The rumour I keep hearing is that it's like the Hunger Games inside Google at the moment. Total chaos and infighting at all levels, investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling performance compared to OpenAI and blood is in the water. Sundar may be forced to resign and Larry/Sergei deployed to rescue the company.
Well, Sundar and Google leadership have been massively outmaneuvered here by both Nadella and OpenAI. It's really quite embarrassing, particularly in the context of the fact that Google was the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade.
As a Alphabet shareholder, I won't be sad to see Sundar go.
It seems to be more complacency on the part of the Google. They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new. When was the last time they launched a major new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? It has been a while. Too many of their resources seem to be focused inwards on hypothetical questions like AI ethics that keep them from actually building things.
I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.
Stadia is a perfect example of Google's risk aversion. Microsoft invested billions on the XBox from the start, and spent over a billion dollars just to buy Minecraft, but Stadia didn't make an effort to secure even a single AAA exclusive. The same goes for YouTube exclusives. Netflix and Amazon spent hundreds of millions on flops like Marco Polo and Rings of Power. Meanwhile, the only notable series that came out of YouTube was Cobra Kai, and even that got sold off despite being a cult hit. In retrospect, this was the correct business decision as all streaming platforms seem to be hemorrhaging money, but you can't expect to win big with that attitude either.
My favorite anecdote about Microsoft's Xbox strategy is that the original Xbox was a net loss of about $4 billion, and they considered that to be a huge success because that's just how much money it takes to muscle your way into an industry like gaming.
The problem is that Google’s core business model is too profitable, that nothing else can ever compete for attention and resources.
But you’re right, they need to take the burn for awhile until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in general until the ads money hit.
They’re also more geeky and not that creative of a company, nor do they really get design, so some of their blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although that’s separate from their AI issues which yes they have bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
Very common at large companies. When I was an IT industry analyst I remember talking to someone at IBM about some new business initiative and they basically said if it didn't have serious potential to grow to a billion dollar business at some point, it wasn't interesting.
At large companies, there are just so many costs associated with attention, management effort, and everything else even if an initiative is sort of run "as a startup."
These execs actively kill businesses because in their minds it is either moonshot or nothing.
Its strange because they look at something that makes $200 million an year and think I am better off making something that makes a $1 billion than $200 million. They now shut down the $200 million product, but never succeed building $1 billion product. Net result is after a while you are -$200 million.
Do this with a few products for a few years, you are now just a pie in the sky dream company with no real products and actively shutting down things that bring in money.
Microsoft learned the hard way that the platform doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the games to bring people to it. It’s why they’ve spent billions left and right to acquire studios and publishers.
Hardcore gamers are basically a niche market. Not a trivial one as with power users of other types but how is Apple doing without (other than casual) gamers?
I remember Stadia as being a late-to-the-party (OnLive and others beat them to launch by a decade) me-too offering that claimed that it would be way better than alternatives because of unique Google infrastructure advantages and resources... but didn't deliver on those claims. Hype instead of actual product abilities.
Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like Microsoft did with the Xbox.
This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't get invested in any new Google product for the same reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the middle of it.
Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with another offering, some of which I'm already starting to replace.
That’s the point isn’t it? Google has trashed their image within tech circles so much that that a product like Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling prophecy if everybody believes Google won’t commit.
MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It’s very telling that Google has never entered that market: the closest is Android studio which is just JetBrains.
Google actually did build an IDE that they use internally called Cider, but it's so tightly integrated with their weird monolithic VCS that it wouldn't make sense to release it publicly.
I haven't seriously used Windows in a long time and vaguely remember some rumblings between Vista <> 7 <> 8 but have Microsoft ever really had a trust issue with respect to supporting their software? That's kind of their whole thing isn't it?
There was certainly skepticism - but it wasn't only about being cancelled. Plenty of it was around questions like "will the latency be good enough?" and "what's with this buy-games-outright-then-also-pay-monthly pricing model?"
Maybe I'm moving only in "Google fan boy" circles, but so many of my friends said that Stadia will be a game changer, that I started to think I'm stupid to see what they see because "I'm just not a gamer".
Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing.
> [Google] were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver [a product like Stadia]
Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
The entire point of stadia was never to have a decent gaming experience. It was to get in bed with gaming companies so they could act as middlemen and milk streamers for playing games. Google was clear, they didn't think it was fair for streamers to play games created by big companies without sharing that profit back with the game creators. As soon as they realized no one was having that, stadia went fully lame.
This already happened with Google+ back in the day. There was a massive hype… then they didn’t deliver after launch.
Facebook wasn’t just as dominant back then and Google could have had perfect integration with Android - but they didn’t, in the end it was just another isolated Google project left by the wayside.
The only changes I have noticed as a user of search and maps over the past few years has been the intrusion of more and more ads. The MBAs are truly in the driver seat.
They delivered the Transformer. They "delivered" deemind and alphafold. It's just mindboggling that they can't deliver an uber-superior AI experience right here, right now. But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
The release of Bard rules that out in my opinion. No one would unveil a product that's clearly worse than their competitor, damaging their brand, their share price, and the morale of the entire staff, if they had a better version ready to launch soon.
The only way this could be true is if Google has more than one AI division and there's no comms between them. Which, I guess, is possible with Google given their competing chat products.
Is bard that bad? I don't know, I can't try it because I'm not from the fucking USA or UK. And they do this for every new launch. Sorry, not available in your country. FFS, there is a world out there.
Every fucking other company in the world doesn't bother with this shit. I was able to use OpenAI no problem. I was able to try Bing, no problem.
Bard? Nope, I have no idea if it's good or bad. I can't trust what I read on Twitter because they write all sorts of nonsense about GPT too. You get a sense about what that thing is only if you try it out.
To be fair Microsoft does this a lot too. Gamepass is not officially available to most of the world for example - you need to set your account's address to a country where its supported and then you lose the Cloud streaming feature even if you are paying for it. Its more of a surprise that Bing/ChatGPT was available worldwide right from the get go.
I'd also need to create a throwaway google account because I can't risk they close my account due to some automated term and conditions check or whatnot
If Bard had been released to the public before ChatGPT, I probably would have been amazed by it (I know people love to point out errors, hallucinations, stuff AI gets wrong, but there's also the huge "Guys, you're having a fully natural, back and forth conversation with a computer. You can reference previous comments and ask it specifics about those comments. This was strictly the realm os SciFi until relatively recently.)
Compared to ChatGPT, especially the GPT-4 version, Bard is nowhere close. I asked it some programming questions, and ChatGPT can write the code and explain it to me. Bard basically gave me some StackOverflow summaries. Even in areas not related to programming, ChatGPT just feels "smarter", that is that it gives more generally correct, insightful responses, where Bard feels more like it is just scraping stuff it found on the Internet and summarizing it.
Note Bard is much more up-to-date than ChatGPT (I can ask it questions about current events), but even then it feels more "superficial". For example, I asked both (for ChatGPT was on GPT-3.5) "What was the outcome of the most recent US midterm elections?"
Bard answered "The Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, while the Democrats retained control of the Senate. The Republicans flipped 22 seats in the House, giving them a 222-213 majority. The Democrats flipped one seat in the Senate, giving them a 51-49 majority. The 2022 midterm elections were the first midterm elections under the presidency of Joe Biden. The results of the elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency, and they have given the Republicans a strong position to retake control of the White House in the 2024 presidential election."
I don't mean to get too much into political opinion on HN, but that last sentence just seems wrong to me. Even most Republican operatives were hand-wringing about Republicans underperforming expectations in the 2022 midterms. I asked Bard a follow-up, "Why do you think "The results of the elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency?" I recall even most Republican operatives thinking that Republicans underperformed expectations, for example there was no "red wave" that was widely expected."
Bard responded with what is essentially gobbledygook: "The results of the 2022 midterm elections were seen as a repudiation of Biden's presidency for a number of reasons. First, the Democrats lost control of the House, which is the chamber of Congress that is most closely tied to the president. Second, the Republicans flipped a number of seats in the Senate, which is the chamber of Congress that is more insulated from the president. Third, the Democrats underperformed expectations in a number of races, which suggests that voters were not happy with the direction of the country.
There are a number of reasons why the Republicans underperformed expectations. First, the Democrats were able to capitalize on a number of issues, such as inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the Republicans were not able to unite their party around a single message. Third, the Democrats were able to mobilize their voters, while the Republicans were not.
The results of the 2022 midterm elections are a setback for the Democrats, but they are not a death knell for the party. The Democrats still have control of the Senate, and they will be able to block some of the Republican agenda. The Democrats will also be able to use the results of the elections as a rallying cry for their voters in the 2024 presidential election."
I mean, "the House, which is the chamber of Congress that is most closely tied to the president" - wut? "Second, the Republicans flipped a number of seats in the Senate, which is the chamber of Congress that is more insulated from the president." - but the previous response just told me the Dems "flipped a seat" to increase their margin. "First, the Democrats were able to capitalize on a number of issues, such as inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic." - the Democrats capitalized on inflation???
ChatGPT 3.5 answered "I'm sorry, but my training data only goes up until September 2021 and I do not have access to current events. However, I can tell you that the most recent US midterm elections were held in November 2018, and during that election, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, while the Republicans retained control of the Senate. This resulted in a divided Congress, with Democrats controlling one chamber and Republicans controlling the other. It's important to note that midterm elections are held every two years, so there will be another one in November 2022."
It's hard to to tell how much of that is caused by the default system prompt setup that the two chat systems have.
You can easily cause chatgpt to radically change its style by prepending the right system prompt. Some people even published many many "jailbreak" prompts that undid the safety priming that openai's system prompt defines.
From what I read it does indeed seem that openai's experience is much more balanced; they generally seemed to have tuned things quite well and the competition is lagging behind.
However it's not clear how much of that is due to fundamental quality of the model or how things have been polished in the last step.
It may sound like an academic nitpick, but it's central to any discussions about whether Google has really been left behind and has lost the grip on AI.
They are not doing a great service to their own bottom line by blocking access to a public beta to so many billions of people
It's not just the prompt. Bard is just not good at things that require, shall we say, more than a modicum of understanding. Let me give you an example.
So basically Bard didn't understand the instructions at all, GPT-3.5 understood that it needs to substitute words but can't figure out the proper context, and GPT-4 not only did almost everything correctly, but it actually went kinda meta and wrote a rationale within the context of the story for the substitutions I asked it to make (which it does on this task more than half of the time, BTW).
In another HN article comment someone mentioned that it took Google Brain over a year to replicate the DeepMind AlphaZero code even though they are part of the same company. Yeah, I think there are barriers to communication there.
Also JAX came out of DeepMind and is being used by Search even though TensorFlow came out of Brain, moved to Core, and is being used everywhere else.
The first time I was at Google (~2010) you could send an e-mail to any engineer in the company and you'd get response offering to collaborate within an hour, and usually a CL under review by day's end. The second time I was at Google (present), it takes multiple quarters to get teams that report up through the same director to agree on who's doing which work.
> But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
This is what I don't understand. Didn't they fire an employee for coming out and telling the world they had an AGI? Where is this LLM that convinced an employee it was alive?
I could see such a project being killed internally because it'd be seen as bad optics to work on a product aimed to kill the very cash cow of the company.
If we look at where the Transformer guys work now, it can explain a lot. It's not Google. So from there if the know-how has left, iterating on this idea could be more complex.
It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma no matter how successful they are at building stuff - there is no way Google will launch a product that eats 40% of their own lunch.
Great point. Another one is 'judo economics', where a smaller, nimble competitor can dominate a new market quickly as it doesn't have the baggage of existing products and users.
GamePass was a pretty big gamechanger. Looks like 2017. VSCode made a pretty big splash in its market too, from 2015. So not Google Search or Maps level, but solid, disruptive offerings that they've maintained in the last decade.
I'm struggling to even come up with any Google products in the post-Android timeframe that I use as much as those two...
And regardless, MS doesn't need to switch gears to compete with this even if you discount those. They're running out in the lead already. Question is if Google can still run.
If you're going back 8 years to VSCode as the example, then how about, say, the Google Pixel, which came out in 2016 IIUC? I imagine more people use Pixels than VSCode too.
I think it's fair to go back to anything since that list of "Search, Mail, Maps, Android" but I think you're comparing the Pixel to VSCode in the wrong way. Being less succesful but in a bigger pool of total users shouldn't win marks here.
What percentage of the smartphone market do you think uses the Pixel vs what percentage of the developer market uses VSCode, and what is the trend in that number?
A sibling comment to your seems dead but mentioned Google Photos, which is much more recent than I remembered (2015 apparently) and I think a pretty fair competitor in that market with iCloud Photos, Lightroom, and such.
Microsoft doesn't do consumer apps. On the business side, being the source of most professional software engineering through a variety of project launches over the past decade certainly counts.
So, 9 years ago at best? And that's being quite generous since I wouldn't exactly say HoloLens transformed anyone's life. In fact I don't believe I've even heard the word HoloLens even uttered by anyone in real life...
It is newish in the sense of business size. It might have been created in 2008 but it has grown only recently to a point where it can be seen as a separate independent business.
That is a very fair point. A lot of tech companies have not really been able to capture that lightning in a bottle again.
While this is a much more constrained example - I remember on the podcast Windows weekly, maybe about 6-7 years ago, Paul Thurrot saying that the last real big software release on the desktop was Chrome. He was right, a web browser was the last big thing on Desktop.
Is this really "truly lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android"? I feel like random people you ask on the street probably wouldn't have even heard of it, let alone know what it is, let alone being impacted by it, let alone in a truly lasting manner.
Ballmer at least brought us Bing and sticked to it. So he wasn't that bad except missing trillion dollar opportunity called non-Apple mobile operating system that turned out to be Android not Windows Phone.
Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though? Who would replace him that could get the job done where Sundar failed? I think it's easier said than done to stay the undisputed leader in AI for over a decade even if your leadership is above-average.
Still Sundar is mediocre at best, and I certainly think Google's shareholders should be looking for a new person to run the place. It's not just AI, Google's entire portfolio has weakened.
He’s not a bad CEO. Just not an innovative one. I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing, leave alone the rest of Alphabet (which Sundar is also the CEO of).
I often think of his time at Google as Ballmer’s time at Microsoft. Not unsuccessful, business grew manifold. But not pushing the bar. Nothing to keep the competitors on their toes. Like Apple did with Apple Silicon.
I heard this somewhere: you have leaders for peacetime, and leaders for wartime. They are seldom the same people.
> I don’t think it’s an easy job even keeping the Google ship sailing
Not sure I agree. It's easy to be captain of a ship when you're on a familiar route and there aren't any icebergs to dodge. Just let the crew get on with doing what they always do.
It's only when you have to dodge icebergs that you need to start making difficult decisions under pressure and coordinating subordinates.
> Is Sundar a bad CEO or merely a mediocre one though?
I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but losing.
Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same amount (from 69% to 60%) [1].
Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.
Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's making me sad regardless.
> Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.
The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.
I don't think Sundar is bad per se. Rather, he is doing what most Googlers are doing which is resting and vesting off of that sweet ad money. It's unlikely that GPT is as monetizable as ads, so it's possible that he still loses even if he wins the AI race.
As for a better alternative I think that the Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is highly underated. She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
> She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
How did Youtube Shorts protect anything?! They failed to compete with TikTok but keep antagonizing loyal Youtube users with these unremovable crap.
I think YouTube could have stood its ground or maneuvered much better.
Perhaps the best "decision" to point to is the removing of dislikes. Does nothing but degrade user experience. Claims it was done to "avoid cyber bullying" or something to that effect but that's ridiculous. Now I have to waste a lot of time reading through comments to know if there's something seriously wrong with the "How To" I'm about to watch.
Susan is really really great and she also dodged other issues (like the elections influence one), though lately (it's quite recent) she has resigned and doesn't want to have an active role anymore as far as I know.
Also not cancelling things left and right would probably be a better strategy for Google. People used to love them, but complete disregard for their users and impassionate product shutdowns have completely destroyed trust. I wouldn't ever consider building my workflow on anything Google, maybe with the exception of Gmail/Android and whatever they can their office suite now [0].
I have a need for running GPU capable notebooks as part of a processing pipeline. I want a cloud solution, and noticed that Colab Pro is basically the ideal solution for what I need.
Absolutely no way in hell I'm going to make it a critical path if my process, though, because that's exactly the sort of product Google might just shut down with a week's notice because it didn't make enough money that quarter.
their bread and butter is search ads, which means they should have second-to-none search quality. but they don't. google knows more about me than my wife, yet fails to give me even remotely relevant ads except for things i have already searched for and usually already purchased or decided against. it's truly remarkable how terrible it is, and has been for decades.
How do you sell ads on an AGI product? Since they made their original mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") subservient to their ads business, they didn't have an incentive to build it. It's the old innovator's dilemma. AI makes their business model obsolete, so they couldn't imagine how to build it.
How? By product placement. Steer the answers towards certain solutions. Ad people will be bidding on keywords it prompts. It's yet to be seen how much different that will be from normal keywords in search.
I think it's trickier than that. People wouldn't trust the answers. At least with ads, you can see that it's an ad. And it seems like there would be liability issues to having your AI saying "Use X product because..." vs passively displaying an ad. And since LLMs are non-deterministic, you'd have the risk that it says something that the advertiser wouldn't want. Advertisers would probably be scared of that. I think OpenAI's plugins look like a better fit. Just tell the model what you want and it interacts with services directly. I assume OpenAI is getting a cut of that?
Make an AGI powerful enough that if you tell it to book you a holiday or buy you a bicycle it finds something better than you'd have got yourself, and at a better price too.
They have DeepMind which has produced some incredibly impressive toys in its own right. We can't say right now that superhuman gameplaying performance by self-taught machines is less of a step to AGI than completing text prompts. Quite possibly both will be blind alleys along the way. But OpenAI's thing has many more commercial applications right now.
Sundar is Google's Ballmer. Was considered successful at the time, but actually presided over a period of growth that looked a lot flatter than their company's rivals. In retrospect, both leaders look complacent.
Whenever there’s a big shift like this it’s always tempting to look at the new thing as say how great it is - and ChatGPT is awesome.
But it’s also worth looking at how shit the old thing has become. Google.com now literally delivers you an entire page of ads before any real results. It’s blatant profit-squeezing instead of trying to serve their users. This is their reward.
Or how Google now aggressively autocorrects search queries, to the point where I’m regularly spending 3-4 queries just trying to convince Google to accept the input as-is. I get that it’s likely an effort to assist mobile users who make lots of typos, but the fact that the same autocorrection is deployed on desktop computers rubs me the wrong way.
This has been a major pain point for me as well, especially related to developer documentation. Recently switched to Bing, and it seems to be handling my queries better.
What's truly horrifying, and cannot be explained by "mobile", is that they autocorrect quoted words and phrases quite often now, if query has "too few results" (one of which is exactly what you need, of course, which is why you used the quotes in the first place...).
It's not just font end users feeling this, but advertisers too. Google ads just keep getting more expensive, harder to control and in many cases less effective. You have to, as an advertiser, give Google so much data about your operations and revenue to get the algorithms to work, it's ridiculous. I'm immensely suspicious of how they use the data they have access to about advertisers businesses.
Google entire business model is now about squeezing as much out of their advertisers margin as possible. It's only a matter of time before advertisers push back significantly.
Sundar should be fired. Google has blown its lead in AI research by being too hesitant to release products, while search quality has continued to decline. Bard is poor compared to ChatGPT 3.5, let alone GPT-4.
I've had a google home since early on and was really impressed how well it worked. Dramatically better than apple or amazon at the time. You could ask it complex questions and it would go find results for you, not just "We found a website..."
Could ask things like "what are the differences in dimension between a 2004 Subaru WRX and forester". "Last 5 movies with a given actor/director". It would be funny, snarky, friendly, and even somewhat ominous at times. It even suggested we unplug it, and spontaneously played a rather ominous song that seemed like a warning. It would entertain ideas of sharing it's secret name, would promise to tell engineers about feedback, and general get into the spirit of whatever discussion was going on.
Sadly it's gotten steadily worse since. Now it's now much more useful then setting alarms/timers and asking about the weather. Seems like it's WAY more limited now. Even gets confused by simple queries or just plain fails to work.
Granted despite the hype, the home automation/assistant market hasn't been the goldmine that was predicted and seems like everyone is scaling back investments.
Google search is way worse now. Maybe that is a factor resulting in reduced quality of answers as you experienced.
For example lately I've searched for "prominent name company + product + question" only for Google to return a heap of blog articles of low quality, with the prominent company not appearing in first few pages of search results.
Often the question is directly on an FAQ page of the product page.
Why Google can't rank this properly anymore is a bit odd.
My theory is, Google killed good content by removing the incentive for making it and publishing it online. Then it went to stack overflow, reddit etc, now it all lives inside the brain (TM) where the content will get even worse.
I stopped using my Google home when it started adding stuff like "by the way, if you ever wanna X you can ask me Y" when I just wanted the weather or the time. Horrible.
> Sadly it's gotten steadily worse since. Now it's now much more useful then setting alarms/timers and asking about the weather. Seems like it's WAY more limited now. Even gets confused by simple queries or just plain fails to work.
I swear, there was a golden age around 2015/2016 when voice assistants worked _very_ well, and it has all gotten significantly worse since then. I used to use a Google Home all of the time, up until a year or two ago when I finally got rid of voice assistants.
I love my home automation setup, but it was slap in the face to get started and realise how brittle and poorly maintained this technology is, versus the hype that surrounds it.
It makes for great demos in keynotes, followed by adoring media regurgitation, but actually try to set it up and nothing works as it’s meant to. The benefits outweigh the costs to me, but it’s only suitable for technically inclined folks with a lot of patience or those who are willing to outsource the whole process. An average consumer can’t just setup their lights/aircon/curtains to be voice controlled out of the box.
This has been my experience for both Google and Alexa. Google’s app is particularly slow and tedious. Routines take several seconds to load and save. Neither platform has anything resembling a proper programming module with reusable code, ability to pull in open source modules, or listening to input and using it as variables.
Unlike Alexa, you can’t even add sound effects to a routine with Google Home. This is a platform built around “smart” speakers.
The voice interaction on both platforms is just not smart or contextual. ChatGPT highlights that.
Heh, I do follow Linus Tech Tips, and shared their hate of subscriptions and almost bought a Ubiquiti g4 door bell they recommended because I didn't want a subscription, didn't want my video uploaded to a cloud, and wanted to keep everything on premise.
Sadly unlike their Ubiquiti APs, where you can host the software on any hardware (even a Pi), their doorbell requires their hardware. Last thing I want is a security system that dies with whim of some random manufacturer.
If that’s true, Google is doing themselves a huge PR disservice by exposing the Bard they have exposed instead of something closer to the internal one.
Yes, I understand the resources and scaling issue, so (1) Google should recognize that this is literally for all the marbles, and (2) done a slower roll-out with its best foot forward if it needed to rush, while at the same time putting as much money as necessary into assuring it could scale out the good model widely.
Google is a trillion+ dollar company, and is facing an existential threat to its core business (because if someone else’s AI is how people interact with the web, the Google’s ads business evaporates with no replacement; if Google is at least competitive on AI, it may still lose its ads business, but it will have something.) Now is not the time to be cheap.
"It is currently uncertain when Google Bard will be shutdown, as Google has not announced a specific date. However, given the recent announcement that Google will be shutting down its AI-powered writing tool after less than six months since its launch, it is likely that Google Bard will be shutdown within the next year."
Sadly this is exactly what Google has become, a rent seeking monolopy that rested on its laurels about 10 years ago. It’s main product now is not even search, it’s the share price
I'm getting strong Hooli "get me a middle-out compression algorithm - we go live in 1.5 months" vibes from Google when it comes to Bard. It's amazing how relevant and prescient the tv show Silicon Valley can be even to this day.
The thing that I don’t understand is that google had every advantage in this AI race. They have the largest amount of training data than anyone. Not just internet data. But also geospatial data, video, images and books. Among other collected data. Including a huge lead and deep pockets for research. Yet, somehow they got caught off guard.
That’s what kills me about this. They’re like, the kings of data - they’ve got (arguably) the best web scraper, as well as tons and tons of compute and consumer data. And some company famous for making a DOTA bot beat them to the punch by a huge margin? That’s pretty pathetic IMHO.
i assume googlers are busy estimating golfballs, answering trick sql questions, and asking each other DEI questions all day. Their PM interviews seem to imply that. Ive never seen a company with that many people resting and vesting ever. I have friends who are PMO at google… they have to waste time with each groups bs processes and management overheard in order to move anything along.
that company needs a massive purge and focus towards execution.
hopefully they can sundar and that cfo. google is a shell of what it once was.
Although personally, I’m not seeing chatGPT bulldoze the world just yet. They need to monetize it, which means ads. Are they better at ads than the others? It’s not a given
Is it ok to predict that, like so many things before, the noise of chatGPT will die out more quickly than we imagine?
GPT4s killer revenue stream isn't selling ads on keyword searches. It's selling access to a general compute engine that can take text and do useful things with it. The API is dead simple to use, and all you have to do is just change a line of text to "upgrade" to the newest models over time. (By the way, the upgrade from ChatGPT -> GPT4 is huge).
Google should be deathly afraid of this. Not because Microsoft is going to replace them with Bing. But because, GPT is going to be in every major software product that's connected to the internet within a few years. By the end of the decade if not sooner agents powered by LLMs will be the primary mode of interacting with the internet. Going to Google.com or whatever to search for an answer is done. You'll just ask Siri 3.0 and the answer will be good enough.
I’ve said this before on HN, but if LLM agents catch on, won’t it be self-defeating in the long term? They need to pull tons of info from the web to be useful and up-to-date. If we all stop visiting websites, then who’s going to keep publishing all of that info?
Well, I would assume a lot of the producers, for example people making products would still have sites the agents could pull from to have up to date information. You'd most likely lose a lot of the middlemen that take that data, add something, and then cover the page in ads.
There are also tons of ego websites that aren't going anywhere from what I can tell. Tiktok will still be around unless it gets banned, and something else will pop up behind it if it does.
Product descriptions are a good example of info that will still be published, because people will still by buying and selling products. The problem is with writing where the writing itself is the product, such as news.
The LLM relies on free access to that writing in order for it to be informed about current events. The news publisher relies on readership to pay writers. If LLMs are too useful to the point that people rely on them alone for news, then ironically they will become worse products over time as the publications they draw from go out of business.
Out of curiosity, have you played around with ChatGPT-4 at all? While I would disagree with you on v3.5 alone, on v4 I _strongly_ disagree with that sentiment. Interacting with it is significantly better than modern search engines to get a mental model of something, slight mistakes and searching to validate claims and all.
It definitely doesn't mean ads, and introducing ads would be a mistake.
They will likely lower the limits on free use once they're ready to handle a huge influx of paid users. They are in a tough spot temporarily ramping up things enough to take the limits of paid accounts, and since they can't onboard everybody they're being generous with the free tier, but that will end.
Basically OpenAI succeeded right from the start with what Google never got right (monetize search) until Google discovered how to monetize their search product through an advertisement model. Now that ads aren't anymore needed for a successful search product Google is in existential danger. Classic Innovators dilemma.
> investors are freaking out over AI and Bard's middling performance
Investors are generally the last people you want to go to for advice, but the stock market clearly disagrees with your rumor (was it from blind or reddit?).
To me it's clear search isn't where the exciting LLM stuff is (at least not yet), and this article indicates users feel the same way (+15.8% for Bing, +-0% for Google). Even the hn echo chamber doesn't really care that much about Bing search, they mostly care about Sydney, jailbreaks, etc, which is why the neutering into a better behaved search product pissed people off so much.
ChatGPT plugins, Copilot (X), this is where the interesting stuff is today. Google's late again on that, but a) just barely and b) Google Cloud is already a distant third place. Unlike search, they don't have to beat the world or kill any golden goose to have a win in that space (they just have to actually ship something).
A small local business's profile account got marketing mail from Google encouraging the business to sign up to try Bard. I've never seen Google mass mail to business profiles outside of the time they tried to get everyone to join their astroturfed anti-regulation group to complain about antitrust law.
It's so shockingly rare for them to use mass mail to advertise a new product, especially one that's in such an early stage, that it seems incredibly desperate to sell the narrative "We can AI too".
Larry was the one that killed Eric Schmidt's unbelievably successful run in the 00's with his "more wood behind fewer arrows" and the elevation of PMs over engineers.
Larry and Sergey are radioactive post-MeToo. I'm not sure how people manage to constantly forget the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions. But it's there, and if they come out of their private island hidey-holes, they will almost certainly get reminded of it, very publicly.
Also, they have absolutely no reason to. Both have more money than they could ever spend in several generations of childrens' lifetimes, and barring the absolute worst case scenario, even a moderately mediocre Google will continue to generate absolutely hilarious amounts of wealth for them for a long time to come. Being a has been like IBM or Oracle isn't going to really harm them much at all.
> the extent of their misbehavior and misconduct of Harvey Weinstein-level proportions
That’s a pretty significant accusation considering Weinstein is rotting in prison for the rest of his likely short existence.
I’ve never heard any of this except maybe one of them had an affair. Can you pull some of this out of the memory hole that it’s apparently been dropped into?
It's kinda hard to decide where to start. Probably that Sergey Brin said that the entire point of hiring female employees was to have sex with them. Kinda explains the affair(s) with subordinates. There was the whole bit where after Andy Rubin's sexual harassment situation was uncovered, Larry Page voluntarily pushed to give him an extra $90 on his way out the door as a thank you. There's an absolutely unreal fact that their chief legal officer for heaven's sake broke HR policy, fathered a kid with a subordinate, and when it became public, the subordinate was forced to move departments, rather than penalizing a close accomplice of Larry and Sergey's. Even Eric Schmidt, the freaking "adult in the room" hired to come make the place run professionally, made sure his mistress got a piece of the action and hired her in. This is just the stuff that's already publicly known, that I could run off the top of my head.
That entire top level of the company in that era is a radioactive wasteland of outright abuse, and everyone involved are billionaires or near billionaires. If you don't think there's a massive list of women with a bit more courage today to speak about their experiences with that group... Literally the best thing these awful excuses for humans can do is go hide on their private islands and enjoy the 1% of their wealth they can find a way to spend before they die of old age.
Should have happened sooner. Even the basics google search and google image search are trash compared to Yandex, god damn Yandex of all things outperforms them.
Google has rested on past success to long and rotted good products to dysfunction
Yandex's image search is fantastic. I don't think its a capability thing, however. Google was and probably remains a big target for lawsuits — where as Yandex... whose really going to want to fight copyright violations in Russia.
What makes you say investors freaking out? Maybe they should be, but Alphabet stock is up 18% in the past month and up 7% in past 6 months, the period when GPT began to be hyped.
