That's not fair to Google+.
I actually liked that platform over Facebook.
It's a shame they had to cram it down people's throat. It would've been a fantastic alternative to Facebook. I especially liked it's friend organization feature with circles.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
156 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59377 readers
3815 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It was really much better than fb and other platforms, really easy to group and filter content on it.
I just hated their forced integration with YouTube comments section which only served to artificially pump up the number of G+ users. Great platform, bad management decisions.
They only did that AFTER releasing it as a walled garden that people had to jump through a bunch of hoops to join.
Funny that Blue Sky just did that same old thing. Launched like a VIP club with a limited guest list. Even though that tactic hasn’t really worked well for most people since the 00’s.
also - blue sky was eating glue while twitter was falling and lost a lot of attention to threads
I always thought the whole circles concept was genius, and it annoys me that nobody has tried to replicate it.
I know!!!! You really had control who you could reach with your posts. It was great!
Google+ was just cancelled before it had a chance to turn to shit...
You mean, before it was adopted en masse and people and corporations made it shit?
Nah, Google+ was actually good, it just had shitty managers ruin the launch and subsequent bullshit.
Gemini is just straight garbage.
Google made it invite only when people actually wanted to try it. Then when people got tired of waiting and no longer interested, Google tried to push it to everyone.
Yeah, it was a total shitshow. G+ could've been great too.
Due to the nature of our work, my firm has had early access to most LLMs including Bard (now Gemini). I might be short on imagination but I honestly cannot see how LLM general search implementations can ever be fixed. There is too much garbage data for any system to be able to intelligently parse and the results of our tests were laughable. Now, if you offer LLM search that is restricted to curated datasets like "The Library of Congress" or peer reviewed scientific papers, I can see the value in that. You'll probably still have to triple check your results, but at least it can get you 80% of the way there rather than sending you in the wrong direction.
EDIT: For context, our clientele are all enterprises with very large, mission critical systems. They are not the type to use some buggy trinket just because it's new and cool.
yes, I find Gemini actually not bad when it comes to my specific use case of showing generic examples for R programming, so I can figure out the syntax for my actual code. I don't try to have it generate actual code for me because my topic of marine biogeochemistry is far too specific for it to have any idea how to work with it. Unlike ChatGPT, which often makes up nonsense functions or hallucinates whole packages, Gemini seems to do ok. I also found it pretty good for generating images of natural subjects. It did the best job of generating a pic of a giant clam of any image generator I've tried. I would never trust factual information from Gemini. So like Google+, it's a pretty good product that in no way should be shunted into search results, Google Docs and other places where its output is not relevant, yet that is exactly the trap Google is falling into again.
...yet that is exactly the trap Google is falling into again.
Every time. It'd be funny if it didn't mean people constantly being punished and losing their jobs for errors made at the executive level.
With Gemini you can let it show you search results for (some) of its statements. It's useful for cross-checking: I was, for example, researching plastics recycling and there was a claim that seemed untrue and corporate. The automagic search/source function for that statement led me to a blog post of some consortium/lobbying group of manufacturers. After telling that to Gemini it apologized and compiled a list of different view points for that specific statement.
I was pretty impressed with that, and I find it very useful for researching topics I know basically nothing about. Of course it's not the sole source of truth.
Exactly this. We need to figure out making machines that can reason first and then we can have THEM sort the data and figure out what to feed the data pool.
But if we have a computer that can reason, we don't need LLMs at all.
The more I use ChatGPT and the like, the more I realize "the old ways" is usually just faster and easier. At best, I might use it to point me in the right direction instead. Which is very helpful, but it's nowhere near good enough to be a replacement for most of its applications.
I know the article is about Gemini but people are realizing that AI isn't replacing anything any time soon way faster than the people making it.
The Gemini I know is "an application-layer internet communication protocol for accessing remote documents, similar to HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and Gopher". It's not used much but it could be part of a useful alternative to the, now Google controlled, internet. Maybe Google named their project Gemini to obfuscate a potential competitor for simple web pages (or perhaps both project teams are bad at choosing names - if Gemini isn't a human cloning machine you're doing it wrong).
HTTP is not Google-controlled, you don't need to replace that in order to build something new without Google
This looks like an interesting project. Thanks!
The article is too long for me. 2 of its main ideas are "Everyone using large-language models should be aware of ai hallucination and be careful when asking those models for facts." and "Firms that develop large-language models shouldn't downplay the hallucination and shouldn't force ai in every corner of tech."
There was already so much misinformation on the Web before Chatgpt 3.5. There's still so much misinformation. No need for the hallucination to worsen the situation. We need a reliable source of facts. Optimistically, Google, Openai or Anthropic will find a way to reduce or eradicate the hallucination. The Google ceo said they were making progress. Maybe true. Or maybe generic pr lie so folks would stop following up re the hallucination.