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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

#281

Post by dekhn »

hintymad wrote: post #263
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…

> 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. I'm not sure 20%-time is a better strategy. At least it was not proven yet. For starters, which successful products were initially Google employees' 20% projects? Google Search was certainly not. Google Search Ads was not per the book In the Plex. T…

(for those curious about Google Ads history, Eric Veach is the one who proposed second-price; I believe he was unaware of its previous existence when he did). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Veach

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

#282

Post by reaperducer »

steveBK123 wrote: post #262
jbverschoor wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT would probably be a better search engine than google. ChatGPT and Reddit cover most of your info. What remains is shopping, but Amazon and even Instagram are better at that. Lastly, Google has no audience for creating awareness like fb / ig / tt

Well I'd say they both put all their eggs in one basket & let that basket deteriorate. Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..

Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse?

Google's unwillingness to show any results older than Taylor Swift' last breakup song made me switch to DuckDuckGo.

It was a bit rough at first, but in time Duck turned out to be just as good as Google, and sometimes better for the sorts of thing I search for.

Then, about four or five months ago, something happened to Duck, and it's gotten significantly worse. Short lists of results. More results that are off-topic than on. In the last couple of weeks, for me it's as bad as Google was before.

I'll stick with Duck because it's not trying to harvest every morsel of my life to make a quick buck. But I wonder if anyone else has noticed a very quick and very significant change in quality with their DuckDuckGo results?

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

#283

Post by eduction »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #211
eduction wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maga…

My memory is that originally business listings were excluded from the white pages, added in later years. Been a while though!

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

#284

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

fragmede wrote: post #261
AlbertCory wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By your own story, it's not a myth. Not everyone has one, and your boss had to be supportive of you working on it, but there are a bunch of internal systems that are supported by 20% time. It might be more appropriate to frame that 20% as giving 120% (aka working on it on Saturday instead of Friday) for some of the things, but it's a real thing that exists. Just because not everybody has such a project doesn't make i…

Just because something vaguely resembling the popular story seems to exist doesn’t make it not a myth.

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

#285

Post by dekhn »

sorenjan wrote: post #106

What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company. In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.

Sundar was a robot put in place to handle the difficulties that Larry wasn't interested in dealing with: growing revenue, handling the leadership ego fights, and making vapid presentations at developer conferences. He has little or no independent thought. No leadership skills (IE, rally the troops) at all.

Ruth will replace Sundar as CEO in the coming year or so. And then Google's transition to evil will be compelte.

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

#286

Post by hintymad »

fragmede wrote: post #265
hintymad wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm not sure 20%-time is a better strategy. At least it was not proven yet. For starters, which successful products were initially Google employees' 20% projects? Google Search was certainly not. Google Search Ads was not per the book In the Plex. T…

Gmail is the breakout hit that came from a 20% time project.

Oh yeah, you're right. How could I forget gmail. The value of the 20% of project, in my experience, is not giving employee additional time, as Googlers can find time easily given the company's lax'd culture of enforcing deadlines. Instead, the value is that such projects do not need coordinations, or approvals from dozens of committee members.

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

#287

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

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.

This varies heavily by phone manufacturer. They employ different strategies to inflate their battery life stats, and Samsung is currently the worst offender: https://dontkillmyapp.com/

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

#288

Post by onetokeoverthe »

reaperducer wrote: post #282
steveBK123 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'd say they both put all their eggs in one basket & let that basket deteriorate. Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..

Show of hands - people who feel google search has improved in the last 5/10 years vs people who feel it's gotten demonstrably worse? Google's unwillingness to show any results older than Taylor Swift' last breakup song made me switch to DuckDuckGo. It was a bit rough at first, but in time Duck turned out to be just as good as Google, and sometimes better for the sorts of thing I search for. Then, about four or five m…

[dead]

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

#289

Post by steveBK123 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #264
steveBK123 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did they try though? it seemed all scattershot, unfocussed, repetitive (how many chat/video apps) and quickly taken out back and shot.

it's not ALL scattershot. GMail and Docs for enterprises are a pretty sustained effort. Cloud is pretty sustained. YouTube is unkillable. But in general you're right.

GSuite is either underpriced or underfeatured.

Most real enterprise still happens on Office, and lots of consumers happy give Apple $100/year for iCloud.

Cloud services - aren't they basically 3rd behind AMZN/MSFT now, by A LOT? They are basically competing for 3rd against IBM/Oracle/etc, and some quarters they are #4.

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

#290

Post by gmiller123456 »

wiihack wrote: post #87
iLoveOncall wrote: post #75

I don't understand why they freak out. Every single time I have used ChatGPT (which isn't many), it gave me an absolutely unusable answer completely off the mark. It's funny to see FAANG CEOs have FOMO over what is essentially smoke and mirrors.

Could you provide an example of what you're asking for? It appears to work well for me. I would estimate that 80% of the answers are very good, and 10% provide at least a glimpse of the information I was seeking.

One of the first things I asked it to do was to "write a program to compute the rise and set times of a star". It got a couple of pieces right, but was way off the mark. I asked it a few other astronomy related questions, and it would try to use a library like Astropy, but make API calls that don't exist. I tried things like "don't use Astropy", and it would just switch to a different library.

It seems to do OK on things like the instructions for Fizz-Buzz.

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