Google's live from Paris event private/deleted immediately

[colesantiago]

Just watched the 'Google Live from Paris' event and it looked like a non-event to me.

It seems that the livestream event was set private after it ended. (It was unlisted to begin with) They even forgot the phone used to demonstrate multisearch.

This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You know, whatever the merits (and it sounds as if there were very few) of Google's presentation (or Pinchai's recent non-statement) might be, I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search. If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understand these models' currently unsolved problem with lying and fabulation.

And yet when I read the comments, I see this sort of calm acceptance that of course this technology is going to take over search. Why is everyone so confident? The performance of these models is simultaneously jaw-dropping and absurd. With no proposed solutions to the problems that they fundamentally face, why this level of belief that their ascendance is inevitable?

[sho_hn]

I'd like to have more discussion about the attribution problem, specifically.

We now have a couple of the players saying they're working on, or having demos. But from what I can see, all of these don't _actually_ attribute the source. They're just able to find _a_ source that fits to the output, working backward from it. Often the attributed source fits, but is actually disagreeing with the original output in specific details. In other words, it's not backing the output at all. At most it's a "you could check out these links and compare yourself and it might help you judge our accuracy".

Is there any indication real attribution is coming?

[pasquinelli]

> If there's a crowd anywhere in the world large enough to leave 200+ comments on a post like this, you'd think thatg the one at HN would understand these models' currently unsolved problem with lying and fabulation.

if i'm being frank, that doesn't match my experience with HN at all. chatgpt is the hot new thing, of course people here are preoccupied imagining a future powered with it.

there are a bunch of different types of people here, with different perspectives that might be at odds with one another, but they don't necessarily comment on the same articles.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Assuming that Google is in a panic over ChatGPT, as suggested the HN commentariat and the "tech" news media, then arguably this only highlights how little confidence Google has in the quality of its search engine and the trustworthiness of the web as a source for information. For example, instead of trying to match or beat ChatGPT, whatever that would entail, Google could instead focus on illustrating the shortcomings of conversational AI versus a search engine as a reliable and trustworthy means of locating information on the web.

As usual, it appears "tech" companies have an extremely warped view of web users as being non-discerning consumers of whatever garbage "tech" companies feed to them. Perhaps online advertising services companies are not a good choice to serve as arbiters of data/information search and retrieval.

[tarsinge]

That thread is mostly about Google completely messing up their response to what Microsoft announced yesterday.

I don’t see that unanimous acceptance, there are a lot of interesting discussions about the shortcomings. There are many comparisons between Google results for examples, with also potential solutions to problems you cite like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709883

It’s not about replacing search overnight, but if it can take even 10% of search volume that would have serious consequences for Google.

[jozvolskyef]

The disruption isn't hypothetical. People like me are excited about the technology because it already has disrupted search for us. My brother has been using it for the majority of his queries because he doesn't speak English and ChatGPT is a gateway to the knowledge that only exists on the English-language internet.

[labrador]

Microsoft is doing it right. They display search results on the left and ChatGPT results on the right. It's up to you to decide what is accurate knowing the results on the right are supposed to be a summary of what is on the left.

[mark_l_watson]

I am not really disagreeing with you, but just wanted to add:

Probably the secret sauce to using LLMs for search and other forms of information retrieval is first taking a query and use traditional lookup to find likely information. Then aggregating this data, provide the aggregated data as context, append the query, and pass it to the LLM. Probably some post processing is a good idea also.

I used to do this with squad LLMs.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> I would have expected the commentariat here at HN to display way more skepticism about language models as a replacement for search.

Because plenty of people don't see it necessarily as a replacement for search, but as a useful adjunct.

More to the point though, why do people always want to define the "HN commentariat" as some monolithic bunch? I've seen tons of comments and articles on the front page pointing out many issues with LLMs, from attribution, to confident bullshitting, to bias issues. Heck, there was plenty of discussion about a big proposed reason for Google's stock crash yesterday was due to the ad Google used to highlight questions their LLM can answer gave a confidently incorrect response.

Whenever I see comments that treat the rest of the HN audience like some monolithic group, especially in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary, I feel like, ironically, the poster is saying "Why don't you all agree with me?"

[ekanes]

For me, it's that this recently-released product is already competing (in the minds of users, which is what counts) with a decades-old mature product. In terms of accuracy, the "but sometimes it's wrong" perspective reminds me of the initial reaction among some to wikipedia. Yep, ANYONE can edit it. Yep, they could lie... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[doomleika]

I would argue the state of search engine(i.e. google) is worse than ChatGPT. Half of the time top of the search gives me non-answers like "it depends". I have to use `stackoverflow` `reddit` or incognito mode to force google at least give me something tangible, and I don't see google going to change in short term considering for them, me going through all 3 pages of search is engagement and ad revenue.

ChatGPT might not be ideal, but they are way better than current offering.

[uoaei]

Any numerical system operates only on numerical, not logical/grammatical/whatever constraints. Wrongness is built into any system based solely on neural components by the simple fact that rightness is unverifiable from within these systems' own "logical" (read: associational) apparati.

I share your confusion regarding the grave dearth of incredulity in the reception of these technologies.

[rchaud]

> And yet when I read the comments, I see this sort of calm acceptance that of course this technology is going to take over search. Why is everyone so confident?

It is difficult to get a man to critically evaluate something if his future salary depends upon his unquestioning acceptance of it.

[potatolicious]

Agreed heavily - and I work with these technologies regularly. There is a mania around it much like there was for crypto (though I would maintain there's more merit here than there ever was with crypto - orders of magnitude more).

There are a litany of problems that surround LLMs that are solvable, but are highly non-trivial. The present hyped demos all seem to involve mainlining the unfiltered output of LLMs directly at the user, and this approach strikes me as largely impractical, with all of the issues you've brought up and more.

Ultimately I think we will land on a few learnings, some of which are IMO pretty obvious already with existing ML:

- There are going to be lots and lots of use cases for LLMs where despite its additional complexity it won't out-perform simpler ML models, or even heuristic-based solutions. This has been a plague for AI startups forever - where the shameful truth is that the ML bits do not significantly outperform heuristic-based approaches, but the ML bits sure as useful for the hype machine. There will be more of these use cases than use cases where LLMs actually do significantly move the state of the art forward.

- In most broadly mainstream-palatable applications the LLM will need to be intermediated by many other systems - some using other ML models, and some using heuristic-based solutions. For example for search, mediating the output through a knowledge graph with reliable provenance and accuracy. Realistically there will be vanishingly few use cases that are thin-wrappers around LLMs. Real usefulness of this tech will require very heavy lifting around the core model to make it actually accurate/reliable enough to be useful on a mass scale. The many products spinning up that seem to be premised on very thin wrappers around OpenAI's API will IMO mostly not survive, both because there is no moat and because the results won't be sufficiently useful.

- Accuracy matters and will be a thorn in the side of these products for quite some time, even though it is solvable. For some use cases (mostly creative ones with a human in the loop - like creative writing or image synthesis) the lack of accuracy is livable, but for most others the propensity to hallucinate is going to be a major barrier to adoption. Right now you're dealing with an enthusiast audience that's willing to look past glaring and obvious errors in output in favor of what it could be and how far we've come, but a mainstream audience I suspect will be less forgiving. Social media virality around product failure cases will also further punish products.

Overall I think what we're looking at here is legitimately a huge leap forward, but this legitimate and well-found excitement needs to be tempered by the fact that some (most?) players in the space seem to be getting in way over their skis, and that truly productionizing this technology is going to be intensely difficult.

[edit] To be a bit less doom and gloom about this - I think the real winner here are natural language interfaces, and stepping ever closer towards computer systems that do not need to be actively learned before being used. There is IMO an over-focus on the knowledge-encoding part of LLMs (which is unreliable and prone to hallucination) and not enough focus on the language-encoding part of LLMs (which is what they actually do). For the most part voice/language-based interfaces have had limited traction because they honestly haven't been smart enough to understand user requests with a sufficient level of expressivity and fidelity. I suspect these products (and new ones) will have another crack at this problem.

[mistymountains]

It’s difficult to disentangle people’s desire for Google to fail due to layoffs and corporate misbehavior from legitimate analysis about how LLMs will cause Google to fail.

[hahahawhat]

"And yet when I read the comments, I see this sort of calm acceptance that of course this technology is going to take over search. Why is everyone so confident? The performance of these models is simultaneously jaw-dropping and absurd. With no proposed solutions to the problems that they fundamentally face, why this level of belief that their ascendance is inevitable?"

Because you forgot the nr 1 rule of fight club. It doesn't matter if it has unsolvable problems. The only thing that matters is if it has the momentum and the support to create a bubble and drive economic growth.

You're welcome.

[zzzeek]

simple answer is the consensus groupthink on Hacker News is deeply wishful

i made this same point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699087 and got nothing but pushback how there is no real problem with ChatGPT and Bing just fixed all the problems (which didn't exist) anyway.

[jaggs]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0

If this was a startup, they would be dead in the water. Nothing of substance, awful sound, 9:45 mins in they don't have a key piece of live demo equipment (the phone)/

As someone else said, it's like they asked a couple of interns to rush something out in 24 hours.

No wonder the stock price is tanking. Awful display from Google.

[lm28469]

Damn that was painful to watch. They seem utterly disconnected from how people actually use their phones in real life.

Finding elevators and atms with AR ? Is that the future google is selling ? Who's buying. If google maps was the equivalent of the invention the printing press that would be the invention of scented toilet paper

[hn_throwaway_99]

This whole display was just - weird. The production values make it seem like it was the equivalent of a local meetup group, not a worldwide presentation/announcement. But coming so soon after Google's big AI announcement on Monday, looks like the public/investors were assuming this would be a much bigger/more substantial event than it actually was.

That said, I still think this reflects very poorly on Google's organizational focus.

[anon84873628]

Maybe the people who were supposed to be running the event got laid off xD

[awa]

I think the correct link is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLWXJ22LUEc (atleast the sound is better here)

[gardenhedge]

I just skimmed through the video and didn't see anything too terrible. To be honest, I don't care they forgot a phone. I'd rather see mistakes like that than over rehearsed presentations.

[pellucide]

I am in the minority here. But for me, google's presentations were always like this. The presentation always seemed so rehearsed with artificial excitement.

[guardiangod]

I hope Google is not pulling a Blackberry moment. I remember when the iPhone was first announced, BB scrambled to put out press releases saying they have competing products in development. 2 years later the Bold(EDIT: Storm) was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance.

>Used to work for BB/RIM

[htrp]

> 2 years later the Bold was released and everyone realized it's just a hastily designed iPhone clone. That marks the end of BB's dominance.

I feel like Google is going to bleed credibility for every month that they don't have a lamda/llm enabled search integrated into the home page. You can talk all you want about the foundational models and how advanced they are, but the search product itself will require a ton of fine-tuning on real-world training data that they aren't collecting yet.

Unless Microsoft completely botches their "newBing" launch, this is probably the most potential they've had in search since MSN was launched.

[EarlKing]

It's worse than that: This is Google pulling a Yahoo moment. They're realizing they missed the boat and are scrambling to try to maintain relevance against what is clearly an existential threat to their revenue.

[treeman79]

Decades ago intel put out a press about the amazing new tech their CPUs would have. 3 of 5 CPU manufactures gave up. By the time the tech actually arrived, AMD had it as well. The others would have been fine.

Sometimes a press release can make all the difference.

(Sorry can’t find story that old)

[rchaud]

Blackberry Storm was released in November 2008, which is a year after the iPhone, not 2 years. The first Android phone came out just a month before in October. I was in NYC for job interviews then I saw billboards for both everywhere.

[afavour]

ChatGPT as a search engine sounds amazing but also really quite problematic. It's an extension of the issue with Google's "instant answers" (or whatever they're called): right now the creators of the content Google/ChatGPT scrapes are usually paid via the advertisements on their pages. When no-one clicks though any more, no-one gets paid.

I know, I know, the ad banner-funded web is a mess and I wouldn't mourn its demise either. But it worries me that it's an entirely open ended question for what actually replaces it.

[candyman]

I don't think Google Corporate had any idea this was going on and that way more people were interested in it than normal and many were reporters and investors. It had a feel like a local Google dev group meeting which is informal. I stopped using Google Search months ago because it was totally unusable. For some things it's still good and I use search within Google Maps often.

I think this will make voice-based UI viable (finally!) which is great. It's going to definitely eat into traditional Google ad revenue since clicking around and "impressions" are going to go way down.

[nunodonato]

I was watching... meh all the time and then suddenly it goes blank and disappears. Like, wtf Google. After yesterday's Microsoft presentation, this was such an underwhelming event.

And it gets real tiring on how much Google tries to create an idea on how advanced their AI is.. (and it might be) but the fact is, nobody can access it or try it. So until we actually are able to put our hands on something, I'm calling vaporware. At least with OpenAI we get to experiment and build actual products with it.

[stephencoyner]

The MSFT event yesterday was impressive. To see them bring GPT to scale, real-time, with citations and other new features is very cool. The new products look genuinely very helpful - they solve real jobs to be done.

Surely Google will catch up, but this was a blunder worse than I would have expected. The race is truly on

Edit: one more thought. After listening to talks from Kevin Scott and others at MSFT, it seems like their vision is copilot for everything. Kevin made it sound like they have dozens of these experiments happening right now. I think this is a winning formula and we’ll be seeing all kinds of other new launches this year.

[jurmous]

Google felt stumbling repeating many previously announced AI features in other spaces or small improvements to distract that their version of conversational search is behind.

Google did not have the source links below the Bard chatbot responses. They also did not show recent news results like Bing did yesterday.

And their presenter felt stumbling at moments too and lacking confidence. And the demo phone was "stolen". So also in execution the event felt lacking...

Microsoft said in their interview with The Verge that they were working on a raw version of their new Prometheus model since mid 2022 which also shows those sources. And they showed the nice compose and website summarise conversational tool integrations for within Edge. There were no hints of integrations of Bard within Chrome. So it feels that including training time + product development time that Microsoft is at least a year ahead.

[paulpan]

For what it's worth, Google should be taking a page out of Netflix's playbook in pivoting their search business: not by improving/adding LLM features to existing search algorithm and results, but instead fork into a new site and starting from scratch. Netflix had spun out their DVD mail-in business to focus on streaming but had maintained ownership of both.

This would allow them to innovate quickly on the new tech without worrying about the baggage and backend migrations required for the first approach. Otherwise it could slow things to a crawl and risk of being leapfrogged by Microsoft. We saw a similar scenario play out for YouTube Shorts - it took 2-3 years of beta testing to avoid disrupting the core YouTube content but that allowed TikTok to firmly entrench itself.

[taubek]

Watched it. Seemed like a panic reaction to me. Like they need to get out something quickly out. Presented features look OK, but the event it self seemed like internes presenting what were they doing during the summer break. When it ended I was like "that's it?!?".

[ttoinou]

Why wouldn't Google be able to compete with their own version of ChatGPT ? I don't understand this underlying assumption behind all comments here

[HaZeust]

Wow, they really are in disarray. Maybe the (ex-)Googlers in recent AI HackerNews articles are wrong in proclaiming that Google will come on top of the AI wars, due to their immense contributions to its lead-up.

I look forward to see what new Bing amounts to the industry, as well as Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI for Bing, Azure, and whatever else is planned. This is an exciting tectonic shift.

[throwaway29303]

Here's a mirror of the event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npV4Kix7Td0

[meltyness]

Seems like a disjointed attempt to convince that Google is already an AI provider, which probably isn't wrong. Here's kind of the "touchstones" from the 4 or 5 speakers.

- Highlighting the bleedover between search and conversational AI.

- Highlighting the widespread deployment of Translate across Google services.

- Highlighting "Google Lens" (coming soon? I thought this has been integrated for a decade?).

- Feature announcement, "multisearch" multi-modal search such as with an image and associated text.

- Feature announcement, "Bard" -> "But" -> "Further conditions..."

- Upgrades to the "expert answer recommendations" that is actually enabled by "Generative AI" -- (what were they doing before throwing darts?! when the hell was "do dogs dream?" https://www.popisms.com/TelevisionCommercial/101945/Google-A...)

- Feature announcement, "Next month", Generative Language APIs "onboarding developers, creators, and enterprises"

- "Responsible AI/ AI Principles" (https://ai.google/principles)

-Feature tease, Google Maps eye-candy / novel interface overlays using NeRF

- Google Maps AR demonstration that also looks like something from a decade ago that didn't get adopted / basically what Glass did

- Proper EV charging stations support (it doesn't already do this?)

- "Project Air View" to collect data about infrastructure's effect on air quality to benefit city planning? No idea what this is about.

- Google Arts and Culture (chrome experiments) / the blobs from 8 years ago revisited, I guess "Google Books" archival is just "arts and culture" now, AR application for an image viewer still very 2012,

It abruptly ends. This was all very out-of-touch.

[Rebelgecko]

Original with better video quality - https://www.youtube.com/live/yLWXJ22LUEc

[beastman82]

wow this is pretty hard to watch tbh

[operatingthetan]

This quote from Nadella going around today is pretty humorous on light of the video: "This new Bing will make Google come out and dance, and I want people to know that we made them dance."

[_jplc]

> This suggests to me that Google is finally getting disrupted and are scrambling of desperation because of the release of ChatGPT.

Is there a term like premature ejaculation but for believing in disruption?

[gardaani]

Maybe related to that failed event: Google stock price is falling, it's currently -7%.

[marricks]

Important to note that both companies don’t have a public demo yet. Microsoft’s “demo” only answers select questions which is… not an actual demo.

That said this is a hilarious mess up because Microsoft actually had a presentation.

[jeppester]

The reaction to this compared to the MS presentation yesterday really shows the difference a good presentation can make.

It will be interesting how well the products work when we get to use them for real.

[hn_throwaway_99]

For all the folks saying "Google is getting disrupted", I'm glad to see what's going on but I wouldn't hold my breath. Most importantly, by all accounts Google does have better (or at least as-good-as) tech internally that can match ChatGPT. They have been slow to release because of reputational risk, and having to deal with internal (and external) pressure about amplified bias.

I think the best analogy here is when Microsoft fought tooth and nail to win the original browser wars with IE, then sat on their laurels and did nothing for years, then Chrome finally came along and ate their lunch. Definitely remains to be seen whether other companies will end up eating Google's search lunch, but I do think if Google can get their shit together organizationally that they'll still be able to compete.

[jowday]

For people in this thread convinced that Google is scrambling to come up with a ChatGPT competitor - that’s only true on the product side. Internally, LamDA has been available with a chatGPT style interface for years (maybe more like 18 months).