11 ms·

Google employees criticize CEO for “dumpster fire” response to ChatGPT

467 points by bribroder 4y ago

belter 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402
ouid 4y ago
Has sundar been a good CEO otherwise?
- robofanatic 4y ago
  He survived for 8+ years as a Google CEO and 4+ years as Alphabet CEO. Tells that he has done few things OK.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - modeless 4y ago
    He is world class at being inoffensive. He's great at testifying to Congress.
    - jwestbury 4y ago
      Testifying to Congress is a pretty key skill for a Google CEO at the moment, to be fair.
      - modeless 4y ago
        Yes, these are unironically extremely difficult skills which were critical for a Google CEO over the last 10 years. Maybe the next 10 years will be different though.
- xoogler2004 4y ago
  hahahahhahahahahah
- mc32 4y ago
  Better than say a former industry stalwart like Jack Welch. He's vanilla and sometimes vanilla is what you need to steer a steady course.
- blindriver 4y ago
  He has brought no innovation and his fearfulness has ground Google down to a halt. What new successful products has arrived during his tenure? All he did was not fuck up. He's lucky because the entire market has increased, but that's his doing. He could be replaced by any overly cautious algorithm and the results would have been the same.
  - malfist 4y ago
    Stadia! Oh wait..
    - myko 4y ago
      That probably is the greatest innovation Google launched in his tenure, and they killed it! How frustrating.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    Before he was CEO he led the Chrome, ChromeOS/Chromebook, Google Drive projects. What is interesting though, according to Wikipedia, is that he is not a software engineer nor a computer scientist by training. He is a materials scientist with an MBA and apparently briefly worked at McKinsey. Does this limit his tech vision? Hard to say. Satya Nadella however has a Master's in Computer Science + an MBA comparatively.
  - muzz 4y ago
    Sounds more like Tim Cook
    - blululu 4y ago
      Going to have to disagree with you on this. AirPods and the Apple Watch both came out under his watch. But the biggest area of expansion for Apple is going to be in software which has seen a ton of innovation in the past decade (Cloud services, payments and a whole slew of improvements to the OS) which all happened under Cook's watch.
    - snapcaster 4y ago
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Stadia was a massive lost opportunity, they had no unique games (i.e. using server-side co-locality for multiplayer, etc.) nor a decent subscription to compete with MS Games Pass.
- gg-plz 4y ago
  Sundar is good at keeping things running as-is. He was elevated to CEO of Google to keep things running as-is while the founders moved their exciting ventures up to Alphabet. When those other bets were abandoned, Sundar was left as the top engaged executive, but he's still only a caretaker when the company needs an actual leader with vision to navigate their competition. So, no. He has not been a good CEO. He was a good middle-manager and a decent CEO at best, but he's not been what the company needed, and he's definitely not what they need today.
  - substation13 4y ago
    It's true. Even Ballmer had a vision.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Leadership with actual visions is a rarity these days across the board. It's not just large companies who are getting their lunch eaten by startups left and right (cough Oracle), but also politics. Most people in high positions want the fame associated with the title (and for companies, the compensation), but not provide leadership beyond managing the status quo - and to make it worse, both shareholders and voters seem to prefer stability over progress.
- sylens 4y ago
  I feel like there is no vision for the future of Android there except chasing the iPhone. In the early part of the last decade, Android had its own identity which was part of the reason I used it. When it lost that, I moved to iPhone.
  - muzz 4y ago
    What do you mean by "its own identity"? If you're saying that Android and iPhone/iOS are very similar, that seems like a good thing?
    - sylens 4y ago
      It doesn't seem like a good thing for Google in that they are trying to sell Pixel phones at iPhone level prices without having the fit and finish, battery life, or app ecosystem that iOS has.
- aix1 4y ago
  I think the current reality is that Sundar is more of a figurehead, with Ruth calling the shots.
- blululu 4y ago
  Well he sat at the helm of a very powerful company during one of the largest and longest bull markets in history. Beyond being at the right place at the right time - did he do a good job? I would say that he is thoroughly mediocre. I don't get the sense that he is very strong as a technically oriented leader or as a product oriented leader. He seems more of a political/consensus leader who is trying to keep the peace without any principle other than 'be respectful'. You can see the problems growing. Costs grow faster than revenue and irrelevant projects drag on, while nobody is providing a clear vision about why anyone should care and why these product are going to be the best. Google does fine without too much leadership so maybe this isn't the worst. That said I think he would be remembered more positively if he were to be fired in the next 6 months.
skullone 4y ago
It's hard to differentiate the various dumpster fires going on at Google right now. And I don't think they're all the CEOs fault.
- dhaulagiri 4y ago
  Everything is your fault when you're the CEO
  - Yuioup 4y ago
    He takes full responsibility /s
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Responsibility? He’s full of it.
dboreham 4y ago
Does this make Alphabet stock a buy? In general I have a rule to never invest in adtech-based companies but a 12% discount is attractive. Edit: a quick look at the chart shows the drop was off a recent peak and current price is roughly the 3mth mean. Tempest in teacup then.
mc32 4y ago
There will always be people who think they knew better. It's not the end of Google or their Bard. It's an emotional outburst precipitated by lousy HR numbers. People are fearful and need to lash out a bit. Ars is riding the slight wave of disenchantment among a few emps.
deleted 4y ago
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kubota 4y ago
Whatever happened to move fast and break things? Who cares if it wasn't perfect in the first iteration. It was a shot across ChatGPTs bow, and pleased the shareholders.
- lokar 4y ago
  Wrong company
- malfist 4y ago
  Move fast and break things don't apply if your "break things" cooks the golden goose
- jmathai 4y ago
  I don’t think any Google shareholders are happy with the stock price after their announcement.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  The criticism is valid. It was a pre-recorded demo with 3 bullets and they got one wrong. Easily could have fact checked it before publishing it. It would have been forgivable in a live demo, but they didn't do one because they "lost"[0] the phone. 0 - There's a chance they didn't do the demo on purpose because it wasn't ready.
- outside1234 4y ago
  That was Facebook. Google is move slow and have your PR nitpicked eight times.
npalli 4y ago
Here's the weird thing though, as discussed yesterday [1], the Microsoft demo was totally broken as well. In the end, everyone is looking for a big platform shift (next MOBILE!!!) and hype getting ahead of reality. When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms. https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  The coming years of LLM/GPT hype and vaporware will be a good relief from the past years of blockchain hype and vaporware. Seems like it’ll be more interesting anyway.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Microsoft can botch their search without tanking the company. Google cannot.
  - npalli 4y ago
    Sure, but the narrative seems to be Microsoft has somehow cracked the puzzle and will leave Google behind which is not the case currently.
    - cma 4y ago
      Google search has gotten so degraded in the past few years that people want something to beat them.
      - jakzurr 4y ago
        Hmmm. Yeah, now I'm starting to believe it too - I hope it does beat them.
    - bioemerl 4y ago
      They don't have to, they only have to be relative equals. It's possible chat GPT is a "dreadnaught moment"
gjsman-1000 4y ago
I’m struggling to find the link because of all the new coverage, but Bard was mentioned as a Google project in 2019. It had a prefix in the name though, which I'm struggling to remember (it wasn't OpenBard, but it was SomethingBard). If that is real (and hopefully I can find it and update this post)… that would indicate Google has been working on it for years, never thought it was ready, and then decided to snap-deploy it after ChatGPT’s success. Which, predictably, would make a massive mess internally as reported here. I find it believable. UPDATE: OK, it was called "Apprentice Bard." However, that names comes from CNBC in 2023, but CNBC doesn't say when "Apprentice Bard" actually began development. However, "Apprentice Bard" was a replacement for Google's first internal chatbot solution Meena, which Google did deploy internally and also publicly revealed only for bragging rights (and not actual use) in January 2020 (and so the 2019 figure in my head does somewhat line up). So if you think about the Bard project as having started with Meena... sounds about right. https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-age...
lvspiff 4y ago
Whats with everything being a dumpster fire nowadays? how about a simple hot mess? or what happened to a good ol hell in a hand-basket? or Ninth Circle Of Hell? I'm sure there are better euphemisms than the dumpster being on fhir as that indicates someone stoking it whereas the reality is more indecision and inaction causing confusion and demoralizing the teams.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  Everything has to be turned up to 11 today because too many people think they won't get enough attention if they actually label something as severe/important as it actually is.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Think about it, we stopped watching traditional news, then shunned news that was too slow because twitter was faster though sometimes wrong. so traditional news media was like "aight, bet" and now we are where we are. the trump era fully solidified that the more ragetastic you can make your title, the more people tribe up and engage in the comments so your one shitty little 30 second article now has people mobbing together in droves for the comments and your ad rate is through the roof. what you're writing doesn't even have to have any fact, it can be all opinion, and in most cases this can afford you even more leeway to be inflammatory. does anybody else see this happening or am I just here rambling at the sky?
    - xg15 4y ago
      > what you're writing doesn't even have to have any fact, it can be all opinion, and in most cases this can afford you even more leeway to be inflammatory. Sounds like it could be automated pretty well with ChatGPT.
    - Domenic_S 4y ago
      Traditional news invented it. "More on this amazing story after these messages" - everything was formatted to keep you around through the next commercial break. The internet didn't have to do that since you were seeing ads inline, so the news was more useful. But then the internet realized if you sensationalize... etc etc.
nivenkos 4y ago
It's gonna be Chatbots / NFTs all over again.
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  I stopped using google and almost don't use SO for programming related searches, my daily driver is chatGPT even when sometimes it gives bad answers. Chatbots were useless garbage from the get go and I hated them and NFT is, well NFT.
  - therealcamino 4y ago
    Doesn't it bother you that it sounds just as confident when it's making stuff up as when it's accurately summarizing? Do you just think you can tell when it's wrong?
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I can easily tell whether the code that ChatGPT writes for me is wrong by using an IDE. But it’s always closer to meeting my exact requirements than a Google search.
    - myth_drannon 4y ago
      Sometimes I can tell it's wrong. But it faster to try and fail than searching for an answer on Google.
- hef19898 4y ago
  just wait until the various ChatGPTs are training each other using the well "researched content" they spamming the internet with... That alone will kill search more thoroughly then ChatGPT ever could by facilitating search at Bing.
  - h4kor 4y ago
    I think we just ignited the AI Poisoning bomb. Future system will have a harder time to be trained, because their datasets will be poisoned. Wrote up my thoughts about this a few weeks ago when ChatGPT started https://blog.libove.org/posts/ai-posioning/ https://blog.libove.org/posts/ai-posioning/
renewiltord 4y ago
They're the guys who built it. It's not like he's demoing something that they spent 4 days building. It's been in dev for 4 years. Everyone knows Google is primarily a BD play right now. The engineering there is in the "we'll make the button blue by next quarter" quality. But BD plays build quite good moat. So I think they'll be fine.
- travem 4y ago
  Could you explain what you mean by Google being a “BD play”? I’m not familiar with that term.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    They are primarily dependent not on technology but on their incumbent position which lets them negotiate strategic business deals to protect their market. Their advantage is not technological.
    - travem 4y ago
      So to spell out the abbreviation, BD means “Business Development” then?
      - renewiltord 4y ago
        Yes, sorry.
robofanatic 4y ago
as a developer I ran few tests on ChatGPT for example "write me a javascript code that does canvas animation" it was amazing to see it write actual working code. but it took about a minute to write it. If I had "Googled" the same thing, in under a second I would have found multiple working code examples (thanks to sites like StackOverflow). IMO, ChatGPT has a long way to go.
- abm53 4y ago
  Often what you’d like to do has not been asked for exactly before. And almost all programmers need to do something quick in a language or framework they aren’t experts in. ChatGPT can be extremely useful in those cases in my experience.
vouaobrasil 4y ago
[flagged]
- endisneigh 4y ago
  why not?
abudabi123 4y ago
Google Prepared Transformer => GPT, that has a nice marketing ring and clearly claims the invention/innovation. Google took their eye off the ball and fumbled. A "goto market" division could have helped the inventors/innovators.
BeefWellington 4y ago
AI is the new "Big Data", though maybe it has one or two practical use cases for larger companies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lysecret 4y ago
I am super excited about ChatGPT even just yesterday it helped me fix a really difficult bug. (I was so excited that I even wanted to pay for it but their payment was broken haha) However, I am starting to think that moving it to bing already wasn’t a smart move. These things are great on OpenAI scale. But I fear they are a money pit with bad pr for google and even bing scale.
- hnfong 4y ago
  > it helped me fix a really difficult bug Tell us more?
osener 4y ago
Remember when winner of the voice interface war was going to win the future of computing? Apple has a "dumpster fire" of a voice assistant and they're still around.
- scarface74 4y ago
  No one at any point thought that voice interaction would be dominant.
- muzz 4y ago
  Every new thing gets hyped up as the "killer" of existing businesses. Siri, Alexa, etc. were all supposed to be existential threats to Google's search, and then they weren't
  - drewcon 4y ago
    I’m surprised no one has connected ChatGPT to a voice interface? The way it holds conversational context is really leaps and bounds better than Alexa/Siri
  - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> Google employees > Interactive chart of Alphabet (GOOG) annual worldwide employee count from 2010 to 2022. Alphabet total number of employees in 2022 was 190,234 There should be a rule where you can't over-represent a group of people in media headlines. What percentage of 190,000 people called the CEOs response a dumpster fire? What percentage of 190,000 are even aware of ChatGPT or Google's response to it?
- saagarjha 4y ago
  You would have to be living under a rock to not be aware of Google’s launch.
- Liquidor 4y ago
  Journalism has been like that for a while now. Sometimes it's just as bad as when the media quotes a random tweet from a nobody as their source for "the people" or "the public".
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    exactly what i was also thinking of it's almost like they should be required to provide sources imagine if this headline said "30 out of 190,000 employees noisy/outspoken employees have an angsty opinion on google's CEO"
- kweingar 4y ago
  Reminds me of news articles that quote a couple tweets with 2 likes and no retweets and declare that this is what the people really think.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  You only need 2 Google employees to criticize Sundar for "Google employees call the response a dumpster fire" to be plausibly true. When things like this come out in the media, I generally assume n < 10. That said, you can add me as an Xoogler who thinks that Sundar is phenomenally bad at managing the company.
kweingar 4y ago
(Disclaimer: Google employee, I don’t work on Bard, views my own, etc.) I don’t think either Bing Chat or Bard is ready to be released widely. You need a certain mindset to be able to wring value out of them, and most normal users will not think this way. That being said, it’s probably fine to release these tools to enthusiastic early adopters who understand how to use them.
- system16 4y ago
  This is what I find the most surprising. I was under the impression that ChatGPT was still "research" and wouldn't be ready for prime time for a while. These rushed products that don't live anywhere near up to the hype seem like they will sour public opinion on it.
  - kweingar 4y ago
    OpenAI seems to have been the forcing function. Investors tried out GPT-3/ChatGPT and saw dollar signs.
  - SilverBirch 4y ago
    From some of the reporting it sounds like AI was in a bit of a cold war that accidentally turned hot. OpenAI got it into their head that someone else was going to release a chat bot imminently, so they panicked and raced to release their own, which is why it's GPT3 based, doesn't have up to date info and has all sorts of other problems. OpenAI panicked and rushed something out and now Google is doing the same. All of these companies know the tech isn't ready, but they couldn't afford to be left behind when someone moved. It's funny, because this happens quite often in tech. Remember when Tesla announced self-driving? Suddenly Intel were doing deals with MobilEye and BMW, GM did Cruise etc. etc. and then 5-10 years later nothing has been delivered? They all jumped the gun and couldn't afford ot be left behind.
    - Ambolia 4y ago
      I haven't used it, but I know plenty of people who today use ChatGPT for work or for school every day. If you are ok with a higher degree of inaccuracy in exchange for minimizing your efford by a lot, ChatGPT is a game changer for many people.
greatpostman 4y ago
I heard from an internal employee that Bard is worse than ChatGPT. How could google have dropped the ball like this
- htrp 4y ago
  From the blog announcement >We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This would mean Bard is a significantly smaller model vs ChatGPT, which would mean it generalizes worse for most tasks. The full featured lamda model is about 22% smaller than the GPT3 model that ChatGPT is based off of.
yalogin 4y ago
The writing is on the wall. Sundar hasn’t done anything but maintain the status quo at Google. That is a loss for google, particularly GCP didn’t gain any market share, couldn’t productize their self driving car platform effectively, the ad market is facing increased pressure from all governments. I see him replaced soon or some activist investor demanding some changes.
- ragnarsson 4y ago
  Failure of Self driving certainly can't be attributed to Sundar. Yes GCP has obviously failed. What Sundar has done well is the AI first focus. Deepmind acquisition was key and they are developing their own chat thing which very well might bail them out. Thanks to him, Google spends a large amount in AI related R&D. What Sundar's main issue is his philosophy of "Reward Effort, Not Outcomes". This leads to people pretending to work hard, releasing half baked products. Instead he should change this to awarding long term outcomes. His other issue is that he is not a good storyteller (e.g. like Nadella). Being a non-founder CEO he needs to work on this.
  - ur-whale 4y ago
    > Deepmind acquisition was key Name one thing Deepmind produced that had a tangible positive impact on Google's bottom line.
    - htrp 4y ago
      They did some AI energy datacenter optimization https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-by-40 https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-dat...
m3kw9 4y ago
Gpt as everyone that uses it extensively by now only excel in certain tasks. There is a lot of bias towards it being “great” as many of its answers look really plausible and not verified because what’s the point of using Chatgpt if I have to google again to verify? In my view this is overhyped as a google replacement and the cracks are showing.
system16 4y ago
Seeing a lot of criticism towards Sundar lately, and it's not without merit. There is blood in the water now and I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited. He is good as a caretaker who didn't rock the boat, but Google needs bold innovation and competence if it intends on staying relevant in the years to come.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited. Good riddance. > who didn't rock the boat He was chosen for his exceptional ability to not rock the boat. Unfortunately, that's about the only skill he's displayed so far (oh yeah, and being "thoughtful" about stuff).
oh_sigh 4y ago
With 150,000 employees, you can write an article saying "Google employees say X ..." regarding pretty much any subject under the sun. So why was this particular article written, which refers to .002% of the company?
- ragnarsson 4y ago
  clicks
sys32768 4y ago
I'm excited for Google's AI to ingest the ~40 million titles in the Google Books library.
spir 4y ago
"And above all things, a prince ought to live amongst his people in such a way that no unexpected circumstances, whether of good or evil, shall make him change; because if the necessity for this comes in troubled times, you are too late for harsh measures; and mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as forced from you, and no one will be under any obligation to you for them." Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and maybe the Jassy of Amazon.
sidcool 4y ago
Someone somewhere will call this the lost decade of Google. But they will bounce back i think. The current reaction is impulsive, not surprising for the internet age.
cloudking 4y ago
People hating on Sundar completely overlooking the fact that he pivoted Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI was hyped up. https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-google-shifts-from-mobile-first-to-ai-first-world/ https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-google-shifts-from-mobi... He funded the Brain team that came up with major research breakthroughs like Transformers that power ChatGPT. AI is embedded behind the scenes in pretty much every Google product, you just don't know it because it's not packaged into a fancy chat interface. They didn't push Bard because they know LLMs have problems with getting facts straight, and they still are rolling it out in response to ChatGPT very cautiously.
- EagnaIonat 4y ago
  > Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI was hyped up AI hype train started back in 2015.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    AI hype train started in 2012 thanks to Alexnet winning Imagenet competition, and this paper from Google: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/amp https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/amp
    - pornel 4y ago
      Ooof, an AMP link. Reminds me why avoid Google products.
      - jwilk 4y ago
        Unamped: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/ https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - hnfong 4y ago
thrilled2behere 4y ago
If I were IBM management, I'd be getting a laugh out of all of this. When IBM had to scale back their ambitions for Watson, especially those related to automating medical diagnoses, they were roundly mocked. Do not ask, dear tech companies, for whom the bell of AI overpromising tolls - it tolls for thee!
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I agree in principle, but Watson was a lot of different things, mostly unrelated to any “modern” AI tech. Edit: the Watson that played Jeopardy was smart (for that time) natural language processing, that backed on to a large fact store, generated from natural language processing of a relatively small set of sources like Wikipedia. The Watson that was sold to companies was essentially a consulting service. I'm sure they had some re-usable components, but it's possible those components weren't much more than data pipelines, model training, etc. Most of the smarts were people doing a ton of data science specific to each problem. Worthwhile, but only good compared to companies who don't have a data science function. Conversely, "modern" AI is things like LLMs, which have their own problems of course, but are a huge paradigm shift compared to Watson.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  Watson was always vaporware, with a marketing message designed to seduce know-nothing middle-managers in large corporations. There never was any tech. backing it up.
pictur 4y ago
What makes chatgpt so private and untouchable?
Zetice 4y ago
Will anyone remember how Bard was released in 5 years, if it delivers on its promises? I doubt it, so the hand wringing over a stumble this early seems overblown.
- hnfong 4y ago
  It signals incompetence at the highest levels of Google, and that's bad for the company.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    [dead]
- falcor84 4y ago
  Even though Windows 98 was an overall long-term success, the blue screen that popped up during their live demo left a memorable impression, and arguably led to a significantly slower adoption. Wikipedia that describes this as such [0]: > ...when presentation assistant Chris Capossela plugged a USB scanner in, the operating system crashed, displaying a Blue Screen of Death. Bill Gates remarked after derisive applause and cheering from the audience, "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet." Video footage of this event became a popular Internet phenomenon. In a subsequent paragraph about the sales Wikipedia says: >In the first year of its release, Windows 98 ... had a market share of 17.2 percent, compared to Windows 95's 57.4 percent And it's definitely not just me who still remembers this. There's for example an article from the Register reviewing it 20 years after [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98?wprov=sfla1 [1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bsod_video/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
  - Zetice 4y ago
    So in other words, no it’s ultimately not important if the idea is good, which Bard seems to be. It seems more indicative of leadership quality that Google had this in their back pocket, ready to go shortly after someone else did the market validation for them.
GuB-42 4y ago
From outside, I found it to be a dubious move myself. ChatGPT went first, nothing Google does will change that, that's too late. The only thing they can do if they don't want to lose face is the "we didn't make it available because we want to do it well" strategy. It has been used many times by Apple when competitors beat them at some features, so much that it has become a meme at some point, but it worked. And I've seen hints of Google going in that direction, pointing out things like reliability issues most people came to know about by now, implying that they already can do what ChatGPT can do, but unlike their competitors, they don't release half-assed products. But their latest announcement breaks everything, they are essentially admitting defeat. They didn't manage to be the first to market, and they can't claim they took their time to release a quality product instead. So it was either a terrible communication blunder, or they really didn't have much choice, with the latter being a real possibility, I understand investors reactions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mrstone 4y ago
I think LLMs are great, but most companies have not figured out what they are truly useful for. Hint: it's not for search. LLMs are not knowledge databases, and should not be relied on for unknown information. In my opinion, they are more useful 24/7 editing service. Write a paragraph and ask it to paraphrase. Ask it to make a new story that can be edited. If you don't have any idea what the answer to the thing you're asking is, you shouldn't rely on the response from the bot.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Search can be achieved reasonably well using LLM embeddings to draw edges in a knowledge graph, which is called a "Semantic Knowledge Graph". But your broader point remains, LLMs are a small improvement for search technology and a quantum leap forward for editing, cheating on leetcode, consulting, etc.
college_physics 4y ago
ChatGPT is neither an earthquake nor a tectonic plate faultline. Along with ever improving algos in nearby domains (images, speech etc) it is a signal, of sorts, of the slowly accumulating energy that will, eventually, unleash the next phase of information technology. It is not an accident, imho, that it is Microsoft that somehow emerges as Google's "nemesis". After all it was MS' business model that Google disrupted with mass market "freebies" such as gmail, docs etc. While "disrupting search" might be the immediate skirmish, the bigger battle is about broadly defined "AI augmented information management": who will offer it to the masses, under which business model etc. My feeling (nowhere near a complete analysis) is that Google will lose this war even if, as it is widely assumed, it has the technical advantage. This is because it has been happily cornered in an extremely lucrative but ultimately dead-end business model. AI augmentation as part of its existing search/adtech model is a marginal and even problematic (loss making) addition, whereas as part a re-invented MS it can blow new life into its old bread-and-butter business that has been commoditized. A wildcard in all this is (as always) Apple, but whatever its eventual approach to AI, it is likely to be just another headwind for Google. NB: I am a lifelong open source enthusiast, I have no stake or love for any of the above entities. The ideal, least dangerous, most beneficial form of AI augmentation would be as a widely available and open source digital public good.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Xoogler here. I'll ignore the AI and "has Google lost its way?" threads, not that they're not interesting. Rather, Sundar: he's the inevitable product when you hire a CEO based on his longevity and whether everyone likes him. In the military they distinguish between a "barracks general" and a "combat general." He's the former. He looks good when nothing bad is happening.
- oofta-boofta 4y ago
  Whew boy you hit the nail on the head. Google just seems to be aimless at this point, and now with the layoffs (despite their immense profitability) they're going to have a much tougher time hiring and retaining top talent.
  - cheeze 4y ago
    Where is the top talent going to go? Seems like a vast majority of FAANG* ended up laying folks off.
    - applecrazy 4y ago
      I would make the argument that top talent wasn’t the contingent that was laid off.
      - raydev 4y ago
        You would be provably wrong.
        applecrazy 4y ago
        > provably wrong How so? I don't see any examples of top talent being fired (barring the scuffles at Twitter, but that isn't FAANG). Most people on my LinkedIn feed being let go are new grads or middle management who ostensibly didn't perform to company expectations of perfromance.
  - warning26 4y ago
ergocoder 4y ago
Google has lost its way since they have switched their own mantra from "user-first" to "AI-first". On the flip side, I think Microsoft has made a strategic mistake of going after search openly. Satya literally called out Google to compete. Google also has a lot of money and will not lose easily. This war is going to cost a lot of money for both of them.
formvoltron 4y ago
Sounds like goog employees spending too much time staring at the stock price.
ignoramous 4y ago
When Sundar doesn't react fast enough: Google's gone. They no longer have the ship-fast mentality of an upstart. Perfect is the enemy of the good. The ethics lords have taken over Google Brain. Google needs a war-time CEO. When Sundar reacts fast enough: Google's gone. The product was rushed. It is no where close to perfect. Could it be Google's been bluffing about its AI. What a knee-jerk reaction. Google needs a war-time CEO. Meanwhile, Satya in Redmond: I want people to know that we made [Google] dance.
- cutenewt 4y ago
  One CEO (and company) has joy. The other one does not. I know which one I'd rather join.
  - AceJohnny2 4y ago
    At this point, I'm curious which you think is which.
    - cheeze 4y ago
      I'm with you. I honestly have no idea which one the commenter is talking about.
      - gregw134 4y ago
        Microsoft has a chance at eating Google's lunch. There's definitely no joy about that at Google.
        glass3 4y ago
        It will make life easier for those who want to improve search. Looking at Google's search results, shareholders must have demanded that only the necessary amount of resources are used. With Microsoft's competition, it's easier to justify more resources for better search results.
        4y ago
tonymet 4y ago
I hope this helps shake up Google's product marketing which hasn't met expectations. Poor segmentation, poor GTM, poor messaging, poor community engagement , poor CTAs on marketing messages. Everyone's aware of the messaging-app missteps. I'll share a more tactical example. Recently Google Home "beta" was launched with lots of messaging via email & twitter to join the Beta. All of the CTAs were broken. The "beta" that was expected in days took a couple months to land. Compare that to Bing ChatGPT Beta which had a clear CTA into the enrollment program ( activate Edge, Bing, etc) and waitlist. Google has a strong community of fans but they do a poor job of engaging their audience. Microsoft by comparison has MSDN, MS Insiders, etc. The Bard (horrible name, btw) debacle was not a singular event but a culmination of many product marketing issues. As a fan, i hope they make some big changes.
mrcwinn 4y ago
I could not believe Sundar and the team around him for a simple unforced error: "That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago" I suppose this was meant to reframe the conversation around Google being a leader, but I think it has the opposite effect. It comes off as defensive and of course, quite honestly, if you planted the flag so much earlier, why don't you have a product to show for it in the way that OpenAI does? What's perhaps more interesting though: does Google have an innovator's dilemma here? Google built a flywheel that drives its ads business: sites are hungry for traffic so they structure in such a way that attracts Google's attention, and that structure in turn helps Google serve relevant ads. People tend to click on the first link (the most relevant link). In the context of a chat interface, what happens if there is no link? Or only one result (the perfect answer)? What if there is much less traffic going directly to websites? And yet without that long tail of websites, how do you train your language model to know the answer? Fascinating times!
htrp 4y ago
Left out of this is that Google is trying to promose a perfect product, and trialing it out only internally Microsoft shipped someone else's product to the world and is getting the results to iterate on for their next version. The fumbled response by Google distracts from the fact that you're going to need exponential amounts of training data and only one of the companies is in a position to collect it.
rank0 4y ago
The blowback about googles response is unreasonable. Everyone is making some wild assumptions about gpt-based search. We don’t even know yet if it’s fit to replace a search engine. Why not wait for a moment and see what unfolds? ChatGPT has only been alive for a few months. Why does google need an answer immediately? They should take their time and be calculated instead of rushing out some half baked AI search solution. How is GPT-search supposed to be profitable anyways? The traditional model of targeted advertising would be insufferable if injected into a chat bot.
- Clubber 4y ago
  >We don’t even know yet if it’s fit to replace a search engine. Entrenched tech companies are desperate for the next big thing. Tech is pretty stale right now. I suspect they're trying to will ChatGPT to be that. Think 3D TV's and VR. Kinda cool for the 30 seconds you play with it at the store, but just doesn't quite capture the imagination much longer after that.
VirusNewbie 4y ago
I think people are too soon to make judgements. Zuck going all in on the metaverse might be one of the most brilliant and daring business moves of recent history, or it might be a poorly implemented dream of chasing Apple. Google being 'second mover' to AI Chat might be the smart play, or it might be terrible. I'm very surprised even here people aren't realizing we don't know how this plays out yet.
nablaone 4y ago
Do they have a chat?
thexumaker 4y ago
They should’ve just maintained what they were doing and not follow in the footsteps of Tesla/Microsoft with their shit implementations
andrewprock 4y ago
I am constantly amazed that chat bots so completely capture imagination. They have been, and will always be a hollow shell of interaction. Has social drive atrophied so much that many (most under 30?) prefer to talk to nothing instead of taking to someone?
- Sebb767 4y ago
  ChatGPT does produce useful content right now. Maybe not necessarily information, but definitely boilerplate text and code. Also, a child can interact with it, no problem. It might not be a social interaction, but it's really not hard to imagine that it has a lot of potential.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
I wonder if this is going to end up like Waymo vs tesla. Remember when people were criticizing waymo for going too slowly (tesla expects to put level 9000 self driving in millions of cars by the end of <five years ago>!!)? But it turned out that doing it in a way that the market requires was slower than commentators expected, and waymo seems to still have a great shot at being the leader. Or maybe it ends up like uber vs lyft. The cost of using LLMs is so high, maybe we see products with unsustainable economics in the quest for dominance, followed by something shittier. Personally, I'm in the camp that google is in a great position specifically because of their TPUs. They already have the infra to do this at crazy scale including the hardware. I'm betting it's a marathon, not a sprint, before we see an economically sustainable LLM based interact-with-all-of-human-knowledge tool like we're expecting. ChatGPT has spoiled our expectations by being free.
- 2h 4y ago
  > The cost of using LLMs is so high Thats true, but they could just use MLLs instead. Much cheaper.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
fleddr 4y ago
Tech reporting is so hysterical these days, and so is social media of course. A crappy demo, and before you know it, Google is declared dead. AI has wrong answers, which is the end of the world. Plus it's racist because I tried for 3 days to trick it into saying something racist. Drama is the product, not reality or any actual in-depth tech journalism. Google got a wake-up call, but search will be just fine. Google controls search defaults on Android, iOS, Chrome on Windows, and Firefox. Not to mention on TVs, voice control, it's everywhere. Google can launch a new product to billions of people with the press of a button, Microsoft...not so much. You could argue they can push it into Windows, but most people are on their phones these days. Microsoft has no serious presence in the consumer space anymore. This is what will buy Google time to integrate a competing service, which I expect to be better as it sits on a lot more data. Just kidding, I would absolutely recommend dumping Google stock.
dang 4y ago
We changed the URL from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/google-employees-criticize-ceo-for-dumpster-fire-response-to-chatgpt/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/google-employees-cri... to the article that one is pointing to. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Recent and related: Google employees criticize CEO for ‘rushed, botched’ announcement of Bard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 - Feb 2023 (36 comments)
zainhoda 4y ago
Instead of focusing on adding LLM to search, they should have rolled it out as a GCP service. There would be less reputational risk and it would give them a chance to learn how it would be used when it did eventually integrate into Search.

467 points by bribroder 4y ago

belter 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402

ouid 4y ago

Has sundar been a good CEO otherwise?

robofanatic 4y ago
He survived for 8+ years as a Google CEO and 4+ years as Alphabet CEO. Tells that he has done few things OK.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- modeless 4y ago
  He is world class at being inoffensive. He's great at testifying to Congress.
  - jwestbury 4y ago
    Testifying to Congress is a pretty key skill for a Google CEO at the moment, to be fair.
    - modeless 4y ago
      Yes, these are unironically extremely difficult skills which were critical for a Google CEO over the last 10 years. Maybe the next 10 years will be different though.
xoogler2004 4y ago
hahahahhahahahahah
mc32 4y ago
Better than say a former industry stalwart like Jack Welch. He's vanilla and sometimes vanilla is what you need to steer a steady course.
blindriver 4y ago
He has brought no innovation and his fearfulness has ground Google down to a halt. What new successful products has arrived during his tenure? All he did was not fuck up. He's lucky because the entire market has increased, but that's his doing. He could be replaced by any overly cautious algorithm and the results would have been the same.
- malfist 4y ago
  Stadia! Oh wait..
  - myko 4y ago
    That probably is the greatest innovation Google launched in his tenure, and they killed it! How frustrating.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  Before he was CEO he led the Chrome, ChromeOS/Chromebook, Google Drive projects. What is interesting though, according to Wikipedia, is that he is not a software engineer nor a computer scientist by training. He is a materials scientist with an MBA and apparently briefly worked at McKinsey. Does this limit his tech vision? Hard to say. Satya Nadella however has a Master's in Computer Science + an MBA comparatively.
- muzz 4y ago
  Sounds more like Tim Cook
  - blululu 4y ago
    Going to have to disagree with you on this. AirPods and the Apple Watch both came out under his watch. But the biggest area of expansion for Apple is going to be in software which has seen a ton of innovation in the past decade (Cloud services, payments and a whole slew of improvements to the OS) which all happened under Cook's watch.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
nivenkos 4y ago
Stadia was a massive lost opportunity, they had no unique games (i.e. using server-side co-locality for multiplayer, etc.) nor a decent subscription to compete with MS Games Pass.
gg-plz 4y ago
Sundar is good at keeping things running as-is. He was elevated to CEO of Google to keep things running as-is while the founders moved their exciting ventures up to Alphabet. When those other bets were abandoned, Sundar was left as the top engaged executive, but he's still only a caretaker when the company needs an actual leader with vision to navigate their competition. So, no. He has not been a good CEO. He was a good middle-manager and a decent CEO at best, but he's not been what the company needed, and he's definitely not what they need today.
- substation13 4y ago
  It's true. Even Ballmer had a vision.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Leadership with actual visions is a rarity these days across the board. It's not just large companies who are getting their lunch eaten by startups left and right (cough Oracle), but also politics. Most people in high positions want the fame associated with the title (and for companies, the compensation), but not provide leadership beyond managing the status quo - and to make it worse, both shareholders and voters seem to prefer stability over progress.
sylens 4y ago
I feel like there is no vision for the future of Android there except chasing the iPhone. In the early part of the last decade, Android had its own identity which was part of the reason I used it. When it lost that, I moved to iPhone.
- muzz 4y ago
  What do you mean by "its own identity"? If you're saying that Android and iPhone/iOS are very similar, that seems like a good thing?
  - sylens 4y ago
    It doesn't seem like a good thing for Google in that they are trying to sell Pixel phones at iPhone level prices without having the fit and finish, battery life, or app ecosystem that iOS has.
aix1 4y ago
I think the current reality is that Sundar is more of a figurehead, with Ruth calling the shots.
blululu 4y ago
Well he sat at the helm of a very powerful company during one of the largest and longest bull markets in history. Beyond being at the right place at the right time - did he do a good job? I would say that he is thoroughly mediocre. I don't get the sense that he is very strong as a technically oriented leader or as a product oriented leader. He seems more of a political/consensus leader who is trying to keep the peace without any principle other than 'be respectful'. You can see the problems growing. Costs grow faster than revenue and irrelevant projects drag on, while nobody is providing a clear vision about why anyone should care and why these product are going to be the best. Google does fine without too much leadership so maybe this isn't the worst. That said I think he would be remembered more positively if he were to be fired in the next 6 months.

skullone 4y ago

It's hard to differentiate the various dumpster fires going on at Google right now. And I don't think they're all the CEOs fault.

dhaulagiri 4y ago
Everything is your fault when you're the CEO
- Yuioup 4y ago
  He takes full responsibility /s
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Responsibility? He’s full of it.

dboreham 4y ago

Does this make Alphabet stock a buy? In general I have a rule to never invest in adtech-based companies but a 12% discount is attractive. Edit: a quick look at the chart shows the drop was off a recent peak and current price is roughly the 3mth mean. Tempest in teacup then.

mc32 4y ago

There will always be people who think they knew better. It's not the end of Google or their Bard. It's an emotional outburst precipitated by lousy HR numbers. People are fearful and need to lash out a bit. Ars is riding the slight wave of disenchantment among a few emps.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kubota 4y ago

Whatever happened to move fast and break things? Who cares if it wasn't perfect in the first iteration. It was a shot across ChatGPTs bow, and pleased the shareholders.

lokar 4y ago
Wrong company
malfist 4y ago
Move fast and break things don't apply if your "break things" cooks the golden goose
jmathai 4y ago
I don’t think any Google shareholders are happy with the stock price after their announcement.
mritchie712 4y ago
The criticism is valid. It was a pre-recorded demo with 3 bullets and they got one wrong. Easily could have fact checked it before publishing it. It would have been forgivable in a live demo, but they didn't do one because they "lost"[0] the phone. 0 - There's a chance they didn't do the demo on purpose because it wasn't ready.
outside1234 4y ago
That was Facebook. Google is move slow and have your PR nitpicked eight times.

npalli 4y ago

Here's the weird thing though, as discussed yesterday [1], the Microsoft demo was totally broken as well. In the end, everyone is looking for a big platform shift (next MOBILE!!!) and hype getting ahead of reality. When we look back in 3 months we will wonder why we thought LLM/GPT type queries will replace search in all forms. https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted

berniedurfee 4y ago
The coming years of LLM/GPT hype and vaporware will be a good relief from the past years of blockchain hype and vaporware. Seems like it’ll be more interesting anyway.
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Microsoft can botch their search without tanking the company. Google cannot.
- npalli 4y ago
  Sure, but the narrative seems to be Microsoft has somehow cracked the puzzle and will leave Google behind which is not the case currently.
  - cma 4y ago
    Google search has gotten so degraded in the past few years that people want something to beat them.
    - jakzurr 4y ago
      Hmmm. Yeah, now I'm starting to believe it too - I hope it does beat them.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    They don't have to, they only have to be relative equals. It's possible chat GPT is a "dreadnaught moment"

gjsman-1000 4y ago

I’m struggling to find the link because of all the new coverage, but Bard was mentioned as a Google project in 2019. It had a prefix in the name though, which I'm struggling to remember (it wasn't OpenBard, but it was SomethingBard). If that is real (and hopefully I can find it and update this post)… that would indicate Google has been working on it for years, never thought it was ready, and then decided to snap-deploy it after ChatGPT’s success. Which, predictably, would make a massive mess internally as reported here. I find it believable. UPDATE: OK, it was called "Apprentice Bard." However, that names comes from CNBC in 2023, but CNBC doesn't say when "Apprentice Bard" actually began development. However, "Apprentice Bard" was a replacement for Google's first internal chatbot solution Meena, which Google did deploy internally and also publicly revealed only for bragging rights (and not actual use) in January 2020 (and so the 2019 figure in my head does somewhat line up). So if you think about the Bard project as having started with Meena... sounds about right. https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-age...

lvspiff 4y ago

Whats with everything being a dumpster fire nowadays? how about a simple hot mess? or what happened to a good ol hell in a hand-basket? or Ninth Circle Of Hell? I'm sure there are better euphemisms than the dumpster being on fhir as that indicates someone stoking it whereas the reality is more indecision and inaction causing confusion and demoralizing the teams.

wccrawford 4y ago
Everything has to be turned up to 11 today because too many people think they won't get enough attention if they actually label something as severe/important as it actually is.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Think about it, we stopped watching traditional news, then shunned news that was too slow because twitter was faster though sometimes wrong. so traditional news media was like "aight, bet" and now we are where we are. the trump era fully solidified that the more ragetastic you can make your title, the more people tribe up and engage in the comments so your one shitty little 30 second article now has people mobbing together in droves for the comments and your ad rate is through the roof. what you're writing doesn't even have to have any fact, it can be all opinion, and in most cases this can afford you even more leeway to be inflammatory. does anybody else see this happening or am I just here rambling at the sky?
  - xg15 4y ago
    > what you're writing doesn't even have to have any fact, it can be all opinion, and in most cases this can afford you even more leeway to be inflammatory. Sounds like it could be automated pretty well with ChatGPT.
  - Domenic_S 4y ago
    Traditional news invented it. "More on this amazing story after these messages" - everything was formatted to keep you around through the next commercial break. The internet didn't have to do that since you were seeing ads inline, so the news was more useful. But then the internet realized if you sensationalize... etc etc.

nivenkos 4y ago

It's gonna be Chatbots / NFTs all over again.

myth_drannon 4y ago
I stopped using google and almost don't use SO for programming related searches, my daily driver is chatGPT even when sometimes it gives bad answers. Chatbots were useless garbage from the get go and I hated them and NFT is, well NFT.
- therealcamino 4y ago
  Doesn't it bother you that it sounds just as confident when it's making stuff up as when it's accurately summarizing? Do you just think you can tell when it's wrong?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I can easily tell whether the code that ChatGPT writes for me is wrong by using an IDE. But it’s always closer to meeting my exact requirements than a Google search.
  - myth_drannon 4y ago
    Sometimes I can tell it's wrong. But it faster to try and fail than searching for an answer on Google.
hef19898 4y ago
just wait until the various ChatGPTs are training each other using the well "researched content" they spamming the internet with... That alone will kill search more thoroughly then ChatGPT ever could by facilitating search at Bing.
- h4kor 4y ago
  I think we just ignited the AI Poisoning bomb. Future system will have a harder time to be trained, because their datasets will be poisoned. Wrote up my thoughts about this a few weeks ago when ChatGPT started https://blog.libove.org/posts/ai-posioning/ https://blog.libove.org/posts/ai-posioning/

renewiltord 4y ago

They're the guys who built it. It's not like he's demoing something that they spent 4 days building. It's been in dev for 4 years. Everyone knows Google is primarily a BD play right now. The engineering there is in the "we'll make the button blue by next quarter" quality. But BD plays build quite good moat. So I think they'll be fine.

travem 4y ago
Could you explain what you mean by Google being a “BD play”? I’m not familiar with that term.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  They are primarily dependent not on technology but on their incumbent position which lets them negotiate strategic business deals to protect their market. Their advantage is not technological.
  - travem 4y ago
    So to spell out the abbreviation, BD means “Business Development” then?
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      Yes, sorry.

robofanatic 4y ago

as a developer I ran few tests on ChatGPT for example "write me a javascript code that does canvas animation" it was amazing to see it write actual working code. but it took about a minute to write it. If I had "Googled" the same thing, in under a second I would have found multiple working code examples (thanks to sites like StackOverflow). IMO, ChatGPT has a long way to go.

abm53 4y ago
Often what you’d like to do has not been asked for exactly before. And almost all programmers need to do something quick in a language or framework they aren’t experts in. ChatGPT can be extremely useful in those cases in my experience.

vouaobrasil 4y ago

[flagged]

endisneigh 4y ago
why not?

abudabi123 4y ago

Google Prepared Transformer => GPT, that has a nice marketing ring and clearly claims the invention/innovation. Google took their eye off the ball and fumbled. A "goto market" division could have helped the inventors/innovators.

BeefWellington 4y ago

AI is the new "Big Data", though maybe it has one or two practical use cases for larger companies.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lysecret 4y ago

I am super excited about ChatGPT even just yesterday it helped me fix a really difficult bug. (I was so excited that I even wanted to pay for it but their payment was broken haha) However, I am starting to think that moving it to bing already wasn’t a smart move. These things are great on OpenAI scale. But I fear they are a money pit with bad pr for google and even bing scale.

hnfong 4y ago
> it helped me fix a really difficult bug Tell us more?

osener 4y ago

Remember when winner of the voice interface war was going to win the future of computing? Apple has a "dumpster fire" of a voice assistant and they're still around.

scarface74 4y ago
No one at any point thought that voice interaction would be dominant.
muzz 4y ago
Every new thing gets hyped up as the "killer" of existing businesses. Siri, Alexa, etc. were all supposed to be existential threats to Google's search, and then they weren't
- drewcon 4y ago
  I’m surprised no one has connected ChatGPT to a voice interface? The way it holds conversational context is really leaps and bounds better than Alexa/Siri
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
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MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> Google employees > Interactive chart of Alphabet (GOOG) annual worldwide employee count from 2010 to 2022. Alphabet total number of employees in 2022 was 190,234 There should be a rule where you can't over-represent a group of people in media headlines. What percentage of 190,000 people called the CEOs response a dumpster fire? What percentage of 190,000 are even aware of ChatGPT or Google's response to it?

saagarjha 4y ago
You would have to be living under a rock to not be aware of Google’s launch.
Liquidor 4y ago
Journalism has been like that for a while now. Sometimes it's just as bad as when the media quotes a random tweet from a nobody as their source for "the people" or "the public".
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  exactly what i was also thinking of it's almost like they should be required to provide sources imagine if this headline said "30 out of 190,000 employees noisy/outspoken employees have an angsty opinion on google's CEO"
kweingar 4y ago
Reminds me of news articles that quote a couple tweets with 2 likes and no retweets and declare that this is what the people really think.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
You only need 2 Google employees to criticize Sundar for "Google employees call the response a dumpster fire" to be plausibly true. When things like this come out in the media, I generally assume n < 10. That said, you can add me as an Xoogler who thinks that Sundar is phenomenally bad at managing the company.

kweingar 4y ago

(Disclaimer: Google employee, I don’t work on Bard, views my own, etc.) I don’t think either Bing Chat or Bard is ready to be released widely. You need a certain mindset to be able to wring value out of them, and most normal users will not think this way. That being said, it’s probably fine to release these tools to enthusiastic early adopters who understand how to use them.

system16 4y ago
This is what I find the most surprising. I was under the impression that ChatGPT was still "research" and wouldn't be ready for prime time for a while. These rushed products that don't live anywhere near up to the hype seem like they will sour public opinion on it.
- kweingar 4y ago
  OpenAI seems to have been the forcing function. Investors tried out GPT-3/ChatGPT and saw dollar signs.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  From some of the reporting it sounds like AI was in a bit of a cold war that accidentally turned hot. OpenAI got it into their head that someone else was going to release a chat bot imminently, so they panicked and raced to release their own, which is why it's GPT3 based, doesn't have up to date info and has all sorts of other problems. OpenAI panicked and rushed something out and now Google is doing the same. All of these companies know the tech isn't ready, but they couldn't afford to be left behind when someone moved. It's funny, because this happens quite often in tech. Remember when Tesla announced self-driving? Suddenly Intel were doing deals with MobilEye and BMW, GM did Cruise etc. etc. and then 5-10 years later nothing has been delivered? They all jumped the gun and couldn't afford ot be left behind.
  - Ambolia 4y ago
    I haven't used it, but I know plenty of people who today use ChatGPT for work or for school every day. If you are ok with a higher degree of inaccuracy in exchange for minimizing your efford by a lot, ChatGPT is a game changer for many people.

greatpostman 4y ago

I heard from an internal employee that Bard is worse than ChatGPT. How could google have dropped the ball like this

htrp 4y ago
From the blog announcement >We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This would mean Bard is a significantly smaller model vs ChatGPT, which would mean it generalizes worse for most tasks. The full featured lamda model is about 22% smaller than the GPT3 model that ChatGPT is based off of.

yalogin 4y ago

The writing is on the wall. Sundar hasn’t done anything but maintain the status quo at Google. That is a loss for google, particularly GCP didn’t gain any market share, couldn’t productize their self driving car platform effectively, the ad market is facing increased pressure from all governments. I see him replaced soon or some activist investor demanding some changes.

ragnarsson 4y ago
Failure of Self driving certainly can't be attributed to Sundar. Yes GCP has obviously failed. What Sundar has done well is the AI first focus. Deepmind acquisition was key and they are developing their own chat thing which very well might bail them out. Thanks to him, Google spends a large amount in AI related R&D. What Sundar's main issue is his philosophy of "Reward Effort, Not Outcomes". This leads to people pretending to work hard, releasing half baked products. Instead he should change this to awarding long term outcomes. His other issue is that he is not a good storyteller (e.g. like Nadella). Being a non-founder CEO he needs to work on this.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > Deepmind acquisition was key Name one thing Deepmind produced that had a tangible positive impact on Google's bottom line.
  - htrp 4y ago
    They did some AI energy datacenter optimization https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-by-40 https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-dat...

m3kw9 4y ago

Gpt as everyone that uses it extensively by now only excel in certain tasks. There is a lot of bias towards it being “great” as many of its answers look really plausible and not verified because what’s the point of using Chatgpt if I have to google again to verify? In my view this is overhyped as a google replacement and the cracks are showing.

system16 4y ago

Seeing a lot of criticism towards Sundar lately, and it's not without merit. There is blood in the water now and I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited. He is good as a caretaker who didn't rock the boat, but Google needs bold innovation and competence if it intends on staying relevant in the years to come.

ur-whale 4y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited. Good riddance. > who didn't rock the boat He was chosen for his exceptional ability to not rock the boat. Unfortunately, that's about the only skill he's displayed so far (oh yeah, and being "thoughtful" about stuff).

oh_sigh 4y ago

With 150,000 employees, you can write an article saying "Google employees say X ..." regarding pretty much any subject under the sun. So why was this particular article written, which refers to .002% of the company?

ragnarsson 4y ago
clicks

sys32768 4y ago

I'm excited for Google's AI to ingest the ~40 million titles in the Google Books library.

spir 4y ago

"And above all things, a prince ought to live amongst his people in such a way that no unexpected circumstances, whether of good or evil, shall make him change; because if the necessity for this comes in troubled times, you are too late for harsh measures; and mild ones will not help you, for they will be considered as forced from you, and no one will be under any obligation to you for them." Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and maybe the Jassy of Amazon.

sidcool 4y ago

Someone somewhere will call this the lost decade of Google. But they will bounce back i think. The current reaction is impulsive, not surprising for the internet age.

cloudking 4y ago

People hating on Sundar completely overlooking the fact that he pivoted Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI was hyped up. https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-google-shifts-from-mobile-first-to-ai-first-world/ https://venturebeat.com/ai/ai-weekly-google-shifts-from-mobi... He funded the Brain team that came up with major research breakthroughs like Transformers that power ChatGPT. AI is embedded behind the scenes in pretty much every Google product, you just don't know it because it's not packaged into a fancy chat interface. They didn't push Bard because they know LLMs have problems with getting facts straight, and they still are rolling it out in response to ChatGPT very cautiously.

EagnaIonat 4y ago
> Google to an AI first company 6 years ago, way before AI was hyped up AI hype train started back in 2015.
- p1esk 4y ago
  AI hype train started in 2012 thanks to Alexnet winning Imagenet competition, and this paper from Google: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/amp https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/amp
  - pornel 4y ago
    Ooof, an AMP link. Reminds me why avoid Google products.
    - jwilk 4y ago
      Unamped: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/ https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hnfong 4y ago

thrilled2behere 4y ago

If I were IBM management, I'd be getting a laugh out of all of this. When IBM had to scale back their ambitions for Watson, especially those related to automating medical diagnoses, they were roundly mocked. Do not ask, dear tech companies, for whom the bell of AI overpromising tolls - it tolls for thee!

danpalmer 4y ago
I agree in principle, but Watson was a lot of different things, mostly unrelated to any “modern” AI tech. Edit: the Watson that played Jeopardy was smart (for that time) natural language processing, that backed on to a large fact store, generated from natural language processing of a relatively small set of sources like Wikipedia. The Watson that was sold to companies was essentially a consulting service. I'm sure they had some re-usable components, but it's possible those components weren't much more than data pipelines, model training, etc. Most of the smarts were people doing a ton of data science specific to each problem. Worthwhile, but only good compared to companies who don't have a data science function. Conversely, "modern" AI is things like LLMs, which have their own problems of course, but are a huge paradigm shift compared to Watson.
ur-whale 4y ago
Watson was always vaporware, with a marketing message designed to seduce know-nothing middle-managers in large corporations. There never was any tech. backing it up.

pictur 4y ago

What makes chatgpt so private and untouchable?

Zetice 4y ago

Will anyone remember how Bard was released in 5 years, if it delivers on its promises? I doubt it, so the hand wringing over a stumble this early seems overblown.

hnfong 4y ago
It signals incompetence at the highest levels of Google, and that's bad for the company.
- Zetice 4y ago
  [dead]
falcor84 4y ago
Even though Windows 98 was an overall long-term success, the blue screen that popped up during their live demo left a memorable impression, and arguably led to a significantly slower adoption. Wikipedia that describes this as such [0]: > ...when presentation assistant Chris Capossela plugged a USB scanner in, the operating system crashed, displaying a Blue Screen of Death. Bill Gates remarked after derisive applause and cheering from the audience, "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet." Video footage of this event became a popular Internet phenomenon. In a subsequent paragraph about the sales Wikipedia says: >In the first year of its release, Windows 98 ... had a market share of 17.2 percent, compared to Windows 95's 57.4 percent And it's definitely not just me who still remembers this. There's for example an article from the Register reviewing it 20 years after [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98?wprov=sfla1 [1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bsod_video/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
- Zetice 4y ago
  So in other words, no it’s ultimately not important if the idea is good, which Bard seems to be. It seems more indicative of leadership quality that Google had this in their back pocket, ready to go shortly after someone else did the market validation for them.

GuB-42 4y ago

From outside, I found it to be a dubious move myself. ChatGPT went first, nothing Google does will change that, that's too late. The only thing they can do if they don't want to lose face is the "we didn't make it available because we want to do it well" strategy. It has been used many times by Apple when competitors beat them at some features, so much that it has become a meme at some point, but it worked. And I've seen hints of Google going in that direction, pointing out things like reliability issues most people came to know about by now, implying that they already can do what ChatGPT can do, but unlike their competitors, they don't release half-assed products. But their latest announcement breaks everything, they are essentially admitting defeat. They didn't manage to be the first to market, and they can't claim they took their time to release a quality product instead. So it was either a terrible communication blunder, or they really didn't have much choice, with the latter being a real possibility, I understand investors reactions.

deleted 4y ago

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mrstone 4y ago

I think LLMs are great, but most companies have not figured out what they are truly useful for. Hint: it's not for search. LLMs are not knowledge databases, and should not be relied on for unknown information. In my opinion, they are more useful 24/7 editing service. Write a paragraph and ask it to paraphrase. Ask it to make a new story that can be edited. If you don't have any idea what the answer to the thing you're asking is, you shouldn't rely on the response from the bot.

Der_Einzige 4y ago
Search can be achieved reasonably well using LLM embeddings to draw edges in a knowledge graph, which is called a "Semantic Knowledge Graph". But your broader point remains, LLMs are a small improvement for search technology and a quantum leap forward for editing, cheating on leetcode, consulting, etc.

college_physics 4y ago

ChatGPT is neither an earthquake nor a tectonic plate faultline. Along with ever improving algos in nearby domains (images, speech etc) it is a signal, of sorts, of the slowly accumulating energy that will, eventually, unleash the next phase of information technology. It is not an accident, imho, that it is Microsoft that somehow emerges as Google's "nemesis". After all it was MS' business model that Google disrupted with mass market "freebies" such as gmail, docs etc. While "disrupting search" might be the immediate skirmish, the bigger battle is about broadly defined "AI augmented information management": who will offer it to the masses, under which business model etc. My feeling (nowhere near a complete analysis) is that Google will lose this war even if, as it is widely assumed, it has the technical advantage. This is because it has been happily cornered in an extremely lucrative but ultimately dead-end business model. AI augmentation as part of its existing search/adtech model is a marginal and even problematic (loss making) addition, whereas as part a re-invented MS it can blow new life into its old bread-and-butter business that has been commoditized. A wildcard in all this is (as always) Apple, but whatever its eventual approach to AI, it is likely to be just another headwind for Google. NB: I am a lifelong open source enthusiast, I have no stake or love for any of the above entities. The ideal, least dangerous, most beneficial form of AI augmentation would be as a widely available and open source digital public good.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Xoogler here. I'll ignore the AI and "has Google lost its way?" threads, not that they're not interesting. Rather, Sundar: he's the inevitable product when you hire a CEO based on his longevity and whether everyone likes him. In the military they distinguish between a "barracks general" and a "combat general." He's the former. He looks good when nothing bad is happening.

oofta-boofta 4y ago
Whew boy you hit the nail on the head. Google just seems to be aimless at this point, and now with the layoffs (despite their immense profitability) they're going to have a much tougher time hiring and retaining top talent.
- cheeze 4y ago
  Where is the top talent going to go? Seems like a vast majority of FAANG* ended up laying folks off.
  - applecrazy 4y ago
    I would make the argument that top talent wasn’t the contingent that was laid off.
    - raydev 4y ago
      You would be provably wrong.
      - applecrazy 4y ago
        > provably wrong How so? I don't see any examples of top talent being fired (barring the scuffles at Twitter, but that isn't FAANG). Most people on my LinkedIn feed being let go are new grads or middle management who ostensibly didn't perform to company expectations of perfromance.
- warning26 4y ago

ergocoder 4y ago

Google has lost its way since they have switched their own mantra from "user-first" to "AI-first". On the flip side, I think Microsoft has made a strategic mistake of going after search openly. Satya literally called out Google to compete. Google also has a lot of money and will not lose easily. This war is going to cost a lot of money for both of them.

formvoltron 4y ago

Sounds like goog employees spending too much time staring at the stock price.

ignoramous 4y ago

When Sundar doesn't react fast enough: Google's gone. They no longer have the ship-fast mentality of an upstart. Perfect is the enemy of the good. The ethics lords have taken over Google Brain. Google needs a war-time CEO. When Sundar reacts fast enough: Google's gone. The product was rushed. It is no where close to perfect. Could it be Google's been bluffing about its AI. What a knee-jerk reaction. Google needs a war-time CEO. Meanwhile, Satya in Redmond: I want people to know that we made [Google] dance.

cutenewt 4y ago
One CEO (and company) has joy. The other one does not. I know which one I'd rather join.
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  At this point, I'm curious which you think is which.
  - cheeze 4y ago
    I'm with you. I honestly have no idea which one the commenter is talking about.
    - gregw134 4y ago
      Microsoft has a chance at eating Google's lunch. There's definitely no joy about that at Google.
      - glass3 4y ago
        It will make life easier for those who want to improve search. Looking at Google's search results, shareholders must have demanded that only the necessary amount of resources are used. With Microsoft's competition, it's easier to justify more resources for better search results.
      - 4y ago

tonymet 4y ago

I hope this helps shake up Google's product marketing which hasn't met expectations. Poor segmentation, poor GTM, poor messaging, poor community engagement , poor CTAs on marketing messages. Everyone's aware of the messaging-app missteps. I'll share a more tactical example. Recently Google Home "beta" was launched with lots of messaging via email & twitter to join the Beta. All of the CTAs were broken. The "beta" that was expected in days took a couple months to land. Compare that to Bing ChatGPT Beta which had a clear CTA into the enrollment program ( activate Edge, Bing, etc) and waitlist. Google has a strong community of fans but they do a poor job of engaging their audience. Microsoft by comparison has MSDN, MS Insiders, etc. The Bard (horrible name, btw) debacle was not a singular event but a culmination of many product marketing issues. As a fan, i hope they make some big changes.

mrcwinn 4y ago

I could not believe Sundar and the team around him for a simple unforced error: "That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago" I suppose this was meant to reframe the conversation around Google being a leader, but I think it has the opposite effect. It comes off as defensive and of course, quite honestly, if you planted the flag so much earlier, why don't you have a product to show for it in the way that OpenAI does? What's perhaps more interesting though: does Google have an innovator's dilemma here? Google built a flywheel that drives its ads business: sites are hungry for traffic so they structure in such a way that attracts Google's attention, and that structure in turn helps Google serve relevant ads. People tend to click on the first link (the most relevant link). In the context of a chat interface, what happens if there is no link? Or only one result (the perfect answer)? What if there is much less traffic going directly to websites? And yet without that long tail of websites, how do you train your language model to know the answer? Fascinating times!

htrp 4y ago

Left out of this is that Google is trying to promose a perfect product, and trialing it out only internally Microsoft shipped someone else's product to the world and is getting the results to iterate on for their next version. The fumbled response by Google distracts from the fact that you're going to need exponential amounts of training data and only one of the companies is in a position to collect it.

rank0 4y ago

The blowback about googles response is unreasonable. Everyone is making some wild assumptions about gpt-based search. We don’t even know yet if it’s fit to replace a search engine. Why not wait for a moment and see what unfolds? ChatGPT has only been alive for a few months. Why does google need an answer immediately? They should take their time and be calculated instead of rushing out some half baked AI search solution. How is GPT-search supposed to be profitable anyways? The traditional model of targeted advertising would be insufferable if injected into a chat bot.

Clubber 4y ago
>We don’t even know yet if it’s fit to replace a search engine. Entrenched tech companies are desperate for the next big thing. Tech is pretty stale right now. I suspect they're trying to will ChatGPT to be that. Think 3D TV's and VR. Kinda cool for the 30 seconds you play with it at the store, but just doesn't quite capture the imagination much longer after that.

VirusNewbie 4y ago

I think people are too soon to make judgements. Zuck going all in on the metaverse might be one of the most brilliant and daring business moves of recent history, or it might be a poorly implemented dream of chasing Apple. Google being 'second mover' to AI Chat might be the smart play, or it might be terrible. I'm very surprised even here people aren't realizing we don't know how this plays out yet.

nablaone 4y ago

Do they have a chat?

thexumaker 4y ago

They should’ve just maintained what they were doing and not follow in the footsteps of Tesla/Microsoft with their shit implementations

andrewprock 4y ago

I am constantly amazed that chat bots so completely capture imagination. They have been, and will always be a hollow shell of interaction. Has social drive atrophied so much that many (most under 30?) prefer to talk to nothing instead of taking to someone?

Sebb767 4y ago
ChatGPT does produce useful content right now. Maybe not necessarily information, but definitely boilerplate text and code. Also, a child can interact with it, no problem. It might not be a social interaction, but it's really not hard to imagine that it has a lot of potential.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

I wonder if this is going to end up like Waymo vs tesla. Remember when people were criticizing waymo for going too slowly (tesla expects to put level 9000 self driving in millions of cars by the end of <five years ago>!!)? But it turned out that doing it in a way that the market requires was slower than commentators expected, and waymo seems to still have a great shot at being the leader. Or maybe it ends up like uber vs lyft. The cost of using LLMs is so high, maybe we see products with unsustainable economics in the quest for dominance, followed by something shittier. Personally, I'm in the camp that google is in a great position specifically because of their TPUs. They already have the infra to do this at crazy scale including the hardware. I'm betting it's a marathon, not a sprint, before we see an economically sustainable LLM based interact-with-all-of-human-knowledge tool like we're expecting. ChatGPT has spoiled our expectations by being free.

2h 4y ago
> The cost of using LLMs is so high Thats true, but they could just use MLLs instead. Much cheaper.
- deleted 4y ago
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fleddr 4y ago

Tech reporting is so hysterical these days, and so is social media of course. A crappy demo, and before you know it, Google is declared dead. AI has wrong answers, which is the end of the world. Plus it's racist because I tried for 3 days to trick it into saying something racist. Drama is the product, not reality or any actual in-depth tech journalism. Google got a wake-up call, but search will be just fine. Google controls search defaults on Android, iOS, Chrome on Windows, and Firefox. Not to mention on TVs, voice control, it's everywhere. Google can launch a new product to billions of people with the press of a button, Microsoft...not so much. You could argue they can push it into Windows, but most people are on their phones these days. Microsoft has no serious presence in the consumer space anymore. This is what will buy Google time to integrate a competing service, which I expect to be better as it sits on a lot more data. Just kidding, I would absolutely recommend dumping Google stock.

dang 4y ago

We changed the URL from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/google-employees-criticize-ceo-for-dumpster-fire-response-to-chatgpt/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/google-employees-cri... to the article that one is pointing to. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Recent and related: Google employees criticize CEO for ‘rushed, botched’ announcement of Bard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758402 - Feb 2023 (36 comments)

zainhoda 4y ago

Instead of focusing on adding LLM to search, they should have rolled it out as a GCP service. There would be less reputational risk and it would give them a chance to learn how it would be used when it did eventually integrate into Search.