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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

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Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#631

Post by Sebguer »

Lerc wrote: post #423
gcanyon wrote: post #317

Several people have suggested that LLMs might end up ad-supported. I'll point out that "ad supported" might be incredibly subtle/insidious when applied to LLMs: An LLM-based "adsense" could: 1. Maintain a list of sponsors looking to buy ads 2. Maintain a profile of users/ad targets 3. Monitor all inputs/outputs 4. Insert "recommendations" (ads) smoothly/imperceptibly in the course of normal conversation No one would…

LLMs should be legally required to act in the interest of their users (not their creators). This is a standard that already applies to positions of advisors such as Medical professionals, lawyers and financial advisors. I haven't seen this discussed much by regulators, but I have made a couple of submissions here and there expressing this opinion. AIs will get better, and they will become more trusted. They cannot be…

Who decides what's in the interest of the user?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#632

Post by unknown_user_84 »

labrador wrote: post #175

I only AI for one reason since I'm retired and live alone: Life-like chats with a reasonable approximation of a knowledgeable friend. With the new memory features ChatGPT excels at that. I'm not even sure Google cares about that; that goes to show how little of it I've noticed with Google.

While I'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for I've found success with a variety of Gemini models getting them to take to a specific persona when given initial prompts to take on a specific persona. Gemini 2.5 is specifically interesting because the block shows how much the notebook is playing a persona/role vs. becoming that role. In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro likes to revert to 'maintaining a persona' in the block. I questioned it about this at one point and it pointed out that humans also maintain a certain persona in their responses, and that you can't see their thinking. Still not entirely sure what I think about that.

I have experimented with telling the notebook to change the block to a more narrative style. It seems to like to revert to ordered lists and bullet points if not continuously prompted to think in narrative.

Regarding maintaining consistency throughout the chat I have noticed Gemini 2.5 seems able to do this for quite a while but falls victim to the needle in a haystack problem that all LLMs seem to suffer from with an extremely long context and no external tooling.

I have a substack post on creating the initial prompt, which I call a bootstrap, using AI Studio and a set of system instructions if you are curious to explore.

https://consciousnesscrucible.substack.com/p/creating-charac...

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#633

Post by b112 »

runjake wrote: post #585
b112 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In tech, Android's acquisition by Google is ancient history. It has zero relevance to today's Google. When was it, 2006? Almost 20 years ago, back when the company was young.

Mobile is still nearly everything. Google continues to develop and improve Android in substantial ways. Android is also counted on by numerous third-party OEMs. This doesn’t strike me as zero relevance.

This thread was about new markets, having foresight, being able to build "new".

Android and mobile are none of these things.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#634

Post by dinfinity »

samtp wrote: post #455
dinfinity wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. 1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs. 2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in vario…

A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas, filled with hallucinations, unable to ever get past the first step. Sounds lovely.

> A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas,

Well yeah, that's how evolution works: it's an exploration of the search space and only the good stuff survives.

> filled with hallucinations,

The end products can be fully AI-free. In fact, I would expect most ideas that have been floating around to have nothing to do with AI. To be fair, that may change with it being the new hip thing. Even then, there are plenty of implementations that use AI where hallucinations are no problem at all (or even a feature), or where the issues with hallucinations are sufficiently mitigated.

> unable to ever get past the first step.

How so? There are already a bunch of functional things that were in Show HN that were produced with AI assistance. Again, most of the implemented ideas will suck, but some will be awesome and might change the world.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#635

Post by mike_hearn »

summerlight wrote: post #618
mike_hearn wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TPUs aren't necessarily a pro. They go back 15 years and don't seem to have yielded any kind of durable advantage. Developing them is expensive but their architecture was often over-fit to yesterday's algorithms which is why they've been through so many redesigns. Their competitors have routinely moved much faster using CUDA. Once the space settles down, the balance might tip towards specialized accelerators but NVID…

Not sure how familiar you are with the internal situation... But from my experience think it's safe to say that TPU basically multiplies Google's computation capability by 10x, if not 20x. Also they don't need to compete with others to secure expensive nvidia chips. If this is not an advantage, I don't see there's anything considered to be an advantage. The entire point of vertical integration is to secure full contr…

They must very much compete with others. All these chips are being fabbed at the same facilities in Taiwan and capacity trades off against each other. Google has to compete for the same fab capacity alongside everyone else, as well as skilled chip designers etc.

> The revenue delta from this is more than enough to pay off the entire investment history for TPU.

Possibly; such statements were common when I was there too but digging in would often reveal that the numbers being used for what things cost, or how revenue was being allocated, were kind of ad hoc and semi-fictional. It doesn't matter as long as the company itself makes money, but I heard a lot of very odd accounting when I was there. Doubtful that changed in the years since.

Regardless the question is not whether some ads launches can pay for the TPUs, the question is whether it'd have worked out cheaper in the end to just buy lots of GPUs. Answering that would require a lot of data that's certainly considered very sensitive, and makes some assumptions about whether Google could have negotiated private deals etc.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#636

Post by ZeroTalent »

sva_ wrote: post #610

It is sort of funny to me how the sentiment about whoever seems to be leading in ML changes so frequently (in particular here on HN.) A couple months ago it felt like people were sure that Google completely fucked it up for themselves (especially due to the fact that they invented the transformer but didn't productize it themselves at first.) For a short while, Claude was the best thing since sliced cheese, then Deep…

Claude was only ever good for coding, in my opinion. It had nothing on OpenAI pro models for multimodal use.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#637

Post by indigodaddy »

bagacrap wrote: post #626
indigodaddy wrote: post #623

"They're also small, which makes them perfect for edge applications and phone integration." - you can't locally install or onprem Gemini right, so why does small make it better for edge applications, essentially because small means light and fast, so it will respond quicker and with less latency? Requests are still going out over the network to Google though right?

Wrong, Android and Chrome infer locally

So Gemini on Android isn't sending requests to the Internet? Highly unlikely

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#638

Post by sva_ »

gcanyon wrote: post #317

Several people have suggested that LLMs might end up ad-supported. I'll point out that "ad supported" might be incredibly subtle/insidious when applied to LLMs: An LLM-based "adsense" could: 1. Maintain a list of sponsors looking to buy ads 2. Maintain a profile of users/ad targets 3. Monitor all inputs/outputs 4. Insert "recommendations" (ads) smoothly/imperceptibly in the course of normal conversation No one would…

Would be illegal in Germany ('Schleichwerbung') and perhaps the EU?

I think it is actually covered in EU AI act article 5 (a):

> [...] an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect of materially distorting the behaviour of a person or a group of persons by appreciably impairing their ability to make an informed decision, thereby causing them to take a decision that they would not have otherwise taken [...]

It is very broad but I'm pretty sure it would be used against such marketing strategies.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#639

Post by mike_hearn »

ndriscoll wrote: post #579
mike_hearn wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google knows how to avoid mistakes like not bucketing by session. Holdback users just did fewer unique search sessions overall, because whilst for most people Google was a great way to book vacations, hotel stays, to find games to buy and so on, for holdback users it was limited to informational research only. That's an important use case but probably over-represented amongst HN users, some kinds of people use search…

The issue is precisely that "did the click lead to a purchase" is not a good target. That's a target for the advertiser , and is adversarial for the user. "Did the click find the best deal for the user (considering the tradeoffs they care about)" is a good target for the user. The winner in an auction in a competitive market is pretty much guaranteed to be the worst match under that ranking. This is obvious when look…

You can't optimize for knowing better than the buyer themselves. If they bought, you have to assume they found the best deal for them considering all the tradeoffs they care about. And that if a business is willing to pay more for that click than another, it's more likely to lead to a sale and therefore was the best deal, not the worst.

Sure, there are many situations where users make mistakes and do some bad deal. But there always will be, that's not a solvable problem. Is it not the nirvana fallacy to describe the potential for suboptimal outcomes as an issue? Search engines and AI are great tools to help users avoid exactly that outcome.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#640

Post by whiplash451 »

sva_ wrote: post #638
gcanyon wrote: post #317

Several people have suggested that LLMs might end up ad-supported. I'll point out that "ad supported" might be incredibly subtle/insidious when applied to LLMs: An LLM-based "adsense" could: 1. Maintain a list of sponsors looking to buy ads 2. Maintain a profile of users/ad targets 3. Monitor all inputs/outputs 4. Insert "recommendations" (ads) smoothly/imperceptibly in the course of normal conversation No one would…

Would be illegal in Germany ('Schleichwerbung') and perhaps the EU? I think it is actually covered in EU AI act article 5 (a): > [...] an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect of materially distorting the behaviour of a person or a group of persons by appreciably impairing their ability to ma…

The trick is in the « materially ».

The inability to demonstrate incrementality in advertising is going to come in very handy to dodge this rule.

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