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

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

#331
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are the numbers impressive, the tools are impressive too. But that doesn't change the reality that ad revenue related to search is the lion's share of Google's revenue. That makes them exceptionally vulnerable for a company of their size and breadth. And in that vulnerable area, anecdotally at least, the search quality feels as if it has regressed over the years. Google was once the gateway to the web. Now t…

>Maybe I'm just nostalgic You're not. It was so much better up until 2018. Now it only indexing spam blogs And ai generated contents? Search quality is so bad today that duckduckgo is performing actually better in many cases, especially software development related queries

DDG used Bing's index. "Search is so bad that" another trillion dollar corporation, which has been caught copying Google's search results, sometimes returns better results for niche queries, isn't much of an indictment.

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't even know this WAS a thing, I could probably do this between myself and ChatGPT and make millions. ;)

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

#333

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.

The only thing that matters to me is overall usefulness. If I had access to a practitioner of a craft to teach me, and they mostly lead me in the right direction but also had some dumb ideas and incorrect practices. Well I would still want to learn from that person and expect my self to be critical and improve on the work of my teacher.

As long as ChatGPT assists me more than it harms me it is quite powerful simply due to the number of different things it can assist me with, and the raw scalability.

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

#334
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 think this goes back to Google’s decision to be evil. Being evil has a lot of overhead where you have to invest significant time into researching grey areas to exploit and then crafting your product or service not step over the line. Then it falls apart when you get to Europe and they are happy to call you on being evil and fine you billions of euros for doing evil things. Google should go back to not being evil, t…

"Being evil", as you say, means saving money by leveraging synergies between products. If it wasn't a successful strategy, it wouldn't matter.

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

#335

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.

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

No where near enough radiation. See the inverse square law.

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

#336
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…

> Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company 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

Why would the owners pay a man $200M/yr of their hard earned money, if he comes to them to say he doesn't know how to do his job?

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

#337

I've played with ChatGPT and see it as (at best) just complimentary to existing approaches. Unfortunately, I also see it as a vector of misinformation and potentially harmful. It appears highly knowledgeable on topics that I know little about, but otherwise it's replies are often riddled with errors and inaccuracies. It also seems unable to quote sources or references for such information. It seems reasonable to use…

I think this is called Knoll's law of media accuracy [0] or wikipedia [1] - "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge". Interestingly enough, I tried asking ChatGPT what it was before googling it, and it confidently told me I was asking about "Confirmation Bias." But then when I told it what I was talking about was indeed Knoll'…

Exactly. We should be realistic about AI and ChatGPT and LLMs. You have great example of how “confidently” produced atrocious results even with the oft-cited ad hoc solution of “follow up” it gave even more misinformation and you, the user, only know this because you happened to know the answer. Oddly enough, if you google the types of things you are talking about, you will largely get the correct answer as the first result. There is something to be said about being naive about the potential of LLMs models but I am astounded how hyped and eager everyone is to hand over the future of all knowledge work to them without even clear evidence that that would make sense.

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t need to believe it, they just need to believe that other people will believe in it. Even CEOs can get a lot of pushback and since they’re looking to do drastic changes it helps to get as much buy in as possible.

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

Google only has 2 shareholders to pander to. Everyone just gets to sit and watch unless he's unambiguously destroying huge amounts of value.

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

#339
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I google, I have an internal dialogue about whether the results are shit to begin with, if they aren't, maybe the thing I'm looking for is more niche, so it's not in the top ten results. ChatGPT could for example just maybe try 5 google searches in the background, just glean data from the description, title, question asked, date, etc, and maybe use some of it's own scraping on the top 10 results to reorder them and give better summaries.

E.g. imagine when you search via chatgpt. It googles : search phrase, search phrase + reddit, search phrase variation 1, variation 1 + reddit, var 2, etc... all in parallel almost then uses that to mini-tune an ai model to find the stuff that best matches what you're really wanting to find, and then scrapes top ten for results.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>is a LinkedIn influencer the fact that this is a thing just makes me sad

I didn't even know this WAS a thing, I could probably do this between myself and ChatGPT and make millions. ;)

Are you prettiet then Simon and a smoother talker?

It's a crowded competitive market. The content has always been the easiest part.

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