Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company.
I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course not.
Sundar doesn’t seem exceptionally promising. It seems like he is an ok leader when things are going well but not so good in tougher times.
They should be freaking out. Google is overwhelmingly dependent on a single revenue stream and AI like ChatGPT is a serious threat to their dominant position.
Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alternative. Google has some real challenging times ahead.
20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain.
Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a show of hands, "How many have a 20% project?" There was one hand.
What it WAS useful for was checking out a project you might want to transfer to.
> Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology
It’s not that at all.
Given that Larry + Sergey still control Google (>50% shareholder votes), seem prudent to meet with who controls the company to debrief them on current events & action plan.
I think this goes back to Google’s decision to be evil.
Being evil has a lot of overhead where you have to invest significant time into researching grey areas to exploit and then crafting your product or service not step over the line. Then it falls apart when you get to Europe and they are happy to call you on being evil and fine you billions of euros for doing evil things.
Google should go back to not being evil, that worked a lot better for them, and just focus on making cutting edge products.
It would also be great if they answered the phone on occasion, and did more to listen to their users. Community support is an obvious cop-out, and nobody wants be dismissed without warning or explanation when it involves something they care about.
> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance.
I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time).
The more AI Google applies to my life, the more I want to escape it. I remember, when it was said people pay a premium for Apple products because they want privacy. I wonder if it will also become, people migrate to Apple to escape AI.
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."
Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete.
Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? It would be a blessing (presumably, because things can always drift further into evil) but, so far at least, there is little to point to such an imminent disruption
Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better.
In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user experience that Altavista had succeeded with originally.
Given how bad Google's results have become, I think you can certainly outdo it. Anecdotally, it's amazing how often I find myself reaching for ChapGPT these days to find basic facts that Google can't. I think Google is right to be afraid.
Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of esoteric, "school assignment" type queries, but they're not really a threat for the high-value searches.
Search existed before Google. They also didn't invent adtech. Instead of a marginal improvement, they made it so much better that the previous option looked silly. If such a disruption happens again to the core technology (e.g. search through a ChatGPT-like entity), whether the financial backing is adtech will be irrelevant.
You know how better app for finding good restaurant can't find good restaurants of there are no good restaurants?
Search is dead, spammers killed it and Google was happy about it because it has become an answer machine where they can say the answer is whoever pays the most. Greatly deteriorated experience from what it used to be.
Now someone builds an answers machine with much much better user experience with all that data which Google can no longer surface.
I don't know if Google can quickly match that function but even if they do, are they going to be able to replicate the experience if the answers machine choose the answers by a bidding war?
> You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search.
Pretty sure you can, because Google search sucks balls. (First and foremost because it ignores context. E.g., searching for programming API documentation is tuned entirely differently compared to searching for movie recommendations.)
That said, Google is not in the search business, because there is no such thing. Google is in the context advertising business.
Buckminster fuller was notoriously unsuccessful at changing anything, but was very successful at making it seems like he would have been successful if it wasn’t for all the conspiracies against him stopping his success.
Taken in that context puts it in a different light.
Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely?
I think the revenue assumption here lies on the fact that GPT generates content when the web wait for the user to provide the content. Generates congent, for lawyers or hospitals for example - pardon my lack of imagination. So a basic business model would be to charge per request I suppose.
A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding.
Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google.
It truly saves a lot of time.
Google is right to be quite worried.
Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before.
Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds?
And worse I can ask the Ai to write a short couple of paragraphs about each one.
Then I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style.
What do I do?
I do online marketing and programming to support online marketing activities.
I write. I plan. I code. I hire.
We just taught a junior employee who is not great as a writer to use ChatGPT to help her with a good start to writing.
The training for her was how to formulate detailed and highly specific “prompts” and to use google as a backup to confirm facts in the AI generated output.
It’s not there to replace people’s work. It’s there to make them much, much more efficient.
I kind of feel they should be. I cannot remember what their last major customer-facing AI product launch after Google Assistant. Sure there is AI in photo tuning and many interesting features for the Pixel phone, and there is Gmail autocomplete but I remember I used to really following every Google product launch when I was a kid: there is Google Reader, Google Drive launch in those days. That excitement was kind of gone: all the new AI products feels like polished but conservative.
The GPTs and Whisper really get me excited again these days though. But Google pioneered this field.
I love their JAX, but in a way many people would love pytorch but not so much in the META company.
Personally I've no interest in any new Google products because who knows when it may be discontinued with little or no notice. Most recently Optimize, but I've also been burned by Universal Analytics, Fusion Tables, goo.gl, and Google Site Search.
Google Assistant was launched 6 years ago. Probably the most AI that Google has inflicted upon the general public since then is Waymo One. Other recent launches include the thing that automatically fills in your formulas in Google Sheets. Also DeepMind's WaveNet text-to-speech. Then there's fancy stuff like Project Relate that will train a speech-to-text model individually for disabled users[1].
But mostly the ML stuff is silently launched behind the scenes. And you slowly become inured to astonishing feats of machine learning like being able to translate spoken Chinese to English text on your mobile, and cars that drive themselves, and the fact that you can search your photos for "toy lizard" and that actually works.
Edited to add: with regard to the idea that some competitor with an AI code generator will out-program Google as an organization, you should take note that Google has already deployed AI code generators in large-scale production. So whenever a future competitor re-invents this facility at that moment they are already years behind Google[2].
To summarize, I believe it is somewhat strange to believe that the organization with demonstrated state-of-the-art machine learning research and development will be caught unaware by the ML revolution.
While I do agree that AI is going to bring a huge shake up to the search market, I still believe that Google is in the best position to fight this battle.
Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so.
And then they are the company that's best suited to have this AI driven search in Android and Google search thus limiting the impact of this whole problem.
Sure, maybe Microsoft will deprive them of some developers that will look for information inside VS Code or their editor, and stuff like that, but overall I don't see Google going to suffer that much as long as they are able to answer the ChatGPT challenge in a meaningful time, something they should be easily able to do given their immense computational and data resources.
There's a surprisingly long and detailed blog post (https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyon...) which details some of what they have coming this year. It sounds like they're planning on taking some of the skunkworks/internal stuff and exposing it through products. Sidenote: I was surprised to see one of the charts even showing ChatGPT outperforming LaMBDA in one area.
That is exactly the problem and indicates a lack of grand vision. Releasing hodgepodge of internal projects is not same as rebuilding AI-first products.
Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.
I still would pay for good search without ads. Definitely google should make more than me clicking ads, which, in the past 20 years (or however long it is that google has apps), happened 0 times. I know why, but there must be a model that works like that?
What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company.
In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.
“Google sucks,” “search doesn’t show real results anymore,” and many similar comments are common in my world of heavy industry / manufacturing / b2b sales.
They’ve been harvesting profits rather than making a better product. They should be freaked out.
I think this is hitting the nail on the head. AI and ChatGPT isn't even the point. The scary part is that Google appears to have cannibalized their own offering in order to keep their numbers black to the extent where they have no ostensible way of dealing with a credible competitor.
Ironically, the young Page and Brin predicted the inherent conflict of interest between search and advertisement.
"For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine."
After trying out their adwords platform for a year combined with the fact that search in general has plummeted in quality i can't wait for them to crash completely.
Adwords is such a scummy endeavour that squeezes more or less all companies using it, but more so smaller players. They are not a friendly company. They are a MegaCorp that is so monopolistic and dark (design) in its behaviours it's incredible that it's legal.
Technology wise, ChatGPT is not a challenge for Google. It was a blessing that OpenAI is charging $42 for premium tier. Google very much can build a similar/better offering in a near term and would not have to worry about losing ad $$, as it will be compensated from a paid product.
The challenge is execution. Most of the leadership have done amazingly great, but only when they had no competition. For FB, Cloud, Gaming, AR, self-driving cars - they could not do much. They did great on Android and Nest - both were founder led for a while.
Right now, OpenAI is adding new features like crazy - they are a startup. Google may have better engineers, but they will lag behind in execution. Plus, changing a 20yr search+ad mindset in a month is hard.
> Google’s approach to AI in recent years has been conservative compared to some rivals
Well yes of course. They are the incumbent and they've been in cash generating mode for a while. With a large lead over "competitors", if we can even call them that, and a virtual monopoly status in the both the ad space and search space, it's perfectly normal for Google to move at a glacial pace. They have no external need or intrinsic motivation to do otherwise at this point in time.
That is, until an actual threat shows up..
I honestly don't think ChatGPT is a real threat except they are getting a lot of attention and they are the new David to Google's Goliath so they are a psychological threat more than a technical one
Perhaps, Google can finally start focusing again on creating quality products instead of nonsense videos/hypes like "Demonstrating Quantum Supremacy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU).
However, would people even trust their new products knowing Google's tendency to kill off these products within a short amount of time?
> The demo for the chatbot search says Google will prioritize “getting facts right, ensuring safety and getting rid of misinformation,”
This goes to the chaotic problem which is still to be decided. There is no consensus position on what facts are, what is safe and what is misinformation. Part of the success of modern democracy hinges on being able to switch the leadership out with people who have a different frame on life than the old group. Yesterday's misinformation can become tomorrows facts (consider, famously, the impact Snowden had on the conversation).
Can a company as large as Google do this without splitting their own market along various political boundaries? Will they be forced to take religious, political and moral positions? Will they be out-competed by more neutral or more partisan chatbots? If chatbots become a big deal, will the target audience scale like search did or is it fundamentally fragmented?
Google is getting worse and worse. Today I searched for exact term “boat skipper b”. Google threw ton of trash at me. Ended looking through Bing results and found what I needed. 2/3 of my Google searches are not usable to me. Some advertisement and shady websites as results.
A decade ago, I had calculated that a startup would need at least $1B (but more likely $4B) of capex to match Google if trying to use conventional crawl/index tech. With conventional tech, quality upper bound is more or less fixed so you are forced to match breadth to compete which is super expensive. With model-based index, you need less than $100M capex to turn on the proverbial flywheel because you can now sacrifice breadth for very different notion of quality. This is a game changer because we will soon see dozen or so strong startups which will chip away the search share, each trying to leverage, cost optimize and improve this tech.
[+] [-] pm90|3 years ago|reply
Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company.
I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course not.
Sundar doesn’t seem exceptionally promising. It seems like he is an ok leader when things are going well but not so good in tougher times.
[+] [-] trentnix|3 years ago|reply
Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alternative. Google has some real challenging times ahead.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain.
Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a show of hands, "How many have a 20% project?" There was one hand.
What it WAS useful for was checking out a project you might want to transfer to.
[+] [-] alberth|3 years ago|reply
It’s not that at all.
Given that Larry + Sergey still control Google (>50% shareholder votes), seem prudent to meet with who controls the company to debrief them on current events & action plan.
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|3 years ago|reply
Being evil has a lot of overhead where you have to invest significant time into researching grey areas to exploit and then crafting your product or service not step over the line. Then it falls apart when you get to Europe and they are happy to call you on being evil and fine you billions of euros for doing evil things.
Google should go back to not being evil, that worked a lot better for them, and just focus on making cutting edge products.
It would also be great if they answered the phone on occasion, and did more to listen to their users. Community support is an obvious cop-out, and nobody wants be dismissed without warning or explanation when it involves something they care about.
[+] [-] clumsysmurf|3 years ago|reply
I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time).
The more AI Google applies to my life, the more I want to escape it. I remember, when it was said people pay a premium for Apple products because they want privacy. I wonder if it will also become, people migrate to Apple to escape AI.
[+] [-] college_physics|3 years ago|reply
Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete.
Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely? It would be a blessing (presumably, because things can always drift further into evil) but, so far at least, there is little to point to such an imminent disruption
[+] [-] atombender|3 years ago|reply
In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user experience that Altavista had succeeded with originally.
Given how bad Google's results have become, I think you can certainly outdo it. Anecdotally, it's amazing how often I find myself reaching for ChapGPT these days to find basic facts that Google can't. I think Google is right to be afraid.
[+] [-] svantana|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karamanolev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|3 years ago|reply
Search is dead, spammers killed it and Google was happy about it because it has become an answer machine where they can say the answer is whoever pays the most. Greatly deteriorated experience from what it used to be.
Now someone builds an answers machine with much much better user experience with all that data which Google can no longer surface.
I don't know if Google can quickly match that function but even if they do, are they going to be able to replicate the experience if the answers machine choose the answers by a bidding war?
[+] [-] otabdeveloper4|3 years ago|reply
Pretty sure you can, because Google search sucks balls. (First and foremost because it ignores context. E.g., searching for programming API documentation is tuned entirely differently compared to searching for movie recommendations.)
That said, Google is not in the search business, because there is no such thing. Google is in the context advertising business.
[+] [-] lazide|3 years ago|reply
Taken in that context puts it in a different light.
[+] [-] atdrummond|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadcore|3 years ago|reply
I think the revenue assumption here lies on the fact that GPT generates content when the web wait for the user to provide the content. Generates congent, for lawyers or hospitals for example - pardon my lack of imagination. So a basic business model would be to charge per request I suppose.
[+] [-] mansoon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoduck14|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric4smith|3 years ago|reply
Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google.
It truly saves a lot of time.
Google is right to be quite worried.
Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before.
Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds?
And worse I can ask the Ai to write a short couple of paragraphs about each one.
Then I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style.
What do I do?
I do online marketing and programming to support online marketing activities.
I write. I plan. I code. I hire.
We just taught a junior employee who is not great as a writer to use ChatGPT to help her with a good start to writing.
The training for her was how to formulate detailed and highly specific “prompts” and to use google as a backup to confirm facts in the AI generated output.
It’s not there to replace people’s work. It’s there to make them much, much more efficient.
[+] [-] chazeon|3 years ago|reply
The GPTs and Whisper really get me excited again these days though. But Google pioneered this field.
I love their JAX, but in a way many people would love pytorch but not so much in the META company.
[+] [-] closewith|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|3 years ago|reply
For those out of loop: https://github.com/google/jax
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682507
[+] [-] jeffbee|3 years ago|reply
But mostly the ML stuff is silently launched behind the scenes. And you slowly become inured to astonishing feats of machine learning like being able to translate spoken Chinese to English text on your mobile, and cars that drive themselves, and the fact that you can search your photos for "toy lizard" and that actually works.
Edited to add: with regard to the idea that some competitor with an AI code generator will out-program Google as an organization, you should take note that Google has already deployed AI code generators in large-scale production. So whenever a future competitor re-invents this facility at that moment they are already years behind Google[2].
To summarize, I believe it is somewhat strange to believe that the organization with demonstrated state-of-the-art machine learning research and development will be caught unaware by the ML revolution.
1: https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/globalgoals/projects/...
2: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/07/ml-enhanced-code-completio...
[+] [-] kyrra|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epolanski|3 years ago|reply
While I do agree that AI is going to bring a huge shake up to the search market, I still believe that Google is in the best position to fight this battle.
Realistically, given how fast the AI field improves month after month, do we think it will take long for Google to replicate a product similar to ChatGPT? I don't think so.
And then they are the company that's best suited to have this AI driven search in Android and Google search thus limiting the impact of this whole problem.
Sure, maybe Microsoft will deprive them of some developers that will look for information inside VS Code or their editor, and stuff like that, but overall I don't see Google going to suffer that much as long as they are able to answer the ChatGPT challenge in a meaningful time, something they should be easily able to do given their immense computational and data resources.
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninethirty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vespasian|3 years ago|reply
If GPTSearch ends up as infested with spam and ads as Google it will be little more than a new input interface with embedded ads in the output.
Part of the appeal right now (for me) is it's lack of SEO spam and over the top ads.
That won't last (obviously), at least not for their mainstream implementation.
[+] [-] tluyben2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorenjan|3 years ago|reply
In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.
[+] [-] flybrand|3 years ago|reply
They’ve been harvesting profits rather than making a better product. They should be freaked out.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
Ironically, the young Page and Brin predicted the inherent conflict of interest between search and advertisement.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a
With gems such as
"For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine."
[+] [-] tjpnz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worthless-trash|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kossTKR|3 years ago|reply
Adwords is such a scummy endeavour that squeezes more or less all companies using it, but more so smaller players. They are not a friendly company. They are a MegaCorp that is so monopolistic and dark (design) in its behaviours it's incredible that it's legal.
Hope alternatives would be better.
[+] [-] bg24|3 years ago|reply
The challenge is execution. Most of the leadership have done amazingly great, but only when they had no competition. For FB, Cloud, Gaming, AR, self-driving cars - they could not do much. They did great on Android and Nest - both were founder led for a while.
Right now, OpenAI is adding new features like crazy - they are a startup. Google may have better engineers, but they will lag behind in execution. Plus, changing a 20yr search+ad mindset in a month is hard.
[+] [-] emrah|3 years ago|reply
Well yes of course. They are the incumbent and they've been in cash generating mode for a while. With a large lead over "competitors", if we can even call them that, and a virtual monopoly status in the both the ad space and search space, it's perfectly normal for Google to move at a glacial pace. They have no external need or intrinsic motivation to do otherwise at this point in time.
That is, until an actual threat shows up..
I honestly don't think ChatGPT is a real threat except they are getting a lot of attention and they are the new David to Google's Goliath so they are a psychological threat more than a technical one
[+] [-] bagacrap|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jb1991|3 years ago|reply
I actually laughed out loud at that one.
[+] [-] speedylight|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajdoingnothing|3 years ago|reply
However, would people even trust their new products knowing Google's tendency to kill off these products within a short amount of time?
[+] [-] roenxi|3 years ago|reply
This goes to the chaotic problem which is still to be decided. There is no consensus position on what facts are, what is safe and what is misinformation. Part of the success of modern democracy hinges on being able to switch the leadership out with people who have a different frame on life than the old group. Yesterday's misinformation can become tomorrows facts (consider, famously, the impact Snowden had on the conversation).
Can a company as large as Google do this without splitting their own market along various political boundaries? Will they be forced to take religious, political and moral positions? Will they be out-competed by more neutral or more partisan chatbots? If chatbots become a big deal, will the target audience scale like search did or is it fundamentally fragmented?
[+] [-] im3w1l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nprateem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnsru|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|3 years ago|reply