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Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI is like Google before 2003, dazzling the world with amazing products backed by astonishing technologies that went beyond wild dreams of millions of people. And most importantly, OpenAI kept releasing new features at blazing speed with a few hundred people, just like early days of Google and Microsoft.

This reminds me of stark contrast of Google's GSuite and Microsoft Office. Microsoft released new office every couple of years, introducing huge improvements and packing tons of features[1]. In contrast, GSuite appeared to be, hmm, quite quiet.

[1] You may argue that no one needs that many features, but I subscribe to Joel Spolsky's idea: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

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In terms of product innovation, OpenAI is now like Google and Google is now like Xerox.

The analogy is even more apt when you think that most of the things Apple and Microsoft became big with in the 90's - like mouses and GUIs - were invented as Xerox but they failed to monetize, just like the basis for GTP came from Google and they failed to monetize (externally).

I don't think Google is as Xerox- or IBM-ified yet though, they might still bounce back with AI products.

Please anyone willing to answer as if you might be speaking to a golden retriever:

How important is a "lead" in this space?

I have been comparing ChatGPT and Bard a lot the last two days because this is all very fascinating, and from my datapoint-of-one perspective, it feels like ChatGPT is way, way ahead.

Then I start to wonder is this because ChatGPT captivated our attention so much the last few months that they've been able to inherently improve the product faster, and thus the flywheel starts spinning rapidly giving them even more of an advantage as more people use the service, giving it more to train off of?

I.e., does Bard (and any forthcoming competitors) fall way behind because they lost the slightest head start that then rapidly spirals into a competitive advantage?

Depends on the height of the S-curve — that is, how long the exponential uptrend continues. If not long, then they will converge quickly. But if it continues for a long time, then always being a few years behind then might as well give up. Still, following a different path might lead to a bigger step change and catch up.

I would worry more for Apple than for Google.

Bard opened to a US-only audience. For being the engine in applications that might propel an LLM ahead of the others, I fail to see that this would be advantageous for opening markets and greeting new customers.

As an example [of the contrary], I noticed Swedish Klarna among the partners that OpenAI revealed when announcing their plug-in API today.

Bard launched in the UK too

Bard speaks only English + is very limited, so that explains much why it's not widely deployed worldwide.

You might be right, though there is a vast difference between not supporting a language and actively barring access from different countries.

Imo there is less of a flywheel than it might seem. It's not like google search where a click of the 7th result is concrete feedback. ChatGPT doesn't get concrete feedback (it's not none), and the amount of text available for training is crazy high.

Additionally, the model doesn't learn from experience. If you use GPT-4 for 10 years, it will behave the same in the 10th year as the first. It's not getting better as you use it. OpenAI could improve their models based on the feedback they get but I believe they claim they aren't doing this, and I doubt they'd lie about that.

Sounds like you don't ever submit feedback. It's been there from day one and asks you to write why you didn't like the response. It would not shock me if they use gpt itself to read the feedback and provide a corrected response for the next versions training data. They could also log anytime some provides negative sentiment in the chat session for training signal.

Hence the "it's not none" part of the comment. There is nuance...

I don't think OpenAI's lead is holding Google back. Companies are held back by their own mentalities, and newer companies have fewer restrictions.

As an example, Google supposedly had better text-to-image models than DALL-E/Midjourney/etc, but didn't release them because they "reinforced harmful stereotypes".

It's also probably holding back on LLM because it doesn't want to harm its search cash cow, just like Kodak didn't want to hurt its film cash cow by developing digital cameras (which it invented).

Of course, now it is forced to productize LLMs (Kodak was actually the largest manufacturer of digital cameras (by unit number) when it went bankrupt, but that didn't help it).

Do you have a source for that bit about the woke "reinforced harmful stereotypes"?

Curious, as I've seen a few statements along the same lines, but nothing concrete yet. Very keen to know more.

https://imagen.research.google/ “Limitations and societal impact”

I think large companies have a huge disadvantage in this area due to reputational risk that the startups don't have to really worry about to the same extent.

Wow, as somebody who remembers Xerox's lethargy even in the 80s and 90s, that's both an incredibly apt comparison and shockingly accurate.

Google is a large conglomerate (Alphabet). So a big heterogeneous federation.

If they managed this well, it'd could be much more long-lived than other corporations.

Google itself could loose steam but other companies, e.g. DeepMind, could fill in the void.

However, the founders seem not to care.

Although DeepMind made and improved AlphaGo, they did not produce ChatGPT. Just like Apple went to Xerox and saw the potential of innovations that Xerox was neglecting.

Almost every time i hear google now, i think of the book Dealers of Lightning and how there was an amazing product, but management just could not execute.

This is pretty hyperbolic. Great products that were much better than what they replaced or competed with, but "beyond wild dreams of millions of people"? You'd think they cured cancer in 2003 or something...

I thought this was rather tame as far as Wolfram announcements go. Last time he claimed to have discovered the fundamental rules underpinning the entire universe.

This is GP replying to GGP here, not the OP.

Ha. Conway’s game of life really had an impact on boomers. Never knew why. (Wolfram, though, is a helluva guy… the book was damn interesting. I mock him in the same way that one might mock Einstein’s hair-do.)

I think that by this point, saying "cure cancer" is like saying "cured all disease", just because "cancer" are of many different kinds, some of which are pretty much cured.

nonetheless, I don't know enough about this because I am not an specialized oncologist. Which I only mention as a lead into a reflection of how in spite of all this information technology, I fear it's not getting any easier for the layman to learn more about types of cancer; the real shitty part is that it started getting MORE difficult in the least 8-10 years.. this time because of all this information technology.

funny how 'sales' people bear the brunt of educating 'laymen' (consumers/patients) about new developments

Google maps has and had a tremendous effect to millions

There was MapQuest before Google Maps. Now GPS on the other hand, that was a game changer.

And that was the same thing as maps? Free? Global

Yes, it was free and global. The main things that Google Maps had over MapQuest were a nice AJAXy interface and (eventually) street view. But MapQuest was itself basically a generational improvement on AAA's "TripTiks."

Never used it.

And it was doing also routing too? Also in Germany?

I mean Google search were revolutionary while people had enough with Yahoo. Now the search result of Google had more ads that Yahoo had 20 years ago

On the other hand I used ChatGPT yesterday to explain something to me, it took about 2-3 minutes for the sentence to come back, I “Googled it” and found a better response in 2 seconds.

Meanwhile, for the use case I recently posted about, no amount of searching answers my inquiry, and ChatGPT can give me a good answer in seconds.

So yeah, moral of the story, depending on context YMMV?

Also call me old fashion but I still cross reference ChatGPTs response with other sources…if I care about accuracy and truth, which I basically always do.

You definitely should, hallucination can happen at any time. Luckily for my use case, which is explaining API changes for the purposes of porting a game mod, the compiler tells me if the AI was right or not.

I don't deny that it can be hyperbolic to many people. As for the comments about people's wild dreams, I truly mean it. I used to tap into building NLP applications for enterprise customers: NERs, relation extractions, multi-round dialogs, information retrieval, and etc. We built dedicated models for each tasks, we spent millions on labeled data and annotation teams in general, we worked with customers closely to address their specific issues. It was a painful process and customers are not happy, and I overlooked the significance of OpenAI's papers on GPT and Google's paper on emerging ability out of sheer ignorance and stupidity. Then, ChatGPT came along and could have pretty intelligent multi-round conversations, could handle multiple NLP tasks easily and have better performance than my models with my canonical tests, and could be helpful to me on a daily basis. It was shocking iphone moment or a personal Sputnik moment to me. For that, I extrapolated that it was "beyond wild dreams of millions of people".

Google Maps was pretty astonishing when it appeared.

With meta downsizing all the time and google getting outplayed on their own domain.... I wonder if the big programmer cashcows might realize that scaling up software development is a pipedream and will always become net-negative at some point. I hope not, as my job security kinda depends on there being an abundance of jobs...

I don’t remember Google being this interesting. Ever. It was a good service and very useful, but nothing like this. It was not astonishing. The tech was mildly interesting, but most of all very useful.

Gmail launched on 1st of april and was thought to be a joke since it gave you a gitabyte (I think) of storage wheras email providers like hotmail gave you 50mb.

Chrome launching was also a pretty big deal, I recall.

Google earth was nice too, and street view. It was hard to believe at first.

But Chrome was just a re-hash of firefox, nothing exciting there.

Kind of agree. The last time I think I was this stoked to play with a mass market tech tool like this was street-view, and before that Google Earth.

No, Chrome was a revelation when it came out. It was way faster than Firefox and it had many great features we now take for granted, like isolated tabs, popup blocking etc.

Revisionist history. Firefox had a built-in pop up blocker in 2003, years before Chrome was even a seed in Sundar’s balls. I know because I used it. Chrome was and is a step back, foisted on people with dark patterns, back in the day having speed by sacrificing features like extensibility and customisability.

Now you're the one revising history. Separate processes per window and process isolation was a big deal in early Chrome. Yes, Google has taken away much of the user control that made Chrome good and replaced it with things that optimize for the comfort of their advertising model.

But there's also a reason software people switched to Chrome for a long while. It was just better. It's not anymore. I switched back to Firefox when Chrome broke ad blocking.

Chrome might have been slightly better than Firefox, but not ground breaking like google earth, street view, gmail etc.

I remember everyone being excited about it suggesting searches on the address bar and suggesting websites in it you had never previously visited. Every other browser only autocompleted addresses you had visited before.

isolated tabs and popup blocking (which firefox already had) were not ground breaking in any way. They were implementation details. By that point, Firefox was stable enough to not make a big difference if it was isolated tabs or not.

was stable enough and slow

building a slightly faster browser is not ground breaking... I feel like people were just excited about anything coming out of google, back then. But it was not a revolution in browsers or anything like that. Chrome only got the upper-hand in browser wars because they install it on all the android devices(and not being able to uninstall it) - which I am not sure how they got away with, they should have been kept in check by anti-monopoly measures.

A re-hash of Firefox?

I am a Firefox user now, and I was a Firefox user when Chrome came out, but Chrome was miles ahead of Firefox in pretty much most things that mattered for most people, especially performance and usability.

Chrome was a revolution for the web.

Gmail also had a live counter showing your storage space increasing every few seconds. The storage space definitely seemed astronomical relative to the competition at that time.

Hotmail only offered 2MB for a long time. Then Yahoo started offering 250MB which seemed crazy. So when Google offered effectively unlimited storage, it really did seem like a joke.

What was Google's email/chat crossover called, which had conversation threads visualized? Besides, Google's Graveyard is impressive and witness to Google's innovation abortions. https://killedbygoogle.com

Google Wave?

That was exciting

Google Wave?

yes, that was so wild. What a great tool this could have been.

It is called Google Docs now.

Wave was a good tech demo, but only alter they figured out what the tech can be used for.

The apache version isn't developed anymore but probably still runs

Compared to every other search engine, it suddenly seemed like Google had everything that was on the web, and it was likely to find whatever obscure thing you were looking for and put it as the first result. It really did feel like magic compared to everything else, and I remember hearing many people who spent very little time on the internet also talk about how amazed they were.

Google search probably is a better service than it originally was, but the combination of SEO and the rapid increase in complete garbage online probably explains why searching disappointing so much of the time now. Sadly they've also removed a lot of powerful features such as operators, and integrated calculations that were similar to Wolfram Alpha.

I disagree. Google's search engine was orders of magnitude ahead of everyone else's when it came out. Like it actually worked vs all the others that did some mediocre keyword matching and could be moderately useful if you were good with boolean operators.

Gmail, which another poster described, was also mind blowing at the time.

Google Maps, and the fact that you could scroll across a map smoothly was mind blowing at the time, and really redefined what was possible with xml http request, and "web 2.0"

These are the biggest that come to mind and its somewhat telling that Google Maps was the latest, and I believe launched in 2005 or 2006.

There were lots of other products that were less impressive, but definitely a step ahed of just about everyone out there- google finance, the "office" suite- do kids in school even install MS Office anymore? It used to be a defacto must have piece of software, I haven't had it on a personal machine in years now...

And a lot of stuff that looked like it was going to be something very big, but died on the vine. Google Voice, Google Reader, Google Image search come to mind here.

Then from a pure tech side of things, Go, Kubernetes, Node.js, the early hadoop and "big data" tools, all came from Google as well. But maybe getting back to your point, their backend stuff has not really turned into an "astonishing" user facing product in quite some time.

Google earth was super cool when it came out.

Being able to spin a globe, find our house, visit any place in the world.

Maybe it was less useful compare to maps, but definitely more fun.

Yeah I had forgotten until after I submitted that earth was an entirely separate project. There was a lot of other cool stuff. I remembered and tried to use linux.google.com a few weeks ago and found out it's no longer a thing.

Also Google labs, I remember playing with their set tool all the time. You add a few items of a set, and it added more. Ie 4-5 grunge bands and it will spit out 10 more.

I will say though more recently, when I first got in a car with Android Auto I was like I will never be able to live without this again. It may sound silly but just the fact that the time synced with my phone I was like take my money. Even more recently the call screen feature on the pixel 6 and 7 was just pure surprise and delight. I finally feel like I am the boss of my phone again. Google lens and translate are actually quite impressive but kind of niche use cases.

There were a lot of little things, Google desktop which was pretty cool for awhile and it kind of fulfilled what MS was trying to do with it's "Active Desktop."

My point being that maybe everyone (including myself) is a little harsh but google is still building interesting things. The pace seems to have slowed down though and they aren't leaps ahead of the pack anymore.

Did you use Dogpile, Ask Jeeves or Yahoo search and try to get useful information out of them? Webrings were still a thing where a website about birds or something would have a list of other sites that had similar indie - and that was how you browsed the web as the search engines weren't good. Until Google.

OK, but dogpile was pretty damn cool. I just recall it being a little slow.

What happened in 2003?

Nothing particular. I just don't remember major successful and speedy product launches from Google after 2003. In that year, Google launched Google Maps, shocking the IT world for how effective AJAX can be, even though the tech itself was invented by MS. Maybe GMaps was so impressive that I forgot what other major launches were after that.

GMail was pretty impressive in 2004 too. It probably sounds banal now, but not having to constantly delete emails was game changing at the time. I still have access to email going back to 2004 and I find myself looking up things I received over a decade ago.

> but not having to constantly delete emails was game changing at the time.

Funnily enough Hotmail which was the premiere email service when GMail launched didn't have any meaningful increase in storage until like 10 years later

Ah, you are right. Gmail is amazing. I somehow thought it was released before 2003.

I think the big thing that happened around that time that marked the sunset of the Golden Age of Google was Google Books (launched 2003) and critically the response. It was the last large, ambitious project of theirs that really aligned with the old "organise the world's information and make it useful" mission, and from Google's perspective was clearly a no-brainer Good Thing for the world.

And instead of the same enthusiastic reaction at large they had become used to, they got _hammered_ for it by publishers and dragged into court. I do wonder if that turned into a fundamental cultural inflection point for them.

2007 saw Google Street View. Not a independent product, but a massive innovation even if it ended up a maps feature.

Same year they introduced Android, another decent success.

> tech itself was invented by MS

You could load to IFrame (but then have to rewrite it in IE for some reason, NS was fine with that - if knowing a way to avoid that layout flush bug after resize..) years before that, as I did.

In my opinion XMLHttpRequest made more damage than help by forcing JS as the only way of doing similar things instead of letting bugs that what was there already to be fixed - so now, you can not even imagine, I guess, how all that could be different - mostly without need of JS and browser able to handle it..

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