I did two post docs and they were great. I learned many valuable things, foremost among them that it was time to get the fuck out of academia.
Seriously I regret nothing, I had a great time.
Every time I talk to my friends in academia, I’m grateful that I was just smart enough to know that I’m too stupid for academia.
The best was when you heard how the Professors got their job back in the 70s-80s.
They generally just finished a PhD and were given a position!
Literally my advisor. Like damn.
Real talk: it’s been widely understood that AI–in its current state–is an unreliable source of factual information. Why the hell is Google pushing it at the top of search results?
$$$$$
What money tho
Investor money.
This mostly. There’s also some speculation that worse results may cause users to execute more search queries (at least in the short term) and get served more ads.
Jokes on them, people are starting not to use Google at all.
Shameless plug here for Qwant. I love it so far.
The real answer is that there is currently an AI arms race (mostly) between Google and OpenAI.
The way that the modern internet economy works is that the winners generally take the majority of the market and everyone else takes the scraps.
I work in machine learning and have spoken with some of the Google engineers about it recently. They said that when ChatGPT blew up last year, it sent shockwaves through the whole company. They had thought that they were ahead on AI, but suddenly realised that they were WAY behind.
Now they are putting a ton of effort into trying to push new models and uses because they are worried about becoming the “Bing of AI” rather than the “Google of AI”
FOMO.
People who haven’t gotten an industry job yet wouldn’t understand but google is right here. Jobs outside of academia suck balls.
Counterpoint: they at least exist, and the sooner you get into one and learn how they work the better? (e.g. discard “correct” and learn how the boss is always right)
You are alpha testing it for them. The more problems you find for them the better as they see it. They don’t care if someone glues their pizza.
