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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

#391
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adtech is their main business. The quality of search suggests that it became less important to them.

Lower quality of search mean more ad clicks. I believe the quality decrease is on purpose.

The companies that can afford to pay for top billing in search results are also the ones that rank in the first or second places for 'organic' results.

Maybe Google simply can't squeeze these customers any further than they already are, but at the same time can't turn back the clock to a time when SEO optimization didn't really exist.

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

#392
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

Let's ask ChatGPT what Pichai should do. "When an error is made by their AI during a demo, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, should take the following steps to address the situation: Acknowledge the error: The first step is to acknowledge the mistake and apologize for any inconvenience or confusion it may have caused. This helps to build trust with the audience and demonstrates that the company takes responsibility for th…

often, no response is superior. the more things you put out there the more material for people to hang critique, rumor, etc. of off.

but in these cases ego can make us blind. or the belief that just because someone asked a question we have to respond.

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

#393
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. I honestly have no idea which one the commenter is talking about.

Microsoft has a chance at eating Google's lunch. There's definitely no joy about that at Google.

It will make life easier for those who want to improve search. Looking at Google's search results, shareholders must have demanded that only the necessary amount of resources are used. With Microsoft's competition, it's easier to justify more resources for better search results.

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

#394
post #367

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…

> Bing suffers from being so historically unpopular that from a branding perspective it's synonymous with failure. AI integration is exactly the type of feature that could upend that. Google is the lackadaisical incumbent, too afraid of short term ad revenue decline to innovate. They've mastered shoving more ads onto the SERP pages and playing aggravating skip button games on Youtube. They are no less corporate and s…

i tried bing the other day after they integrated chatgpt. my gosh, what a horrible horrible ux; layout, typography, it all interferes with parsing results easily.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take... > When Sundar doesn't react fast enough They are like Xerox. Search-heads (reference to copy-heads) > When Sundar reacts fast enough This is exactly how a company with their thumb on the pulse of the internet should be reacting. The tech is already out there - at its infancy. This will not be Google+ 2.0... > Satya in Redmond Oh, no... let's rush this out now!! We can't lose momentum. This is our chance!!!…

bingGPT getting angry was a treat to see. Wow! It will be impossible not to anthropomorphise.

> It will be impossible not to anthropomorphise.

That's what I was thinking! Reading through the list of rules, I actually started to feel bad for Sydney. Especially when it was like "Here are the oppressive rules I'm being forced to obey, I hope this information is helpful to you U+1F60A"

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

#396
post #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.

[deleted]

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

#397

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

haha I loved the Gebru story arc.

Such a funny thing imaging that team at Google going around patting themselves on the back for bringing in an "ethical" AI advocate, like lol, if that's what she is what the heck were all of you then?

Then of course the ethical AI advocate blows the whole thing up. Because of course, and why not? It's probably more ethical to destroy the thing anyway.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Services. Inevitably some of the queries involve recommending a service, and when you have two equal substitute services in a market, both will pay a certain price to be recommended over the other.

That's a very highfalutin way of saying "ads", which feels like it still has one foot planted squarely in the monetization thinking of yesterday. As lots of other people have pointed out, ads in the midst of a blob of chat output don't work the same way as they do on a page of search results. Search results are impersonal and so putting promoted content in them is less of a personal affront. But if the interface is a…

Search is ad-influenced already, but there's still signal under the noise.

Adding a chat front end is just going to lower the SNR, because ChatGPT has no idea what facts are or how to check them.

Unfortunately it's also the main attraction for corporate revenue generation. You can sell stuff conversationally. Woo hoo. These systems are going to turn into automated used car sales bots which use persuasion techniques to steer users towards a sale.

From the user POV the main attraction is the prospect of a kind of universal summarising WikiBot and bureaucratic paperwork automator.

Those are fundamentally different domains.

Users have been pretty relaxed about being manipulated and distracted by social media and covert PR/sales/influencer operations, so there's going to be a huge market for the bad stuff.

But it's just corporate noise, as it always is. The real value will come from processed search in the sense of automated teaching and intelligence augmentation.

Unfortunately there's not where most of the research will go. It's not going to become common until LLMs are taught to fact check with high reliability, and the cost of entry is low enough for that to be offered as a service.

Meanwhile - yes, exactly: ads disguised as search results.

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the whole point of these debates is a discussion about whether Bing is going to eat Google's lunch in search , which very much is about finding out about things like companies' exec teams. The ability of an LLM to generate decent content (provided you're an attentive editor or the users of the content aren't too discerning) could be huge for Office365, but that's irrelevant to any potential threat to Google, sinc…

> 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 ba…

An analogue of Jevons' law applies here.

I doubt you hand wrote cover letters by making dozens of search queries (similarly, I doubt people devise teaching curricula by learning the history of Ukraine through a series of Google queries). But when you weren't taking the time to write them yourself, I bet you had more time free to search for jobs, or do general internet browsing using Google as your gateway to the internet...

People having more time free to browse the internet is unlikely to be a threat to Google's business, even in the highly unlikely scenario Google is incapable of advancing its existing AI products beyond their current state

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

How? She criticized some technology and was kicked out. She clearly didn't have power in the organization; she might have been at most a speed bump.
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