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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

#401

Post by lumost »

WalterBright wrote: post #388
AlbertCory wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I never quite understood this. New tricks only have to have ROI better than 14% or so to be worthwhile.

It’s tricky - companies with high margin businesses are loath to scale into low margin businesses. It makes the firm look more like a commodity than it is. Meanwhile startups in large enterprises are often desperate to grow revenue to show relevance.. leading to low margins.

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

#402

Post by lumost »

fragmede wrote: post #266
steveBK123 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The non-ad moat that I see them losing is if slack gets into the office app game. so instead of editing a Google doc and sending the link in slack, you just edit it inside slack.

Salesforce owns quip a pretty reasonable office competitor. This should only be a matter of time.

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

#403

Post by steveBK123 »

csomar wrote: post #395
steveBK123 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t know but Google is very bad at releasing and maintaining products they already have a horrible reputation. They could have done better but I guess no one gives a flying f when the money is still coming. Google did more than search: gmail, youtube, docs, cloud and that’s just stuff on top of my mind.

YouTube makes money.. because ads.

Cloud they have somehow managed to slip so badly as to be competing for 3rd against IBM & Oracle.

Docs/gmail is rounding error because its feature poor and not monetized well.

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

#404

Post by lumost »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #380
Scubabear68 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google Maps is already losing. I was a faithful user since it came out. Game Apple Maps a few tries but always went back. The past couple of years Google maps has gotten more glitchy, given worse directions, and most recently started showing extreme lag. Maps in CarPlay started falling behind real-time. First by a few seconds, then by minutes. Wasn’t sure if it was the car head unit, phone, reception or what.…

Google Maps is unequivocally the champion in terms of reviews, and this is what really matters when it comes to actually finding places to go. Not just that, but it's directly monetizable because if the user journey starts with a Google Maps search query, e.g. "lunch near me", those first few results are worth real money.

Isn’t this saying that google maps started optimizing the thing that made money- rather than the thing customers want?

Apple Maps will get better at reviews as more people switch over.

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

#405

Post by steveBK123 »

WalterBright wrote: post #392
petre wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud is funny because it's just storage and an e-mail address compared to GSuite which can be actually used to do a bunch of hobby level stuff. ChatGPT AI is overhyped, just like full self driving was five years ago. Yes, it can do stuff, write articles, code etc. until people realize that what it spits out is useful stuff mixed with made up gibberish and has to be checked by a human. It's going to be just great fo…

ChatGPT generated code has the interesting property of looking like it should work, but is subtly completely wrong.

Yes, its funny when people post what is obviously cherry picked examples of it working.

So far the code I've seen is the same level of word salad as its text writing. I gave it some really easy ones that it responded back with 1-liners that would produce runtime errors, let alone actually produce correct result. I find it interesting since its really just synethesizing new content from existing content it has trained on, yet it produced simple one-liners that were wrong.

Lorem ipsum.

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

#406

Post by jkuria »

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…

“You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom. Things may get rough with the move we're trying.” --Michael Corleone, The Godfather

Said to Tom Hagen when firing him.

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

#407

Post by steveBK123 »

lumost wrote: post #401
WalterBright wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never quite understood this. New tricks only have to have ROI better than 14% or so to be worthwhile.

It’s tricky - companies with high margin businesses are loath to scale into low margin businesses. It makes the firm look more like a commodity than it is. Meanwhile startups in large enterprises are often desperate to grow revenue to show relevance.. leading to low margins.

It just seems like they wasted their lead, margin and talent.

Bell Labs produced a lot of interesting stuff with their monopoly profits. Apple R&D seems to come up with lots of interesting new product lines.

GOOG bought Nest and managed to become an also-ran in home automation.

GOOG other bets might produce something with Waymo, but when.. all this autonomous car stuff is continuously 5 more years, every year. That's about the closest they've come so far, no?

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

#408

Post by nradov »

steveBK123 wrote: post #260
eastbound wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the people, it’s the management that decided which traits they would reward, both at hiring and during the career.

Thankfully when I was graduating they had some strict school & GPA filters that someone as lowly as me wasn't even dignified a response. Wall Street tech DGAF about that though.

And yet there are fairly high-level Google employees who came in with acquisitions and don't even have college degrees.

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

#409

Post by forgetfulness »

onphonenow wrote: post #143
ninethirty wrote: post #108

Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.

Google+ was good until google lost its mind and started shoving it everywhere- even I as a google+ user HATED this. It was to me the social network for grownups without the Facebook clickbait - I liked the circles model too (I did one for professional stuff one for personal) and great photos support. But then someone was put in charge who lost their mind and just started wrecking products (YouTube etc) with plus and…

> It was to me the social network for grownups without the Facebook clickbait - I liked the circles model too (I did one for professional stuff one for personal) and great photos support.

There was probably no viable business model for that as it was, closest is LinkedIn, which is rife with influencers, grifting and inspirational chain mail.

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

#410

Post by narrator »

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 think that Google has the ability to absolutely crush ChatGPT. Lambda is so far ahead that Google employees were raving that it was sentient. So they could disrupt everybody.. except for two things.

First, the woke crowd deeply embedded all over Google will burn the whole place down if there is anything controversial that comes out of the AI. They have spent years slowly degrading YouTube and Google to prevent anything from showing up under an extremely broad definition of misinformation or anything that could be considered derogatory of any sensitive group. AI is like a Chernobyl of potential microaggressions and misinformation. Evidence of this fear of their own AI is that the deepmind guys said they wanted to even stop releasing research papers because they were worried about what bad people would do with AI research.

Second, the innovators dilemma. How are they going to monetize AI and get people to click on ads?

They need Larry, currently hiding out in Fiji, and Sergei, playing around in retirement, to come back and do the work of changing the culture to actually allow these two disruptive changes.

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