Google has let AI divisions take over both search
I fucking bing’d something the other day to get a better search result. What the fuck google.
Comment on Microsoft insiders worry the company has become just 'IT for OpenAI'
EnderMB@lemmy.world 1 week ago
All of big tech is really worried about this.
- Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
- Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
- Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
- Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.
If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.
normanwall@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Subverb@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Try Kagi. Paid search engines are the future in order to extract yourself from the enshittification of “free” search engines.
glasgitarrewelt@feddit.de 1 week ago
If your goal is to get away from this AI shit show, Kagi might be not the answer, according to their own blog.
I will search for a very interesting article everyone should read, before deciding to give kagi any money.
fluxc0@lemmy.world 2 days ago
yeah, that seems rough on kagi’s part. i used the free trial, and then just moved onto startpage because startpage doesn’t make me pay.
wolfshadowheart@leminal.space 1 week ago
There’s also the whole interaction in how the CEO treated someone who wrote an article and he wouldn’t leave her alone after asking him to stop.
From his perspective I get it, you want to have good press and try to clear up any misconceptions. But how he went about it was very unprofessional and far too pushy.
Subverb@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I read that stuff a few weeks ago. And the responses and discussion on Kagi’s Discord. I’ll continue to monitor Kagi’s behavior, of course, but for now I prefer Kagi. I get far more relevant results with no advertising noise and as much or as little “AI” assistance as I want.
Google is a cesspool and DDG is simply inferior - worthy, but inferior.
justaderp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Monopolies don’t care about the user experience, only profit. The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter. The continued degredation of the user experience is a likely indicator of an increase in revenue as function of successful application of AI.
thurstylark@lemm.ee 1 week ago
The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter.
Do you possibly mean “The AI evangelists” or something similar?
Like, I could totally understand it in the “software will also include the biases of those who wrote it” kind of way (a la Amazon’s failed attempt at automating job candidate search). If the only incentive you’re given as a programmer is “make it make money”, then yeah, your AI is going to bias towards that end.
Just couldn’t tell on first reading
justaderp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m not actually asking for good faith answers to these questions. Asking seems the best way to illustrate the concept.
Does the programmer fully control the extents of human meaning as the computation progresses, or is the value in leveraging ignorance of what the software will choose?
Shall we replace our judges with an AI?
Does the software understand the human meaning in what it does?
The problem with the majority of the AI projects I’ve seen (in rejecting many offers) is that the stakeholders believe they’ve significantly more influence over the human meaning of the results than exists in the quality and nature of the data they’ve access to. A scope of data limits a resultant scope of information, which limits a scope of meaning. Stakeholders want to break the rules with “AI voodoo”. Then, someone comes along and sells the suckers their snake oil.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
its a function of paying their employees less for more work relatively speaking and extracting more profit from consumers through ads and enshitification in general
brianorca@lemmy.world 1 week ago
But that’s also a path for them to no longer be a monopoly, if the right competitor makes the right moves.
justaderp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
We’re living in a late stage capitalistic hellhole and you’re advocating faith in the free market.
What. The. Fuck.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I don’t remember anything ever in history undermining faith in the free - from regulation, but not from jailing crooks, - market.
It’s not as if anything lefties claim to be that were free. And when one talks about what is needed to make it free, one can hear screeching of the “reeeeeee useful idiots for capitalism reeeeee you just want poor people to die reeeeee we should all vote for 8 hour work week and peace on Earth reeeeee what do you mean it’s not enough to vote reeeee” kind.
Even Ponzi schemes are usually about everyone being conscious it’s a scheme, but thinking they are very smart and will fool some other suckers, and those suckers think the same in turn. That is covered by the “jailing crooks” part.
And various cartels and trusts and such usually make government regulation their instrument. They benefit from it.
I mean, all this has been said and proven many times.
brianorca@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m saying it’s happened before. AOL. Palm. Yahoo. Blackberry. A company with an effective monopoly gets complacent and fails to serve their users. They get replaced.
greenskye@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I’m not sure there could be any sort of legitimate threat to them, but I could definitely see a Netflix situation playing out. That is a popular upstart temporarily seems poised to take over, but then suffers from extreme levels of interference from bigger players who artificially hold the upstart down while they desperately catch up and then ultimately come at least equal while the Netflix equivalent is mostly a shell of what it could’ve been.
Never underestimate how much buckets and buckets of cash reserves can overcome even incredibly out of touch laziness when it comes to competing with any start ups. Apple in particular could probably afford to let competitors get a decade ahead and still be able to come back based on the ridiculous amount of cash they have to float their business along with.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah competition won’t work in a market where some competitors have such massive amounts of wealth. This is a failure of unrestrained capitalism and it’s bad for consumers ultimately.
cm0002@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now
Not really, unfortunately, because of the sheer mass of the internet the infrastructure to just support the index of it requires massive funding. Even other giants like MS with Bing struggled with this. Short of a radical new way to run a search engine without a massive index, I just don’t see it happening.
greenskye@lemm.ee 1 week ago
It’s kind of curious to me about search because honestly my Internet world has only grown smaller and smaller. Where I used to use Google to find new websites, I feel like most of my searches on Google are now to search a handful of sites I already know. Ironically if Reddit had a better search function, a lot of my Google usage would fall off as I’d just go directly there, as it’s still the best place I’ve found for troubleshooting support and real reviews of lots of products. A competitor to Google wouldn’t really need to index the entire web for most people, but rather a relatively small number of website super giants like Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.
Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Kagi literally provides the same quality Google used to.
CosmicGiraffe@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They pay Microsoft for access to the bing index
Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
They stopped using Bing a year ago.
cm0002@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Kagis ok, it’s better than Google now, but not the Google of the past and only if what you were looking for is recent and indexed. If not, it just falls back to the same Google results. Good if you want separation and not having Google know what you’re searching for, but beyond that…meh.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If the AI boom is a dud,
Whaddya mean, “if”?
MataVatnik@lemmy.world 1 week ago
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago. Now all we have is latecomers with FOMO. It’s gonna be all incremental gains from here on.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago.
A simple control algorithm “if temperature > LIMIT turnOffHeater” is AI, albeit an incredibly limited one.
LLMs are not AI. Please don’t parrot marketing bullshit.
The former has an intrinsic understanding about a relationship based in reality, the latter has nothing of the likes.
MataVatnik@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I can see where you’re getting at, LLM don’t necessarily solve a problem, they just mímic patterns in data.
Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
I think the true use case for these AI technologies is yet to come. What most people are doing with the AI tools available today is just gambling around. But working with personal computers could be changing fundamentally in the coming years.
Holzkohlen@feddit.de 1 week ago
And people will still say AI isn’t a bubble.
Womble@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There is a bubble in AI, AI isnt a bubble. In the same way there was a bubble in e-commercebthat lead to the dotcom crash. But that didnt mean there was nothing of value there, just that there wasnyo much money chasing hype.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I think it will hinge on one thing: Will AI provide an experience that is maybe worse, but still sufficient to keep the market share, at lower cost than putting in the proper effort? If so, it might still become a tragic “success”-story.
aphlamingphoenix@lemm.ee 1 week ago
It’s very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn’t generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren’t going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.
Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
That’s what I suspect, too, but I’m not entirely sure in my research so far. The question I am still unsure about: Is it as costly in running, or is the real costly part “just” the “training our model” part? I wondered that, because when I was messing around, things like generative text models could run on my potato PC with a bit of python scripting without too much issue, even if not ideally - as long as I had the already trained dataset downloaded.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 1 week ago
Summary: stick to open source if you want usability.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
How does that address web search and online shopping?
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 1 week ago
web search: Searx-ng & co.
online shopping: only thing i see so far in local big shops is AI chatbots to reduce load on telephone support. I never used Amazon, don’t care what bullshit they do.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
No. They are still capable of pressure typical for oligopoly (censoring out mentions of their competition, tactically buying out things which could help that competition and shutting them down, defamation, lobbying for laws directed against their competition).
Unless that happens too fast for them to realize.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
slate
slag?
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
or more like their user experience was already so garbage, adding AI to it doesn’t make any noticeable change lol
yrmp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.
Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.
And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.
Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.
vxx@lemmy.world 1 week ago
yrmp@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).
There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.