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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

#281

Post by crote »

treeman79 wrote: post #134
guardiangod wrote: post #9

I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. I remember when the iPhone was first announced, BB scrambled to put out press releases saying they have competing products in development. 2 years later the Bold(EDIT: Storm) was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance. >Used to work for BB/RIM

Decades ago intel put out a press about the amazing new tech their CPUs would have. 3 of 5 CPU manufactures gave up. By the time the tech actually arrived, AMD had it as well. The others would have been fine. Sometimes a press release can make all the difference. (Sorry can’t find story that old)

There was NexGen around 1990, which was bought by AMD and ended up providing the base for AMD's further products.

Transmeta released two x86 CPUs a bit after 2000, which ended up being technological failures.

Cyrix released some budget CPUs in the 1990s but had legal issues and ran into financial trouble, eventually ending up as part of VIA.

Centaur Technology developed some CPUs in the 2000s, and eventually became VIA's x86 division. They released efficient low-cost processors, which were reasonably successful on the embedded market. VIA is still around, but doesn't bring out a lot of new products.

I think most of them were killed mostly by the dotcom bubble, and CPUs getting increasingly complex. The market just shifted beneath them. It is rarely a matter of just giving up.

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

#283

Post by sho_hn »

t-writescode wrote: post #279
sho_hn wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to have more discussion about the attribution problem, specifically. We now have a couple of the players saying they're working on, or having demos. But from what I can see, all of these don't _actually_ attribute the source. They're just able to find _a_ source that fits to the output, working backward from it. Often the attributed source fits, but is actually disagreeing with the original output in specifi…

> Is there any indication real attribution is coming? Looking at the main article on HN yesterday around it: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/7/23587454/microsoft-bing-ed... you can see citations in the examples provided.

I've had those Bing images in mind specifically when writing the above, because I seem to recall them phrasing it very carefully as "you can look at these links for more information", not "we retrieved this info here".

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

#284

Post by tarsinge »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #243

You know, whatever the merits (and it sounds as if there were very few) of Google's presentation (or Pinchai's recent non-statement) might be, I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search. If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understan…

That thread is mostly about Google completely messing up their response to what Microsoft announced yesterday.

I don’t see that unanimous acceptance, there are a lot of interesting discussions about the shortcomings. There are many comparisons between Google results for examples, with also potential solutions to problems you cite like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709883

It’s not about replacing search overnight, but if it can take even 10% of search volume that would have serious consequences for Google.

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

#285

Post by sho_hn »

jerf wrote: post #269
sho_hn wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to have more discussion about the attribution problem, specifically. We now have a couple of the players saying they're working on, or having demos. But from what I can see, all of these don't _actually_ attribute the source. They're just able to find _a_ source that fits to the output, working backward from it. Often the attributed source fits, but is actually disagreeing with the original output in specifi…

I was musing on my website about ChatGPT [1] and one of the things I noticed about it is that if you analogize it to your own brain, which has a language model in it too, we are collectively asking ChatGPT to do something we would never ask of our own language model. ChatGPT does not have the "higher level" reasoning that we're asking for, to do logic, attribution, and the other things we want. This is not necessaril…

Yep, this resonates heavily with my own thinking. Thanks!

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

#286

Post by filoleg »

steponlego wrote: post #255
filoleg wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple, who shares more user data with the CCP than most American tech companies Whether intentionally or not, your comment is very misleading due to omitting the fact that it only applies to chinese customers of Apple in China (which the linked article mentions in the very beginning). Apple doesn't share user data of people outside of China with the CCP. Also, this is literally a legal requirement to be able to ope…

We have no idea what Apple and Google share unofficially. Remember the Apple China bribery scandal? No? Of course not, it was barely a blip in the news.

> We have no idea what Apple and Google share unofficially

There is a phrase that describes "we have no evidence of them doing this, but they might be doing it, because there is no proof of them not doing it" pretty succinctly - baseless speculation.

> Remember the Apple China bribery scandal? No? Of course not, it was barely a blip in the news.

Are you referencing a Foxconn employee getting hit with allegations of bribing some of the Foxconn suppliers back in 2013[0]? If yes, then I remember it. However, I don't see how one can in full seriousness refer to it as "Apple bribery scandal", given that Apple wasn't aware of it happening, and none of the people involved were Apple employees.

0. https://qz.com/42409/why-apple-is-probably-in-the-clear-over...

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

#288

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #243

You know, whatever the merits (and it sounds as if there were very few) of Google's presentation (or Pinchai's recent non-statement) might be, I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search. If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understan…

Assuming that Google is in a panic over ChatGPT, as suggested the HN commentariat and the "tech" news media, then arguably this only highlights how little confidence Google has in the quality of its search engine and the trustworthiness of the web as a source for information. For example, instead of trying to match or beat ChatGPT, whatever that would entail, Google could instead focus on illustrating the shortcomings of conversational AI versus a search engine as a reliable and trustworthy means of locating information on the web.

As usual, it appears "tech" companies have an extremely warped view of web users as being non-discerning consumers of whatever garbage "tech" companies feed to them. Perhaps online advertising services companies are not a good choice to serve as arbiters of data/information search and retrieval.

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

#289

Post by minsc_and_boo »

filoleg wrote: post #239
minsc_and_boo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Apple, who shares more user data with the CCP than most American tech companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce... All FAANG are suspect these days

> Apple, who shares more user data with the CCP than most American tech companies Whether intentionally or not, your comment is very misleading due to omitting the fact that it only applies to chinese customers of Apple in China (which the linked article mentions in the very beginning). Apple doesn't share user data of people outside of China with the CCP. Also, this is literally a legal requirement to be able to ope…

Nothing I said is intentionally misleading, it's right there in the source I linked. Apple Chinese users are still Apple users.

Google employees rejected that same requirement to operate in China, showing that Google cares more about user privacy than Apple does. Apple has shown they care more about profits than privacy, which is the point.

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

#290

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sho_hn wrote: post #272
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This also seems intuitively true: If you ask your friend a difficult question, you often don't expect them to be able to answer it on the spot. You probably expect them to have relevant experience and a rough understanding of the topics and the tools to look up or figure out the rest. Similarly, it feels intuitively wrong to expect a LLM to come ready-made with all knowledge baked in. Not sure. In theory, this bein…

I've seen some studies that call what I mean a "chain of thought" approach (also reasonable is just "higher-level reasoning", but maybe we need a term for the engineered implementation), and I like that terminology. I don't know, it's a gut feeling, but a one-shot prompt completion feels intuitively too simple for me - it seems like we need to build up more elaborate "thought processes" next where we use these method…

That's undoubtedly true for "reasoning". I don't think it is true for "search".

When I ask a question that is "demonstrably" answerable based on "reliable" sources (e.g. what is the capital of Mexico), I don't need or expect it to reason. I want it to (a) tell me the most likely answer, probably (b) provide a list a of URLs that also provide an answer, probably the same one.

And that's what Google and others do right now; ignoring the results presentations being skewed by commercial interests, they do it rather well.

Figuring out when a question is not answerable in this way, but requires reasoning, is certainly a part of the challenge.

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