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Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

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Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#161
post #91

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0 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.

Damn that was painful to watch. They seem utterly disconnected from how people actually use their phones in real life. Finding elevators and atms with AR ? Is that the future google is selling ? Who's buying. If google maps was the equivalent of the invention the printing press that would be the invention of scented toilet paper

The lens feature is not new but it steadily keeps getting better

But yeah the 720p demo was bad, probably why they deleted the original

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#162
post #85
post #75

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…

I think the main point about all this is that Google search results are now a complete joke for the most part. After you scroll down through the list of paid ads, the top results are typically a bunch of SEO gamed waffle, stuffed with long tail keywords and designed to provide enough bland text to rise up the rankings.

The actual information value of these 'results' is usually close to zero. I went onto a top search result yesterday, and the scammers hadn't even bothered to do a decent page. It was just a list of links to 404 pages, with an intro paragraph to satisfy the Google algorithm. It was pathetic and a waste of time.

That's why they're running scared. They know their key product is broken and useless, which means they're ripe for being ignored.

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#163
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had to work with a list of the 50 states abbreviations, full names, etc. Previously, I'd have found the data somewhere with Google et al and then manipulated it myself into the JSON I needed. But this time I asked GPT to not only source the data, but also return it structured to my liking—with revisions ("please include Guam and Puetro Rico") Lots of my searches are simply I want an answer, but often times I also w…

with revisions ("please include Guam and Puetro Rico")

Your wrote "please" to ChatGPT?

FWIW, Miss Manners had a column a couple of weeks ago where she stated that we should not say please or thank you to machines, including Siri and Alexa.

I was surprised.

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#164

I don't think Google Corporate had any idea this was going on and that way more people were interested in it than normal and many were reporters and investors. It had a feel like a local Google dev group meeting which is informal. I stopped using Google Search months ago because it was totally unusable. For some things it's still good and I use search within Google Maps often. I think this will make voice-based UI vi…

Google isn't a retail store that has 'stores' and 'corporate offices'. It's all corporate, but you are absolutely right that the 'mothership' in Mountain View is very distinct from offices that are 'remote'. I don't know if Google has internal lingo to describe this but at SV companies I've been at we called it '{city where the main office is}' vs 'remote office'. So if you are at an Oracle office in New Jersey I would imagine you would say something like "I have to get up early to meet with Redwood City."

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#165
post #140

For people in this thread convinced that Google is scrambling to come up with a ChatGPT competitor - that’s only true on the product side. Internally, LamDA has been available with a chatGPT style interface for years (maybe more like 18 months).

Product is all that matters. You can have the world's best AI but if it's horrible to use who cares, right?

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#166

Important to note that both companies don’t have a public demo yet. Microsoft’s “demo” only answers select questions which is… not an actual demo. That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation.

>That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation.

They are the company the produces Powerpoint after all...of course they know presentations! :D

I didn't see the Microsoft presentation but I hope it had a powerpoint!

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#167
post #162
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the main point about all this is that Google search results are now a complete joke for the most part. After you scroll down through the list of paid ads, the top results are typically a bunch of SEO gamed waffle, stuffed with long tail keywords and designed to provide enough bland text to rise up the rankings. The actual information value of these 'results' is usually close to zero. I went onto a top search…

Yep. Even wikipedia now often shows up towards the bottom of first page despite being more informative.

But I get it, most people dont want wikipedia because they really do seek the 10 second waffle answer.

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#168

Any other GCP customers feeling nervous? Is GCP stand-alone profitable now, or if Google takes an e.g. 50% hit in advertising revenue are we going to see services being killed off?

You've got it the wrong way around, no? If ads revenue takes a hit, non-ads businesses like Cloud become more important, not less.

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#169
For all the folks saying "Google is getting disrupted", I'm glad to see what's going on but I wouldn't hold my breath. Most importantly, by all accounts Google does have better (or at least as-good-as) tech internally that can match ChatGPT. They have been slow to release because of reputational risk, and having to deal with internal (and external) pressure about amplified bias.

I think the best analogy here is when Microsoft fought tooth and nail to win the original browser wars with IE, then sat on their laurels and did nothing for years, then Chrome finally came along and ate their lunch. Definitely remains to be seen whether other companies will end up eating Google's search lunch, but I do think if Google can get their shit together organizationally that they'll still be able to compete.

Re: Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

#170
post #13

ChatGPT as a search engine sounds amazing but also really quite problematic. It's an extension of the issue with Google's "instant answers" (or whatever they're called): right now the creators of the content Google/ChatGPT scrapes are usually paid via the advertisements on their pages. When no-one clicks though any more, no-one gets paid. I know, I know, the ad banner-funded web is a mess and I wouldn't mourn its dem…

Perplexity https://www.perplexity.ai/ does it well in my opinion. It builds a paragraph answering your query but it has a lot of footnotes that link directly to websites. Ex: "geopolitical reason for palm oil being banned and why it's bad for health" The EU has banned palm oil in biofuels due to its negative impacts on health[1] and its geopolitical implications, such as favoring alternative crops grown in Europe[2].…

> Perplexity does it well in my opinion.

Nope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685862

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