Many in the tech community have high expectations for Google engineering quality and product development. The expectations are now too high, much like the executives who pushed this feature.
Wait? Whom has these expectations? I presumed most in the tech industry scoff at anything Google launches, point at Google Graveyard or at all the failures they've been through.
Seriously: aside from search, ads and android, what product has Google developed ever that is of high quality and meeting the high quality? Maybe maps at some point? Gmail, maybe? Google docs? For each and every google product, I can name two competitors that meet much higher expectations of engineering.
That’s not a bad thing, Google is really a story about a shrewd - even brilliant - acquisition and integration strategy.
However, they have systemically failed to grow new things in-house - be it space balloon internet, being an ISP, games network, etc etc.
They are likely better off just buying Anthropic at this point.
Non-Products: Kubernetes and MGLRU.
See Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain; for a year or so practically every company was announcing some sort of blockchain thing. Did any of these come to anything? Of course not, but that was, when it comes to it, hardly the point.
LLMs are a particularly dramatic example, but I suspect the dynamic is, in reality, more or less the same as metaverses, blockchains, the _previous_ AI bubble (remember the year or so when everyone was announcing chatbots, until Microsoft Tay kinda scared everyone off it abruptly?), and so on.
1. Excellent integration with rest of the google ecosystem which ends up me and my friends using it and it is good enough so we continue using it. (E.g. Chrome, Photos, Drive, etc.)
2. Products are genuinely better and leagues ahead of nearest competition. (Gmail, Docs, Youtube).
I suspect Gemini is relying more on 1 rather than 2 at this point as it is not clear if it is indeed the best. But if it can play well with other Google products I am happy.
For example, I have Google One 2TB subscription to pay for all the storage and extra features, result of which I get Gemini Advanced for free and it also works in Docs. I rarely have the need to open ChatGPT even if ChatGPT is better than Gemini.
Search is where I am somewhat skeptical but this experiment is totally worth it in my opinion in Google's perspective and not doing it is stupid. Human beings adapt to the error rate of the Gen AI over time. So unless someone else delivers say 5x better accuracy than Gemini, I think it wont matter.
https://i.imgur.com/fgtjBTj.jpeg
Never seen these kinds of weird word combinations.
Allegedly Scarlett Johansson was approached multiple times about being the voice, but turned it down, so they just made a voice that sounds like her.
There were some tweets that had very conspicuous timings that accelerated the drama.
It seems that google is mixing in the largest related search terms.
But that doesn’t explain the nonsense word salad. I would actually be very skeptical to assume that these were taken verbatim from searchers.
You would have needed A LOT of people to have searched that exact phrase for it to be added to PAA.
Google does a good job with People Also Ask, and I have never seen this before. It might be nothing, but I am leaning towards one of their NLP systems leaking.
It's a great service for providing the wrong answers to things I didn't search for, but I admit I haven't yet figured out why I am supposed to desire this.
'What when ChatGPT like scarlett?'
Mistral, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all have their unique advantages and I have yet to find one LLM being superior in every task I use them for, but purely for such simple questions that should be in the training data, few are consistently as poor as Google efforts have been, first with Bard and now Gemini.
Google should have run at the enterprise when it had the chance fifteen years ago.
There’s no need to doctor screenshots to get these responses, at least twice now Google has shown bad answers in their own marketing materials.
These feel like something a satirical tech website would come up with.
(A lot people seem to subscribe to an ideology of "dumb people get what they deserve." What this really means to me is "I have Dunning-Kruger syndrome," but I wonder how much of that gets filtered down into making excuses for AI that sucks so badly it becomes actively dangerous.)
To me, a real sign of intelligence and maturity is being able to say, “I don’t know.” I always lose a lot of respect for people when I catch them making up answers to questions they can’t answer. It means I can’t trust anything they say. If I’m not willing to accept this behavior from a person in my life, why would I accept it from a machine?
It's easy to hold it wrong if you believe things you see in print.
It reminds me of a young Mark Zuckerberg, “they trust me. Dumb f*cks.”
"Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes. You fucked up! You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it... maybe we can help you."Keep in mind these come from the new "AI Overview" feature, which means these appear at the TOP of search results!
That's the mantra that allows far too many scammers to sleep at night.