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Comment by deadmutex | Hacker News Reader

> Does he really believe this?

Google Translate, Google Photos, YouTube Recommendations, etc. and many many more are powered by AI. It is included also sprinkled in features such as gmail smart reply, etc.

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Google Translate and Google Photos are good examples, but YouTube Recommendations is absolute garbage in my experience. Heck, I'm not even sure it's using any sort of AI because it seems to mostly want to funnel me to the currently most popular videos, not anything similar to the things I actually watch. I mean, it'll recommend new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to, but almost everything else is music videos in languages I don't speak, sports clips when I don't watch any sports, local news from countries I don't live in, and videos from channels like the Paul brothers, which I abhor.

No matter how many recommendations I click "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" on, there's still an endless list of completely irrelevant, unwanted content and channels.

Same as with ads:

There's always another pay-to-win "strategy" game, another "revolutionary Japanese chefs knife", some brilliant genius that has made a device that heats your house for free

... not a single remotely useful ad.

I too have tried to click them away as not relevant, but I think Google now sell ads by impression, not by clicks so they don't care at all.

Google Lens, AI algorithms for pixel cameras, voice recognition for Assistant, Translate, etc. We really just focus on Search being bad - a lot of which is because of SEO spam.

When it comes to big companies, Google does have pretty good AI in products. I don't particularly find any mature product bad per se.

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