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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#201

> And today, we’re [...] opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks. It feels like a mistake to make the big announcement for this, but not open it up to a wide audience. It's not like ChatGPT hasn't been out for months now. Not sure how much they gain by making headlines before it's ready for people to play with it.

They failed to learn any lessons from the Google+ launch.

Google and Facebook had a deal that Google stops doing social and Facebook stops doing search.

I don't see the same thing happening between Google and Bing

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#202
post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

Or maybe they had ChatGPT write their blog post. ha ha ha...

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#203
post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

Or they asked their new AI to write the post and they got a result that sounds amazing but is still total fluff

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#204
OpenAI: Actually usable

Google: We'll let you use it. We have it. Honest

Meta: Ours is so good. It's better than anything. It honestly is the best. No you can't see it

So much for all those "What's so open about OpenAI" people. This is what's open about it. Anyone can use it.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#205
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a very reactionary move. ChatGPT went viral, and now they have to rush something to market to try and compete. So of course the product doesn't exist yet, but they've had enough time to put together a project plan and some mockups. It's not a great position to be in.

as someone who did nlp research at Google, Google had a ChatGPT level chatbot 3 years ago and did nothing with it

This sounds a bit like those stories about Kodak having a digital camera before anybody else did, and they just fearfully watched the thing from a distance doing nuthing until someone else brought it to market and ended the party for them.

May be an entirely different thing this time of course. But still...

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#206
I’m curious to hear why Google isn’t going to win in this AI arms race.

The way I see it, Google:

* is effectively the gateway to the internet, owning the most popular website in the world, mobile OS, and browser

* has infinite LIVE data, both unstructured and structured (knowledge graph)

* has infinite compute resources

* employs the world’s best AI scientists and invests heavily in AI

* has decade(s) of experience in AI products

* has one of the most popular suit of apps already in people’s hands (gmail, calendar, maps, docs, YT, drive, wallet, photos etc etc)

* is a popular cloud provider (which is another vector, ie platformizing AI)

* has infinite money

* is probably the most well positioned company to actually monetize AI

Honestly I don’t see why HN seems to think it’s over for Google. Outside of tech, most people have never heard of ChatGPT or Bing. Everyone on the planet knows Google.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#207
post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

Exactly, he announced that they are doing a thing. With a very ambiguous screenshot of the thing and zero evidence of just how good the thing is. And no link to the actual thing. So, the thing doesn't exist yet in a form that is concrete or demoable. And it definitely isn't ready for users. Which is the same thing really. Also there's no timeline of the thing actually getting there either. So, there's nothing here re…

[deleted]

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT didn't just "exist" one day. OpenAI made a half-dozen models before getting to GPT-3, and even had demos like Talk to Transformer freely available for anyone to play with long before ChatGPT was in development. Just because you didn't hear about it until the news got there doesn't mean it's not a journey.

Would you consider Google to be mid-journey?

That would be Midjourney: https://midjourney.com

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#209

Lotus 123, Borland and Wordperfect were at the top of the software world. They failed to make the transition to GUIs/Windows. Microsoft missed the arrival of the web. Microsoft also missed the mobile revolution and ended up with zero mobile operating system market share. Internet Explorer, having vanquished Netscape, declared "job done" and stopped developing the web browser further, only to be cast to irrelevance fo…

The results of Google today really look like Altavista in 1999. I started using you.com, which looks like Google 10 years ago. You get actual non-SEO-optimized search results on the first page. I‘m sure that will change once more people use it, but at the moment I have a working search engine again.

Same. switched to you.com since day and never looked back. Once in a while I’ll use DuckDuckGo for very specific queries.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#210
post #9

>AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and gui…

That's good for users, potentially. But not good for the sites where google is sourcing the information.

I’d rather get my information without having to click on a site. I get the need for attribution but Google can cite the sources it gets it’s content from, and I don’t really care about losing ad money.

But another issue is accuracy. Of course real sites aren’t always accurate, but they’re way more reliable than AI (and sometimes the site is ground truth like official docs so it can be trusted…unless…the official docs are wrong….).

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