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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

#211

Post by Turing_Machine »

eduction wrote: post #176
isx726552 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one would use a search engine composed of 100% ads. Isn’t that pretty much what the Yellow Pages used to be? As long as you know what you’re getting…

Yellow pages were not 100% ads. They were where you got phone numbers and addresses for businesses, which was important pre internet. They did have tons of ads alongside the listings, but the unpaid listings were core to the offering. If you wanted to call for a reservation at a particular restaurant, check movie showtimes at a particular theater, you would go to the yellow pages, and to the regular listings specific…

> If you wanted to call for a reservation at a particular restaurant, check movie showtimes at a particular theater, you would go to the yellow pages

If you wanted to find the number of a particular restaurant, the white pages were far more efficient.

The yellow pages were primarily useful when you wanted a list of restaurants, not a specific one.

Something else that was nearly 100% ads: the old Computer Shopper magazine. As I recall, they printed just enough editorial material to qualify for the "literature" postal rate rather than the "advertising" rate.

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

#212

Post by AlbertCory »

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…

Former Googler here.

20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain.

Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a show of hands, "How many have a 20% project?" There was one hand.

What it WAS useful for was checking out a project you might want to transfer to.

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

#213

Post by ajdoingnothing »

Perhaps, Google can finally start focusing again on creating quality products instead of nonsense videos/hypes like "Demonstrating Quantum Supremacy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU).

However, would people even trust their new products knowing Google's tendency to kill off these products within a short amount of time?

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

#214

Post by marginalia_nu »

nprateem wrote: post #67
roenxi wrote: 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.

The terminology has gotten really muddy, and people talk of statements that are true, i.e. in accordance with the facts as though they were the facts themselves. The facts are what a true statement agrees with that makes it true.

Facts are, epistemologically, the way things are. That statement wasn't a fact, but it was true.

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

#215

Post by dinkumthinkum »

datavirtue wrote: post #178
trentnix wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Without peer? It gets facts completely wrong for which Google produces the correct result on the first hit.

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

#216

Post by propogandist »

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…

> I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style... to support online marketing activities.

it sounds like you're using AI generated output to do content marketing to support SEO activities for a healthcare client at a marketing agency

if this is the case, when humans search for [organic] content on health conditions related to the human liver (on Google) you are hoping they land on ChatGPT generated content you published (for your client), to help the client avoid buying Google Ads to get those customers

at some point your content will rank well enough that other SEOs will do the same thing to compete, leading to dilution of overall quality content as it's all SEO optimized content, which makes Search generally unusable.

This, to be fair, has been happening well before ChatGPT, but will only accelerate.

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

#217

Post by scarface74 »

bob29 wrote: post #177
scarface74 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the day of the week, I might be doing a standard enterprisey dev project or I might be doing a “DevOps” project automating some things around AWS (where I work in ProServe) using the AWS SDK. Before ChatGPT, I would spend a lot of time searching on Google for the right API call and the response structure: Problem: I need a simple Python script that list roles in an AWS account that has at least one of a…

Lol dude I just googled “script list IAM roles that contain policy” and this was the top result. Probably less typing than the usual silly authoritative tone people use when composing an “AI” prompt , like they’re Tony Stark or Captain Picard . And trust me, once u google stack overflow enough pretty soon you won’t need to ask anyone how to output a csv https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66127551/list-of-all-rol...

that’s true. But that code snippet didn’t meet all the requirements. I laid out. And it definitely was less typing using ChatGPT once you add all of the requirements I laid out.

And then there is the context switch. This is just one little script as part of a larger system where I’m designing an entire system. It’s much easier if I’m already writing out a long set of documentation, diagrams, slides, etc just to open ChatGPT and keep writing English.

Not to mention when you’re juggling a couple of projects and one is Node and one is Python.

And just in case you are trying to gatekeep, I’ve been programming for a few years - let’s just say my first hobbyist code was in 65C02 assembly language in 1986

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

#218

Post by dinkumthinkum »

archagon wrote: post #188
datavirtue wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is wrong much more than 1% of the time.

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

#219

Post by AlbertCory »

steveBK123 wrote: post #155
trentnix wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> not bother to find some other ways to make money.

Oh, they definitely tried, and still try. The problem is the same as many large companies: they want a new trick as lucrative as the old trick, and there aren't any.

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

#220

Post by dylan604 »

hef19898 wrote: post #175
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Simon Sinek is a LinkedIn influencer with very limited insight into anything beyond sounding smart and sellong self-improvement books.

>is a LinkedIn influencer

the fact that this is a thing just makes me sad

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