I dont work at Google, I think other FAANGS underinvested in this area as they didnt think it was promising. But I will admit, I am suspicious that Google is incompetent. Probably they can come back given how much money they will be forced to throw at it. But Bard is clearly behind and I dont believe their "abundance of caution" arguments for why Bard cant even code.
Google was built by brilliant people whose mission was to make any information available to anyone, instantly.
Google is run by smart people whose mission is to maximize clicks on ads. If a user finds what they’re looking for quickly, that’s lost revenue.
Google’s profit motives are not aligned with useful AI. The better AI is, the less people need to click through to lots of web pages and ads, the less revenue for Google.
I don’t think they can catch up without a major pivot in business model. It’s very hard to be deeply invested in providing more value if it means reducing your revenue.
FAANG companies have distribution. They can sell anything. Give them a bit of time. They are not companies of a single product, they milk people better than governments.
The impression I get is that they purposely limited Bard in certain ways. It does not seem to be willing to code and makes a lot of excuses when you ask it to (at least as of a couple of weeks ago when I last tried it). Did they put this limitation on it because it's not so good at coding or because they don't want it to be abused in some way? In my experience I had to trick it into coding by telling it to pretend that it had created it's own programming language and then implement an algorithm in it. It seemed to think that it had created Python.
> I am suspicious that Google is incompetent.
Google has put a lot of effort and investment into AI. With Bard I get the feeling they're not showing us what they really have - it's like for some reason they're holding back the good stuff, at least that's my suspicion.
I am still wondering if Google is experiencing it Kodak moment.
They have the dominant product that makes them billions and billions of dollars at 'relatively' low cost.
The new dominant product is on its way, but it costs far more to operate and will net them far less money, so... um no one wants to kill the goose that is still laying golden eggs, even though its days are numbered already.
(moment worth photographing): From an Eastman Kodak Company advertising campaign.
(business's failure to foresee): In reference to the Eastman Kodak Company's decline when cameras and film were overtaken by smartphones and digital technologies.
Noun
Kodak moment (plural Kodak moments)
(informal) A sentimental or charming moment worthy of capturing in a photograph.
(informal) The situation in which a business fails to foresee changes within its industry and drops from a market-dominant position to being a minor player or declares bankruptcy.
Kodak Film Commercial - These are the Moments - Baby (1993):
I don't see ads as a big problem with ChatGPT. You could put a side-bar on the right and on the fly recommend products relevant to the on-going conversation.
The cost of computing these ads would be a lot more than today's keyword-based approach, that's certainly a problem. But think of hyper-relevant ads, based on the chat itself. There's a lot of information there, that beats tracking people's behavior online all day.
That depends on ad publishers, right? If they want to sell A, B and C and I am interested in D, then Google's still showing one of A, B or C to me. D doesn't make profit if there is nobody paying for ads.
Google is advertising things we don't need, that's why ad clicks are so abysmal. LLMs won't change that.
I’ve been infuriated with DuckDuckGo on occasion because it refused to exclude certain results.
In fact when you add an exclusion clause it simply boosts those results further instead of removing them.
I’ve been told this is because the underlying search providers refuse to exclude paying customer even when you explicitly don’t want to hear from them.
I could definitely see this happening in LLM answers too and I don’t expect it to be particularly subtle.
100% this -- a Google search requires multiple input queries, refinement, and scrolling a list of possible answers that are really just links to other web sites. The ChatGPT experience is far superior to this, for the average consumer and getting close for the power user. It's a better way to ask the Internet what it knows with a more natural interface that everyone already knows how to use -- real natural language. Less cognitive overhead, no busy search results that require clicking back and forth and (for now) no ads. That last part is key -- ChatGPT is doing Google's job right now, and not even having to run ads. Google doesn't even offer a premium no ads option for search and if they did I doubt enough people would buy it anyway to matter.
If I was Google I'd be worried. Very worried indeed. They either need to dramatically change their entire company within 18 months, or accept they are going to loose substantial amount of market -- and once its gone, it's gone in a first mover, winner takes all environment like what we have right now. Just ask Google themselves what it felt like back in the early 2000's when they completely destroyed the other search engines.
Now it is. Google used to be good too, until ads started looking like search results, and then the first page became entirely ads.
In the future, when you ask ChatGPT to help you write your resume, it will try to upsell you a premium account in linked in. It will withhold its best resume advice only for LinkedIn premium users after all.
> With Bard I get the feeling they're not showing us what they really have
I highly doubt this. If they had it they would show it because if they don't react swiftly and decisively their brand will be in 'catch up' mode rather than out front where they are used to being.
It's not just about hardware, it's about the software infrastructure to go with it. Other than OpenAI most researchers weren't interested in "merely" scaling things up because that was/is seen as simple engineering, unworthy of the great minds who dream up new algorithms.
