As a Alphabet shareholder, I won't be sad to see Sundar go.
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.
Now do Tim Cook.
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.
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.
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).
After all there you only get presented a handful of links at most and the chatbot can hype up the sponsored link.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobi...
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.
HH
MM
it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.
Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the end they didn't.
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?
There was Google Code, a service that was similar to GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers...).
Google did at least one attempt of creating an IDE (I can not judge from the outside, though, how serious this attempt was): Google Collide
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 (jump to 1:45 to see it in action).
Well, Google open-sourced it in 2012 (i.e. shot it down): https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/
A fork of Google Collide on GitHub (its last commit was from end of 2018, though): https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide
Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing.
(well, it turns out I didn't miss anything)
But I was at the Google Next event when I think they announced Stadia and there were some serious gamer stars associated with it.
They are very aware Windows is nothing without the literal decades of software available for it.
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.
I'm guessing their OKR's go on the lines of building billion dollar businesses or nothing at all. And 'nothing at all' winning at the end.
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."
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.
Interesting, that's essentially Dutch disease[1] for a corporation.
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.
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.
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.
When was the last time Microsoft did that (prior to the AI rush of the last few months)?
The difference is Microsoft already has a very diversified revenue stream. Google only has search.
The move to become a cloud provider happened, I want to say, in 2015-ish.
You couldn't even get VMs on Azure for the longest time, and their VM service reached parity with AWS very recently.
[1] https://studysection.com/blog/history-of-microsoft-azure/
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.
I'll ignore the Window Phone era. ;)
And I didn't include anything in the Azure area/time period.
And LinkedIn / GitHub acquisitions were done well and now going to be fueling the automation of professional work with the AI technology.
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.
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.
Office 365?
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.
Google Brain and Deepmind? Not sure about the "no comm" part, but their HQs are in different countries.
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.
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.
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."
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
Bard: https://i.imgur.com/m5UGjxU.png
GPT-3.5: https://i.imgur.com/XH1266o.png
GPT-4: https://i.imgur.com/ZcaZ9Qk.png
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).
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?
Google has delivered a good number of really good, big products.
And then it abandoned them like a kitten after her new chew toy has lost its new catnip smell.
Have they thought about introducing more leetcode questions? /s
Bard seems hobbled because Google can't conceive of anyone not referring back to Google Search as the ultimate arbiter of truth.
[0]: I've lost track of their rebrandings.
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.
Google's product is ads, with all else--including AI--in service to that.
How could the company that is working on Google Brain and DeepMind slip up THIS badly on their own home turf?
I wouldn't be long GOOG. They've got a long way to fall, and it's unclear if they can turn it around.
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.
Let me add that in more and more topics you can only find bogus/fake rating sites now, like car tires in my country for example.
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.
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.
When are they planning to sunset it?
If you tell us that then we know they’re actually planning to release it.
:)
or
"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."
I have not used copilot from github yet so I dont really have a point of comparison tho.
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.
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.
Customers are learning or have learned, the hard way, that home automation is not at all like fairy dust and unicorns.
See for example: Linus Tech Tips.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
(Noam Shazeer is one of the authors of the Transformer paper.)
https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/
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?
Why ads? Seems like they're going the service route. Are you predicting them to start targeting the masses and build search/assistants/etc?
What's wrong with the current approach of just selling access?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They'll grow together with their customers. And the possibilities are huge
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).
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".
I didn't even have a microsoft account when I tried to sign up for bing, and was accepted off the waitlist right away. So??? Good job google.
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.
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?
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.
Google has rested on past success to long and rotted good products to dysfunction