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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

#191

Post by sdrinf »

karpierz wrote: post #179
unsupp0rted wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ChatGPT had up to the minute crawl results and my Geo location, that'd be enough. "Help me buy whichever budget electric range Wirecutter recommends at the moment". > Okay, here's the store near your home that is selling the Frigidaire electric range that Wirecutter is currently recommending, at the best price. > Would you like to buy it online at roughly the same price or get the address of the store?

You're saying if ChatGPT had a regularly updated search index, and was capable of effectively ranking webpages to duck around SEO (adversarial webpages looking to hack the rankings), it'd be competitive with Google? Can you explain how this is any different than what Google does?

Not GP, but, and this is a hypothesis, it seems to me the realtime scrape might be enough. GPT seems incredibly intelligent in figuring out the ranking(!), importance(!) constraint-search(!) and personalization(!) by itself. Meaning, if OpenAI can do realtime fine-tuning of the web on a daily basis, they _might_ have sidestepped ~25 years of R&D from Google, and be an order-of-mag better.

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

#192

Post by plaidfuji »

memen wrote: post #171
bognition wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely the case, but also people make up stuff online all the time, so google has this exact same problem.

No. Google gives you the source. ChatGPT does not.

It’s funny because when I was in high school the argument was always “books, published articles and other print media are actual source material, Google doesn’t give you that”

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

#193

Post by archagon »

rapsey wrote: post #174
kirsebaer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These arguments are just like the old days when wikipedia showed up. Don't miss the forest for the trees. ChatGPT is a huge threat to google and a bunch of other industries.

Not comparable. Wikipedia has always had a strict policy on citing sources. ChatGPT can't cite sources by design, because its answers are based on synthesis.

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

#194

Post by ForHackernews »

acdha wrote: post #173
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…

> What do I do? Compare with an actual expert because the list from ChatGPT is almost certainly incomplete and will inevitably contain plausible-sounding but completely wrong claims. One of the big challenges here is when you don’t know the field well enough to know what ChatGPT didn’t include on it’s list at all or be able to tell when there are multiple similar sounding things being conflated.

He does online marketing: plausible-sounding but completely wrong claims are not a bug, they are the feature.

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

#195

Post by voisin »

AI wouldn’t be the threat to Google of yesteryear that it is today. It’s a threat only because Google killed search with ads overtaking the genuine effort to “index the world’s information”. If they hadn’t sold their soul for more of that sweet addictive ad revenue, ChatGPT would be an interesting niche sideshow.

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

#196

Post by saiya-jin »

tirpen wrote: post #147
vanviegen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that bothers me most is that background services are now management by some AI thingy, in order to 'optimize battery usage'. Ergo, background services are now unreliable.

As an example, Facebook Messenger has become almost completely unusable on Android phones because the OS keeps killing the process despite the user specifically telling it to don't. I'm not 100% convinced that this is by accident.

few years ago when I got rid of all FB apps from phone (can't recommend enough), main reason was that their apps were draining battery hard, even when not used (when deciding whether it was so much spying of devs incompetency I'll be nice and tend to incompetency). Maybe its still the case?

Its bad that platform that is supposed to be more free alternative is not so much so. Similar story with me and Strava - when I record some walking, Samsung's latest android 13 sometimes tends to kill after some time the tracking thread. So my maps sometimes look like I invented teleport, pretty annoying and made the app useless and unused. I checked and Strava doesn't have any settings for this enabled.

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

#197

Post by sseagull »

franze wrote: post #150

Long long time ago at a conference I did hold a talk (about something that is now common knowledge) that SEO is not a product, it's a channel. And an ad based revenue model does not work based on SEO. As as soon as the revenue (which is coupled with traffic) goes down you are inclined to just ad more ads or make ads more agressive, which counteracts good UX which will lead to further traffic loss, which leads to more…

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were on record as saying that quality search results and ads are at odds. So at first they were generally against ads. Here's somewhat of a mention:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-...

Can't say I blame them, though. See how well you stick to your convictions when someone waves a few billion in front of you :)

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

#198

Post by pelasaco »

"This is a moment of significant vulnerability for Google", maybe I'm being cynical or too simplistic, but I just read it as: "Our stakeholders are going to be sad because they are not profiting as they wanted".. I cannot imagine google being in danger, because they are not leading that topic.

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

#199

Post by JPLeRouzic »

dragonwriter wrote: post #159
JPLeRouzic wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Come on, there's no absolute correctness for a result in being in Google's first versus second answer. The actual order depends a lot on the user's context.

Even Google doesn't change the order of answers based on the user's context. Otherwise it wouldn't say in Google Web Console "your site appears in nth position"

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

#200

Post by pelasaco »

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…

they spent years as well polishing their tools like google mail, docs, search and etc.. so i guess they still have a lot of enterprise or paid users, paying for their services.

Actually the numbers are quite impressive[0]:

"The global G suite business software market is expected to grow from US$ 2,224.76 million in 2021 to US$ 3,903.72 million by 2028; it is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 8.4% during 2021-2028. G suite provides professional services with productivity tools to stay connected and organized to meet the clients' needs.4 Apr 2022"

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/worldwide-g-suite-business-so...

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