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) search. Win-win. If that bot stumbles in demo, no big deal. They already saw 100 examples, 95 good and 5 goofy; adding one to either bucket is not critical.
Google AI bot is an unknown quantity. Google search is (again, just perception wise) the leader in the search. When the bot stumbles it is a big red flag.
I really do not know why Google rushed it out instead of coming up with a friendly "hey, play with our toy first" approach. With this approach the bot can be iterated and made cool (hey, we can pair it with a stable diffusion-like painter for kids; or a lullaby composer; whaterver). Once cool, then it is "hey, you know, you can start leveraging it from the google search tomorrow". Screwups like this really make me think Google's rot is very broad. My 2c.
I'm not saying I'm ready to replace Google by ChatGPT or Bing AI. I'm saying this is a huge step in the right direction overall for human-computer interaction, and Google has been sleeping at the wheel for this one.
They have this. But it's internal. But with 200,000 employees, that's a plenty big enough pool of testers.
This quote is 18 years old, and already by then it was established understanding that Google had extreme technical magic the rest of the world lacked. A rushed, bumbled tech demo in an area a company who for decades has invested billions in and widely enjoyed a perception of AI supremacy is a wildly different thing to a polished demo from a company nobody expects anything good to come from.
They have constantly encouraged the belief in their technical dominance in their marketing and hiring for as long as I can remember. If that's the perception externally, imagine how much more scathing a defeat it must feel to current employees.
Microsoft Word came after WordPerfect. Chrome came after Netscape Communicator. Python came after Perl. Nintendo came after Atari.
I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.
And pretty much all of them have better QC and a vaster maintenance network than Tesla (and in the E.U the charging network all use the same type of connector, so you are not tied to the manufacturer of your car).
But still, whenever you talk electric car, people often talk first about Tesla and they have no problem selling them. This might mostly be true in the E.U though. Also the model 3 is still priced fairly well being in-between the higher-end of the market and the intermediate.
Also, you don't really need to beat Tesla if you just want to make (and sell) electric cars. Tesla doesn't fill every niche and is nowhere near enough in terms of volume to satisfy the EV demand.
(If you want to be a bigger electric car company than Tesla then you have to beat Tesla, yeah -- that's a tautology, not an interesting observation tho).
*written by chatgpt
Google however came in with a different expectation. I remember something about one of their execs disparaging OpenAI over inaccuracies before. If you are going to sling mud, you had better make sure you don't have the same problem. Or it makes you look like a fool.
In your example, if I told that at random about 30% of the results were made up, you would not consider that a time saver. In fact it would be total time waster since you would have to vet every single entry. People think since 70% is accurate, only 30% work is needed but not if you don't know which 30% is bogus. You would need to check the entire work using conventional means including perhaps a 'regular' search engine.
* How does getting recommendations from a chatbot (what TV to buy) play with websites that produce such content (TV reviews) * How does it play with websites that rely on ad impression * How can you monetize a chatbot? (there's an easy way: free tier + monthly subscription) * How to reduce the massive compute cost of a good chatbot without making it bad (this also seems more straightforward)
But is this related to search? I'm a "pro ChatGPT" user (ie, I pay) and I don't use it for anything search related. It's entirely unrelated.
Google was worried Facebook would disrupt their Adwords dominance by having social ads.
ChatGPT, if successful (a large IF), will disrupt search and probably a dozen other business models.
I'm awaiting the true counterstrike from Google, not this initial flub.
It's not just blind optimism for the future of AI. We need search to be better because it's a cesspool of SEO spam/content farms and AI generated garbage. Search engines have declined in effectiveness and utility. We've lost even basic functionality like the consistent ability say "-whatever" to filter out garbage. Google, even DDG, have really dropped the ball here.
We're left looking for a savior and suddenly AI comes in and promises to be able to tell us whatever we need to know, it hints at a near future where AI is trained to see the spam and bring actual content to the top of search results again. We're so over dealing with the mess Google has made of their once awesome search engine that for a brief moment the entire internet was excited about fucking Bing!
I have to admit, I'm disappointed that it doesn't appear that Sydney will be the hero we need, but these are still early days and I hope all the attention leads to advancement in our understanding of AI and that fear of competition gets these companies to put a little more effort into improving the search engines they have now.
But the bigger thing is that Satya Nadella also has the "it" factor - he has a way of communicating effectively. Even when Microsoft is fucking you over for the last few years, they come out smelling like roses. Sundar doesn't have that gravity and gets overshadowed in public by the Google Cloud guy.
The markets hate the perception of weakness and punish it. Microsoft is taking Bing, a joke product, and it's repackaging of Chrome and pushing it from a place of strength. No different than stitching a bunch of random shit together created Teams, which made Slack instantly irrelevant and was the equivalent of flipping the bird at Google. They're dangerous to Google because of that.
Seems like it’ll be more interesting anyway.
I really hope so. LLM for search seems like a big leap right now. It isn't even really search but just a UI change for interacting with the underlying search engine. The caveats being that the people who actually think and create don't gain the clicks that they would get today (with the accompanying ad revenue) and there are no citations.
I really hope more companies realize that LLM for Wikimedia sites would be a vastly superior application of the technology. Could you imagine the impact this application would have given the sheer amount of knowledge and data that is on these sites? Learning and teaching would be changed from virtually the ground up. IMO, this is the killer app and not general search. Given the extreme verbosity and general un-readability of many technical pages on Wikipedia, a LLM that can summarize and answer questions correctly is a huge paradigm shift. Oh,don't know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is? Here you go. In whatever length of text you want. Want to know how this relates to Information Theory? Okay, here's a primer on that. The internet can once more become a place that people come to for learning rather than being fed total crap by an algorithm.
I do have to commend Satya Nadella though. He and Microsoft know exactly what they are doing. They know Google and Sundar Pichai are on the backfoot and they really are making them "dance". Bing + ChatGPT isn't really scalable right now. Riding the hype wave and putting pressure on Google hoping they make poor decisions based on short-minded thinking is the best thing they can do right now. Looks like it's working out well for them.
To question the underlying premise: what makes you so sure that an improved interface for searching _isn't_ meaningful? From what I can tell, we're a lot closer to optimal collection/categorization of data in search engines than we are to optimal interfaces for searching that data. We've all seen stories like the grandmother typing in questions into google with "please" and "thank you" (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/16/grandmother-...), and the concept of having good "google-fu" shows that right now, being able to find the answer to your question is influenced not just by whether the answer exists but whether you're skilled at _asking_ the question.
I don't think this improvement is limited to non-technical folks either. As an example from just the past couple of days for me, I recently have been running into issues with Linux gaming on my laptop due to abysmal power management, and from doing some research, it's somewhat of a known thing with my laptop brand and model. I decided to research what laptops are known for being good for gaming on Linux and also fit my specific preferences (at least 1440p, 16 GB or more RAM, and AMD CPU/GPU for good measure due to my issues being related to Nvidia's weirdness on Linux). I spent a good hour or two finding specific models that seemed promising, searching for mentions of them in places like /r/linux_gaming, looking up availability and prices, and while I found a few potentially decent options, I didn't have much confidence that I was finding all potential options. I found some options for laptop-specific searches that were purportedly able to let me select on whatever criteria I wanted (e.g. noteb.com, notebookcheck.net), but none of them let me pick the _exact_ critieria I wanted; some of them were too granular (e.g. making me search and select exact GPU models to check off instead of letting me just say something like "discrete AMD GPU from 2021 or later", or giving me a list of 30 or so different resolutions and making me manually check off the ones I wanted to include without enabling bulk checking with shift-click) and some of them were not granular enough (e.g. only letting me select a single resolution to search for at a time, or allowing me to require a discrete GPU but not specify the vendor). On a whim, I decided to open up a session with ChatGPT and present it with these criteria to see what it came up with. I needed to nudge it to prune a bit (occasionally it would give me a clearly incorrect option, e.g. one with an Nvidia GPU or only 1080p), but within a few messages, I was able to get it to generate dozens of options. Unfortunately, it only had knowledge up through 2021, and despite trying various roleplaying methods with it to circumvent the "I can't search the internet" policy based on things I saw back when it first became available, I wasn't able to get it to completely finish the job, so I only was able to use those options as a guide for looking up newer models and then finding reviews from people who had used them for Linux gaming. If/when a language model like that that has access to search current data is made generally available, it genuinely seems like that would be a game-changer.
Furthermore, Google's ongoing incorporation of ads into Google Maps and declining search quality may be turning search into a wasteland of SEO. This may be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, prompting discussion about whether a leadership change is needed.
Google search is worse than before.
Youtube recommendations feel worse than before.
Gmail lets in spam (maybe I was unlucky few times).
Android market / play market has very bad search...
Rest is stagnating? Maybe even better, at least they dont change it for worse.
They hired thousands of employees yet you cannot contact a person. What do those people even do?
"Everyone" (apart the CEO?) knows that in Google you get promoted for shipping half baked stuff, so for years they ship half baked stuff to kill it few years later.
Yes, and when we look again in 6 months, they will surpass Google already. It happened too many times in the last few years - something thought impossible was actually doable with a clever twist or two[1].
"When an error is made by their AI during a demo, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, should take the following steps to address the situation:
Acknowledge the error: The first step is to acknowledge the mistake and apologize for any inconvenience or confusion it may have caused. This helps to build trust with the audience and demonstrates that the company takes responsibility for their technology's shortcomings.
Explain the cause of the error: Pichai should explain the technical details of what went wrong and how the error occurred. This helps to demonstrate transparency and honesty and can help to build credibility with the audience.
Demonstrate the progress made in AI development: Despite the error, Pichai should showcase the progress made in AI development and highlight other successful demonstrations that have taken place. This helps to reassure the audience that the technology is making progress and that the company is committed to innovation and improvement.
Outline the steps being taken to prevent future errors: Pichai should outline the steps that are being taken to prevent similar errors from occurring in the future. This can include a discussion of the company's testing and development processes and any additional measures being put in place to improve the reliability of their AI systems.
By taking these steps, Pichai can demonstrate a commitment to transparency, innovation, and the improvement of their technology while also acknowledging the limitations and challenges of AI."
There you go - problem solved.
but in these cases ego can make us blind. or the belief that just because someone asked a question we have to respond.
I'll ignore the AI and "has Google lost its way?" threads, not that they're not interesting.
Rather, Sundar: he's the inevitable product when you hire a CEO based on his longevity and whether everyone likes him. In the military they distinguish between a "barracks general" and a "combat general." He's the former. He looks good when nothing bad is happening.
Seems like you could make an LLM generate product ideas and it would be about equally effective.
Beautifully put.
I knew there was some reason why I'm so irresistibly drawn to books about warfare.
Patton in WW II was the quintessential wartime general. Even though it WAS a war, his style was too much for Eisenhower. Until the Battle of the Bulge.
When Sundar reacts fast enough: Google's gone. The product was rushed. It is no where close to perfect. Could it be Google's been bluffing about its AI. What a knee-jerk reaction. Google needs a war-time CEO.
Meanwhile, Satya in Redmond: I want people to know that we made [Google] dance.
If Google was able to launch anything Bard related that someone could use -even if flawed- I think most people would call it a win. It would mean that Google takes it seriously but also has the tech on a shelf in a usable form. Google was understandably not worried about search until ChatGPT. Once the first whiff of search-replacement discussions happened in November, Google should have started scheduling a February release and prepped a plan. Or a marketing campaign warning about lying AIs or something real.
FWIW, I think it’s probably good that they didn’t release anything. If an AI search goes poorly, bing gets all the bad press. If it goes well, they can swoop in and say “now let the search engine you actually want do it”.
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 it's synonymous with failure. It's meme territory. It's not like MS is going to overcome that in a matter of weeks or even months.
Google has plenty of rope here.
Spot on.
Sundar was in fact chosen for his totally bland, milquetoast leadership style, because Google was getting to a size, level of influence, and power that was starting to make governments queasy.
Choosing as useless, bland, uninteresting, non-threatening NO-OP of a CEO was perceived to be the best move to preserve the enormous amount of goodwill the company had in the market, even if their actual cultural stance had shifted 180 degrees from the the "don't be evil" days.
Their response wasn't fast enough. They should have been experimenting with this stuff in public for years now, but they've kept it under cover.
This was a deflated promise from Google. They swore up and down they could blow Chat GPT out of the water. They just didn't release it for.... Reasons.
Now we see the answer. Chat GPT marches forward with name recognition and lots of trial and error. Google's future rests on an untested platform.
And yet, if they did that, and it didn't go anywhere, it would have been another addition to "KilledByGoogle". I'd rather Google release products when they are sure of the long term viability and plan.
> When Sundar doesn't react fast enough
They are like Xerox. Search-heads (reference to copy-heads)
> When Sundar reacts fast enough
This is exactly how a company with their thumb on the pulse of the internet should be reacting. The tech is already out there - at its infancy. This will not be Google+ 2.0...
> Satya in Redmond
Oh, no... let's rush this out now!! We can't lose momentum. This is our chance!!!
(In the last few days we've seen articles: Their demo was littered with errors, tons of factual errors surfacing, GPT-Bing getting "angry" with a user while making stuff up).
I think this was always going to play out this way. There was no other way it could go. We are beta-testing both (1) the products and (2) our ability to think critically when the results are spewed out.
Do you know that "war-time" is a banned phrase in Google, because it is just so f*@$ offensive? In the end, words are weapons used by Nazis. We need 1000 Gebru to do things ethically in Google /s
I think she is exactly the kind of responsible-AI people we don't need. We need responsible-responsible-AI people. She would rather burn all LLM technology and burry it.
Such a funny thing imaging that team at Google going around patting themselves on the back for bringing in an "ethical" AI advocate, like lol, if that's what she is what the heck were all of you then?
Then of course the ethical AI advocate blows the whole thing up. Because of course, and why not? It's probably more ethical to destroy the thing anyway.
I know which one I'd rather join.
I don’t think either Bing Chat or Bard is ready to be released widely. You need a certain mindset to be able to wring value out of them, and most normal users will not think this way.
That being said, it’s probably fine to release these tools to enthusiastic early adopters who understand how to use them.
And yet it will be, because everyone is wowed so we need something out to capture those wowbucks. There are meetings all over the place to figure out "how to best leverage that technology in our product". While there is some value to raise GPT3 as a technology available in your toolbox, these are largely "let's find a problem that this can fix" meetings, and you can bet your sweet ass we'll see GPT in all sorts of stupid maladapted use cases very soon.
Also, whatever happened to just slapping 'beta' on the product and calling it good to roll out? I'm only half kidding as the issue wasn't that products were labeled 'beta', it's that they seemingly never came out of beta.
[1] Actually even more so today than pre-ML Google since the services now are constantly (incorrectly) deciding that what I'm asking for isn't actually what I want.
e.g, my wife and family members would enter:
* "Distance from Toronto to vancouver" * "How old is the universe" * "What is the capital of Belgium"
I'd enter:
* "Toronto vancouver distance" * "Universe age" * "Capital Belgium"
etc.. you get the point. So for those, I think the ChatGPT approach of "ask question in natural language, get natural language response" is actually quite attractive. Provided it's not outright hallucinating the answer
All of these companies know the tech isn't ready, but they couldn't afford to be left behind when someone moved. It's funny, because this happens quite often in tech. Remember when Tesla announced self-driving? Suddenly Intel were doing deals with MobilEye and BMW, GM did Cruise etc. etc. and then 5-10 years later nothing has been delivered? They all jumped the gun and couldn't afford ot be left behind.
There’s lots of papers on hybrid information retrieval with LLMs that is probably the right strategy for Google rather than a chat bot (which they tried with Google Assistant which was fairly accurate but not very useful). The main issue with these models right now is they are horrible at recalling facts from their training set but incredible at pulling facts from their prompt. Google has the best IR and LLM researchers in the world, they just need a bolder strategy rather than this FOMO strategy.
so traditional news media was like "aight, bet" and now we are where we are.
the trump era fully solidified that the more ragetastic you can make your title, the more people tribe up and engage in the comments so your one shitty little 30 second article now has people mobbing together in droves for the comments and your ad rate is through the roof. what you're writing doesn't even have to have any fact, it can be all opinion, and in most cases this can afford you even more leeway to be inflammatory.
does anybody else see this happening or am I just here rambling at the sky?
Same thing with Wave, Google Plus, Allo, Reader, countless examples.
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.
> Interactive chart of Alphabet (GOOG) annual worldwide employee count from 2010 to 2022. Alphabet total number of employees in 2022 was 190,234
There should be a rule where you can't over-represent a group of people in media headlines.
What percentage of 190,000 people called the CEOs response a dumpster fire?
What percentage of 190,000 are even aware of ChatGPT or Google's response to it?
That said, you can add me as an Xoogler who thinks that Sundar is phenomenally bad at managing the company.
Sometimes it's just as bad as when the media quotes a random tweet from a nobody as their source for "the people" or "the public".
it's almost like they should be required to provide sources
imagine if this headline said "30 out of 190,000 employees noisy/outspoken employees have an angsty opinion on google's CEO"
He funded the Brain team that came up with major research breakthroughs like Transformers that power ChatGPT.
AI is embedded behind the scenes in pretty much every Google product, you just don't know it because it's not packaged into a fancy chat interface. They didn't push Bard because they know LLMs have problems with getting facts straight, and they still are rolling it out in response to ChatGPT very cautiously.
Objectively, Google is doing just fine as far as I know. So my personal subjective experience is just that: anecdotal.
However, over the last 6 years I have found myself abandoning Google's products en masse, with the most notable being search.
Where Google really shined in its application of ML IMO was eliminating spam. Since then they have tried to use ML to solve all sorts of problems and it has only served to make their products worse.
I switched away from search because, at some point, it started trying to infer some sort of meaning from my keywords when all I want are 1:1 keyword matches ranked by relevance, with exclusion and grouping operators. I started using DuckDuckGo not because of privacy concerns (ok maybe a little bit because of privacy concerns), but because I started to find that it was giving me more relevant results.
I use GMail for work and it's fine, but even that widely popular product doesn't seem any better than the alternatives these days. I still have an ancient Yahoo mail account from the 90s and I use Tutanota for other personal email addresses. Granted, I'm not an email power user so I don't really use tags or other advanced features. Maybe GMail really shines there. But for a simple email client with good spam filtering, GMail is no better than alternatives these days IMO.
Google docs and sheets are OK. I'm not sure how those are leveraging ML but it's the same deal as with GMail. I've used Office365, G-Suite and Libre Office running locally and as for features the only difference in functionality that I can observe is cloud vs local; if that's not a factor then they are all interchangeable.
So I don't see how being "AI First" has improved the end user experience. I liked their products much better 10 years ago.
Wrong.
Like all good McKinsey trained goons, Sundar has been trained to jump on existing established trends.
He did realize the size of the AI swell when it was already very big and hopped on the gravy train.
The deep net powered AI revolution started way before Sundar ever realized it was important.
And all of this is nice, but none of the dollars poured into AI R&D at Google have been converted to a world changing product.
Sure, you can now get Google to recognize your pet in your photos.
But given all the shite they invented since 2010-ish in the AI domain, you'd think they'd have found a way to make something useful with it.
I can think of maybe three places where AI really shines in Google products: translate, photos and spam filtering. That's it. Given the billions poured in the AI R&D black hole, that's really nothing to be proud of as a CEO.
AI hype train started back in 2015.
They completely missed the mark on LLMs as a critical component of search. They are AI last. This company had to be dragged into innovating on their core business using their supposed core competency.
ChatGPT went first, nothing Google does will change that, that's too late. The only thing they can do if they don't want to lose face is the "we didn't make it available because we want to do it well" strategy. It has been used many times by Apple when competitors beat them at some features, so much that it has become a meme at some point, but it worked.
And I've seen hints of Google going in that direction, pointing out things like reliability issues most people came to know about by now, implying that they already can do what ChatGPT can do, but unlike their competitors, they don't release half-assed products.
But their latest announcement breaks everything, they are essentially admitting defeat. They didn't manage to be the first to market, and they can't claim they took their time to release a quality product instead. So it was either a terrible communication blunder, or they really didn't have much choice, with the latter being a real possibility, I understand investors reactions.
He is good as a caretaker who didn't rock the boat, but Google needs bold innovation and competence if it intends on staying relevant in the years to come.
Good riddance.
> who didn't rock the boat
He was chosen for his exceptional ability to not rock the boat. Unfortunately, that's about the only skill he's displayed so far (oh yeah, and being "thoughtful" about stuff).
However, I am starting to think that moving it to bing already wasn’t a smart move. These things are great on OpenAI scale. But I fear they are a money pit with bad pr for google and even bing scale.
Tell us more?
If that is real (and hopefully I can find it and update this post)… that would indicate Google has been working on it for years, never thought it was ready, and then decided to snap-deploy it after ChatGPT’s success. Which, predictably, would make a massive mess internally as reported here. I find it believable.
UPDATE: OK, it was called "Apprentice Bard." However, that names comes from CNBC in 2023, but CNBC doesn't say when "Apprentice Bard" actually began development. However, "Apprentice Bard" was a replacement for Google's first internal chatbot solution Meena, which Google did deploy internally and also publicly revealed only for bragging rights (and not actual use) in January 2020 (and so the 2019 figure in my head does somewhat line up). So if you think about the Bard project as having started with Meena... sounds about right. https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-age...
Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and maybe the Jassy of Amazon.
Chatbots were just a worse way to fill out a form. NFTs we’re…where to even begin.
But I’ve already used GPT to write thank you note and create a blog post, and I’ve used midjourney to create stock photos.
Neither of those are searching for information, though, which is a very different use case.
If 95% of the time GPT writes a great thank you note, that's very useful. If 95% of the time Midjourney gives me a good stock image, that's great! If 95% of the time GPT gives me a correct search result, that's horrible, because I now have to fact-check every time I do a search; I can no longer trust the output.
Unfortunately Microsoft didn't realize this and may have just bought itself a $10 billion parlor trick machine.
Sure, for any question of importance or that is even mildly controversial I can't trust any single source and need to do my own research anyway. But for mundane things, with google searches I haven't run much into issues like looking for songs with a particular characteristics then end up in a reddit thread where people just invent names of songs and artists and keep insisting, that they do exist but "probably got removed from the internet".
The whole point of a thank you note is that it takes time and effort. You didn’t write a thank you note, you forged one.
e.g. generate 3d models of X animating Y with this exact resolution, etc. and then choose the best ones as a starting point.
Or using this drum sample generate a load of bass tracks and then choose the best one, etc.
But yeah then it can be useful for small things where the quality isn't super-critical but otherwise might just go without art entirely - like indie games, small organisations, etc.
And I played Counterstrike for a first person video game, and I used a Dewalt impact driver to drive in some screws, and I slept on a Purple mattress. How does any of this mean Google is doomed?
Another possibility is that the LLM just gets used as an NLU front-end to the search engine. In that case keyword search essentially goes away and semantic search allows people to actually ask questions rather than playing the keyword/phrase guessing game.
Either way, it seems like the advertising game on the web is going to change.
This may seem amazing but the more interesting thing is where it takes us in a year, 5 years, etc.
Or maybe it ends up like uber vs lyft. The cost of using LLMs is so high, maybe we see products with unsustainable economics in the quest for dominance, followed by something shittier.
Personally, I'm in the camp that google is in a great position specifically because of their TPUs. They already have the infra to do this at crazy scale including the hardware. I'm betting it's a marathon, not a sprint, before we see an economically sustainable LLM based interact-with-all-of-human-knowledge tool like we're expecting. ChatGPT has spoiled our expectations by being free.
Thats true, but they could just use MLLs instead. Much cheaper.
Drama is the product, not reality or any actual in-depth tech journalism.
Google got a wake-up call, but search will be just fine. Google controls search defaults on Android, iOS, Chrome on Windows, and Firefox. Not to mention on TVs, voice control, it's everywhere.
Google can launch a new product to billions of people with the press of a button, Microsoft...not so much. You could argue they can push it into Windows, but most people are on their phones these days. Microsoft has no serious presence in the consumer space anymore.
This is what will buy Google time to integrate a competing service, which I expect to be better as it sits on a lot more data.
Just kidding, I would absolutely recommend dumping Google stock.
Everyone's aware of the messaging-app missteps. I'll share a more tactical example. Recently Google Home "beta" was launched with lots of messaging via email & twitter to join the Beta. All of the CTAs were broken. The "beta" that was expected in days took a couple months to land. Compare that to Bing ChatGPT Beta which had a clear CTA into the enrollment program ( activate Edge, Bing, etc) and waitlist.
Google has a strong community of fans but they do a poor job of engaging their audience. Microsoft by comparison has MSDN, MS Insiders, etc.
The Bard (horrible name, btw) debacle was not a singular event but a culmination of many product marketing issues. As a fan, i hope they make some big changes.
Edit: the Watson that played Jeopardy was smart (for that time) natural language processing, that backed on to a large fact store, generated from natural language processing of a relatively small set of sources like Wikipedia.
The Watson that was sold to companies was essentially a consulting service. I'm sure they had some re-usable components, but it's possible those components weren't much more than data pipelines, model training, etc. Most of the smarts were people doing a ton of data science specific to each problem. Worthwhile, but only good compared to companies who don't have a data science function.
Conversely, "modern" AI is things like LLMs, which have their own problems of course, but are a huge paradigm shift compared to Watson.
There never was any tech. backing it up.
It would have been forgivable in a live demo, but they didn't do one because they "lost"[0] the phone.
0 - There's a chance they didn't do the demo on purpose because it wasn't ready.
Edit: a quick look at the chart shows the drop was off a recent peak and current price is roughly the 3mth mean. Tempest in teacup then.
What Sundar has done well is the AI first focus. Deepmind acquisition was key and they are developing their own chat thing which very well might bail them out. Thanks to him, Google spends a large amount in AI related R&D.
What Sundar's main issue is his philosophy of "Reward Effort, Not Outcomes". This leads to people pretending to work hard, releasing half baked products. Instead he should change this to awarding long term outcomes.
His other issue is that he is not a good storyteller (e.g. like Nadella). Being a non-founder CEO he needs to work on this.
Name one thing Deepmind produced that had a tangible positive impact on Google's bottom line.
On the flip side, I think Microsoft has made a strategic mistake of going after search openly. Satya literally called out Google to compete.
Google also has a lot of money and will not lose easily. This war is going to cost a lot of money for both of them.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Recent and related:
Google employees criticize CEO for ‘rushed, botched’ announcement of Bard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 - Feb 2023 (36 comments)
"That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago"
I suppose this was meant to reframe the conversation around Google being a leader, but I think it has the opposite effect. It comes off as defensive and of course, quite honestly, if you planted the flag so much earlier, why don't you have a product to show for it in the way that OpenAI does?
What's perhaps more interesting though: does Google have an innovator's dilemma here?
Google built a flywheel that drives its ads business: sites are hungry for traffic so they structure in such a way that attracts Google's attention, and that structure in turn helps Google serve relevant ads. People tend to click on the first link (the most relevant link).
In the context of a chat interface, what happens if there is no link? Or only one result (the perfect answer)? What if there is much less traffic going directly to websites? And yet without that long tail of websites, how do you train your language model to know the answer?
Fascinating times!
He was elevated to CEO of Google to keep things running as-is while the founders moved their exciting ventures up to Alphabet. When those other bets were abandoned, Sundar was left as the top engaged executive, but he's still only a caretaker when the company needs an actual leader with vision to navigate their competition.
So, no. He has not been a good CEO. He was a good middle-manager and a decent CEO at best, but he's not been what the company needed, and he's definitely not what they need today.
He's lucky because the entire market has increased, but that's his doing. He could be replaced by any overly cautious algorithm and the results would have been the same.
Why not wait for a moment and see what unfolds? ChatGPT has only been alive for a few months. Why does google need an answer immediately? They should take their time and be calculated instead of rushing out some half baked AI search solution.
How is GPT-search supposed to be profitable anyways? The traditional model of targeted advertising would be insufferable if injected into a chat bot.
Entrenched tech companies are desperate for the next big thing. Tech is pretty stale right now. I suspect they're trying to will ChatGPT to be that. Think 3D TV's and VR. Kinda cool for the 30 seconds you play with it at the store, but just doesn't quite capture the imagination much longer after that.
But your broader point remains, LLMs are a small improvement for search technology and a quantum leap forward for editing, cheating on leetcode, consulting, etc.
Wikipedia that describes this as such [0]:
> ...when presentation assistant Chris Capossela plugged a USB scanner in, the operating system crashed, displaying a Blue Screen of Death. Bill Gates remarked after derisive applause and cheering from the audience, "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet." Video footage of this event became a popular Internet phenomenon.
In a subsequent paragraph about the sales Wikipedia says:
>In the first year of its release, Windows 98 ... had a market share of 17.2 percent, compared to Windows 95's 57.4 percent
And it's definitely not just me who still remembers this. There's for example an article from the Register reviewing it 20 years after [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98?wprov=sfla1
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
Google being 'second mover' to AI Chat might be the smart play, or it might be terrible.
I'm very surprised even here people aren't realizing we don't know how this plays out yet.
Microsoft shipped someone else's product to the world and is getting the results to iterate on for their next version.
The fumbled response by Google distracts from the fact that you're going to need exponential amounts of training data and only one of the companies is in a position to collect it.
It is not an accident, imho, that it is Microsoft that somehow emerges as Google's "nemesis". After all it was MS' business model that Google disrupted with mass market "freebies" such as gmail, docs etc. While "disrupting search" might be the immediate skirmish, the bigger battle is about broadly defined "AI augmented information management": who will offer it to the masses, under which business model etc.
My feeling (nowhere near a complete analysis) is that Google will lose this war even if, as it is widely assumed, it has the technical advantage. This is because it has been happily cornered in an extremely lucrative but ultimately dead-end business model. AI augmentation as part of its existing search/adtech model is a marginal and even problematic (loss making) addition, whereas as part a re-invented MS it can blow new life into its old bread-and-butter business that has been commoditized. A wildcard in all this is (as always) Apple, but whatever its eventual approach to AI, it is likely to be just another headwind for Google.
NB: I am a lifelong open source enthusiast, I have no stake or love for any of the above entities. The ideal, least dangerous, most beneficial form of AI augmentation would be as a widely available and open source digital public good.
But BD plays build quite good moat. So I think they'll be fine.
In my view this is overhyped as a google replacement and the cracks are showing.
They have been, and will always be a hollow shell of interaction. Has social drive atrophied so much that many (most under 30?) prefer to talk to nothing instead of taking to someone?
It might not be a social interaction, but it's really not hard to imagine that it has a lot of potential.
This would mean Bard is a significantly smaller model vs ChatGPT, which would mean it generalizes worse for most tasks. The full featured lamda model is about 22% smaller than the GPT3 model that ChatGPT is based off of.
Siri, Alexa, etc. were all supposed to be existential threats to Google's search, and then they weren't
And almost all programmers need to do something quick in a language or framework they aren’t experts in.
ChatGPT can be extremely useful in those cases in my experience.
