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Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

nytimes.com

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Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#461

Post by summerlight »

AlbertCory wrote: post #212
pm90 wrote: post #118

Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course…

Former Googler here. 20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain. Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a…

Another thing to consider is that it's usually 100%+20%, not 80%/20%. It's because you can do whatever you want to do with 20% time but that's usually not going to help your perf unless you can convince your director/org as well, not just a manager.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#462

Post by pooper »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #454
WalterBright wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most shareholders would be happy if they could average a 14% return.

Yeah I'm saying that what appears to be a 14% return won't be, and/or creates risks. Putting small amounts of capital to work to earn 14% is a distraction for Google. The distraction has the potential to cost 100's of billions.

> The distraction has the potential to cost 100's of billions.

Not doing this has the potential for Google to miss the next technology trend, potentially crashing Google completely.

That being said, I completely agree with you on a different note. "Professional" spectator sports in schools and higher education. In my opinion, it should be completely banned. Every single such initiative distracts from a school's or university's core mission. It does not matter if each dollar they spent on it makes back ninety cents or two dollars. It is still a distraction that everyone has to do because everyone else is doing it.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#463

Post by fbn79 »

In the past many things have been considered a serius threat fo Google monopoly: - Facebook (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on Facebook) - Apple App Store (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on App store) - Reddit platform (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly on Reddit) - Voice Assistant (on day people will do not search on Google, but will ask to a voice assistant and get just one right result) - ChatGPT (on day people will do not search on Google, but directly ask to chatGPT).

Of all this threat chatgpt is probably the least dangerous because there is no way to always get a correct aswer (or the better answer internet can offer).

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#464

Post by pcurve »

65 wrote: post #209
lnsru wrote: post #47

Google is getting worse and worse. Today I searched for exact term “boat skipper b”. Google threw ton of trash at me. Ended looking through Bing results and found what I needed. 2/3 of my Google searches are not usable to me. Some advertisement and shady websites as results.

Most of the time you can do "site:reddit.com" at the beginning of your query and get the information you want.

yep. Google has turned into Reddit search engine for me.

I don't entirely blame Google though.

The web has changed. Site content has changed. Much of the content that I'm looking for actually exists as videos, so Google does its best to return mixture of YT and web sites.

Yet, we can't be bothered to click through them. So we rely on human redditor as aggregators, because we don't want to be one ourselves.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#465

Post by luismmolina »

epolanski wrote: post #184

I think the OpenAI argument is overblown. While I do agree that AI is going to bring a huge shake up to the search market, I still believe that Google is in the best position to fight this battle. Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so. And then they are the company that's best suited t…

There will be more players taking market share from Google. Even if Google ultimately wins, they will have less revenue. ChatGPT represents a new beginning for the industry

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#466

Post by bg24 »

Technology wise, ChatGPT is not a challenge for Google. It was a blessing that OpenAI is charging $42 for premium tier. Google very much can build a similar/better offering in a near term and would not have to worry about losing ad $$, as it will be compensated from a paid product.

The challenge is execution. Most of the leadership have done amazingly great, but only when they had no competition. For FB, Cloud, Gaming, AR, self-driving cars - they could not do much. They did great on Android and Nest - both were founder led for a while.

Right now, OpenAI is adding new features like crazy - they are a startup. Google may have better engineers, but they will lag behind in execution. Plus, changing a 20yr search+ad mindset in a month is hard.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#467

Post by SilverBirch »

eric4smith wrote: post #151

A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding. Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google. It truly saves a lot of time. Google is right to be quite worried. Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before. Why research: “give me 30 of the most common h…

I feel like I've seen this on hacker news before, on other subjects. Someone will gush about how new technology X is great, but they give reasons that seem really odd to me. I've never really found Google laborious for searching for facts or especially coding solutions, and when it does provide me with differing options there are almost always great reasons why those options might all be relevent. With ChatGPT you're going to get one verbose answer that's probably wrong and presents none of the context as to why it might be wrong. So sure, if you're only using ChatGPT to answer questions to which you know the answer, it could be quicker.

>Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds?

Because it's not going to be right! If you actually need to know the answer to that question you need to actually find a reputable source. And that's what Google gives you. I'm quite certain that the most common health conditions for the human liver vary by country, will ChatGPT give you the actual answer you're looking for? Maybe, some of the time. Will it save you time, no! because you can't use the answer unless you google it to confirm.

It sounds like your using ChatGPT to pump out worthless marketing SEO. Yes, that's a niche where creating volume of material with no value is common place. The aim shouldn't be to make that more efficient, it should be to find ways to entirely filter that out of the internet. What you're producing is literally the only material people should be using ChatGPT for instead of the web - low quality verbose text that is indifferent to fact checking.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#468

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

scarface74 wrote: post #160
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume ChatGPT will cost around $1 per query for consumers. That's low enough to put human copywriters out of business, but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks. So eventually this is some sort complex of B2B product, and that is very difficult to execute.

You’re literally off by an order of magnitude. Each query costs around 1 cent from every article I’ve seen. > but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks. And “640K ought to be enough for anyone”. Of course this will get cheaper over time as compute gets cheaper and the cloud providers design custom chips optimized for it.

"Query" is ambiguous, because ChatGPT runs on "tokens", not "queries". In real life you will want an order of magnitude more tokens if you're generating something useful and not just testing/playing.

Compute doesn't get cheaper over time, it gets more expensive. This isn't 1993 anymore.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#469

Post by bozhark »

super256 wrote: post #126
blippitybleep wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.

> that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself Music discovery is the best feature for me in spotify. Especially if you listen to more unpopular genres like french/german techno, old school hard trance. I found plenty of great artists there which have <5k monthly plays.

got any french/german techno? I would really appreciate it.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#470

Post by didntreadarticl »

AlbertCory wrote: post #219
steveBK123 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case! I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that…

> not bother to find some other ways to make money. Oh, they definitely tried, and still try. The problem is the same as many large companies: they want a new trick as lucrative as the old trick, and there aren't any.

Makes me realise Microsoft are actually the most diversified of the big players now
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