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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Google will win this race, not because they lack the technical expertise, but because they are too cheap. This is so telling:

"We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback"

They are richer than Croesus, that is no reason for them to hold back and get stomped on because they field an inferior product. Like, being backed by an immensely profitable corporation should be an advantage for them, but now it looks like they are so afraid of eroding those profits that they are hampered instead.

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You're making the assumption that quality is the only feature that matters, rather than it being a multi- dimensional tradeoff where we don't know at all what tradeoffs consumers actually prefer. For example, a smaller model will run faster, right?

At this exact moment, ChatGPT is giving me about a word every 2-3 seconds. It's basically useless. But even when the system is not overloaded, there's a noticeable delay.

How much quality would you be willing to trade off to get results instantly instead? Or the inverse, how much better would the results need to be to justify a 5x longer processing time? It seems hard to believe that ChatGPT happened to be released at exactly the optimal tradeoff. (And obviously it's also unlikely that Google launched with exactly the right tradeoff.)

Try Bing though, based on GPT-4. That's their real competition, and it beats the pants off Google.

I agree it’s currently better because OpenAI GPT4 is better, but it does feel like a bolt on to the search engine since it used the AI to come up with search terms and then summarize the results. Googles Bard seems to be more integrated with their search index which could mean it’s better in the long run once their LLM catches up.

Basically useless? I use it to write articles for me[0], hardly could a human turn text around as fast, and I both do not pay it nor owe it anything. It could be slower still, and if you went back just 5 years to 2018 it would seem a miracle to our past selves, just for the quality output.

[0]: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-revie...

I think OP meant useless for search

Not only quality, Google probably also has to worry about environmental impact. Maybe that will be their "angle of attack" on chatgpt if they get roughly to parity in terms of usefulness.

It’s either that, or they’re secretly incompetent and can’t compete with openai. They are behind

Wouldn't surprise me too much. With the amount of failures they've had (Google Stadia immediately springs to mind, as well as Google+).

Google has been secretly incompetent for at least a decade now, probably more.

It's been weird. They started out a head-neck-and-torso above everyone else in competence. Interviews were neigh impossible, and it was a hyper-elite team and a dream work environment.

Then they screwed up, and hired a fifth of a million people.

Indeed. I asked Bard why it wasn't as chatty at Bing or chatgpt and this was the response.

> I am still under development, and I am not as chatty as ChatGPT or Bing Chat because I have not been trained on as much data. I am also not as good at understanding and responding to complex questions. However, I am learning and improving every day, and I will become more chatty over time.

Do you believe it was sharing a fact?

My understanding is that producing shorter responses proportionally reduces the amount of computing—and thus the cost—required to produce it.

No, these things basically just bullshit full time.

Rather it's because one can't be sure that the product still exists in 24 months

I'm pretty sure that GPT powered bots are here to stay -- this is not like Google+

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but remember that people said the same thing about Google+; it’s baked into every product and it’s here to stay, it’s not Google reader.

except that was still a single product from a single company

oh man, this comment may not age well :)

They also lack taste — Just as Steve Jobs used to mock Microsoft; but it increasingly seems that the tables are turning.

The actual product is the user interactions. ChatGPT etc is trained on examples in the thousands. What google will be doing is trying to get 100s of millions of labelled interactions by getting the users to do it for them.

Then they’ll use those to train its final model.

In case you’re not aware, chatGPT already has scale bordering on 100 million.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-faste...

I would imagine OpenAI already has more interactions than that.

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