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Comment by rom-antics | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a very reactionary move. ChatGPT went viral, and now they have to rush something to market to try and compete. So of course the product doesn't exist yet, but they've had enough time to put together a project plan and some mockups. It's not a great position to be in.

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They've been doing internal testing for while, but I guess they never thought to release it publically until chat GPT became public.

There was even someone who thought it was sentient! https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...

It reminds me of a blander Yann Lecun-like response where he responded on Twitter to a bunch of people saying Facebook ai could have done this and that, without acknowledging they were beat to the (shipping) punch and are now just reacting. Building a roadmap on what is in the zeitgeist and trying to pretend you’re winning a fight you don’t realize you already lost (at least the first battle) is not a way to capture mindshare imho

What are you referring to? My overall impression of Yann Lecun is he feels quite hamstrung by all the extreme caution at Facebook (which obviously exists at Google too) of releasing anything that could produce content that is in any way objectionable to one of a million different subgroups.

I like Yann and think he’s brilliant and also generally appreciate how he engages on Twitter. However, he spent a lot of time recently downplaying openai and I don’t see why that was needed other then to try to say FAIR is important, see one of the most recent of these related tweets https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1620533783702433792

It does seem slightly amateurish. If there was more self-confidence like Apple, there wouldn't be a need to announce anything until it's ready.

EDIT: Especially if it was already available internally for several months as some others say, waiting another month or two until it's ready to go doesn't seem like a big burden.

Google was in this position in relation to Apple and the iPhone, and that worked out all right for them. First-mover advantage isn't the be-all, end-all.

I think the real fear is that there has been a brain drain of high-level AI talent to well-funded startups because those startups can move faster without having the extreme fear/caution of a large company like Google/Facebook. E.g. my guess is that OpenAI doesn't have an "Ethical AI" team who sees their role as primarily to put up roadblocks to releasing.

Hence not surprised by the big investment in Anthropic by Google.

There was a different dynamic there. Apple was clearly focussed on the higher end of the market (price point) and unwilling to compromise on profit margins, while willing to sacrifice pure market share. Google took advantage of that to win the distribution space focussing on lower price point phones on Android (and then expanding to higher price point devices).

With ChatGPT the threat is different and both are going after expanding usage.

I don't think so. Google has had its own internal LLMs for quite some time now. Some of them are even more powerful than GPT 3.5. The only question has been: "Why release it to the public?"

Exactly. I played with "Meena" when I was an employee there and it was ... disturbingly human-like. I can understand why Google didn't want to release it. And even more so after the Blake Lemoine incident.

Google is already accused of operating a panopticon, the last thing they want to be accused of is running SkyNet.

People who think Google has fallen behind here are sorely mistaken. They just don't/haven't-had a way to make money off of it and are likely worried about reputational fallout.

I want Google's lunch to get eaten as much as the next guy, but I don't think it will be on this front.

It is a reactionary move, but Bard existed for months on the intranet, but not as a public offering. So they have the technology but not the product.

Presumably this was the infamous tech that got that one worker fired because he thought it was sentient and wanted to blow the whistle on unethical AI treatment right? This story: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...

It would be funny if Google hastily rehires him as a marketing evangelist to show people their AI is so good you think it's alive.

In one sense, yes, but to me that felt more like a mental illness story than anything else, which would make it much less funny (apologies to the person involved if it was not).

While I don't think LaMDA is sentient (merely based on what I understand about its architecture), what would it look like if some mega corp had a conscious AI on its hands, and an insider was trying to blow the whistle?

Wouldn't it look exactly like this?

It is a bit surprising that Google got scooped by OpenAI, but the product surely has existed before ChatGPT went public. LaMDA was the model behind the 'Our AI has become sentient' controversy last year, if you remember that [0].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...

It's not rushed to market. It already existed for years.

I've tried to say this before elsewhere, but Google has had something internally that's competitive with ChatGPT already for years, under various names. They were just naturally reticent about letting it loose on the world. Esp after the Blake Lemoine incident.

Exactly. With their partner Anthropic's bot "Claude" they have something on the same level as ChatGTP already though.

You can test Claude on ios with the app "poe" (the other two bots in the app are some sort of chatGTP and OpenAI based).

i don't think anybody knows how to monetize it.

really it's kinda a public service, maybe these models should be run that way?

Just picture monetizing it via embedding slant onto the answers it provides like how Alexa suggest purchases but in a way that users can barely just notice...

Or purchasing "market share space" on it in the same way that companies buy shelf space on supermarkets to place their products in...

Monetization seems pretty straight forward.

User: What is the most durable shoe?

AI: Some of the most durable shoes are ... Here are some affiliate links where you can buy these durable shoes...

as someone who did nlp research at Google, Google had a ChatGPT level chatbot 3 years ago and did nothing with it

This sounds a bit like those stories about Kodak having a digital camera before anybody else did, and they just fearfully watched the thing from a distance doing nuthing until someone else brought it to market and ended the party for them.

May be an entirely different thing this time of course. But still...

Well they had a giant conversational size bigger than GPT3. It was not as safe or good at following instructions as ChatGPT. But it was as flowing as it is. So maybe it's an exaggeration (this word has two gs in english!?) to say that it's as good, but it was also extremely strong and impressive

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