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When did Google get so weird?

2011 points · 1123 comments · sancho-panza

  1. mkirsten · · focus · HN ↗
    I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.

    If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.

    If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.

    1. echelon · · focus · HN ↗
      We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.

      - Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features

      - Gmail - same

      - Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare

      - Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.

      - YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution

      - GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.

      I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.

      It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.

      1. auntienomen · · focus · HN ↗
        Agents require training data for RL. This data is rare in comparison to what we feed foundation models, and Google is sitting on a dragon's hoard of sensor and tracking data. I'm not counting them out yet.
        1. echelon · · focus · HN ↗
          We don't need Google's data. Once we instrument the world, we'll get a Google's worth of data in short order.

          It's easier than ever to ingest and label data.

          This is happening with or without Google. The recursive improvement does not require them at all.

        2. fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
          Okay but would it kill everybody to start with commoncrawl?
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