Still Sundar is truly 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, all of Google's products have decayed.
Now do Tim Cook.
Doesn't mean Tim Cook hasn't been successful at his job and what Apple has required of him.
They just don't really make technology for people that want to understand and have real ownership of their computer and software.
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.
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.
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it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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?
When was the last time Microsoft did that (prior to the AI rush of the last few months)?
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.
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.
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/
Office 365?
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.
Google's product is ads, with all else--including AI--in service to that.
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.
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.
As a Alphabet shareholder, I won't be sad to see Sundar go.