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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

#241

Post by marginalia_nu »

flybrand wrote: post #201

“Google sucks,” “search doesn’t show real results anymore,” and many similar comments are common in my world of heavy industry / manufacturing / b2b sales. They’ve been harvesting profits rather than making a better product. They should be freaked out.

I think this is hitting the nail on the head. AI and ChatGPT isn't even the point. The scary part is that Google appears to have cannibalized their own offering in order to keep their numbers black to the extent where they have no ostensible way of dealing with a credible competitor.

Ironically, the young Page and Brin predicted the inherent conflict of interest between search and advertisement.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a

With gems such as

"For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine."

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

issa wrote: post #228
bob29 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I agree completely. Hilarious example. But, hell, if a product's pitch is "you'll feel like Tony Stark or Captain Picard" it will probably be successful.

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by literallycancer »

vanviegen wrote: post #92
clumsysmurf wrote: post #24

> 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…

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.

Wait until you find out about 5G causing brain cancer.

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

#244

Post by rutierut »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #227
abnry wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say ChatGPT gives you false information 50% of the time. It is still useful. Just like it is harder to find primes numbers than verify that a number is prime, it is harder to dig up potential tidbits of information than to verify a piece of information handed to you is true.

50% is still useful? A broken watch is useful in that sense as well I guess. I can only see that has useful if you don’t include efficient in the definition of useful.

Like the comment said, if it's cheap (time, effort, etc) to reliably verify the answer the success rate doesn't really matter.

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

#245

Post by oh_sigh »

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…

It's not like they're going to sit down and write some new AI algo to put Google back on top. What they are doing is just cutting the Gordian knot of management traffic jams. They can come in and say "this is what we're doing, and this is who is doing it". Even for Sundar to try that would require months of wrangling and deal making. But Larry and Sergey can come in and force their will on the company.

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

#246

Post by acdha »

ForHackernews wrote: post #194
acdha wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’ve worked with decent marketers so I was assuming good-faith.

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

#247

Post by brink »

abnry wrote: post #221
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.

Let's say ChatGPT gives you false information 50% of the time. It is still useful. Just like it is harder to find primes numbers than verify that a number is prime, it is harder to dig up potential tidbits of information than to verify a piece of information handed to you is true.

Your prime number analogy doesn't hold water because the average person doesn't verify. Being wrong half the time has potential for serious damage.

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

#248

Post by thro1 »

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…

Couldn't Mitchell Baker start to freak out too ?

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

#249

Post by scarface74 »

issa wrote: post #228
bob29 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I agree completely. Hilarious example. But, hell, if a product's pitch is "you'll feel like Tony Stark or Captain Picard" it will probably be successful.

The entire thesis is that ChatGPT can give better results than Google.

ChatGPT gave me a specific answer with the command line arguments that I specified and allowed me to specify a list of policies and output the result in the format I needed

Google gave me a code snippet that I had to modify for my use case.

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

#250

Post by nprateem »

skytreader wrote: post #86
nprateem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about interpretation. Facts are facts.

Thing is, short of mathematical definitions, everything is subject to some bias, any sufficiently-complex statement is just an interpretation of various signals. Moreover, the threshold for "sufficiently-complex" isn't really so high. In other words, there aren't really facts (in the sense of being "absolute truths") but just Justified True Beliefs, which means Google essentially has to solve the Gettier Problem ( ht…

No, but isn't that where confidence levels come in? Consensus is formed because of research showing statistical significance of however many sigma or something
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