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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

#371
I wonder if this is going to end up like Waymo vs tesla. Remember when people were criticizing waymo for going too slowly (tesla expects to put level 9000 self driving in millions of cars by the end of !!)? But it turned out that doing it in a way that the market requires was slower than commentators expected, and waymo seems to still have a great shot at being the leader.

Or maybe it ends up like uber vs lyft. The cost of using LLMs is so high, maybe we see products with unsustainable economics in the quest for dominance, followed by something shittier.

Personally, I'm in the camp that google is in a great position specifically because of their TPUs. They already have the infra to do this at crazy scale including the hardware. I'm betting it's a marathon, not a sprint, before we see an economically sustainable LLM based interact-with-all-of-human-knowledge tool like we're expecting. ChatGPT has spoiled our expectations by being free.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It would mean that Google takes it seriously but also has the tech on a shelf in a usable form" Even if unusable, they have the network effects and brand... just get something out there to play with that will make some sort of impression, however flawed, that can quickly be iterated on. It can be ancillary to the current experience. Bing suffers from being so historically unpopular that from a branding perspective i…

Why should Google risk their brand reputation in this way? The majority of their users probably have never heard of ChatGPT. They just know Google as the thing that gives them factual information. Google have something to lose by directing their enormous user base to a buggy ChatGPT clone. Bing isn't unpopular, it's just a non-entity. They don't have any brand value to harm. > that can quickly be iterated on. It's pr…

As I said, ancillary. Do it in a way that doesn't impede the current search experience AFA getting the results they need, but gives something extra that is notable, even if flawed.

They need to do this because they will implode from innovators dilemma otherwise.

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

#373

I wonder if this is going to end up like Waymo vs tesla. Remember when people were criticizing waymo for going too slowly (tesla expects to put level 9000 self driving in millions of cars by the end of !!)? But it turned out that doing it in a way that the market requires was slower than commentators expected, and waymo seems to still have a great shot at being the leader. Or maybe it ends up like uber vs lyft. The c…

> The cost of using LLMs is so high

Thats true, but they could just use MLLs instead. Much cheaper.

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

#374

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…

>People hating on Sundar completely overlooking the fact that he pivoted Google to an AI first company 6 years ago

Wrong.

Like all good McKinsey trained goons, Sundar has been trained to jump on existing established trends.

He did realize the size of the AI swell when it was already very big and hopped on the gravy train.

The deep net powered AI revolution started way before Sundar ever realized it was important.

And all of this is nice, but none of the dollars poured into AI R&D at Google have been converted to a world changing product.

Sure, you can now get Google to recognize your pet in your photos.

But given all the shite they invented since 2010-ish in the AI domain, you'd think they'd have found a way to make something useful with it.

I can think of maybe three places where AI really shines in Google products: translate, photos and spam filtering. That's it. Given the billions poured in the AI R&D black hole, that's really nothing to be proud of as a CEO.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes. There's still a calculator widget for the MacOS notification center. It's accessed in any app through a trackpad gesture or by clicking on the date/time in the menu bar.

For now. This is what, the third iteration of widgets on Mac? The fact that it seems to be similar enough to the iOS implementation of them gives me hope, but only barely. You also need to know the feature exists (they had notifications before widgets, people might not know it was updated to support them), that there exists a calculator widget, and to add it before you need to use it. That's the same discoverabiloty…

> For now.

For most of the past decade. I believe widgets were added to Notification center in 2014.

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

#376

Seeing a lot of criticism towards Sundar lately, and it's not without merit. There is blood in the water now and I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited. He is good as a caretaker who didn't rock the boat, but Google needs bold innovation and competence if it intends on staying relevant in the years to come.

> I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited.

Good riddance.

> who didn't rock the boat

He was chosen for his exceptional ability to not rock the boat. Unfortunately, that's about the only skill he's displayed so far (oh yeah, and being "thoughtful" about stuff).

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

#377
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

The coming years of LLM/GPT hype and vaporware will be a good relief from the past years of blockchain hype and vaporware.

Seems like it’ll be more interesting anyway.

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

#378
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It all sounds good as a consumer but there are a few questions which are by no means clear to me: * How does getting recommendations from a chatbot (what TV to buy) play with websites that produce such content (TV reviews) * How does it play with websites that rely on ad impression * How can you monetize a chatbot? (there's an easy way: free tier + monthly subscription) * How to reduce the massive compute cost of a g…

Apparently Google is capable of doing cool things. DeepMind’s speculative sampling achieves 2–2.5x decoding speedups in LLM. That brings cost down significantly, without degradation in quality.

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

#379

When Sundar doesn't react fast enough: Google's gone. They no longer have the ship-fast mentality of an upstart. Perfect is the enemy of the good. The ethics lords have taken over Google Brain. Google needs a war-time CEO. When Sundar reacts fast enough: Google's gone. The product was rushed. It is no where close to perfect. Could it be Google's been bluffing about its AI. What a knee-jerk reaction. Google needs a wa…

> Google needs a war-time CEO Do you know that "war-time" is a banned phrase in Google, because it is just so f*@$ offensive? In the end, words are weapons used by Nazis. We need 1000 Gebru to do things ethically in Google /s

Gebru and her ilk, single-handedly destroyed at least $500B of Marketcap for Google. So, organizations that are going all-in on woke, think again

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

#380

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!

Watson was always vaporware, with a marketing message designed to seduce know-nothing middle-managers in large corporations.

There never was any tech. backing it up.

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