Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 459 posts

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

#231

Post by MisterPea »

mindcrime wrote: post #226
dragontamer wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple came after Blackberry. Dell came after Commodore / Amiga. Facebook came after MySpace. Google came after Altavisa and Yahoo. Verizon came after AOL. Alternating Current came after Direct Current. Microsoft Word came after WordPerfect. Chrome came after Netscape Communicator. Python came after Perl. Nintendo came after Atari. I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.

I feel like first movers advantage is a myth. I don't think there's any question that there is an advantage to being a first mover. What I think is a mistake is thinking that it's an absolute advantage, and/or not recognizing that it's also true that there are advantages to to not being the first mover. I mean, there's a reason why the "fast follower strategy"[1] exists as well. I think in reality though, all of this…

First movers without a fast follower is a huge advantage. There's a great conference talk with Bezos about how he mentioned with disruptive products, there's usually a fast follower entering into the competition - but he was surprised at how long it took other companies to copy AWS.

Similarly with Tesla

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

#232

Post by mynameisvlad »

mejutoco wrote: post #194
mynameisvlad wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think every major OS ships with some sort of calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed to it just being there in the same app you're already using. Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon…

In linux I press the super key (windows key), type "calc" and enter. In Mac Os one can use spotlight with cmd + space with similar results. Or sometimes I check a calculator I implemented myself (shameless plug: https://getcalculator.app/ )

I mean, you can do Win+R and then "calc" on windows too, but that's still context switching and having to remember it's there.

Once again, compared to it just being there in front of you and ready to go that's still work to do to get it there.

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

#233

Post by fdgsdfogijq »

cloudking wrote: post #99

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…

Ai first?

They completely missed the mark on LLMs as a critical component of search. They are AI last. This company had to be dragged into innovating on their core business using their supposed core competency.

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

#234

Post by vel0city »

dsissitka wrote: post #190
nsxwolf wrote: post #143

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

And I saw an example where it gave citations stating the Eagles won the Superbowl.

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

#235

Post by mynameisvlad »

Thlom wrote: post #199
mynameisvlad wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think every major OS ships with some sort of calculator. The problem is discoverability. If you're in the middle of browsing, it's quite a bit of effort to say "oh that's right I have a calculator on here let me just find it in the start menu/Applications folder" as opposed to it just being there in the same app you're already using. Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon…

On my mac I just use the built in calculator in spotlight. So cmd+space opens the spotlight search widget and then I can just type in whatever I need calculated. Not sure if something like this is built into Windows? More often than not I use Google as my calculator when on Windows.

I use Raycast for the same, but does that do multiple calculations? Ie. 184 + 64 then multiplied by 4, etc.

You can do it all as one big expression with parentheses and such but if you're doing a bunch of calculations on the go that could get repetitive, and one wrong Esc and your calculation goes away.

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

#236

Post by MisterPea »

AlbertCory wrote: post #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.

See also Buggins' Turn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggins%27_turn

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

#237

Post by chimeracoder »

xorcist wrote: post #209
nsxwolf wrote: post #143

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…

> If I Google "What's the capitol of Illinois", I might get the Wikipedia page on Illinois Ten years ago, maybe. If you did it during the last decade, your search was probably served by a natural language parser which would serve up the answer from a facts database before searching the web. Just checked, and for me it says "Illinois / Capital: Springfield" with big bold betters, and below that are suggestions for pic…

> Ten years ago, maybe. If you did it during the last decade, your search was probably served by a natural language parser which would serve up the answer from a facts database before searching the web. Just checked, and for me it says "Illinois / Capital: Springfield" with big bold betters, and below that are suggestions for picture searches for Illinois, and even further below that is the web search results of which Wikipedia is indeed the first.

Yes, and for anything that's more complicated than literally a lookup in a very common table ("list of US state capitals"), it's very common for Google to return Instant Answers that are either nonsensical or literally incorrect.

I've had Google tell me that ninjas are Portuguese, that the park is closed today because of rain (it is sunny and the "rain" refers to a day over three years ago), and other stuff which sounds correct, and is presented as correct information, but objectively is not.

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

#238

Post by xorcist »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #82
mynameisvlad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they certainly are in the "AI integrated search" field, considering.... You know.... This entire post and discussion happening.

Google isn't going to suffer severe business consequences for (temporarily) losing dominance in the "AI integrated search" field, because the revenue from that field is effectively NaN compared to Google's current revenue. They might hypothetically suffer if AI integrated search grows to become a major fraction of the existing Search revenue and Google fails to deploy their massive existing ML/AI resources to match B…

On the topic of big companies making strategic errors, it's not entirely unthinkable that if AI generates a lot of hype, Google would throw away its market-dominating search engine and replace it with some AI chatbot-thing without market dominance.

It could very well be that even a small chance of this happening can cause Microsoft to go all in on making Bing more AI. Being very expensive is the point.

See also: Star Wars, Itanium.

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

#239

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #230
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"abstract surface-level content" aka "bullshit"

Bullshit to you but full time work for plenty...

Well, they think they will be paid 10 times more now that they can produce bullshit 10x faster ... in reality, they will be fired.

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

#240

Post by p4coder »

rootusrootus wrote: post #133
mynameisvlad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, sure. In the short to medium term, though, they solidly dominate the field. We're still in that phase phase of both Tesla and Bing AI.

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…

I think the charging network is going to prove to be the iMessage of Tesla. By keeping it closed, they will be selling many more cars. In Europe where they had to use the standard port and open the network, there will be much stiffer competition.
Post reply on HN