491–500 of 748 posts
Comparing the screens to Brave Search, I'm surprised how good Brave Search is. Not only are the results much better, but the UI is super-clean! There's only digestible information and no bloat.
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The frenemy status of Google-Samsung is once again on display. Samsung probably hasn't been happy with the Google's continued Pixel phone push :p But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices? It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likel…
Apple may not consider any other default search engine only in the absence of a search engine other than google offering a pot of money to be the default search engine.
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> How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? It’s like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream early on that was so massive it covered up all their other sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best. Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are scrambling. To put it politely.
Continuing with the oil analogy, I wonder if they'd have done better if they did something similar to what Norway did with their oil wealth (i.e. only spend a small percentage on the interest earned from oil). Perhaps they could've spent less on all of their moonshots and focussed solely on AI. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.
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How do you manage the hallucination problems, or do you not seem to be having them? I’m blown away by the competence of the language model but its willingness to make up facts makes me leary.
Hallucination problem is easily solved by using it as a code/config template or starter, and actually vetting its output. It's still a huge time-saver, even with the vetting time involved. Cold War strategy. Trust but Verify.
Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I kept reading news about Google's AI programs, how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI? Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google com…
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> Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle m…
This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing. Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven. Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.
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> Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed. If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.
>If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. Every day I enter a few difficult queries on both Google and Bing to see if Bing gives me something better. I'm still laughing that people think Bing is a serious threat.
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> ...how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI? Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about displaying ads.
If Google's CEO were really visionary he'd invest 10 billion and half his engineers to support Claude and that AI company's trajectory, because deepmind seems a bit lackluster lately, or maybe they just have their own research agendas that aren't in line with industry demands or something.
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Hmm... >40% of Samsung's net revenue is mobile devices. Only ~56% of Google's revenue is from Search ads - 40% of Samsung's NET REVENUE comes from selling Android devices. It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around. At the end of the day - the majority of people you default to Bing search are going to switch back to Google. Samsung will be lucky to get a meaningful amount of…
> It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around. in a pinch, Samsung could just fork the AOSP project and continue forward without Google, it would be trivial for app makers to re-publish their apps in a Samsung app store (and many already do)
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Actually if you have been really looking at Google's management, just the opposite has happened. Eric Schmidt, who is an exceptionally rare talent understanding engineering, business and politics at the same time was changed to a person who just want to show more ads (the product that makes money) with 0 engineering background.
I think you're both right. Change comes from above and reflects from below. "We hire the best" has become "we hire the best at passing a generic set of tests" because they want hiring to be a thoughtless, automated process.
The best are / were there before they quit to create companies, like OpenAI because it was easier than changing management.
Also I bet Sam Altman would be able to reverse a binary tree (it's a trivial recursion) even if he was never at Google: it's just part of being a professional programmer.