Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

451–460 of 518 posts

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

#451

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.

So are google search results. You have a few really good resources, and many listicles paraphrasing them. With Google completely ignoring the keywords you typed, you end up with a lot of the latter.

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

#452
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the same is also true of Google results. The web is chock full of incorrect stuff, both unintentional and deliberately deceptive.

From a user experience perspective it's interesting that it may be a worse experience to get a set of links and have to pick from them and use cognitive effort to discern which sources are reliable, than to simply use ChatGPT and get an answer. But this step is precisely where verification happens.

Internet content is very rarely verifiable. Very few websites cite any sources aside from Wikipedia.

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

#453
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.

Spotify certainly does sometimes give unexpected results. A few months ago some random train of through made me think of the song "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats and I decided to listen to it. I went to Spotify's search and typed "i dont like' and hit enter, figuring what I was looking for would probably be near the top of the results. It was indeed the first result. But man...the rest of the results were…

Wtf? That playlist is horrible.

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably better, but I'd just as soon take the money back as a shareholder.

Most shareholders would be happy if they could average a 14% return.

Yeah I'm saying that what appears to be a 14% return won't be, and/or creates risks. Putting small amounts of capital to work to earn 14% is a distraction for Google. The distraction has the potential to cost 100's of billions.

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

#455
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can also see this being a major drawback.

Any bias is everyone’s bias. Not saying it doesn’t happy at all today . But wow, scary

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

#456
post #269

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.

In Any advance topic the error rate is closed to 60%

Sadly, so is Google. I've been searching for advanced Blender topics yesterday and even with 20-30 tries at writing a search phrase I just got a lot of the same ****.

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

#457
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody I know also had this issue at one point. In his case it was girlfriend which also used his account (but apparently without creating playlists or hearting anything, idk).

In my case I imported my Rdio history so it’s possible that something went wrong with a difference between loading albums & seeding the recommendation engine. It was really weird because I was expecting better based on most of the other users I knew.

The import could have something to do with it. When I started using Spotify I used a playlist importer that included many false positives when it couldn't find a particular song. I ended up with a bunch of live David Bowie recordings that I've never heard in there, and now it still thinks I want to hear him every time I shuffle my liked songs. It could have chosen a worse artist, but I don't need to hear him every time.

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

#458
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple Maps leverages yelp for reviews which is a better dataset than google reviews. And just like above said, google is optimizing for ad revenue not user experience. This opens the door for a competitor to swoop in and offer better results.

Google reviews is more superior when it comes to europe.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Google does not provide results from books, published articles, etc? Really?

Probably not when op was in high school, if they were still using books over web tools. I'm guessing before 2004? How old is google scholar?

Google Books is from 2004 but I don't remember seeing in search results until the 2010s.

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

#460
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.

Sergey and Larry have the majority vote so if you want to significantly change the business strategy you need to get their sign-off. It's just a business as usual.

Post reply on HN