• sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
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    1 month ago

    Google under Sundar Pichai is a terrible company that only succeeds based on its size and monopoly. Let’s be honest, they’re saying that search results will become secondary as they push their service. How do you, as a CEO and board, sign off on an idea that kills most of your (ad) revenue pursuing something that you haven’t even figured out how to monetize? Make it make sense.

  • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Billions of queries becoming way more energy intensive for a feature almost nobody asked for, now the default. What the fuck are we even doing

    • TehPers@beehaw.org
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      1 month ago

      The sooner, the better. It’s so painful when I use Google these days. Why is it that smaller people can do seemingly obvious features like custom user-controlled site rankings, but the big players are completely incapable of that?

      • Ace! _SL/S@ani.social
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        1 month ago

        Why is it that smaller people can do seemingly obvious features like custom user-controlled site rankings, but the big players are completely incapable of that?

        Because that would give control to the user. And we all know they hate us having that because they can’t shove their shit down our throats then

        • TehPers@beehaw.org
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          1 month ago

          I know Kagi does, but aside from that I wouldn’t be surprised if SearXNG does too.

  • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Awesome. Truly spectacular.

    Generative AI is so energy intensive ($$$), that Google is requiring users subscribe to Gemini.

    Google is entirely dependent on advertising sales. Ad revenue subsidizes literally everything else, from Android development to whichever 8-12 products and services they launch and subsequently cancel each year.

    Now, Google wants to remove web results and just use generative AI instead of search as it’s default user interface.

    So, like I said: Awesome.

    • pup_atlas@pawb.social
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      1 month ago

      While I agree in principle, one thing I’d like to clarify is that TRAINING is super energy intensive, once the network is trained, it’s more or less static. Actually using the network isn’t dramatically more energy than any other indexed database lookup.

      • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 month ago

        It’s static, yes, but the static price is orders of magnitude higher. It still involves loading the whole model into VRAM and performing matrix multiplication on trillions of numbers

        • etrotta@beehaw.org
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          1 month ago

          To be fair, I wouldn’t include “loading the whole model into VRAM” as part of the cost, given they can just keep it in there between different requests, and it might be down to hundreds of billions or dozens of billions instead of trillions… but even after all improvements it should still be orders of magnitude more expensive than normal search, which just makes their decision even crazier

        • pup_atlas@pawb.social
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          1 month ago

          Indexing and lookups on datasets as big as companies like Google and Amazon are running also take trillions of operations to complete, especially when you take into account the constant reindexing that needs to be done. In some cases, encoding data into a neural network is actually cheaper than storing the data itself. You can see this in practice with gaussian splatting point cloud capture, where they are training networks to guide points in the cloud at runtime, rather than storing the position of trillions of points over time.

      • towerful@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        Training will never stop, tho.
        New models will keep coming out, datasets and parameters are going to change.

        • pup_atlas@pawb.social
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          1 month ago

          I firmly believe it will slow down significantly. My prediction for the future is that there will be a much bigger focus on a few “base” models that will be tweaked slightly for different roles, rather than “from the ground up” retraining like we see now. The industry is already starting to move in that direction.

  • eveninghere@beehaw.org
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    1 month ago

    sometimes-correct summary without needing to click on a single result

    Crazier than it sounds. We don’t see the page contents AT ALL by default.

    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Yet again destroying the internet even further.

      No no no, you don’t want to go see pages with creative content. Stay here in my walled little garden, I have such wonders to show you

  • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    If you haven’t already, folks, switch your default search engine over to a searx. You’ll gain back the ability to actually find useful results. It’s not so good for shopping, though.

  • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Holy shit that picture showing where the search results will be is insane. Why even bother with any results at all?

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    honestly i don’t think this is too big a deal - search has always been more than just results like when you could enter in an equation and get a calculator widget or currency exchange.

    i do think that stagnation has hit tech companies as a whole and i think google is suffering because of it. google i/o’s and android used to be so exciting now it just feels like they’re going through the motions (apple suffers from this too).

    • Ilandar@aussie.zone
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      1 month ago

      I would argue the opposite. These big companies have discovered what they believe to be the Holy Grail of technology (generative AI) and are now in a race unlike any seen before to deploy it as quickly as possible to the world and gain market dominance. Big tech is completely out of control right now, even the CEOs are describing it as “frantic” behind the scenes.