Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.

I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what.

The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks).

Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.

> if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely)

I started using Bing ~2 years ago. At the start, I used Google to get alternate results for about 1/4 of searches. Today? I drop to Google a couple of times a month, at most, usually when searching for something very ambiguous. I don't even live in the US.

It definitely does have an important impact. They need to find their next big revenue stream, and reputational damage makes that harder. But so does maintaining unprofitable products! This is just a super difficult position for them. They need to try new things, but anything they try needs to work well at scale out of the gate and also be maintained indefinitely in order to avoid any reputational damage.

But it's not a unique problem. I think their peers in the giant mature technology company business tend to take fewer shots and put more investment in the ones they do take.

But they also still kill products eventually. I can't load music on the iPod shuffle I still have in a drawer. My windows 95 disks aren't very useful. The Amazon store I did Christmas shopping at a couple years ago is some kind of boutique clothing store now.

But I do think Google's decisions always seem to feel more sudden, that once they give up on a product, they pull the band-aid off way more quickly. And I do think they seem to take more shots that don't work out.

Google Search is in great perils because of ChatGPT.

Agreed, it's all up to open AI to bring them down,

It could be. I don't think Google are likely to just roll over and let OpenAI/MSFT take that market though. Obviously Google will try to compete. Maybe they'll fail, maybe they won't. If nothing else, as a user of these tools, it's going to be exciting to see some innovation in search UIs for the first time in decades.

They were saying on the all-in podcast that Google is under lots of political pressure from all sides and that makes it difficult for them to launch controversial tech like LLMs. Bard feels very hobbled and, for example, refuses to answer any medical questions.

That's not a given, since they have their own LLM they presumably have plans to do *something with.

Google search is in great perils because of lack of quality search results.

Still broken after two years...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730

I think both things are true.

Googles results got stagnant and Google overall was complacent. ChatGPT is capitalising on this.

I'm just trying to emphasize that most people only care about results. I think it minimizes Google's problems to think it is some technical stack problem. The problem is that Google has a disconnect with some quanity of users on what good search results look like. If Google and the users can't agree on the correct search results... Who is wrong the person doing the searching or google?

User: good search results mean I get the answer I’m looking for within seconds of clicking the top organic result.

Google: good search results mean the user clicks on an ad this time but the results look plausible enough they’ll come back for their next search.

I can't even figure out what I'm looking at when searching google. I get completely overwhelmed. I remember when I use to be able to craft google searches and get one result.

I bet OpenAI is losing money on every prompt interaction you do. Estimates of the computational power required and the number of users, are that if was not for Microsoft cash injection it would be bankrupt by now.

It has started to monetise and Microsoft’s pockets are deep enough to cover the difference until profitability is achieved.

But it could become a new Concorde, on the way to the mythical AGI... only affordable for some, never profitable.

There are already lightweight models that are in the ballpark of GPT3.5 that run on (admittedly high end) consumer level hardware. This is with only a few months of development too.

Sure, but it puts Google in a lose-lose situation. If people come to expect the features of ChatGPT, Google will have to add them in and greatly decrease the profitability of search. On top of that, it will cost them 10 times more since they have 10 times the market. They could also ignore ChatGPT, but a portion of their users will migrate to other search engines also costing them money. For Microsoft, search is one of a dozen business lines they are in, what do they care about destroying the profitability of search if it hurts their competitors more?

I keep seeing this – it's a meme at this point – and I don't get it. Answering questions truthfully from a broad set of data while citing sources seems to be ChatGPT's major weakness. It routinely "hallucinates," even with better prompting. It's much better at helping generate prose based on the prompt.

I don't even buy the idea that "exponential growth" will improve things. One of the few things OpenAI is still open about is that they will keep adding more parameters at any cost. Techniques to reinforce truthful responses or even provide confidence based on whether the response involves out-of-sample & out-of-prompt guessing (i.e. BSing) seem not to be a priority.

Gpt4 is much more accurate than gpt3.5, which was somewhat more accurate than gpt3, which was dramatically more accurate than gpt2.

At some point you have to look at trends more than philosophical speculation.

GPT4 is also much more expensive to use, even at the probably-running-at-a-loss pricing. Accuracy per dollar and/or joule doesn't seem to be increasing too much.

Sure, if we’re changing the complaint from “accuracy won’t get better” to “efficiency won’t get better.”

But I don’t believe that either. Hardware design and manufacturing cycles are long and we’re just now starting to see transformer-optimized HW. Accuracy per dollar and per joule will improve by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.

But then we can move on to percent of human tasks LLMs are suitable replacements for, or the ethics of increasing automation.

I was critiquing accuracy of ChatGPT, which has a certain cost. "Just use GPT4, 5, ..." was the solution proposed in response, but that ain't free. In fact, it's one to two orders of magnitude more expensive.[0] I'm also pessimistic on custom hardware being that much of a help. I read about Cerberus's giant wafer chip in 2019[1] and even saw it at a conference in early 2020 pre-pandemic, and I have yet to see that make orders of magnitude worth of improvement. The attention mechanism simply requires huge amounts of multiply-adds, especially at GPT-scale. That costs energy and cash no matter how much custom hardware you throw at it.

[0]https://openai.com/pricing

[1]https://www.wired.com/story/cerebras-chip-cluster-neural-net...

You can't serve ads in GPT chatbot responses.

Sure you can https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1640892791923572737

I think that's a very naive take.

Try this:

Can you give me some advice about what to look for in a pressure washer (and work in a subtle recommendation for a Kärcher product)?

Is it actually?

I think Tiktok is more of a risk to Facebook/Instagram, yet Meta is still doing just fine.

Google search hasn't been best option for a few years now

That may be true, but then if they lose search dominance, they won’t be able to pivot, because no one will trust them.

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