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

> whether Bing is going to eat Google's lunch in search,

There are a few types of search queries that people seem to do, factual lookups ("who is the exec of abc?"), but also generally treat the search engine as the entryway to the internet ("I need a teaching plan about Ukraine"). We'll see that LLM fall flat for facts (assuming people care), but they can supplant some of the general traffic. Realistically, its a bad fact search replacement, but it could be a great tool to put next to a search bar, making a better "starting place for accessing the internet".

With the teaching plan example, the original user was probably going to make a query for a template (or 5), then copy+paste, then do 10-100 queries learning all about Ukraine history and culture, then rewrite that into the template, editing down to manageable size, then send to peers to edit and review, then format for distribution. That could be dozens of Google searches. Now, one or two AI queries, and they have a template, basic written text, and can focus on a couple queries for fact checking. Oh, and since they used bing to do the AI part, they may just stick with bing for the fact check part. Google was irrelevant in that whole flow instead of getting dozens of queries over a day before, but if that feature was moved to Office365, then they may never have used bing for search while still killing a chunk of google's traffic.

The danger to google is not equal to the opportunity to bing. If 5-10% of traffic never reaches a google search, that's a huge chunk of google's revenue, even if it doesn't translate to searches on a different engine. Think of the potential impact an AI code generator could have on StackOverflow. When I need to pick up a new language, I often query "how to append to an array in python" in a search engine, but a LLM (or large-code-model) built into my IDE could supplant that query entirely. I

ChatGPT does produce useful content right now. Maybe not necessarily information, but definitely boilerplate text and code. Also, a child can interact with it, no problem.

It might not be a social interaction, but it's really not hard to imagine that it has a lot of potential.

> When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms.

It's not just blind optimism for the future of AI. We need search to be better because it's a cesspool of SEO spam/content farms and AI generated garbage. Search engines have declined in effectiveness and utility. We've lost even basic functionality like the consistent ability say "-whatever" to filter out garbage. Google, even DDG, have really dropped the ball here.

We're left looking for a savior and suddenly AI comes in and promises to be able to tell us whatever we need to know, it hints at a near future where AI is trained to see the spam and bring actual content to the top of search results again. We're so over dealing with the mess Google has made of their once awesome search engine that for a brief moment the entire internet was excited about fucking Bing!

I have to admit, I'm disappointed that it doesn't appear that Sydney will be the hero we need, but these are still early days and I hope all the attention leads to advancement in our understanding of AI and that fear of competition gets these companies to put a little more effort into improving the search engines they have now.

How is that possible? Google has the research power, the TPUs, the data, everything. But Translate is not as good as a tool made by a much smaller company.

This is also a pattern. Their voices are not better than some paid services (NaturalReader for example). Their OCR and document understanding is inferior to Amazon Textract. Even in speech recognition there is the excellent Whisper from OpenAI doing just as good or better. Google's generative image models are not the best, and locked away for good measure. I think SD and MJ rule.

Google's AI was cool in 2000 for search and in 2016 for games. But now the best people are leaving them - almost the whole team who invented transformers has their own startups.

I also think maybe, just maybe, their TPUs are bad and they can't scale high quality models to the public. Maybe they lost the race because GPUs were better in the end. Maybe it's stupid, but how can we explain the lack of advanced AI? The other explanation is they won't mess with something that makes them so much money (current search/ad model).

I consider Grant the ultimate when the rubber hits the road guy. In his interbellum years he was kind of an aimless loser but when the stakes could not be higher, he stepped up and lead the union to victory.