Simon Willison’s Weblog

But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.

— Casey Newton # 15th May 2024, 10:23 pm

The blog post announcing the shutdown was done one day early. The idea was to take the opportunity of the new Pope being announced and Andy Rubin being replaced as head of Android, so that the [Google] Reader news may be drowned out. PR didn’t apparently realize that the kinds of people that care about the other two events (especially the Pope) are not the same kind of people that care about Reader, so it didn’t work.

— Mihai Parparita # 20th April 2024, 9:55 pm

Before Google Reader was shut down, they were internally looking for maintainers. It turned out you have to deal with three years of infra migrations if you sign up to be the new owner of Reader. No one wanted that kind of job for a product that is not likely to grow 10x.

— Jaana Dogan # 4th April 2024, 8:51 pm

One consideration is that such a deep ML system could well be developed outside of Google-- at Microsoft, Baidu, Yandex, Amazon, Apple, or even a startup. My impression is that the Translate team experienced this. Deep ML reset the translation game; past advantages were sort of wiped out. Fortunately, Google’s huge investment in deep ML largely paid off, and we excelled in this new game. Nevertheless, our new ML-based translator was still beaten on benchmarks by a small startup. The risk that Google could similarly be beaten in relevance by another company is highlighted by a startling conclusion from BERT: huge amounts of user feedback can be largely replaced by unsupervised learning from raw text. That could have heavy implications for Google.

— Eric Lehman, internal Google email in 2018 # 11th February 2024, 10:59 pm

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

— Tim Bray # 20th January 2024, 12:13 pm