Comment by MrBuddyCasino
1 year ago
"a friend at google said he knew gemini was this bad...but couldn't say anything until today (he DMs me every few days). lots of ppl in google knew. but no one really forced the issue obv and said what needed to be said
google is broken"
Razib Khan, https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1760545472681267521
"when i was there it was so sad to me that none of the senior leadership in deepmind dared to question this ideology
[...]
i watched my colleagues at nvidia (like @tunguz), openai (roon), etc. who were literally doing stuff that would get you kicked out of google on a daily basis and couldn't believe how different google is"
Aleksa Gordić, https://x.com/gordic_aleksa/status/1760266452475494828
Interestingly enough the same terror of political correctness seems to take center stage at Mozilla. But then it seems much less so at places like Microsoft or Apple.
I wonder if there’s a correlation with being a tech company that was founded in direct relation to the internet vs. being founded in relation to personal / enterprise computing, and how that sort of seeds the initial culture.
Is Microsoft really better? Remember this[1] bizarre intro during Microsoft Ignite?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBRtucXGeNQ
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I’d imagine Google’s culture is more Mao-ist public shaming. Here at Mozilla, we like Stalin. Go against the orthodoxy? You’re disappeared and killed quickly.
We have hour long pronoun training videos for onboarding; have spent millions on DEI consultants from things like Paradigm to boutique law firms; tied part of our corporate bonus to company DEI initiatives.
Not sure why anyone uses FF anymore. We barely do any development on it. You basically just sit here and collect between 150-300k depending on your level as long as you can stomach the bullshit.
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Or perhaps it's Google's hiring process - they are so obsessed with Leetcode-style interviews, they do not vet for the actual fit.
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Must be why, despite the fact that I can recognise OpenAI's product does have clear biases against affluent groups, it seems well intentioned and proportionate. It's clear the internet is bias not just towards the data of the affluent, but also the viewpoints and prejudices, so a reasonable person can recognise there is some unfairness and a bit of a problem. Also that any solution to this problem will be imperfect.
Whereas with Google, I just have to imagine they let some bigot go wild, and everybody was afraid to say anything about how fucking bad the product was due to the optics, so nothing kept them in check.
Here’s a simpler explanation. Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI and rushed out an imperfect product. This is one of probably 50 known issues with Gemini but it got enough attention that they had to step in and disable a part of the product.
That's a simpler explanation but one that I think misses the point completely. A huge reason "Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI" in the first place is because they had lots of people internally who acted as nothing but "vetoers", demanding the pace of AI slow down less it accidentally show too many white people. And this outcome is wholly unsurprising given that Google's second most important AI principle is "Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.": https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/
In other words, you talk about "50 known issues with Gemini", but this issue was not a result of technical underperformance, on the contrary, is was the result of Google making things more difficult for themselves in an effort to satisfy a (false) idealized view of the world.
Well they succeeded at their second principle, by using "fair" bias.
It was certainly not some random issue that popped up, they specifically designed it that way: https://x.com/jonst0kes/status/1761190093669437559
TBH if I were at Google and they asked all employees to dogfood this product and give feedback, I would not say anything about this. With recent firings why risk your neck?
Yeah, no way am I beta-testing a product for free then risking my job to give feedback.
Yea, if you were dogfooding this, would you want to be the one to file That Bug?? No way, I think I'd let someone else jump into that water.
They should put James Damore in charge of a new ideological red team.