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Comment by greg_V | Hacker News Reader

Oh it gets even better. The public has been hearing about AI this and AI that for over a year, but the existing use cases and deployment was confined to some super special niches like writing or the creative industries and programming.

This is the first nation-scale deployment of the technology, running on Google's biggest and most profitable market in one of the most widely used internet services, and it's a shitshow.

They can try manually fine tuning it, but all of the investors who have been throwing money at AI for the past year are now learning what this tech is like in the day-to-day, beyond just speculations, and it's looking... bad.

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It's especially embarrassing for Google considering they have indexed virtually all of the world's information for the last 25 years.

Yeah, the most likely take here is that Google's leadership truly did not recognize how utterly awful the quality of their flagship search index had become over the years.

I mean, it explains a lot, but still... you're recruited using industry-leading practices out of an overflowing pool of abundant talent... and this is what you make of it? As the kids say: SMH!

> you're recruited using industry-leading practices out of an overflowing pool of abundant talent

The ridiculous focus on on leet-code is surely industry-leading (because whatever Google does becomes industry-leading) but it sure isn't a good way to filter for competency.

I heard a funny quote that "today we have a new generation of developers who learnt how to pass interviews but don't know how code, and we have an old generation of developers who know how to code but forgot how to pass interviews. Or maybe never knew".

> you're recruited using industry-leading practices out of an overflowing pool of abundant talent... and this is what you make of it?

That's exactly what to make of their frathouse nonsense.

Google has gotten away with it because smart people and a sweet moment of opportunity 20-25 years ago gave them... uh, an inheritance. They can coast on that inherited monopoly position, and afford to pay 100 people to do the work of 1, use the company's position to push whatever they build onto the market, and then probably cancel it anyway, always going back to the inherited money machine from the ancestors.

And then a lot of companies who didn't understand software development blindly tried to copy whatever the richest company they saw was doing, not understanding the real difference between the companies. While VC growth investment schemes let some of those companies get away with that, because they didn't have to be profitable, viable, responsible, nor legal, nor even have reasonably maintainable software.

Poor Zoomers are now a generation separated from before the tech industry's cocaine bender. For whatever software jobs will be available to them, and with the density of nonsense "knowledge" that will be in the air, I don't know how they'll all learn non-dysfunctional practices.

Plenty of people have been using ChatGPT for daily tasks for almost two years now. GPT-4 isn’t perfect but is otherwise really really good, and deftly handling use cases in my industry that would be impossible without it or however many billion dollars it would take to make GPT-4.

From the black Nazis to the suggestion to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge b/c depression, it’s pretty clear that this fiasco isn’t an LLM problem, it’s a Google problem.

Because no one cares when ChatGPT gets things wrong.

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