201–210 of 518 posts
They’ve been harvesting profits rather than making a better product. They should be freaked out.
> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time…
I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.
I have some cron jobs running that generate new playlists every day with very specific targets (e.g. "min_instrumentalness" on a track) while still being random enough to have variety.
If Spotify ever shuts down their API like how Twitter has done, then I'll move to something else.
They could have fixed search just fine but opted to focus too much on ads...
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Apple still do plenty of AI, no? Eg the whole horse-detection thing. Maybe it’s something more specific that you dislike?
I'm with the OP. I sometimes like AI capabilities, but I don't like my phone making AI decisions or predictions on my behalf. E.g., if I open the share menu, whatever contacts and apps Google guesses are always wrong, and a simple list of whoever I've last shared with would be better. I also don't want any "smart" contextual behavior (widgets changing out throughout the day, etc.). The phone simply doesn't have enoug…
A decent AI system would include a heavy bias toward recent. Good "AI" should mostly feel like dumb heuristics. I think a good example is directions on my iPhone: when it's plugged into a car it always suggests driving directions. When there's something in my calendar soon it suggests going there. If there's not and I'm not at home it often suggests going home (it's right more than half the time). After that, it just offers a list of buttons for places I've told it about: home, work, school.
I'd be annoyed if it tried to do something more clever (like suggesting the post office because I went there on this day last year). I think a key element is that I have an immediate and intuitive idea of why its suggestion is a reasonable one.
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Before it got choked off I had started using chatGPT for all of my searches. For code examples it blows google out of the water. For learning esoteric things (like congressional procedures etc.) quickly, it is without peer. I think Google's founders offered their take years ago...no one listened then.
ChatGPT is only "truthy", however. The algorithm will happily give you information that sounds true, but is actually wrong. And if it's wrong even 1% of time, you will still need some way to verify its claims.
The web is chock full of incorrect stuff, both unintentional and deliberately deceptive.
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…
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but don't they hold > 50% of voting shares? It may just be C-suite CYA action: by ensuring Brin & Page's buy-in on counter-ChatGPT strategy this early, who would blame the current CEO if it doesn't pan out? It won't be "Sundar Pichai's plan" that's at fault
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.
Or Google. There are plenty of pages out there that (e.g.) claim that Alzheimers is caused by drinking out of aluminum cans, or that the world is controlled by grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli.
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.
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ChatGPT is only "truthy", however. The algorithm will happily give you information that sounds true, but is actually wrong. And if it's wrong even 1% of time, you will still need some way to verify its claims.
On the other hand, the same is also true of Google results. The web is chock full of incorrect stuff, both unintentional and deliberately deceptive.