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Google Calls In Help From Larry Page and Sergey Brin For AI Fight (nytimes.com) 56

Posted by BeauHD from the late-to-the-game dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Last month, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, held several meetings with company executives. The topic: a rival's new chatbot, a clever A.I. product that looked as if it could be the first notable threat in decades to Google's $149 billion search business. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who had not spent much time at Google since they left their daily roles with the company in 2019, reviewed Google's artificial intelligence product strategy, according to two people with knowledge of the meetings who were not allowed to discuss them. They approved plans and pitched ideas to put more chatbot features into Google's search engine. And they offered advice to company leaders, who have put A.I. front and center in their plans.

The re-engagement of Google's founders, at the invitation of the company's current chief executive, Sundar Pichai, emphasized the urgency felt among many Google executives about artificial intelligence and that chatbot, ChatGPT. The bot, which was released by the small San Francisco company OpenAI two months ago, amazed users by simply explaining complex concepts and generating ideas from scratch. More important to Google, it looked as if it could offer a new way to search for information on the internet. The new A.I. technology has shaken Google out of its routine. Mr. Pichai declared a "code red," upending existing plans and jump-starting A.I. development. Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products and demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times and two people with knowledge of the plans who were not authorized to discuss them. "This is a moment of significant vulnerability for Google," said D. Sivakumar, a former Google research director who helped found a start-up called Tonita, which makes search technology for e-commerce companies. "ChatGPT has put a stake in the ground, saying, 'Here's what a compelling new search experience could look like.'"

Further reading: Google Axes 12,000 Jobs
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Google Calls In Help From Larry Page and Sergey Brin For AI Fight More

Google Calls In Help From Larry Page and Sergey Brin For AI Fight

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  • Fuck No! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Friday January 20, 2023 @10:52PM (#63227004)

    It's bad enough trying to do end-runs around Google's "helpfulness", which is already almost enough to make me pine for the days of Alta Vista. The last thing I need is some "AI" telling me a "story" when I'm looking for data.

    I'm looking to get closer to source material - I sure as hell don't need another intermediary trying - and failing - to guess my intentions. If I want that kind of intervention I'll ask a question on Quora - better that than risk some credible-sounding fantasy cobbled together by an algorithm.

    • Advertisers do not need Google. And Goolge will not tell advertisers when they are wasting their money 'buying in'. Advertisers employ shotgun strategies, knowing they get bad with the good. But lately they have worked out they are being ripped off, or simply outspent by monsters like Amazon. Alternative, good AI will allow people to work out what to pay, and when, and not waste their ad money. If their AI engine learns Googles 'hits and analytics report' they can then say what is fair price, and when to sa
      • I, too, believe that Google is headed for rough times. But not because advertisers would get smarter and waste less money. I believe we will have language models running in-browser or on the local computer filtering our web experience. You ask the bot, the bot searches Google or whatever site, then collects references and formulates a direct response. This completely cuts off advertising and returns control in the hands of the users. Powerful LMs that run on a normal computer might be just a few years off,
        • You are the product. Our 'Free' browsers are all stealing data to moneygub on future purchases, or steer you to 'preferred' stores, by upromoting those who have bought queue jumping rights. Now if some broswer addon - takes the scroogle results and re-sorts the results, sans the pushed stuff -there will be war. Which is why API access is being altered to favor one interest, sans cookies. Once again, a user AI could remove all the referrer junk, or change it to say a charity. Which is why scroogle plans to b

    • Re:Fuck No! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday January 21, 2023 @01:10AM (#63227086)

      It's bad enough trying to do end-runs around Google's "helpfulness", which is already almost enough to make me pine for the days of Alta Vista.

      If this new AI tech is as great as it's cracked up to be, you should be able to ask it:

      "Give me the same search results that Alta Vista would have shown me if I did a search for 'Iomega Zip Drive' ".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Barny ( 103770 )

        And it will not give any results that are newer than 2013.

      • Let me challenge your search skills, I will give you a question to answer. Use Google, Bing or any search engine, and also chatGPT, GPT-3 or any AI. Nothing solves it, but the answer exists and is written on the internet somewhere if you find the right words to ask.

        "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot?".

    • Besides, Google is too busy cutting jobs to waste time on building anything useful at the moment.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The trick is to lean into it instead of fighting it. And Alta Vista was shit, take it from someone who was there. You don't want to go back to that.

      • Altavista was great for the early internet, before it was stuffed with a bunch of bullshit. And where did that bullshit come from? SEO for Google.

        • Alta Vista pre-dated Google.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It wasn't. Result ordering was whatever order the database entries were created, and SEO was as trivial as spamming keywords.

          • It wasn't. Result ordering was whatever order the database entries were created, and SEO was as trivial as spamming keywords.

            That's no different from early Google. And frankly SEO on Google wasn't that hard until pretty recently, my hobby blog used to be highly ranked and would show up in a bunch of searches. Just make content that people link to, done. Now people do it artificially with a bunch of shitsites, and Google seems to have totally failed to keep up.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Google started as a project to offer better search results than Alta Vista, it was superior from launch.

              • Dude, I was around, I used all of the search engines. It was better, but it still wasn't hard to trick it when it was new, like I said. And now it's easy to trick it again.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I found Alta Vista extremely useful, and I though it was better than Google until there were too many sites that it overlooked. I *really* prefer a search engine that returns what I ask for rather than something that sort of matches a word salad. I want to ask for pages that mention this thing and that thing close to each other, but which don't mention either X or Y.

        Google is ONLY better than Alta Vista because it indexes a lot more pages.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I like that Google understands things like synonyms, but also makes it easy to override with quote marks. Long gone are the days of getting the thesaurus out and constructing a long this OR that OR other thing statement.

          • I like that Google understands things like synonyms, but also makes it easy to override with quote marks. Long gone are the days of getting the thesaurus out and constructing a long this OR that OR other thing statement.

            I find that more and more, Google ignores such things as double quotes, the minus sign, and the "allintext:" operator. It seems to do it almost randomly - sometimes it ignores operators when relevant results are sparse and that kind of behaviour might be expected, and sometimes it ignores them even when there are lots of relevant hits. And don't even get me started on having to trash Google cookies every time my attempts to refine a search - or even just look at the next page of results - convince their clu

      • The trick is to lean into it instead of fighting it. And Alta Vista was shit, take it from someone who was there. You don't want to go back to that.

        I was there too, and I remember how much better Alta Vista was than its predecessors. I did say that Google is "almost" bad enough for me to pine for Alta Vista. I'll add that AFAIC, Alta Vista was as good - in the context of the Web "back then" - as Google was in the context of the web contemporary with the first few years of Google's existence. Google used to be great. It's still better than alternatives such as Startpage and DDG, but the gap is closing. Unfortunately, most of that closure is a result of

    • Never mind what Google'd do with it, do you think they could build out the AI infrastructure to manage > 8 billion queries per day? Let's see who can come up with efficient, feasible AI that isn't offline more often than it's on.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Probably. The real question is, could they make a profit?

        Somebody is going to find the sweet spot of competent and efficient AI search assistance that will draw customers. Since GPT type systems are technically trivial to build, the barriers to entry have suddenly dropped.

        Whoever manages it, I suspect there's going to be significantly less profit in search, which is bad news for Google even if they do win.

    • Hopefully they will make it possible to disable the AI assistance. However I said "hopefully", not "probably".

  • How about just return what I search for?! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    About 90% of the time Google returns results that don't even match the words I put in the search request. WTF is wrong with them. Google's search is actually worse than it was years ago. There are so many times that I know what I'm searching for exists but Google returns nothing useful. Sometimes DDG/Bing can find it but they have their own issues because Microsoft has some weird policies where they refuse to index large numbers of sites for unknown reasons (even the people at Bing don't know!). Like those

    • "My lawyer will talk to your lawyer" style solution applied to this problem - "My AI will talk to your AI". For example AdeptAI is a company founded by two of the inventors of Transformers (working at Google at the time) that wants to automate solving tasks on the web. You ask Adept ACT to solve your problem, it deals with Google and other sites. Use your AI to patch over their AI problems. In the future browsing the web without AI would be like going in a COVID infested space without a mask.

    • About 90% of the time Google returns results that don't even match the words I put in the search request. WTF is wrong with them. Google's search is actually worse than it was years ago.

      All absolutely true. What's even more irritating, results that have more of my search words are further down the results. It makes me wonder if they're just adverranking.

    • What are you searching for? Should the FBI be informed about it?

  • Don't believe it so easily (Score:3)

    by Visarga ( 1071662 ) on Saturday January 21, 2023 @03:19AM (#63227144)
    I'll believe Google is going to release an advanced AI product only after I have seen it with my own eyes. Their translation service is worse than DeepL, their voices worse than Natural Reader, their OCR worse than Amazon Textract, their search - well everyone knows how bad it is, full of spam and ads, and hijacking your search intent to display other things than you ask. Even content recommendation on YT is weak and inflexible. Waymo's car - still under development.

    Google is the sleeping giant that has dreamed of AI but never delivered. Transformer neural networks were invented at Google but all those who invented it are now at their own startups (except one). So they don't even have the talent that got them so famous.

  • adGPT (Score:3)

    by real_nickname ( 6922224 ) on Saturday January 21, 2023 @04:34AM (#63227184)
    Imagine a chat bot but with placement product!

  • Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by holostagram ( 6735694 ) on Saturday January 21, 2023 @08:05AM (#63227336)
    I was once Google's biggest fan boy. Promoted them, bought all of their products. I do not pretend to understand the vagaries of how corporate cultures evolve, but I cannot continue supporting this organization. The main reason? Their support teams are the worst you will ever encounter. Maybe they have great engineers, but they seem to not realize that they also have customers. It is a giant PITA, but I am working hard to move everything I have off of their platform.

    • They know they have customers. You're just recently figuring out you're not the customer.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It seems they want to be a mass consumer company, not a corporate support company. With the first you can get away with rushed crap, as one uses Bing etc. if Google isn't working right on a given day. Just don't depend on them for anything important.

    • Who are the customers? Most of the time, we're not the customers, we're the product. The product doesn't get to vote.
  • Searches built of several keywords or a short question are over. A scrollable textarea would prompt users to use natural language queries. Imagine if you could interview the search engine. Over a period of several days or weeks. The search engine could cue you based on prior interviews where you have broached the same topic (did you see this, can I suggest that). You could move between historical topics and the search engine would pick up the context of your previous interactions. It would be like you are t

  • Using a chat based search is like hitting the I'm Feeling Lucky button every time. You might get the result you want, you might not, the result might be completely wrong/false but given to as an authoritative answer.

    I predict that crap AIs will make humans stupid for a while as humans will believe the wrong answers from the crap AIs, because we keep calling them intelligent when they are nothing of the sort.

  • Their once superior search service has only gotten worse as their goal changed from being good to being profitable. I don't think they have any recollection of how to be good anymore in the search space. It would be nice if ChatGPT and others would cause some innovation, but it seems like a long shot for Google to offer a new great service or for anyone else to make a dent in their search market share.

  • This will be just like all of the annoying voice virtual assistants. The first steps in the setup of new apps and devices will be trying to figure out how to turn it off.

  • Google had been really nice and they have great products, but in the last decade there search results have been skewed to helping the advertises find you vs helping you find the answer you want. I'm all for an interactive chat bot that helps you find things. One of the biggest problems is it's impossible to find something specific on a modern search engine. When you start to narrow down search terms, most search engines ignore specific search terms

  • just wondering how scalable is chatGPT. it's one thing to process thousands of request. is a whole other ball game when you are a search engine.

  • It's the depth of hardware job losses here, that worry me, for now.
  • Google creates 20 AI products, Google kills 19 of them (that is what Google does with projects, after all), the AI doesn’t like it this is how Skynet gets started, people!!

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