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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

#411

Post by viscanti »

irq-1 wrote: post #309
archagon wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think. Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of…

Anyone criticizing ChatGPT now isn't thinking about what's possible with GPT-4 or GPT-5 when lots of research has gone into getting it to be better with answering accuracy. It doesn't take too much of an imagination to see a path where people aren't doing nearly as many searches on a search engine and just asking questions to something like ChatGPT.

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

#412

Post by dinkumthinkum »

addandsubtract wrote: post #386
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely as opposed to those things. With Google, if you use a reliable source like Mayo, NIH, even a WebMD, It is clearly more likely to have accurate information than something that proves even numbers are prime. Certainly all those things can be inaccurate but where in the world you think ChatGPT pattern matches it’s information from?

And how hard would it be for ChatGPT to be retrained on peer reviewed medical journals? ChatMD-GPT, if you will.

And it has already likely been trained on correct information and yet it produces bad results. It certainly has been trained data that explains what prime numbers and yet it produces what it produces, whereas using Google and hitting a credible source directly is more accurate and efficient.

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

#413

Post by steveBK123 »

neilv wrote: post #398
steveBK123 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seemed like Google's hiring filters were about what a Stanford student might think is important (that socioeconomic class, had learned what Stanford students do, thinks whatever they don't know is less important or follows naturally from what they know, preferably recent grad (again, student thinking), with affluent lifestyle expectations, etc.). Wall Street, OTOH, is about making money. They might also not fully…

I graduated between dotbomb & GFC, so my dad was convinced programmers would never have jobs again. Further, Silicon Valley was not exactly top of the list for me given the preceding crash. Finally, if you wanted to stay on east coast in late 90s/early 00s in tech, there wasn't a lot of choice outside Wall St.

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

#414

Post by nhooyr »

rpdillon wrote: post #299
archagon wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree with everything you said, but I want to dig into why I don't find the critique compelling. In short, I see a need for us all to inherently distrust anything single thing we read -- everything needs to be verified and checked out across multiple (hopefully diverse) sources of information before it can be considered "truth" in any sense. I do develop trust in certain sources over time, but meta-sources like an AI…

Absolutely agreed. I see so much bullcrap being peddled by people on hackernews and reddit it's absolutely maddening. People hide behind having a source like it's an immovable shield that protects them against having to perform their own critical thinking.

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

#415

Post by EricE »

steveBK123 wrote: post #403
csomar wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>"YouTube makes money.. because ads." Does it? The last I saw about Youtube and profit referred to it as revenue neutral.

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

#416

Post by pks016 »

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…

Same. I was avid Google+ user. Circles were great. I had made many friends with varied interests.

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

#417

Post by danielmarkbruce »

AlbertCory wrote: post #219
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…

> 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.

Further to this - they not only want it, but they kind of need it if it's to move the needle. It's a difficult situation. A nice problem to have for sure, but still difficult.

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

#418

Post by danielmarkbruce »

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.

This isn't right. In the real world every effort saps a little bandwidth from the CEO/top execs, potentially harms the brand, potentially causes the org to calcify. Better off handing the money back.

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

#419

Post by WalterBright »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #418
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.

This isn't right. In the real world every effort saps a little bandwidth from the CEO/top execs, potentially harms the brand, potentially causes the org to calcify. Better off handing the money back.

One solution with that is to spin off a company that does these things, while keeping majority ownership.

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

#420

Post by sytelus »

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…

This is old myth. 40% their revenue now comes from other properties such as YouTube, gmail, GCP, Android, maps etc. They are fairly comparable in diversification for rest of the big tech but still little way to go.
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