771–780 of 851 posts
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There doesn't need to be a team. Individuals can act according to personal incentives and still create coordinated behavior. Look at flocks of birds. Each bird acts for itself; together they move in unison.
Sure, but that's not what 'astroturf campaigns' impies.
The author mentioned AlphaGo and Alpha Zero without mentioning OpenAI gym and OpenAI Five. Those products show OpenAI was innovating and leading in RL at that stage around 2017 to 2019. https://github.com/openai/gym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five
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Are the administration really going to risk messing with one of their leading AI companies while they are also terrified of China catching up or overtaking them in leading edge AI? I wouldn't put it past them but I don't think it's a given either.
In my opinion they should because the US doesn’t have any GPU restrictions and VCs are hungry for disruption. The US also has the tech talent pool to throw at the problem unlike in manufacturing. After breaking up Google, there will be a lot more moats to be had vs being stifled by the Google behemoth.
Is that the strategy?
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You could also be seeing waves of various astroturf campaigns.
Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN. What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?
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Google is also in a great position wrt distribution - to get users at scale, and attach to pre-existing revenue streams. Via Android, Gmail, Docs, Search - they have a lot of reach. YouTube as well, though fit there is maybe less obvious. Combined with the two factors you mention, and the size of their warchest - they are really excellently positioned.
Over the last nine months, I have periodically tested Gemini’s access to and effective use of data from Gmail/Docs/Calendar/Keep-notes, etc. The improvement has been steady and impressive. The entire integration is becoming a product that I want to use.
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I'm surprised. They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it. Also, for the customers it's usually more expensive and slower than a normal taxi at least here in Spain. The original idea of ride-sharing made sense but just like airbnb it became an industry and got enshittified.
> Also, for the customers it's usually more expensive and slower than a normal taxi Neither of those things are true where I live. > at least here in Spain Well…Spain is Spain. Not the rest of the world.
I think Uber in the US is a very different beast. But also because the outlook on life is so different there. I recently agreed with an American visitor that we'd go somewhere and we agreed to go by public transport. When I got there he wanted to get an Uber :') Here in Europe public transport is a very different thing. In many cases the metro is even faster than getting a taxi.
PS: What bothers me the most about Uber and Cabify is that they "estimate" that it will take 2 minutes to get a car to you, and then when I try and book one I get a driver that's 10 minutes away :( :( Then I cancel the trip and the drivers are pissed off. I had one time where I got the same driver I cancelled on earlier and he complained a lot even though I cancelled within 10 seconds when I saw how far away he was.
Anyway I have very few good experiences with these services, I only use them to go to the airport now when I can book it in advance. And never Uber anymore, only Cabify.
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The point is that the secret sauce in Google's search was better retrieval, and the assertion above is that the advantage there is gone. While crawling the web isn't a piece of cake, it's a much smaller moat than retrieval quality was.
Eh, I don't really see that. Crawling the web has a huge moat because a huge number of sites have blocked 'abusive' crawlers except Google and possibly Bing. For example just try to crawl sites like Reddit and see how long before you're blocked and get a "please pay us for our data" message.
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This is very simply a bunch of minor stuff Googlites feel like they're above implementing. They would rather let you implement that and you both get a cut.
Not like Apple’s quality is any better nowadays but Google’s unwillingness to finish their design work and provide a functional product is one of the many reasons I avoid their products like the plague.
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Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN. What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?
You sound like you're from the Google team ;) Rough steps: 1. Monitor keywords 2. Jump in to sway conversation 3. Profit I'm not saying this is happening. Purely hypothetical.
Full disclosure, I am Xoogler, but if anything I think that makes my skepticism even more justified. If there were people there paid to post nice things about Google on HN and Twitter then I'd love to apply for that team!
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Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN. What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?
This is a great example of a strawman argument. I didn't say anything about teams, or "employees paid solely to post on social media". You injected those details, because you think that they make the idea of an astroturf campaign seem farfetched. But we know that such campaigns happen in other contexts, sponsored by entities with less money to throw around. Why not here? And why do we need to know the mechanics, if a…
In your opinion then, what would a Google-run astroturfing campaign roughly look like? Sounds like this article is an example, right? I'm not asking for insider info, I'm just curious about your mental model on the basic mechanics.
Personally, I think the case "other entities with comparable resources do this, so Google probably does too" isn't super convincing to me. IMO, the null hypothesis "Google has lots of nerdy fans who'll happily post positively about it for free" is a lot reasonable, but perhaps there's something I'm missing.