Why didn't they ship something like ChatGPT earlier? Lack of product vision? Perfectionism?
Is this Xerox vs Apple all over again ?
They suffer from "scared to release an imperfect product that damages PR"-itis.
They are so scared that an AI with Google branding might say something inappropriate, that they prefer to release nothing at all.
For context, they put a lot of engineering effort into making sure "Okay Google" for the voice assistant couldn't be modded to "Yo Dick" or something else off-brand, simply because they were worried about media backlash.
Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.
Nobody is going to care if Google releases a ChatGPT bot on a different website.
It would be a 'you can use all google internal code and infrastructure, for free, as long as you don't use google branding and don't use our user data' deal.
The companies would have the benefits of google tech, without being tied down by internal politics, procedures, risk management, etc.
They could afford to do things like just release a product to the world rather than have a legal and PR team go over every detail for every law in every country worldwide as part of a 6 month long review process.
The closest Google had to it was Area 120, which has also been abandoned?
I might bootstrap revenue without much hiring, so that business success means the team does better financially than the sure-thing FIRE if they'd just taken a FAANG job and grinded promotions.
This business giving away 80% equity would lean on the value of IP, and on knowing how to be very effective with solo/small teams -- not 'scale' in the sense of trying to herd hundreds of software and product and business people. (This is another thing that big orgs can have trouble doing, and so sometimes do insulated spinoffs/units instead, just to unburden people.)
[0] https://area120.google.com/
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/05/technical-interview-platfo...
They're pretty upfront with it... It says "By Meta" on the launch screen
That might have been true at some point - but a combination of their extremely loud rebranding of both to Meta, and the media constantly saying 'Instagram, which is owned by FB' or words to that effect has changed it. Even my elderly parents are aware Instagram is owned by FB / Meta.
Even my non tech friends know.
More things that don't work:
1. Delete the last screenshot.
2. Set timezone to est
3. Turn on hotspot
4. Turn on nearby sharw
However, it should at least just ask for permission the first time you try to do that.
ChatGPT is very cool but they don't make money from it and GPT-3 had a paid public API for a year now and I read that the money they make from it is very little, insignificant compared to the funding they get from VCs.
Currently, there's no clear path for monetisation but has the capacity to take away a lot of Google's use cases. In essence, it's like Napster destroying the Music CD business.
Maybe it's also a bit like Kodak: Invents the technology but its current business is too good to be messed around with. This new tech is the future but we are happy in the moment.
If Google wanted - they could've easily released ChatGPT version that is 100x better than current one considering they invented the technology and they have thousands times more and better data to train it.
They just weren't interested.
I wouldn't be surprised if they used anonymized gmail data though. Even if they removed all proper nouns it'd probably provide a lot of extra tokens for training.
The impressive thing with chatGPT to me is how well it understand what you want even with very sparse input. Even if it gives wrong answers it still feels like you are both on the same page. That seems like the secret sauce even if a larger language model would give more correct output. I wouldn't be shocked at all if Google doesn't have anything currently that feels the way chatGPT does when it comes to interaction and now they are racing to build exactly that.
I don't think it's that, either, given the rate at which they are involved in overt censorship, over the last years.
I believe this tech is so different and revolutionary, that the lawyers have yet to wrap their head around it. I predict a million lawsuits incoming any time now. This I believe is the primary reason for Google not releasing any product before the water gets tested. For what its worth Google already has access to lots and lots of data that it owns, that it can train its AI on (Photos, Gmail, Docs, obviously Search and probably YouTube as well)
I love it, but it’s not ready for all Google users yet.
Tbf ChatGPT was far from production quality for serious applications, lots of misinformation and you can make it produce very offensive content. It is a good for toying around but you cannot take the output seriously.
This is why "jailbreaking" is a thing. Once you convince the model that it's OK, it'll let you do anything from then on.
-Emily
I think it's right that the owners understand what the weaponization of ChatGPT could do and prevent it, and I think we need laws (and fast) before weaponized AI like ChatGPT turns into a disaster for humanity
I welcome idiot savants.
"At Google, Character’s co-founders Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas were instrumental in developing Google’s LaMDA language model, used for natural language processing research. They decided to launch their own startup after getting frustrated with big company bureaucracies, Shazeer previously told The Information."
[0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/character-seeks-250-...
Neither of these two things are true. It's 51% owned by the founders and public companies are not required to only care about profit.
Public companies are legally required to put shareholder interest first - that’s what the whole point of this facet of capitalism is: to provide profit to the “owner” class of society, at the cost of worker exploitation.
Get Adam Smith’s boot out of your mouth and recognize that literally anything a corporation does is for the goal of profit. Corporations are not human - and only have a decision making process that puts “return” first. Zero of them are “not evil.”
No, they are not. And they definitely aren't required to care about the interests of 49% of them.
> Get Adam Smith’s boot out of your mouth and recognize that literally anything a corporation does is for the goal of profit.
Is everything an animal does for the purpose of finding food? (No.)
Finance and management, knowing their bread and butter is as advertising distribution company, undermine, kill, and dilute any projects that are not obviously, undeniably directly tied to improving their advertising distribution revenues. Their big problem is, they never communicated this core identity to the larger corporation, and somehow search is allowed to coast...
In order to launch something you have to need to launch it. Either because you're losing market share, or because you need the revenue, or because your customers expect it. Google rarely has any of those things.
I've seen so many cool ideas thrown around by devs that could actually go onto be monetized by companies go wasted. To think they'd be worked on for free (spare time) and often better then outsourcing because nothing drives true innovation than passion.
Focus on BAU, keep your head down and be lucky you're not getting fired.
I would say they have just in different form. For a few years now when you google something you're given a quote/excerpt at the top of the results that typically answers your question.
The fact that they are freaking out is actually a good sign though
The simplest answer is that the people with the know-how did not work at Google. Knowing why they didn't is not so simple, though.
They back stepped, and then watched someone else capture the market.