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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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing weird about it. It's called first mover's advantage. Wanna make electric cars, you have to beat Tesla. No matter how nice your car is. If your range is worse. Booo. If your self driving is equivalent or worse, Boo. Whatever Tesla has done, you must be better at. You need better design, cheaper price, better range, better reliability else no one would notice you.

The problem with this analysis is that first movers usually don't win.

It depends on the definition what "first" means.

For example Amazon Kindle was not the first eReader. But its platform-ecosystem was years sooner than Barnes & Nobles Nook and Kindle won out.

Amazon itself is technically a "second mover" because there was an obscure online book shop before, but no one else from the established sales companies or Walmart could compete with them.

Tesla was not the first electric car. But it is arguably the first reaching a production of a million, so it is the first e-car from a "main" manufacturer?

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

#122
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because Google immediately cut access to those people and treated them like personas non grata. It was a pretty bad layoff.

Immediately turning off access is common practice in a layoff

Not the way Google did it.

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

#123
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has brought no innovation and his fearfulness has ground Google down to a halt. What new successful products has arrived during his tenure? All he did was not fuck up. He's lucky because the entire market has increased, but that's his doing. He could be replaced by any overly cautious algorithm and the results would have been the same.

Sounds more like Tim Cook

Going to have to disagree with you on this. AirPods and the Apple Watch both came out under his watch. But the biggest area of expansion for Apple is going to be in software which has seen a ton of innovation in the past decade (Cloud services, payments and a whole slew of improvements to the OS) which all happened under Cook's watch.

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

#124
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I’ve already used GPT to write thank you note and create a blog post, and I’ve used midjourney to create stock photos. Neither of those are searching for information , though, which is a very different use case. If 95% of the time GPT writes a great thank you note, that's very useful. If 95% of the time Midjourney gives me a good stock image, that's great! If 95% of the time GPT gives me a correct search result…

If you think that more than 95% of the google search results give you an accurate answer, then I’ve got a search result about bridges to sell you… Edit: and to add more so this response isn’t purely trash talking: plenty of us have already switched over to using ChatGPT/bing for our standard question answerer. It is far more efficient than getting back pages of search results and having to parse through garbage site…

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

#125

If I were IBM management, I'd be getting a laugh out of all of this. When IBM had to scale back their ambitions for Watson, especially those related to automating medical diagnoses, they were roundly mocked. Do not ask, dear tech companies, for whom the bell of AI overpromising tolls - it tolls for thee!

I agree in principle, but Watson was a lot of different things, mostly unrelated to any “modern” AI tech.

Edit: the Watson that played Jeopardy was smart (for that time) natural language processing, that backed on to a large fact store, generated from natural language processing of a relatively small set of sources like Wikipedia.

The Watson that was sold to companies was essentially a consulting service. I'm sure they had some re-usable components, but it's possible those components weren't much more than data pipelines, model training, etc. Most of the smarts were people doing a ton of data science specific to each problem. Worthwhile, but only good compared to companies who don't have a data science function.

Conversely, "modern" AI is things like LLMs, which have their own problems of course, but are a huge paradigm shift compared to Watson.

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

#126
post #39
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

There seems to be an inordinate amount of venom directed at Pichai relative to other CEOs

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 a wasteland of SEO. This may be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, prompting discussion about whether a leadership change is needed.

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

#127

People hating on Sundar completely overlooking the fact that he pivoted Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI was hyped up. https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-google-shifts-from-mobi... He funded the Brain team that came up with major research breakthroughs like Transformers that power ChatGPT. AI is embedded behind the scenes in pretty much every Google product, you just don't know it because it…

> Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI was hyped up AI hype train started back in 2015.

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

#128
post #24
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the narrative seems to be Microsoft has somehow cracked the puzzle and will leave Google behind which is not the case currently.

Google search has gotten so degraded in the past few years that people want something to beat them.

Hmmm. Yeah, now I'm starting to believe it too - I hope it does beat them.

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

#129
post #51

It's gonna be Chatbots / NFTs all over again.

Eh, this feels different. There are some immediate utilities delivered from ChatGPT and Midjourney that feel like magic. Will they get over hyped? Sure. But is there a real kernel of something different there? I think so. Chatbots were just a worse way to fill out a form. NFTs we’re…where to even begin. But I’ve already used GPT to write thank you note and create a blog post, and I’ve used midjourney to create stock…

It certainly feels different, for me the biggest blocker to adapt it more is trust. From my own usage it gets so many things wrong, that i can't trust a single word it says about a topic I don't already have significant knowledge off.

Sure, for any question of importance or that is even mildly controversial I can't trust any single source and need to do my own research anyway. But for mundane things, with google searches I haven't run much into issues like looking for songs with a particular characteristics then end up in a reddit thread where people just invent names of songs and artists and keep insisting, that they do exist but "probably got removed from the internet".

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing weird about it. It's called first mover's advantage. Wanna make electric cars, you have to beat Tesla. No matter how nice your car is. If your range is worse. Booo. If your self driving is equivalent or worse, Boo. Whatever Tesla has done, you must be better at. You need better design, cheaper price, better range, better reliability else no one would notice you.

The problem with this analysis is that first movers usually don't win.

Old enough to remember when Google was the plucky newcomer in a crowded search engine industry.
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