the new shiny thing goes directly into Google territory.

Google didn’t “succeed” in mobile financially. Android historical doesn’t bring that much of a profit in mobile compared to its popularity (that came out in the Oracle trial) and has to pay Apple close to $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices.

Google Play Services is not that much of a money maker and it sells about as many phones in a year as Apple sells in a couple of weeks

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

#153

Post by jossclimb »

trentnix wrote: post #139
pm90 wrote: post #118

Seems 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 alterna…

I honestly think this is the start of a long demise and one day we will look back and marvel at how big they used to be. It's not something I look forward to though considering the masses of personal private data they have amassed from their users.

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

#154

Post by scarface74 »

type-r wrote: post #145
jillesvangurp wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that he's not a leader but a care taker. This article kind of shows the two founders swooping in for some emergency leadership. That's not a good look. I think they've been coasting on their past glory for a decade now. Yes they make money but otherwise they are just doing more of the same and just building out the stuff they've had for more than a decade (Search, Ads, Youtube, Maps, Android, etc.).…

YouTube and Netflix revenues are actually almost exactly the same. Now that Netflix has launched an ad-supported version, I'm not sure how important paid vs. non-paid accounts are in considerations of who's doing better vs. worse.

Revenues and profit is completely different

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

#155

Post by steveBK123 »

trentnix wrote: post #139
pm90 wrote: post #118

Seems 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 alterna…

Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case!

I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that they only work on R&D/moonshot/non-revenue generating activities.. proudly. Quite a large subset of them showed almost an embarrassment of the single revenue stream (tricking old people to click on Pharma ads instead of genuine search results), and actively distanced themselves from it as some sort of moral shield.

It is amazing to have that many smart people working for that long and not bother to find some other ways to make money. Just complete lack of focus.

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

#156

Post by lazide »

college_physics wrote: post #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…

Buckminster fuller was notoriously unsuccessful at changing anything, but was very successful at making it seems like he would have been successful if it wasn’t for all the conspiracies against him stopping his success.

Taken in that context puts it in a different light.

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

#157

Post by amelius »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #29
kossTKR wrote: 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…

> ... i can't wait for them to crash completely. But wouldn't Google, even without search ads (which are only up +4% YOY to $40 bn), still be a hundred of billions behemoth? Sure it wouldn't have a 1.3 trillion cap without search ads but Google is also Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Google Workspace / Google Suite (which, what, 7 millions of SMEs are using), cloud services, etc. I don't see Google "crashing completely" a…

Can't wait for Google to become a tech-only company.

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

#158

Post by kirsebaer »

eric4smith wrote: post #151

A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding. Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google. It truly saves a lot of time. Google is right to be quite worried. Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before. Why research: “give me 30 of the most common h…

ChatGPT often makes up facts. It outputs stuff that looks like it could have been written by a human, not stuff that is correct.

Don’t use ChatGPT for medical research.

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

#159

Post by dragonwriter »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #149
tinus_hn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Despite this objective comparison, in users' view Google's results were much much better. I remember a German CS professor telling me eyes in eyes with obviously a lot of schadenfreud "Google will kill you". And I answered "No they will become as…

> At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order.

Order is a pretty big part of tbe value prop of a search engine, so ”nearly the same” results but “not in exactly the same order” is not as much similarity as you seem to be implying.

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

#160

Post by scarface74 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #130
Avalaxy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MSFT will never get that $10 billion back Easily. By integrating it into their developer tools, office suite, Azure, Dynamics, etc. You can automate/support SO many tasks with the toolsuite that OpenAI offers. In addition to that, the way I understand it they can simply make money by licensing others to use those tools. They already started offering the OpenAI services through Azure.

I assume ChatGPT will cost around $1 per query for consumers. That's low enough to put human copywriters out of business, but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks. So eventually this is some sort complex of B2B product, and that is very difficult to execute.

You’re literally off by an order of magnitude. Each query costs around 1 cent from every article I’ve seen.

> but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks.

And “640K ought to be enough for anyone”.

Of course this will get cheaper over time as compute gets cheaper and the cloud providers design custom chips optimized for it.

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