literally, how does anyone find this acceptable? It makes me feel dumb that I find this outrageous, like the emperor's new clothes: y'all can see this too right?
My strong suspicion is that, for, say, the CEO of Google, this is less about "this will improve the product", or even "LLMs are the future, so we should use them in the present even though they don't work", and more "this is what the markets, which are collectively kinda dumb, have decided they will reward this year, so we will appease them until such time as they move onto a new toy."
See Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain; for a year or so practically every company was announcing some sort of blockchain thing. Did any of these come to anything? Of course not, but that was, when it comes to it, hardly the point.
LLMs are a particularly dramatic example, but I suspect the dynamic is, in reality, more or less the same as metaverses, blockchains, the _previous_ AI bubble (remember the year or so when everyone was announcing chatbots, until Microsoft Tay kinda scared everyone off it abruptly?), and so on.
Many in the tech community have high expectations for Google engineering quality and product development. The expectations are now too high, much like the executives who pushed this feature.
> Many in the tech community have high expectations for Google engineering quality and product development
Wait? Whom has these expectations? I presumed most in the tech industry scoff at anything Google launches, point at Google Graveyard or at all the failures they've been through.
Seriously: aside from search, ads and android, what product has Google developed ever that is of high quality and meeting the high quality? Maybe maps at some point? Gmail, maybe? Google docs? For each and every google product, I can name two competitors that meet much higher expectations of engineering.
Really the only 100% in-house products are Search and Gmail. The rest was bolted on piecemeal into the Borg: maps, android, double click, docs, YouTube, etc. - all acquired.
That’s not a bad thing, Google is really a story about a shrewd - even brilliant - acquisition and integration strategy.
However, they have systemically failed to grow new things in-house - be it space balloon internet, being an ISP, games network, etc etc.
They are likely better off just buying Anthropic at this point.
See Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain; for a year or so practically every company was announcing some sort of blockchain thing. Did any of these come to anything? Of course not, but that was, when it comes to it, hardly the point.
LLMs are a particularly dramatic example, but I suspect the dynamic is, in reality, more or less the same as metaverses, blockchains, the _previous_ AI bubble (remember the year or so when everyone was announcing chatbots, until Microsoft Tay kinda scared everyone off it abruptly?), and so on.