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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

#411
post #400

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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.

She and her ilk sucked the energy, momentum of Google AI.

If Jeff Dean's brain cells are precious, where do you think his time is best spent?

a) Dealing with Activists and Woke Politics

or

b) Delivering sustainable AI

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

#412
post #258

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> They basically built out the features and waited until their competitors made some strategic mistake, Microsoft Word was a loser, but then they changed out the operating system under the winners.

Yes, but the winner also refused to get with the times and embrace the operating system twice. First, they were abysmally slow to Windows 3.1, despite having years to get something together (in part b/c they understood that Microsoft wanted to win at word processing but they underestimated the importance of being on the OS anyway) and then a few years later with Windows 95. Word Perfect had the OS changed from under…

That's too bad.

It was pretty easy to write off Windows 3.1, and continue to be a solid solution on MS-DOS and with Netware, etc.

But Windows 95 had a lot of fanfare in advance that suggested it would have much better uptake. And Windows NT in parallel was developing a credible foundation, and it got the "new shell" as an option around the time of Win95. My recollection at the time was that the writing should've been on the wall, that Windows was going to be the Microsoft platform.

If WordPerfect was slow to move, that's a bad combination with, er, not as direct of access to the platform teams.

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

#413

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At this point, I'm curious which you think is which.

gregw134 nailed it

It's interesting that a company that's at the top of the game is seen as less desirable than one that's a challenger. Objectively, a laughable challenger.

I understand it: we humans feel more excited by potential.

I suspect the feeling will fade in a few months, when things will have settled down.

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

#414

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"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…

But if Google releases something that's bad or drags down the search experience then they have a lot to lose. If Bing releases something that's bad, then nothing is lost.

Bing didn’t even release it in the main flow. It is a separate tab within bing like images or maps. So Google could have done a similar thing

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

#415
post #350
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

An important difference, to me, is that a lot of people already have familiarity with ChatGPT; either directly or through friends, family or just news. Most of those folks (judging by my own friends) had very low expectations which ChatGPT blew out of the water. When they read "Microsoft search with ChatGPT" they are looking for integration of at least somewhat known quantity into a not so great (perception-wise) sea…

> instead of coming up with a friendly "hey, play with our toy first" approach.

They have this. But it's internal. But with 200,000 employees, that's a plenty big enough pool of testers.

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

#416

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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.

High Sierra widgets are the second implementation I mentioned.

Dashboard was first, and then they were reimagined as iOS-style in Monterey.

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

#417

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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…

>Either people will pay a subscription fee to unlock the utility of an information-distilling agent, or they won't.

This feels a bit like projection though. People in general are trained to tolerate ads for most freemium services, such as social media, search, etc., and chat is no different.

For any market involving human attention, there's a portion willing to pay money for the service, but a significant larger portion willing to trade attention time (e.g. ad impressions) for a free service instead.

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

#418
post #300

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Whew boy you hit the nail on the head. Google just seems to be aimless at this point, and now with the layoffs (despite their immense profitability) they're going to have a much tougher time hiring and retaining top talent.

Where is the top talent going to go? Seems like a vast majority of FAANG* ended up laying folks off.

I would make the argument that top talent wasn’t the contingent that was laid off.

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

#419
post #159
post #90

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Let's not forget "Gong Show".

Is this one a West Coast Canadian term of a certain era? It was popular in Vancouver in the oughts but I've been met with blank stares elsewhere on the continent, especially East Coast younger millennials.

It was originally broadcast in the USA in the 70s, and my coworker from the Maritimes watched the show when she was younger. Also my older coworkers have gotten the reference, so perhaps it's a generational thing. It should be brought back, it's a pretty funny term.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing a lot of people misremembers is just how long it took. Microsoft Word was launched only couple of years after WordPerfect, in the early 80s. It didn't dominate word processing until the middle of the 90s. It took more than a decade. They basically built out the features and waited until their competitors made some strategic mistake, of which they made several in that decade. It was pretty much the same with…

Perl killed itself with the Perl5 transition to Perl6. I lived the 3->4 and the 4->5 transitions. When I wanted to try my hand at OOP, I ran screaming from Perl5 to Scheme and eventually Python. 20 years later I'm still programming in Python.

Ah yes, but Python nearly killed itself in the Python2 -> Python3 transition.
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