Google Employees Criticize CEO For 'Rushed, Botched' Announcement of GPT Competitor Bard (cnbc.com) 51
Google employees are criticizing leadership, most notably CEO Sundar Pichai, for the way the company handled the announcement last week of its ChatGPT competitor called Bard. From a report: Staffers took to the popular internal forum Memegen to express their thoughts on the Bard announcement, referring to it as "rushed," "botched" and "un-Googley," according to messages and memes viewed by CNBC. On Monday, Google got ahead of a Microsoft event the following day and had Pichai publicly divulge some details of the company's chatbot technology. More about Bard was revealed on Wednesday at an event held in Paris. In between those events, Microsoft, an early investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, showcased how its Bing search engine will integrate with the buzzy chat technology, inviting reporters to a demonstration at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington. After Google's AI Chatbot Made a Mistake, Its Shares Dropped Over $100 Billion.
This is just how google has operated for a decade (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: This is just how google has operated for a dec (Score:2)
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The diversity memo shows Prichai is a fool (Score:2)
Not because Prichai was evil in sacking Damore, nobody cares about being evil.
But because he did it in such an incompetent manner. He could have quietly told Damore to pull his head in and that would be the end of it. Or to get HR to do it an stay right out of it But he made himself personally responsible for censorship in a company that curates the information that we receive.
Arrogant and incompetent.
Re: This is just how google has operated for a dec (Score:2)
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I've been a fan of their phones since the Nexus line. The Pixel 7 is proper dogshit for a single reason: the fingerprint sensor simply doesnt work. Makes the (probably otherwise decent) phone useless.
While I don't give a damn about Google, a phone with a non-functional fingerprint sensor is far from useless to me: in fact, I have never used the fingerprint sensor in mine.
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While I don't give a damn about Google, a phone with a non-functional fingerprint sensor is far from useless to me: in fact, I have never used the fingerprint sensor in mine.
Once you start using the fingerprint sensor, will see it is convenient and become accustomed to it. It may seem like a minor feature, but when the entire competition has this feature working, why buy one without?
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The fingerprint sensor is a good feature for people who don’t need security.
Re:This is just how google has operated for a deca (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Pichai is to Google what Ballmer was to Microsoft. Good for the stock price and milking the monopoly, but bad for everything else. Innovation comes to a screeching halt under these kinds of leaders.
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Innovation is expensive. So what these people do is to take a look around what startups are succeeding, then hoovering those up. Believe it or not, that's actually cheaper, despite the price tag of a couple billions.
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Oh yes. This is what all large companies do for "innovation". Google is long past the point of being too big and too bureaucratic to innovate organically. Meta is the same way.
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> Pichai is to Google what Ballmer was to Microsoft.
Great description, except Pichai is dreadfully unfun.
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He just needs to do a Developers, Developers, Developers! monkey dance
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More importantly, he needs to start throwing chairs.
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Temporal Error. You're confusing products that never take off and are getting progressively worse with products that were an utter piece of crap from the onset.
Google Assistant isn't even remotely comparable to Bard which not only failed at its one job, but did so in a curated video that Google had every opportunity not to publish.
Not just comparatively, Google Assistant is actually a functional product which in some metrics (not all) is the best on the market.
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Indeed. Google has not made anything really good, ever. Even search was never really good, it just had the largest database for a while.
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Gathering the data only seems easy until you actually do anything with the data, storing it is impossible so you need to process it as you get it...
GPT is the bitcoin of knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:GPT is the bitcoin of knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between crypto and this kind of "AI" is that crypto was a solution looking for a problem to solve. Everyone is going wild imagining how Chat-gpt will make their jobs easier (or obsolete).
Sure no one will trust a plane designed by chatgpt, but I can see the attractiveness of quickly asking questions about general day-to-day things and getting a 90% accurate answer.
Which hey, it makes the entirety of google obsolete.
Re: GPT is the bitcoin of knowledge (Score:2)
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Privacy based Crypto is solving a real problem by providing a way to send and receive money over the Internet without censorship or surveillance.
These days, mostly send.
Re:GPT is the bitcoin of knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
>I can see the attractiveness of quickly asking questions about general day-to-day things and getting a 90% accurate answer.
Which hey, it makes the entirety of google obsolete.
Google gives you way more than a 90% accurate answer. It gives you the most relevant results with a, let's say, 90% probability you will get the 100% correct answer in each one of the top 10 links. You then have the agency to choose the best answer.
ChatGPT takes away your agency in choosing which one is the best, so it must perform much much better than Google for people to trust it.
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You then have the agency to choose the best answer.
If you knew the best answer you wouldn't need to Google it now would you. If I Google "do vaccines cause autism" and then scroll through the results looking for the one which says "yes" then the extra agency afforded to me hasn't really worked in my favour now has it.
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Yes, but there are many, MANY questions that people controlling such answer machines want to answer in specific ways, ways that are way less certain. It's easy and reassuring to just trust consensus but it leads to stagnation at best and horrible outcomes at worst.
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You might have the sense to know that some of these are better sources than others, but ChatGPT sure doesn't. The thing I find really irritating about it is that it provides wrong answers with the same confidence as correct answers, unlike human beings who are more likely to qualify their answers when they're unsure. You can u
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>I can see the attractiveness of quickly asking questions about general day-to-day things and getting a 90% accurate answer.
Which hey, it makes the entirety of google obsolete.
Google gives you way more than a 90% accurate answer. It gives you the most relevant results with a, let's say, 90% probability you will get the 100% correct answer in each one of the top 10 links. You then have the agency to choose the best answer.
ChatGPT takes away your agency in choosing which one is the best, so it must perform much much better than Google for people to trust it.
I think the key is if chat-style search engine cites it's answers. Then you can still get that (usually decent) overview with the ability to read the original sources.
Re: GPT is the bitcoin of knowledge (Score:2)
I guess the whole point for using a NN like ChatGPT is to learn from multiple sources and then generate content based on what was learned. Of they can pinpoint specific content in the response, it seems problematic both on a legal/copyright/IP level and a practical level.
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Google gives you way more than a 90% accurate answer. It gives you the most relevant results with a, let's say, 90% probability you will get the 100% correct answer in each one of the top 10 links. You then have the agency to choose the best answer.
ChatGPT takes away your agency in choosing which one is the best, so it must perform much much better than Google for people to trust it.
ChatGPT is AWESOME for situations like "I don't know what that thing that I'm trying to do is called, so I don't know the right keywords for a Google search. I can describe it though". It'll probably spit out the keyword you need to do a followup Google query, given a description.
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Re:GPT is the bitcoin of knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, GPT can be useful for some things, but a search engine replacement it is not. I just did this test a few minutes ago:
What book is this text from? " She was quite sure he had not died in a construction accident"
I'm sorry, but I cannot determine the book this text is from as it is just a sentence and does not provide enough context to identify the specific source. Could you please provide more context or a longer excerpt?
Bobbie was thinking about the boy's hands. They had been covered with cuts and bruises, in
the characteristic pattern of defense wounds. She was quite sure he had not died in a
construction accident; he had been attacked, and he had held up his hands against his attacker.
"Where is this island they've come from?" she asked
This text is from the book "The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton.
That is incorrect. The text is from the book "Jurassic Park".
I apologize, you are correct. The text is from the book "Jurassic Park" by Michael Crichton. Thank you for correcting me.
This is a good example of just how fuzzy and indirect GPT's knowledge is. It did correctly identify that the book was a Michael Crichton book, however it had the entirely wrong book. Yet the response is so definitive and certain "This text is from the book "The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton." stating that as an absolute fact with zero qualifiers, yet it was completely wrong. Googling my first bit of text clearly returns the correct book, and has hits from many, many sources. Chat GPT can really be dangerous if used naively.
How does he still have a job? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ordinarily they would just buy chat gpt (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine how much more interesting and better things would be if we applied the same level of antitrust scrutiny to every large multinational.
kinda get why people don't like you (Score:2, Informative)
I want to see it in google home (Score:2)
With their google home products and android phones, google already has the platform to release Bard to millions of people.
As good as ChatGPT is (and it is fantastic), Microsoft does not really have the same kind of platform.
If they can get their act together, this is google's game to lose.
Re: I want to see it in google home (Score:1)
but consider is it the lamda engine that they have to convince the world to adapt or just the chat ml front end all the while the gpt 4 standard may be the dragon with the long sharp teeth?
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Yeah, I would say the jury is still out on LaMDA, while GPT-3 is already a massive success with ChatGPT. I would expect GPT-4 to be even better.
Microsoft is clearly ahead of the game when it comes to AI, but Google is ahead of the game when it comes to the platform to put the AI on. It will be interesting to see how this all play out.
Pichai is worse than useless (Score:5, Insightful)
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Didn't ChatGPT recently pass the master exam for MBA?
Replace that goofball with it. Just to add insult to injury.
Ah, yes. (Score:1)
The $100,000,000 "me too".
Un-Googley? (Score:5, Insightful)
The announcement was poorly planned, met with widespread skepticism and/or apathy in the tech community, and abandoned by Google shortly after it was released. That sounds quite Googley to me.
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The announcement was poorly planned, met with widespread skepticism and/or apathy in the tech community, and abandoned by Google shortly after it was released. That sounds quite Googley to me.
They haven't actually cancelled the product yet, so they haven't reached full Google yet either.
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To truly reach "Full Google", they'll first need to launch three or four overlapping-but-somewhat-competing chatbots, confusingly shift focus every few months regarding which chatbot Google is "all in" on, and eventually relegate all of them to the Google Graveyard.