Google's rookie mistake 🤦🏻‍♂️

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Good Morning. This is Refactored. Your favorite tech newsletter ❤️

In today's edition: Google’s presentation mistakes, Disney layoffs and memes.

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in.

Main Thing

Google’s $100B mistake

Rookie presentation mistakes from a trillion-dollar company

What: Google had a rough week with the botched announcement of conversational AI, Bard, followed by a lame AI event in Paris, tanking the market value by $100B.

Bard: The flagship chatbot built to compete with ChatGPT (and Bing), made factual errors in the very first demo!

Here’s a screenshot from Google’s demo:

The first image was actually taken in 2004 by Very Large Telescope (no pun intended) in Chile. Whoops.

AI Event: Google rehashed previously announced AI products in a hastily put together presentation and skipped over a live demo because they “misplaced” the phone.

Zoom Out: Google is in a lose-lose situation over implementing chatbots in search:

• With chatbots - they’ll lose the search based advertising cash cow.

• Without chatbots - they risk loosing the dominance in search industry.

For now, Microsoft has the lead and isn’t shy about it - here’s an excerpt from Satya Nadella’s interview challenging Google:

Big Picture

Disney+: The streaming service lost 2.4M subscribers for the first time since launch. Disney is also planning to lay off 7,000 employees in effort to save costs.

Spotify: New feature called ‘Exclude from taste profile’ allows you to choose playlists that you don’t want affecting the recommendations. Neat.

Netflix: Begins Password-sharing restrictions in 4 countries including Canada. Read our take on the crackdown here.

Meme Time

(Reply to this email with your fav meme)

Quick Bites

• Twitter introduces long-form tweets with 4,000 character limit.

• Inaudible watermark can identify AI generated voices.

• SpaceX will attempt a full static fire of Starship with goal of orbital launch in March

• Countering the layoff trend, Nintendo is increasing pay of its workers by 10%.

Brain Food

• Upgrade Siri with GPT-3 using this guide.

• A report from Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) on why Generative AI is the next Consumer Platform.