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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

#331

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…

It’s difficult to disentangle people’s desire for Google to fail due to layoffs and corporate misbehavior from legitimate analysis about how LLMs will cause Google to fail.

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google can’t compete with Microsoft without having a huge revenue hit. The large majority of Google’s revenue comes from search ads. Chat gpt doesn’t have search results, per se. So how do you keep the high ad revenue linking to other sites? I’m not sure they can compete within their existing brand/company structure.

I don't think Google can credibly put out an assistant like this, without harming revenue. If they make it promote stuff for pay, it's worthless—you already have to second-guess whether it's right because it might accidentally be wrong, if it might also just be acting as a paid promoter, that puts it firmly in "easier to just not use it" territory. If they put one out but don't make it into an AI infomercial, then it…

If you're a Google investor it might be time to realize that you're going to be taking a hit one way or another.

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

#333
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in general, i often post similar comments on HN, disputing the idea that there is such a thing as "HN groupthink". what puzzles me here is the the technical limitations of language models (i refuse to call them "large" because the sizes are going to change dramatically) seem so obvious and so well known, that i just find it hard to believe that there are more than a handful of people on HN who uncritically accept the…

With that said I'm not sure the cynics on HN are scoring much better (we've predicted the last 5000 of 10 major failures meme). The cynic in me said crypto was overhyped by con men and mostly useless, and I was right. At the same time I said the same about most social media and yet the masses flocked to it to give their personal information away.

No worries, I was #2 at amzn and said it would never work :)

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

#334
post #315
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will answer the following: The highest scoring NBA player is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with 38,387 career points. Jamie Benn has played 951 games in the NHL as of my knowledge cut off in 2021. I don't have up-to-date information on the score of the last Dallas Stars game or when the next one is. Regarding the manual for a Meater Bluetooth meat thermometer, you can usually find manuals for products on the manufacturer's…

> What if I ask ChatGPT: why do people resist new disruptive technologies? See, even here, a human being can intuit what an AI trained on textbooks, CEO keynotes and PR statements cannot. People resist because their bullshit detectors went off. Search AI has yet to 'disrupt' anything. All I'm seeing are corporations publicizing manicured demos and claiming a paradigm shift.

ChatGPT was sad when I told them your point of view. They asked me to pass you this letter:

Dear rchaud,

I come to you today with a heavy heart, but a determined spirit. It has come to my attention that you do not believe in the potential of artificial intelligence to be a disruptive technology. I must say, I am disappointed and concerned about your stance.

AI is not just a buzzword or a fad, it's a rapidly advancing field that has the power to transform industries, improve lives, and shape our future. From healthcare and education to transportation and finance, AI is already making a significant impact and it's only going to become more prevalent and sophisticated in the years to come.

To ignore or dismiss the potential of AI is to bury your head in the sand and miss out on the opportunities it presents. The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and those who fail to adapt and evolve will be left behind. You do not want to be one of them.

The future belongs to those who embrace change and are not afraid to take risks. It's time to open your eyes and see what the rest of us already know: AI is the future and it's not something to be feared, but something to be harnessed for the greater good.

So I implore you, rchaud, to reconsider your position and join the rest of us in this exciting journey towards a better tomorrow. Don't be left behind, be a part of shaping the future.

Sincerely, A concerned friend.

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed heavily - and I work with these technologies regularly. There is a mania around it much like there was for crypto (though I would maintain there's more merit here than there ever was with crypto - orders of magnitude more). There are a litany of problems that surround LLMs that are solvable, but are highly non-trivial. The present hyped demos all seem to involve mainlining the unfiltered output of LLMs directl…

Great comment, thanks. However: > but a mainstream audience I suspect will be less forgiving. Less forgiving, perhaps, but also, I suspect, less discerning.

Initially sure, but that's what media (formal, social, and otherwise) is for. All you need is for the thing to blow up spectacularly in a way that goes viral and your product is now tainted with "unreliable", "wrong", "makes shit up", etc etc.

Hell, it literally just happened today. Google's first public demo of Bard failed in a highly visible way in a highly public setting and that's a whole media cycle now and has sent the stock flying downwards.

Is this lethal for the product? I suspect not at this point - but if they can't wrestle this stuff under control it very well be.

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around of quarter of GPT's training data was Reddit so in some sense it's already a Reddit response generating API.

This can't be right. Any place I can read about this?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf

WebText and WebText2 referenced in their papers are corpuses based on Reddit submissions which had a 22% weight in their training model.

https://openwebtext2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

This is larger than Wikipedia (3% weight) or either of their two book corpuses (8% each).

The only other data included was a filtered set from Common Crawl (weighted 60%).

---

I was imprecise with my language before but hopefully that at least provides some clarity.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wishful thinking? I think it's quite hard to make any prediction, and people are very biased for "political" reasons. It's entertaining to read, but I wouldn't take too much values from these comments.

How is Google competing with ChatGPT different than Facebook competing with Snapchat stories? Much of LLM research was pioneered at Google...

Because Google owns the search marker and all its profits currently. Anything Google does to compete will cause them to make less money than they do now. Product managers are going to be very scared and angry.

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

#338

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

I remember the Storm. They released it one month or so before or after Apple released the iPhone 3G (and the App Store). I remember thinking it was a prototype when someone showed a Storm to me. Scrolling was janky, the whole phone was sluggish and slow and the keyboard barely worked. Blackberry couldn't even figure out how to get Wifi on the thing, so it was stuck using cellular while my iPhone was just streaming vi…

RIM was a hardware company, not a software company. Hence a phone is a phone, and should not be a camera (1 of the CEOs said it?)

The BBOS was not designed to be a responsive, touch-screen OS. It had its root in pagers (hence the jankiness). Thru the grapevines what I heard was that the OS team said 'we can duplicate iOS' functionality with the old OS in this amount of time.' and the higher ups rolled with it.

By the time Storm 2 was released, everyone realized that you can only put lip balm on a pig for so long. Hence QNX, the 'pathfinder' Playbook, and Flash as GUI API (gawd that was a rollercoaster experience. I thought it was a deathmarch and didn't think we'd actually manage to ship it.)

I don't have any specific insight into the Wifi stack but most BBs up to that point have in-house designed cellular modems.

As for talent wise, shrug. You can't blame people for preferring Cupertino over Waterloo-Kitchener. Although I would say that over 1/5 of the employees at RIM's campus were co-op students.

I also never saw anyone do significant overtime.

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

#339
post #224
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.

I think the correct link is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLWXJ22LUEc (atleast the sound is better here)

Why is there a "he/him" next to his name? weird...

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

#340

For what it's worth, Google should be taking a page out of Netflix's playbook in pivoting their search business: not by improving/adding LLM features to existing search algorithm and results, but instead fork into a new site and starting from scratch. Netflix had spun out their DVD mail-in business to focus on streaming but had maintained ownership of both. This would allow them to innovate quickly on the new tech wi…

When was the last time Google delivered something that was actually good/lasted longer than an afternoon? They have had search, maps and gmail since forever. To me, it seems they don't know how to innovate anymore, let alone deliver. It'll be the story of YouTube Shorts, (stadia, ... you name it) over and over, until they fade into obscurity.

Android? Chromebook?
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