The incidence makes me wonder what percentage of people at Google spend their time in counterproductive ways.<p>If this is rooted too deeply in Google's culture by now, they might take very long to recover. Like decades long.<p>Has anybody else here seen how the UIs of Google Adsense and Google Ads have evolved during recent years? They are a mess. Another indicator that something is wrong.<p>I witnessed firsthand, how SMBs tried to put ads on Google Ads in the latest version and simply gave up. Because they couldn't figure out the interface.<p>Did Google lose their ability to bang out useful software?
I think part of the disdain is people’s recognition of Google’s inability to make and maintain new products.<p>Separate from recent poor generations, I’d be reluctant to use any Google AI, as if for some reason I’d liked it, the odds are too high it’ll get shut down or replaced by some worse internal competitor.
Remember that while "$90B selloff" sounds like a big, scary number, GOOGL (Alphabet) is still up 52% compared with one year ago.<p>2023-02-27: $89.87<p>2024-02-27: $137.17
Google needs to stop allowing themselves to be bullied by brainrotted culture warriors on both sides. Someone screams at them for not being woke enough and they panic and overcompensate. Someone else screams at them for being too woke and again they start running around like headless chickens trying onto appease the last person that yelled at them. None of this matters at all in the real world.
I really don't think anything happens to C-Suites anymore. As long as the numbers go up, the boards don't care. They don't even care that they could have made a lot of money from the AI gold rush in the last year. They just sit it out with a steady increase in their comp. Maybe after G+ they are all just to risk averse to do good work.
""The issue for the stock is not the debate [over Gemini] itself, it is the perception of truth behind the brand," Melius Research analysts Ben Reitzes and Nick Monroe wrote in a Monday note to clients."
Honestly, I think this whole thing is blown over. Gemini has a huge reach, so they played it safe by doing the same thing OpenAI has been doing (system instructions for their AI services like GPT-4) and tried to max out diversity. This decision is juicy bait for anyone who believes that America is in some culture war. This is unsurprising if you live in America and are subjected to extremely high levels of marketing and polarizing headlines.<p>Please note: I think it is clear that the Gemini models still need work to be historically representative and accurate, however, I do not think there is any real danger in airing with the side of caution and trying to fight the innate biases in the training data. It seems like this was Google's goal.
it's so bad, if I were a conservative hat wearer in liberal clothing, I'd say someone purposefully overturned the guardrails on this thing to do a self fulfilling prophecy of "go woke, go broke"<p>to back up my claim, id cite a few of those incel culture stories Google has had over the last decade suggesting they have some of that "libertarian" strain indistinguishable from fascism or "states rights" ideology.
Am I crazy, or is everyone taking all the wrong lessons from this whole thing? This doesn't really seem like an AI problem, or even a Google problem. Gemini did exactly what Google told it to do, and Google did exactly what prevailing cultural attitudes demanded it do.<p>All that's happening here, it seems to me, is that this episode is casting a bright light on the fact that the cultural values of (a) inclusive representation, and (b) avoiding "harmful" representations of protected categories, are mutually contradictory. But nobody's even attempting to acknowledge this possibility except the idiot "go woke go broke" crowd, which is not exactly a good faith discussion.
DAE think this whole fiasco might've been intentional? Seems like such a glaring flaw in the system. The public reaction was predictable, as well as the stock reaction....