Google dusts off the Google+ playbook to fight ChatGPT
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I confess that the current ChatGPT hype wave leaves me feeling cold. A lot of people are obviously excited about it. But then, a lot of people have been excited about VR and blockchains, and I'm still waiting to see significant uptake. I have to wonder if this is another area where it's more sci-fi driven novelty hypnosis than the beginning of a revolution.
That's essentially where we are going with this.
There is, in fact, a vast amount of talk about that, has been for decades. You might not see a lot of it on HN, but that's mostly because its off-topic.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/may-2021-rtx-dlss-...
The FPS effect is tangible. The visual effect is subtle in a game made in 2016 before anyone in the mainstream was talking about this sort of thing, but imagine the possibilities for an indie developer without much funding. They can make their assets at a resolution that's reasonable for their budget, but that would look bad scaled up with traditional methods. They can offer higher resolutions at AAA quality without an AAA performance tuning and asset budget.
Also I think that once GPT will understand images the designers and front-end devs jobs will start evaporating.
Google -> Stack Overflow
With...
chatGPT --maybe--> Google --> Stack Overflow
I won't make predictions about the future, but it's been pretty transitive for today.
ChatGPT is great for doing some of the heavy lifting. I pasted in a list of raw, unprocessed data and asked it to give me unique values sorted alphabetically. I know I could have done it in code, but just being able to paste it in, give a plain English command and get the same results was fantastic.
Although hmm, on the other hand, it's also arguable that what we may have have coded would be subject to errors too.
A bit ironically, if it is regarding a fact, I perform a search on DDG or google and find an authoritative website or paper to corroborate it. So it still feels like search outside of an LLM is an important tool. If the result is code I can test it myself.
I've had a few times where I didn't like the library that it used to come to the results, I just told it 'use library xyz' and it would rewrite the whole thing using idioms native to that library. It's amazing. It's eliminated like 75% of the drudgery that I've come to hate so much about programming the last years.
I think beginning of a revolution. The ground has shifted under our feet.
It'll be really interesting to see how resistent it is to these problems.
Once upon a time Google Search was a great product.
I believe that gives an answer. But the right answer? Even Wikipedia doesn't guarantee that.
dunno about blockchains, but i'm sure there isn't 100million VR units sold. Plus you don't need to pay upfront to use chatGPT to try it. And everyone who has tried it has been amazed, or at least, impressed at how good the responses are.
Not saying that the language models and AI hype is to be believed, but there's substance there. If you are an investor, you should be wary of missing out. And if you're not an investor, you should be wary of losing your human advantage in the economy.
This is almost the definition of a novelty effect. Consider, for example, 3D.
Stereoscopic 3D has gone through at least 5 waves of people trying it, saying, "Amazing! This will change everything!" But so far every time everything has not been changed. (The 5 waves I count: Brewster stereoscopes in the 1850s, 3D still viewers in the 1940s, 3D movies in the 1950s, VR in the 1990s, and 3D movies/TV starting in 2009. Assuming that we see the current wave of VR/metaverse hype as still open, of course.)
The question for me is what happens once something gets past "amazing". For example, consider Shazam's music recognition technology. It was widely considered amazing at the time. But in very short order it became boring, as it had basically one use case, one that did not matter much to most people.
I rented the Quest for a couple weeks at Christmastime. The first week everybody thought it was amazing, me included. Things tapered off in the second week, with the kids back on their Switches and the Playstation. When I mailed it back nobody even noticed.
I hear a fair number of anecdotes like that. And I find very few people for whom VR games are a daily driver the way, say, mobile games are.
ChatGPT is being used by common people in practical ways, not just going "wow." It's already proven itself.
So: We are already there, all without ChatGPT... ChatGPT (with its cool ways to make it nondeterministic, like: replacing tokens with synonyms and raising the temperature. Or: retraining it...) will make things worse definitely.
Probably the way to go is for {academia,sects,orgs with sense for humanity,...} to build stores of attributable information and then start shunning the branches which produce bullshit (this is what scientific publishing should do already.... it doesn't... even without ChatGPT there's already templated articles strewn around the corpus and noone cares). The main issue there is, that this means that they will also have to stop using a lot of technology (and buy a 32nm foundry...), because many orgs are probably already poisoned.
This was the first result: https://applications.messergroup.com/co2-applications
There were a number of other relevant results. Papers on various applications of CO2, forum posts, etc. Nothing on emissions.
Sure google is a lot worse these days than it used to be, but it still seems plenty usable to me and I have no issues finding what I want with some basic operators.
The problem imo is that Google was good enough that basic operators were not required, as such the avg Joe is amazed when finding out that such operators exist, and Google doesn’t really promote the advanced search page these days.
Sure this talks a lot about emissions, but it also seems to include a detailed breakdown of various industrial uses for CO2, with numbers, projections, statistics and all.
First result for “co2 industrial usage numbers”, without quotes - just like the sibling comment.
You need to specify atleast a few keywords to clarify what you’re looking for - search engine nor llm chatbot nor HN commenters can read your mind…
It's one of the most common patterns I come across. I search word X but find a bunch of word Y stuff that's not what I'm looking for, because word X and Y appear together a lot in Y's context. So I add -Y to the query.
It's become a tool that basically anyone can at least get some information out of. Googling used to be a skill that non-technical people struggled with.
In other words, it's more of a social than a technical issue.
And without commercial buy in, I can’t see why anyone apart from computer geeks and scammers would want to use it. The first question your average users would ask is “why isn’t $SHOP on there”.
Much as I dislike the modern web, it’s what the people have chosen in exchange for free services (like email) and convenience (like online shopping).
And to repeat my earlier point, an EULA isn’t going to keep your vision clean. Malicious actors aren’t going to give a hoot about any EULA. And any business that might take an EULA seriously would simply choose not to use such a minority platform anyway.
Also if this “EULA” is targeting how companies use your platform, then it’s not an EULA. What you’re talking about is a different type of contractual agreement.
I'm not sure more, better rule are going to stop a rule engine from participating. If anything, formalized rules merely makes it easier to train the machine learning system du jour to follow them.
My modest proposal is to go the other direction - fill the entire internet with garbage data so that the generative models trained on it become useless. Clearly there's nothing that could go wrong with this plan.
The masses are still on mainstream platforms, but more and more people are nauseated by the instagrams of this world.
Sooner or later some group will realize it becomes necessary to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another, and you'll have a formal split.
In short, I think people are wired to do better in smaller groups and I welcome this balkanization, albeit with the caveat that the communities can interconnect and grow/shrink/die/emerge organically to suit the needs of the people within them instead of commercial investors.
But on the other hand it's hard to deny that the mainstream internet is getting worse and worse. I grew up with the internet as my nanny, but I'm moving closer and closer to the idea that smaller groups focused on specific interests really do provide better experiences.
Perhaps it was never meant to be, and the sweet spot is just living your life completely offline and using the Internet for Wikipedia and Whatsapp.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444411-it-s-like-in-the-gr...
This sounds like a legit use for ChatGPT :-)
Like how facebook or github account depend on your phone number, or free trials depend on your credit card number.
blockchain?
all that pointless CO2 for nothing
ChatGPT is a symptom that perhaps finally raises discussion of the root problem above the noise. Yeah, ironic.
It’s speculated libgen is in there as well.
It was an interesting time, because (from memory) 2000 was still "It's pretty complicated for average person to create and post content on the web" and transitioned to 2010's "There are highly polished, easy to use, free SaaS solutions that a trained dog could use." With mobile versions of same in the next few years. (All dates mass market penetration, not first release)
There was a direct correlation between ease-of-publishing and less intellectual discourse on the web.
"Info decay" was definitely a good way to put it. It wasn't that people were necessarily dumb or angry, but that there was a lot more honestly incorrect information online.
Before, there were crackpots, but it was pretty easy to tell they were crazy.
Having seen both, the banal wrongness is far worse.
I think that's one reason wikipedia really took off ~2005+. People were craving an easier way to get even roughly-right information.
I would argue this is a problem stemming from the way "AI" is presented rather than anything to do with "AI" itself.
That is to say, fucking nobody trusts autocorrect to be correct and "AI" is really just a more complex form of autocorrect.
But people hear "AI" and think AI as in Transformers, Terminator, R2-D2, etc. They're intelligent, right? And that's where the presentation is doing significant harm. There is nothing intelligent, let alone sentient, about "AI".
Many of my coworkers feel the same. And this started way before GPT was conceived.
Besides, your post somehow feels like generic technology-angst to me. It seems like whenever we invent something new, there are those people that predict this is finally our demise...
GGPT is a tool, like every other technology. Use it wisely, and you will likely benefit. Use it without engaging your brain, and you will like see negative effects.
As for ChatGPT, I'm actually using it and it enhances my productivity by a lot. So, I believe this isn't just hype.
While Blockchain only has hype, AI has hype and real applications. While there are enough bottom-feeder AI bros on Twitter and Discord, AI does have real applications and it solves real problems and makes people real money.
You need to shift your focus from the AGI and LLM hype to real application areas.
I have shipped end-user facing real world AI product myself. It saved each client (non tech companies) 2-3mn USD per year, and made our company money.
I can say with authority that if you think AI and blockchain are the same, you are plain WRONG.
That's why I wrote non-tech companies in parenthesis.
For a tech company, you can sell codegen software where the customers solely determine value.
You can sell another tech company Blockchain Snake Oil and make money off of it.
My work was not such a case. End users, consumers saw real value which made their lives better in a small way, and help save our coustomer, a business- save millions of dollars.
I really care about my work, and rejected many offers where I could have made more money working on snake oil recipe.
> I can say with authority that if you think AI and blockchain are the same, you are plain WRONG.
Is attacking a straw man that you built all by yourself.
But as with both of those and plenty of other novel technology, whether or not I like it doesn't answer most of my questions, which are about what other people will use things for. E.g., I did not like YouTube, but I am just not a video person. So me using YouTube and saying "meh" wasn't informative, because I wasn't the target audience. Similarly, I was wowed by the modern VR experience, but being wowed didn't make me a long-term user, something apparently true for a lot of people.
And that goes double for anything that is supposed to be meaningful human connection. E.g., after my mom died, I got a number of nice notes of condolence from people. I appreciated them. If any of them had felt machine-generated, that person would be dead to me.
So my general feeling about the composition case is that it is going to vastly enable the generation of documents that are, to one degree or another, bullshit. And I don't think that's a net positive for society. It's not like we had a bullshit shortage previously.
And this is a straw man:
> Pulitzer prize email that evokes monumental emotions
There's nothing wrong with a plain and simple email. Indeed, I think that's generally better unless the writer finds it worth the time to write something fancier.
- Customer reviews on sites like Amazon can be gamed with significantly better accuracy, at significantly higher numbers. Presumably there will be a period where this is successful for marketers, and then eventually people will come to wholly distrust customer reviews altogether. This will also likely be the death of the "reddit" trick, where you can just query on reddit for real, live customer experiences with products.
- Significantly increased ads on anything like a social network, where a "user" might be talking about a product.
- Generally cheaper ability to write advertisements in a broad category of platforms.
- Sponsored misinformation (government, corporate, etc.) at scale.
To be clear, I think that ChatGPT is going to be a disaster for the internet.
The recent South Park episode where the boys are using ChatGPT to write the perfect romantic replies to their girlfriends really opened my eyes to how impactful this is going to be, not just business copywriting/education essays/etc but even for social interactions like dating (Tinder is going to get interesting).
It's like an autocomplete for your day-to-day life.
Its going to be integrated in less than 12 months
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste...
First, that just means ChatGPT had 100m people enter their email into the registration page. Second, none of those 100m users had to invest any money, unlike VR or blockchain.
But it's definitely not going to go nearly as far as people are predicting. The more i use it the more it becomes apparent to me that there's no real intelligence behind it, just large-scale pattern recognition that makes it seem real because I'm not intelligent enough to comprehend the patterns.
Does it even need to be to be useful?
A ChatGPT that is legitimately "intelligent" would basically be the El Dorado of tech. There's plenty of value between here and there.
The big issue IMO is people are going to Chatgpt's website explicitly and having certain high expectations. Or they use it via Bing expecting it to be a search engine answer machine. Once such an interface is more directly integrated into our lives in a clean way where people understand what it is and what the limitations are it could easily be an app that basically everyone has installed, but more like a super-useful tool like Google Maps rather than replacing Google. That's still a big business and major development for the industry.
And even if the consumer daily-used mobile app thing or some high-visibility Google integration turns out to be less interesting/useful than predicted, there's still a million niche business and hobby usecases.
> training it off of Reddit posts and then making a surprise pikachu face when it turns out to be an arrogant cunt
The hype is real.
But continuing with your analogy, I'll note that the people who fight financial crimes and fraud have absolutely had to integrate responses to cryptocurrencies. That didn't prove that there was lasting value to the cryptocurrency hype wave.
I will note that you didn't use it for most of the coding. And that looking at your code, you also seem perfectly capable of figuring out the AppleScript if you had wanted to. In an amount of time that would not have wildly increased the total project time.
So overall, this looks very "stone soup" to me. Did it get you over a hump? Surely. Did it actually contribute much in terms of code? Not from what I see in your script.
I do support work myself, and our developers have a function that is broken and shoving too much stuff into the database. This crap is compiled into a DLL so I can't do anything about directly. Went to GPT and said "hey, I have a table named X, when Y updates write a trigger that deletes this"
In a few seconds it dumps out a working trigger. Now, I've never written one of these before, dong SQL stuff isn't really my forte, but with a basic understanding of what I needed done I got working code with an explanation faster than I could parse the how to.
Even if AI doesn't contribute more than that, for lots of use cases it's more than enough.
This sort of reminds me of the 3d-printing hype cycle. People were very excited! We could make any object! We could soon be 3d-printing 3d printers! But in practice, 3d printing is now mostly useful for small, marginally valuable stuff. That's not nothing; I have friends who are excited about their 3d printers. But I also have friends who are excited about woodworking and accordion playing and falconry. But none of these are particularly world-changing.
My interest in it is this: given this (flawed) technology exists, what are the things we can use it for that are genuinely useful and help us build interesting things that we may not have built before?
I've been finding an increasing number of areas where it gives me a 10-30% productivity boost... and a few areas like the above one where that tips me from "not going to do that project" to "doing that project". Those are what's exciting to me, far away from the breathless hype around this stuff.
So in this case the leg-up that GPT gave me was the difference between the project existing and it not existing at all.
You should start believing people are using this.
People are comparing LLM hype to crypto and VR hype and that’s really not accurate. Those are both always in a state of “someone is using it now, and a ton of people will use it in the future”. ChatGPT is in a state of “a ton of people are using it now”.
It would remind me of the explosion of social networking, except it doesn’t have network effects! It’s crazy how much it’s getting used by all sorts of people not because they want to interact with their friends (messaging apps) but just because they want to use it.
I was a big AI and even just generally ML doubter until I started using it as part of my workflow and reading about how other people are, too. At that point, you kinda have to update your priors.
To my shock, She started explaining to me how awesome it is and how all of her teacher friends are using it to offload a lot of the boring work like writing comments and stuff for students report cards. They are required to write numerous paragraphs for each student several times.
Something in the past I would take my wife an entire week each time.
These are people that need help setting up Wi-Fi on a laptop. And they are in love with ChatGPT.
She manages 80 students.
Alternate would be school hire a lot more staff.
If I'm understanding right, your wife is coming up with some bullet point style feedback about each of her students as part of a recurring evaluation, then using ChatGPT to generate lengthy prose from those bullet points.
Hailing ChatGPT as a savior here feels something like the tail wagging the dog. Why not just change the nature of the task so that what's required is to provide the quick bullet points, instead of using language model prose generation as a go-between for communication from teacher to student? What value is being added by the middle ChatGPT layer? More importantly, what value was being added by the 36 hours of marginal effort previously spent doing this manually?
That's one of my main hang ups with all the proposed use cases of ChatGPT - it seems we've created arbitrary problems and now have this complicated tool to solve them. Which in turn will enable us to keep making bigger and more arbitrary problems. But the problems don't need to exist in the first place
Reducing internal pushback to customer hostile bureaucratic requirements imposed by management on employees is a harmful effect of ChatGPT, not a benefit.
I agree with what you say. However she is not willing to a fight worldwide bureaucracy.
Employee pushback isn’t just individual.
What were they doing before ChatGPT?
Teachers tend to work very long hours because of having to grade work, write these kinds of reports, etc, all in their "non-teaching" time.
My entire family fully understands it's just a tool, you need to check it's output, and it's not perfect but it's saved them a bunch of time and allows them to focus on what they are best at by getting a good starting point from *GPT.
I'm not fully convinced it was a net-positive, because sometimes asking the "dumb" question shows that other people in class had that question but didn't want to ask, or didn't know they had that question until someone else voiced it.
The simple fact that people are predicting that GPT will somehow change the world makes me doubt its actual value.
I think ChatGPT is worth doubting, but I think your examples need some work.
I pay for a premium OpenAI ChatGPT account, but except for explaining what code in unfamiliar programming languages does (including libraries it is calling), and occasionally having it write an email for me I don't get a lot of value out of it.
I do get a lot of value from the OpenAI APIs (as well as the offerings from Hugging Face).
This is worrisome because I think mega corporations like Microsoft and Google want AI to just be a fun little tool for drafting emails and writing jokes and recipes. Any more powerful language constructions are too risky to their existing business models or too risky in terms of PR. People will just screenshot something the AI says philosophically and it will get retweeted and people will lose their mind.
I really hope a open source workable competitor to chatGPT emerges soon.
IMO it's not the task of governments to be prepared to address misinformation. It's an individual responsibility. This requires an educated civil society with the media literacy necessary to make a democracy work in the 21st century. It's an ongoing, aspirational project. ...and we can't wait until we think we're ready.
There is no amount of 'media literacy' training (which, in practice, would have to be created and administered by public schools under the watchful eye of some of the selfsame disinformation purveyors, in some states) that will ever be up to the task.
Sometimes I feel that the skill level demanded for media literacy is set artificially high in order to force the conclusion that individuals are categorically incapable of judging their personal information environment. But that does not seem plausible to me.
I feel pretty savvy, and I wasn't trained in school. Almost no journalist or public figure has received formalized training in the way you describe.
And why would that be necessary, what would they teach beyond common sense? Do you have examples of large-scale disinformation campaigns that aren't sufficiently contextualized through regular mainstream media?
The media wasnt perfect but they were better before the fairness doctrine was repealed.
Do you think educated civil societies just spontaneously form, or is it because they are enabled through the government providing things like education (the best way to combat misinformation).
This would rightly be understood as a shallow hold-out. ... and they would probably still be waiting today.
Education is hard work and does not happen spontaneously. Good governance can facilitate education. But people should always be assumed to be capable of judging their informational environment independently of formal education. Not to do so would be deeply paternalistic and infantilizing.
And, as you seem to assume, this skepticism led to more indirect forms of democratic institutions: Would you argue against direct democratic institutions in the U.S. on the same basis?
>But people should always be assumed to be capable of judging their informational environment independently of formal education. Not to do so would be deeply paternalistic and infantilizing.
That's not the point. The question was "what can be done to combat misinformation" and my response was "education" which in the democracies that I'm aware of, is generally provided by the gov't. You are talking about something else entirely, and a bit pejoratively as well, which is ironic because you are talking about education but apparently completely missed the point.
No, the topic was that whether the thesis that technologies like ChatGPT enable misinformation is a reason to keep the technology unfree.
And in response to that topic it was me, not you, who introduced education. You then just added a loaded question designed to hint at a preexisting government.
edit: I can't add further comments anymore due to HN limits, but notice how the person responding to me is changing the topic after I pointed out that they are misrepresenting the earlier discussion.
They wrote:
> The question was "what can be done to combat misinformation" and my response was "education"
But they weren't able to point at the comment where 1) this question supposedly emerged and 2) their response supposedly brought up education as a solution.
Yes an individual should be media literate, just as corporations SHOULD practice fair competition and people should not invest their life savings in Ponzi schemes or kill one another. Unfortunately, maintaining a stable society in the real world requires governance. 16% of the world's population don't have electricity. How can you expect them to educate themselves about misinformation while technology beyond their comprehension is being weaponized against them?
Just ask yourself: What could they mean by being familiar with "the necessity of regulation"? Like _any_ regulation? _Every_ regulation? The " necessity " of specific regulatory measures varies widely, depending on many different factors.
> Unfortunately, maintaining a stable society in the real world requires governance.
Yeah, I mean... how could someone not agree with the second part? ... but why would that be "unfortunate"?
Governance is such a broad human endeavor, even language is part of it, as are all the protocols, supply chains, standardizations etc. that make this conversation possible. Hardly unfortunate?
> Yes an individual should be media literate, just as corporations SHOULD practice fair competition and people should not invest their life savings in Ponzi schemes or kill one another.
I didn't say they, the people, should do something, I said we should do something. We should not, as in this debate, infantilize the population.
> 16% of the world's population don't have electricity. How can you expect them to educate themselves about misinformation while technology beyond their comprehension is being weaponized against them? That's the same argument for why indigenous people can't govern themselves without Western education. I'm not going to go there, and I certainly don't see the threat you are painting.
Misinformation is nothing new at all, and if you argue that social media is making a difference: Not only is that controversial, it assumes electricity - in a completely uncontroversial way. People will deal with misinformation today using the same tools they used to deal with misinformation yesterday: reason, critical thinking, etc.
There's no technical fix for this.
Turns out that misinformation is already incredibly cheap to create and the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
The American system, as designed, is diametrically opposed to waiting for governments around the world to protect you from misinformation.
Even if by Moore's law we get that great power in our own computers, enough to run a today's chatGPT clone, there will always be a commercial version that is 100x more awesome out there built by actors with immense compute power backed by rivers of corporate money.
I know that some of the features were available later in some other social networks too, but the original premise of making groups (friends, family, coworkers, random people I met I don't know where,...) and posting selective content into selective groups was great.
Maybe it was different for people who live and breathe GMail and the google ecosystem but for me it was a walled garden from the start and I kinda hated the UI.
Now its tiktok, and these "first gen social networks" (like facebook, twitter, ...) are a boomer playground mostly, even instagram is slowly getting to that list. Aside from the tech or the medium (video vs photo vs text vs ...) I think this will happen every few years when the youth receives friend requests from tgeir parents on platform X - thats the peak/decline moment no matter how great it is.
Facebook was for looking at content from friends, and then it moved to mainstream media recommended content, ads, and every 20 or so posts, something from a person you actually knew.
People then switched to instagram, where it was based around photos (and not "statuses"), and it was great... now it's 20 photos/videos of "suggested content" and one of someone you actually know.
Social networks should stay social, not become another cable tv provider with "recomended content" and ads.
Btw, one lasting disconnect between most Google SWEs and the general public: many SWEs consider YouTube a social network today.
Would have been actually great without the "love of my life", and if the "creeps" were just "friends" or something.
disclaimer: I'm long GOOG after the selloff.
https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/ "I want every product plan to try and go overboard on Internet features."
Top level goals make sense for focusing, but for generally just improving products significantly, getting rid of blockers is what's important.
They do not generate worth through ideas and they do not generate worth through implementations.
They solicit other people's ideas, count how many votes each idea gets, and passes them to the grunts.
They are middle management distilled.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Heinlein
Devs, especially good ones, can make good products without a PM. A PM can be a nice tool to interface with the rest of the company, Sure.
I had a PM once who listened to Dev feedback and was great at communicating with customers/users.
When done correctly priotizing features which are technically boring or seemingly unnecessary is absolutely the right way forward.
That person is also in the right position to communicate Dev effort and difficulties back.
To be clear: I'm a software developer, and I feel this natural tendency too. I've gotten pretty good at suppressing it though.
Yeah, with abysmal user interfaces.
IME PMs are no better at that stuff than engineers.
It's unfortunate; this statement will probably never be true due to the privatization of research and corporatization of these technologies.
AI will more likely have a profoundly negative effect than a positive one.
2. OKRs are not automatically public (some teams choose to publish theirs; many don't).
It takes incredible and very rare leadership to be able to admit failures downstream.
* It made a lot of coddled high-energy employees continue to feel valued and engaged and not jump to a competitor.
* It forced users to unify accounts making cookie joining and user data from different segments much more universally accessible to ads.
* It brought design uniformity to G on the web, which is an important to contrast the Google brand with the otherwise fragmented Android space.
* Lasting revenue and user data from Google Photos and Drive.
Google plus was Google doing what it does best: solving Google problems. It never had a chance as a product, but they didn’t need for it to win. They needed to re-consolidate data input to Ads and defend against a talent drain.
G+ birthed the "create account / log in with Google" widget for non-Google websites, that could go alongside the "log in with FB" widget that was getting popular. Those widgets let Google / FB join your account cookies with whatever other ads get shown on the page.
G+ lead to a dramatically changed privacy policy that dramatically increaed data sharing.
I have seen articles claiming all sorts of "benefits" of the War, and I believe that was one of them. The coup of 1965, which massacred a million "Communists" was in there.
I was at Google watching the tech all hands with my boss when they announced that "social multiplier" (bonuses tied to success of G+) was going to apply to everyone in the company.
I turned to my boss and said, shit, our bonuses are going to be fucked because G+ is going to flop.
My boss told me not to worry, since "they are never going to be able to admit that this was a failure".
Sure enough, management tried to bullshit everyone on how successful G+ was and we ended up getting a high multiplier for the "success".
Pod seems to only be the "just run your stuff" part on paper, which would be nice, only problem is it sucks. Every little thing you want to do is a huge codelab, and it's less supported. So people default to Boq instead.
Instead they forced it on everyone using any Google product, hurting the product itself, but also preventing the critical feedback loop that would have allowed G+ to improve, and become organically successful.
Also I think Messenger may have been faster than Hangouts. It was not faster than GChat, but it didn't matter because Google killed it and that definitely drove me to use Messenger more.
You have your Instagram, then your close friends list on Instagram. Then your finsta. And the close friends list on your finsta.
All of these are just g+ circles.
The advantage of FB was also that you saw content, whereas on Google+ everyone would have it locked up and you couldn't see it, great for the less popular types.
Parts of it made sense, maybe a bit too early, not enough people using it.
Circles feature was also marketed the wrong way. The G+ ad showed a lady bad-mouthing her boss in a circle that doesn't include him. Who's gonna put that much faith in the separation? The entire point of a finsta is that it's not a supported feature, so you can believe that it's totally separate and also has a different name. You'd use the finsta to bad-mouth your boss, if you're a weirdo who friends their boss in the first place.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/vic-gundotra-the-father-of...
(It also helps to find target communities not well-served by incumbents -- like, perhaps, the multiple communities who interacted poorly with Facebook's "real names" policy. But instead, Google leadership insisted on copying that policy, and in a particularly heavy-handed way, to the point that Google employees couldn't register accounts with nicknames that they were actually known by to colleagues and family alike; see e.g. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/why-googles-rea... )
Google+ was pretty great. It had some really wonderful special interest communities, and it was really easy to separate my family identity from my tinkerer identity from my friends stuff. The whole circles and squares thing was a wonderful, front and center, privacy-focused metaphor, like some product people actually listened to what actual online community Ph.Ds were saying.
But the execs made everything worse repeatedly in an attempt to drive success metrics up.
"We already have a huge user base, we'll just automatically sign them up for <new thing> and get it off to a running start". No, these users will hate you for it and in fact ruin the experience for the select few who are actually interested. Meanwhile executives will tout the rosy user growth metrics, declare the launch a success and collect their bonuses.
There is no substitute for old-fashioned organic growth. Start small. Focus on early power users and listen to their feedback. Have something unique that sets you apart from the competition and attracts more users. This is how Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and the like were able to establish themselves in Facebook's presence while Google+ failed.
Adding a new notification about everytime someone follows you is just asking for people to avoid the product
Poor UX management
Google+ was competing head on with Facebook which had a huge leverage in terms of the network effect.
Well, it was more colorful I suppose.
It wasn't just the execution, the basic idea was bad. The few people this overly complicated thing would appeal to are probably not the kind to use social media either.
I have FB and refuse to use it, Twitter is purely for bored doom scrolling and thats about all I use.
Google+ was great, worked exactly how i wanted it and didn't try to sell me crap i didnt want to know about
I could log into FB, browse the world-famous UC Berkeley meme page, RSVP for a comp sci talk, message my 8 group chats, sell my iClicker, buy a dining commons swipe, and message one of those "my sister needs a date for a party" ads all in one place.
https://review.firstround.com/podcast/episode-11
Today’s episode is with David Lieb, the Director of Google Photos. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Bump, an app that allowed users to swap contact information by physically bumping phones. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and formed the basis for the design of Google Photos, which launched in 2015 and passed the 1 billion users mark in 2019.
while controversial, predictive text in gmail is actually useful, is very conservative relative to chatGPT, and has been around for quite a while.
predicting what measurements you want out of analytics is handy, and gives accurate information
google docs/drive uses ai to surface relevant docs based on time of day, audience, and frequency of editing. it works remarkably well.
google photos is mainly an ai product, and it's all-around amazing
google translate is an ai product and it's gotten pretty good over the years, though it's not without competitors
google's speech recognition is very good, and built in all over google products, though I never use it b/c i don't like talking to computers
....
i feel like this push is likely to lead to messiness. strategy messiness, messiness in ux, messiness in terms of new ai products not being vetted the same way they were before - allowing more inaccurate results to be presented to users.
maybe users will be ok with it, idk. i've appreciated the ai enhancements to google products so far, i think they've done a good job being even-handed. I hope they manage to keep their hands on the wheel.
It was when they changed it to work like Facebook and be article-centric vs. comment-centric when I started hating it.
It was however the best source for news and to meet like-minded tech people.
Rip G+. The best social network so far.
Is that really based on generative A.I. and large language models though ?
If Google can supply the features investors and consumers want without actual neural networks, it would be cheaper as well as being mildly amusing.
This is very different than "we have this new product called Google+, and every business must integrate with it." The first case (generative AI) is open-ended directive, asking the products to leverage generative AI". The later (Google+) case is a closed-ended instruction (integrate a solution without a clear problem).
But I don't see what G+ has to do with Bard (for those unfamiliar, their answer to ChatGPT). Really a stretch.
"Why do I need a G+ account to comment on YouTube?"
If anything, Google Assistant getting shoved onto everything a few years ago (even the wifi routers) was the classic Google+ move. And the Cloud push was bigger.
I have been done using their search service for quite a while.
One thing I wish they could improve is a consumer version of Google Workplace that did: 1) easily share purchased digital assets with your free Gmail account. 2) Include the most excellent Cloud Search option (without the business/enterprise pricing). 3) Include in transit encryption for everything. - Then charge about $10/month for that and they would likely pick up a lot of consumer customers.
the author is really taking liberties here, hooking up an LLM to a chatbox is not a product, it's a technology demo
if people paid, then that demonstrates value doesn't it?
As an example, suppose I come in to your business, flash the gun in my waistband, and offer you a subscription to my protection service. You gulp nervously and pay. Has value been demonstrated?
Suppose I as a software developer create tools for ransomware gangs, who pay me handsomely for each new version. Have I created value?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/tech/chatgpt-real-estate/inde...
"OK Google, now repeat that search with all the SEO spam and content marketing cruft filtered out."
Vic Gundotra (the head of Google Plus) was the most hated executive in Google. There was even a popular meme of him in his sweater vest, where the caption would always be "If you don't like <x>, then you don't have to use <x>."
Haha, what? Almost all Google products I know feel like prototypes.