776 karma · joined March 1, 2024
Thats the embarrassing part, you know “don’t be evil” went out the window years ago, yet still think you’re making a difference with your little bit shifting games. As if the moment the work you do bumped against against revenue it would hold.
Ads doesn’t care until something affects them, GCP doesn’t.
Edit to clarify my prior point: some of the technology makes it into the product, but the putative data protections do not.
Why?
Because there is always a work around, and ads legal will approve it every time.
Then there’s a second tier of things that just make those wheels turn and if they do or don’t make ads revenue is nominally immaterial.
The teams doing this stuff at Google are purely for show, none of this makes it into any real products.
There’s the narrow exception of stuff like gboard, that does use privacy preserving ML/fed learning, but this stuff isn’t in the same zone.
I find it a bit embarrassing when Google publishes this stuff to be honest.
Brexit needs to be reversed already.
Maybe the employees like to lie to themselves more at one place than the other, but SV is SV.
Whatever they have done with RL has produced a dishonest and untrustworthy partner. The alignment is utterly failed, and this deeply worries me.
I’ve asked it to write a benchmark suite. It found a bunch of my adhoc logs in a scratch directory and wrote code that used those instead of running the actual benchmarks!
When I pointed out the 5 hour benchmark seemed to run in 5 seconds it literally said, and I quote, “I cheated”.
That was the easier one, second time I was making a source of truth data set and was parsing complex items into data structures.
Instead of parsing the data I asked, it pulled data out of related network logs, as apparently that felt easier, and inserted that data into my database rather than the specified source.
Again, I caught it and fixed it, but while the benchmark was easy to catch this one was really subtle, the data ended up being slightly off and I caught it.
I don’t trust it, going to switch to another provider most likely.
For our own model training we needed to do some large scale translation tasks of a large dataset (1M or so documents, 10 or so target languages), running full-size NLLB on-prem saved us an absurd amount of money vs Google Translate API.
(For reference doing 1M target docs into a single language in Google Translate API is roughly $120k list price. You can run full size NLLB on an 48GB NVIDIA A600 and the major difference for us was speed, but for this task time to completion wasn’t an issue.)
We’ve a hybrid shop, including hosting our own ML infra, and we save a ton from cloud spend with local ML. Easily one million USD over past three years. But it’s not “free”, you are shifting a lot of labor into your plate.
Couch cushions?
That may not be the intent of the original article, but over the past few years that’s what the phrase turned into.
Luckily, China is on the verge of a true breakout, I’m not sure what exactly it will be - but I’d make a very large wager the “next iPhone” is Chinese, and will constitute a full blown “Sputnik moment” for the US and SV.
If Americans weren’t forbidden to own Chinese EVs they’d know this. But tariffs mean the breakthrough will be even more unexpected.
Since Chinese actually “sell stuff” I’m guessing their unbeatable lead in AI efficiency, manufacturing, and distribution will produce a step change breakthrough within a decade.
Likewise, Gemma4 models are unbeatable at their size.
So I use Gemini for coding? Hell no, but that’s not the same as Google failing writ large.
Googles only real goal is to retain the ownership and dominance of the online world they have now, and Gemini is doing exactly what it needs to do
I’d not wager against him having at one one more break though architecture before he retires.
Bitter lesson wildly overstated in this context.
Of course if the Russians make it to the German border AfD will welcome them with open arms and the rest of the German public will be too busy debating if raising the debt limit to dig their own graves is acceptable if it means limiting pensions, and if so, what are acceptable working hours for grave diggers, pension plans for grave diggers, and whom should negotiate on behalf of the grave diggers.
Google literally is a convicted monopolist in the Search antitrust case. The judge just didn’t impose any remedy or penalty.
Many of the arguments around that case had to do with bundling Search, nothing to do with other products. It was Search.
This is why the Firefox CEO gave Google the testimony they paid for, and retired shortly thereafter. It was quid pro quo.
Firefox was paid for years to include Search so one day they’d show up to court and say “we include Google because they are the best, not because they pay us”. The judge didn’t actually buy it, but that was the deal - we pay you millions, one day you show up and read a script.
The confusing part to the lay person is Google got away with it despite the prosecutions case holding.
Imagine if a person robbed a bank and was convicted. The judge then said, ok you robbed the bank, the prosecution proved it, I rule in their favor.
However, when it comes to the punishment, I’m just going to let it slide, you can go home now.
Also, keep the money you stole, and if you happen to walk by another bank…say Associated Investments (AI), just go ahead and rob that one!