from Hacker News

Google is still drip-feeding AI into Search, Maps, and Translate

by makepanic on 2/8/23, 2:22 PM with 24 comments

  • by jurmous on 2/8/23, 2:43 PM

    Google their presentation felt lacking. Mostly repeating AI features they already announced with some small features or expanded locations/languages to distract that their Bard is totally underwhelming.

    It did not show any source links below the generated text. They did not show off any queries with super recent information.

    It feels Microsoft is at least one year ahead with this Prometheus model and product work with integrations into Bing and Edge. In an interview with the Verge Microsoft CEO mentioned they already had the raw search optimised Prometheus model in mid 2022. So for Google to train a similar model optimised for search including sources will take quite a while.

    It will be interesting to see if Bing market share will grow. I will certainly try it out when it is my turn on the waitlist. Google on the other hand said nothing on availability.. Showing really they were caught unprepared and that this presentation was an act of desperation.

  • by ttul on 2/8/23, 2:54 PM

    OpenAI’s huge advantage is several months of training by hundreds of millions of users. Google never risked putting a chat model out into the wild for fear it would lead to embarrassing misuses - typical behavior for a giant company defending a legacy business at all costs.

    OpenAI has no such legacy business to defend and so was free to take the risk.

  • by ben30 on 2/8/23, 3:32 PM

    The early days of Google were magical, with its ability to answer our questions instantly and without distractions. It's a shame that now, ads and SEO strategies have taken over and made the search process more cumbersome. It feels OpenAI's public chat bot has the potential to bring back that simple, distraction-free experience of finding information. However this simplicity feels in conflict with how Google as an advertising company makes it's money.

  • by webdoodle on 2/8/23, 4:17 PM

    Drip-feeding? How about BOILING THE FROG. A.I. isn't our friend here. With all the censorship Google and other bigtech companies have been repeatedly caught doing, it's just another way of taking out the censorship middle-man, now without human accountability or oversight.