91–100 of 391 posts
If this was a startup, they would be dead in the water. Nothing of substance, awful sound, 9:45 mins in they don't have a key piece of live demo equipment (the phone)/
As someone else said, it's like they asked a couple of interns to rush something out in 24 hours.
No wonder the stock price is tanking. Awful display from Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. I don't know that end-users really care about having a GPT-written paragraph accompanying their search results. Is there some other kind of output AI search currently provides that I'm missing?
Here is a practical example of a problem I couldn’t solve with Google, but could in 5 seconds with GPT. We use deities to name our sprints at work. When you search Google for “Deity starting with ”, you get a list of greek and roman gods. I got tired of that. So I asked GPT “what is a god that starts with and isn’t roman or greek”. It immediately spat out a Norse god. Next time it was Hindu. The increased variety was…
Why wouldn't Google be able to compete with their own version of ChatGPT ? I don't understand this underlying assumption behind all comments here
That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation.
I think the bigger problem is how does something like ChatGPT fit into Google's business model for search. Conversational interface and/or giving immediate answers may not be the best option in terms of ad revenue. Users re-iterating their search queries gives more opportunities to show ads. When users are scanning the page for best results, they might be more likely to click on the ads with clever wording.
Alternatively, how does ChatGPT fit into the usage model for search? I know it's taken on faith in this forum that somehow Google[1] search is bad or failing or about to be killed or whatever.
But... it's actually just fine? It does what the market wants, more or less perfectly. Everyone uses it to find the 99% of stuff that everyone searches for (commercial products, news, sites-you-forgot-the-name-of, etc...). What exactly is AI going to do better when all I want to know is where the Steam page for Skyrim is, or how much a pour-over coffee filter goes for?
The truth as I see it is that "search" simply isn't a market that's disruptable in the way posters here want it to be disrupted. Find 10 people on the street and ask them whether they can find stuff on the internet and they'll say "yes, duh?". This is like asking how AI is going to disrupt freight rail or high intensity agriculture. Those too are stable, already-optimized industries without a lot of room for genuine improvement except on cost (and recognize that training and running models of this scale is still significantly more expensive than crawling the web!).
Now, none of that is to say that there isn't an application for a generalized text model that can answer questions in the market somewhere. I think there probably is. I just don't see how it has anything to do with "search". Having a personal butler to do your research doesn't get you to the Skyrim forums any faster.
[1] Disclosure: I work there, but on firmware and nowhere near search. Opinions entirely my own.
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i was at google half a decade ago. Multiple SVPs expressed in private a concern of search revenue growth and search being disrupted. That was likely the reason for all the now dead products, to attempt to diversify revenue. Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery. They preached 10x but refused to pursue 10x ideas. They tried to create an accelerator, a120 which focused too…
> Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery That has nothing to do with any of this. Google's doom was due to their total lack of empathy for their end users and customers. They launched stuff, then when those things did not immediately produce gigantic profits like the search ads, they just shut them down on the users' face. One can do it once, twice, the third time people…
Wow, they really are in disarray. Maybe the (ex-)Googlers in recent AI HackerNews articles are wrong in proclaiming that Google will come on top of the AI wars, due to their immense contributions to its lead-up. I look forward to see what new Bing amounts to the industry, as well as Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI for Bing, Azure, and whatever else is planned. This is an exciting tectonic shift.
My wife, who uses whatever default is offered unless I provide a compelling enough argument, said she'd actively switch to Bing if it incorporated ChatGPT even in its current form.
And the whole programming thing? It gives wrong results that are not correct and at times don't even compile. Ask it to fix something, it does half the work. It hallucinates functions which do not exist. That being said, if you ask software problems that are not answered with code, it does a better job.
People will say they would switch until they try the current iteration. We certainly want something better, a real virtual assistant, but what we have is not there yet
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i was at google half a decade ago. Multiple SVPs expressed in private a concern of search revenue growth and search being disrupted. That was likely the reason for all the now dead products, to attempt to diversify revenue. Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery. They preached 10x but refused to pursue 10x ideas. They tried to create an accelerator, a120 which focused too…
> Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery That has nothing to do with any of this. Google's doom was due to their total lack of empathy for their end users and customers. They launched stuff, then when those things did not immediately produce gigantic profits like the search ads, they just shut them down on the users' face. One can do it once, twice, the third time people…
> That has nothing to do with any of this.
I wouldn't say it's central, but it's definitely not nothing. When a lot of your recognition comes from DEI efforts, "me too" and other such efforts, you can't expect proper focus. There are plenty of irrelevant internal drives where just aligning with them benefits you greatly, instead of aiming to quickly deliver an excellent, user-focused product and then making it even better over time.
Surely Google will catch up, but this was a blunder worse than I would have expected. The race is truly on
Edit: one more thought. After listening to talks from Kevin Scott and others at MSFT, it seems like their vision is copilot for everything. Kevin made it sound like they have dozens of these experiments happening right now. I think this is a winning formula and we’ll be seeing all kinds of other new launches this year.