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Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

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Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#211

(Disclaimer: Google employee, I don’t work on Bard, views my own, etc.) I don’t think either Bing Chat or Bard is ready to be released widely. You need a certain mindset to be able to wring value out of them, and most normal users will not think this way. That being said, it’s probably fine to release these tools to enthusiastic early adopters who understand how to use them.

> I don’t think either Bing Chat or Bard is ready to be released widely.

And yet it will be, because everyone is wowed so we need something out to capture those wowbucks. There are meetings all over the place to figure out "how to best leverage that technology in our product". While there is some value to raise GPT3 as a technology available in your toolbox, these are largely "let's find a problem that this can fix" meetings, and you can bet your sweet ass we'll see GPT in all sorts of stupid maladapted use cases very soon.

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#212
post #9

Here's the weird thing though, as discussed yesterday [1], the Microsoft demo was totally broken as well. In the end, everyone is looking for a big platform shift (next MOBILE!!!) and hype getting ahead of reality. When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms. https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted

Nope. I am somewhat in disbelief about the level people here downgrade the recent Bing upgrade. The chatbot feature is a such a time saver for jobs where you need to write tons of abstract surface-level content. Just yesterday, I tried compiling a monthly teachers working plan for some local school in Ukrainian language. What it spawned in a minute was at least a day of typing work for a human. This is especially use…

"abstract surface-level content"

aka "bullshit"

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears that Google's long-standing dominance in search has not translated into meaningful innovation in recent years. Despite occasional hardware launches that imitate Apple and multiple failed attempts to launch a messaging platform, there has been a conspicuous lack of successful projects. Furthermore, Google's ongoing incorporation of ads into Google Maps and declining search quality may be turning search into…

>> It appears that Google's long-standing dominance in search has not translated into meaningful innovation in recent years. Google IMHO is still innovating, but still hasn't figured out how to turn that into product/profit. Since their P/E is under 20 they could just issue a dividend of 4 to 5 percent and people would immediately stop expecting growth from them.

Innovation without also seeking to mesh it into a product/market fit is just burning cash. You can innovate, but also need to land it.

Also, they might just be creating a reputation for themselves of killing every new interesting thing that people just aren't as interested in trying their new things. That's a self-own.

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#214
ChatGPT is neither an earthquake nor a tectonic plate faultline. Along with ever improving algos in nearby domains (images, speech etc) it is a signal, of sorts, of the slowly accumulating energy that will, eventually, unleash the next phase of information technology.

It is not an accident, imho, that it is Microsoft that somehow emerges as Google's "nemesis". After all it was MS' business model that Google disrupted with mass market "freebies" such as gmail, docs etc. While "disrupting search" might be the immediate skirmish, the bigger battle is about broadly defined "AI augmented information management": who will offer it to the masses, under which business model etc.

My feeling (nowhere near a complete analysis) is that Google will lose this war even if, as it is widely assumed, it has the technical advantage. This is because it has been happily cornered in an extremely lucrative but ultimately dead-end business model. AI augmentation as part of its existing search/adtech model is a marginal and even problematic (loss making) addition, whereas as part a re-invented MS it can blow new life into its old bread-and-butter business that has been commoditized. A wildcard in all this is (as always) Apple, but whatever its eventual approach to AI, it is likely to be just another headwind for Google.

NB: I am a lifelong open source enthusiast, I have no stake or love for any of the above entities. The ideal, least dangerous, most beneficial form of AI augmentation would be as a widely available and open source digital public good.

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search doesn't give you answers, it gives you pages that are popular that may contain the answers. You have to look at those pages, consider the source, and develop your own intuition and heuristics to determine if you trust that information. It's a skill you develop over time. If I Google "What's the capitol of Illinois", I might get the Wikipedia page on Illinois, and I'm going to easily find the answer is "Springf…

> In the chatbot-as-search paradigm, I'm expected to just accept that error. Bing's implementation gives its sources. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxAAJnp5yms&t=2619s

That's helpful, but how confident can I be it interpreted the information in its sources correctly?

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#216
Xoogler here.

I'll ignore the AI and "has Google lost its way?" threads, not that they're not interesting.

Rather, Sundar: he's the inevitable product when you hire a CEO based on his longevity and whether everyone likes him. In the military they distinguish between a "barracks general" and a "combat general." He's the former. He looks good when nothing bad is happening.

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the short term Google has an utterly dominant position in Search, and Bing AI is basically irrelevant to this. What people are worried about are the implications for the long term.

I don't give a fuck about Bing, frankly, but ChatGPT (the actual first mover here) has already replaced a lot of what I used Google for during a work day. I'll be their paying customer soon. It would be great if that meant I had privacy as well, but I kinda bleakly realize that that might be a bit of a pipe dream.

The big improvement in the chatgpt integrated by bing is that it can take today's search results into the chat to analyze seamlessly (after all, Bing already has all the search results cached internally). ChatGPT as it stands has old knowledge only unless you paste in the results you want to analyze.

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see how the next few years play out in the EV space. Tesla suddenly has actual competition that is very good. Arguably better, aside from that nagging little detail -- the charger network. Tesla needs to keep throwing money at the Supercharger network and do whatever they can to keep it exclusive. Anything that puts the competition on an equal playing field for fast charging would be devasta…

It's unlikely Tesla's market share of the total car market is going to go down no matter how well other companies do. What we're seeing is a general shift towards electric cars, which is only a good thing for Tesla.

Yes, in this case when I say 'market share' I mean EV market share.

Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#219
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but the question isn’t whether it is useful but whether it will replace traditional search

Yes it will replace search. The same way that cars replaced horses, and planes replaced zeppelins because they are had a significant speed advantage and allowed humans to spend time doing more productive activities that can't be automated. Then traditional search is going to become "raw index search" that you can query writing something like "intitle:"carbonara" source:"google_index"" or "give me all webpages contain…

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Re: Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but the question isn’t whether it is useful but whether it will replace traditional search

It doesn't need to replace it though. If Bing has good chatgpt which is useful for some non-trivial amount of searches then people will go there instead of google and then also run all their other searches there as well. It just needs to be useful enough to dislodge the google monopoly.

If the search product still isn't good enough, why would a ChatGPT panel make the difference? You can always pull up ChatGPT in another tab.
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