Search for a Prompt Engineer V - Google Walks into a Trap

Eating small rocks is good for Digestion. Glue belongs on a pizza. Gasoline goes well with spaghetti. Some gastronomic gems from AI embedded in Google Search.  

Not to mention,  

Barack Obama is Muslim.  

No African country starts with K. How about Kenya 

Thirteen US Presidents went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. None did, but they could have visited and that would been one dictionary definition of the word ‘went’. 

Redditor claimed the feature told them one way to deal with depression is by “jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge,” citing a Reddit post for the advice, here.

And here is this interview with Nilay Patel where the editor is miffed that Google is using information from publishers, like The Verge, to inform AI-generated search results, which readers will click on instead of clicking links to, say, The Verge. 

Here is the interview. Read. Watch. Draw your own conclusions.  

Their AI is clearly drawing wisdom from The Onion and Reddit, and I am sure Verge and other publishers as well. It also makes math errors. Now that is unacceptable and I am personally miffed.  

Google is a good company  

It has had a powerful and wonderful effect on how information is shared, knowledge is gained and believe it or not, businesses have grown.  

YouTube more so when it comes to sharing music, arts, and do not forget the bonhomie in comments. Believe it or not, there are more people being nice to each other on YouTube videos than you would actually know.  

I have discovered music, artists, movies, recipes, you name it.  

All of that and more without spending a single dime.  

But you all know this. 

What’s happening at Google? 

Google is being managed by Sundar Pichai, and he can and should be credited with maintaining their Search Business. Google was pioneer in AI with their own ai-model called LamDa, they had TensorFlow, transformers, I am sure you might have run into these things.  

And why worry about ChatGPT? It is not your competitor. Neither is Perplexity but now google is rolling generative results directly into search and that has unknowable (and also knowable) consequences.  

Google’s all-in investment in AI would simply add another entry into their increasingly dubious, albeit still profitable, search result page. Google has lots of user data and they were putting contextual ads in users’ inboxes right after launching Gmail. And now with Android, Google Maps, Search, Gmail and the rest of the products, they have more and then some. Read about the overview here.

And they had time and resources on their side. Not to mention an Army of engineers and scientists. And yet they fail time and again to bring forth a convincing product.  

The funny part is the rest of the products do not work either.  

As it stands the AI hullabaloo is hullabaloo.  

Google has simply walked into a trap. 

Remember Wave, Buzz, Orkut and Google+?  

Did they learn nothing from building social networks?  

That are there are organizations with brilliant minds, and sufficient resources and concentrated efforts. And those organizations can probably play the game better.  

Now Sundar Pichai is not someone you would confuse with vision or a discernable ability to predict the future of Search. But he is the perfect His Masters’ Voice and the masters being the shareholders. He did well by them, and they did well by him. No matter he is selling his Google shares, and they are letting him.  

The man got to eat, now.  

Search is not Microsoft’s business. Neither it is of Amazon nor Apple.  

But AI gets them leverage.  

And from the history of mankind, man has been looking for leverage. 

‘Give me a lever long enough,’ said Archimedes, the ancient Greek, ‘and I will move the world.’  

If not lever Satya Nadella got a stick to make Google dance, and from botched up launch of Bard, to roll out and pausing of Gemini, their image generation tool and now these generative AI results. Google has been obliging ever since. More here.

Epilogue 

Search for a Prompt Engineer are series of articles that reflect upon the happening in and around AI. Hashbrown Systems has been writing machine learning and deep learning algorithms and have successfully implemented artificial intelligence in our products.  

We would be soon launching AI and Machine Learning Services as part of our extended offerings but meanwhile if you intend to learn more about how you can or cannot of if you should implement ai; and wish to explore more about it you may contact us here.