Comment by Me1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Me1000 | Hacker News Reader

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> Something like ChatGPT Chatbots are not new, they've been around forever, so there's plenty of prior art for things like ChatGPT. What sets ChatGPT apart is the quality. And in that respect, Bard is a long ways away.

>They just need a new CEO and to feel enough pressure to make it a company priority.

Sundar made machine learning a company priority years ago. Employees were encouraged to take machine learning courses, and much in the same way Google made everything "mobile first" in the early 2010s, I believe I remember hearing about them making everything "ML first" in the early late 2010s.

You can see their announcements at IO around their assistant which they presented as having the ability to call physical businesses, have a conversation with the person on the other ends, and book you an appointment/reservation.

And as recently as ChatGPT3, Sundar declared a "code red" to respond to it.

Google has been investing in this tech for a long time and it's been looking for ways to create products with it too. It's just that OpenAI leapfrogged them. I'm not saying they won't catch up, but they weren't caught flatfooted here.

Still, I don’t see OpenAI having a strategic advantage.

Until today, Google still has a defacto monopoly on search. Their secret sauce made them leader in the space and so far no other company has been able to come up with something better.

ChatGPT does not have any special secret sauce, Google can just build something better. So if I have to bet, long term, I will still bet on Google. That said, it is also not obvious that leadership at Google will be capable of delivering. That’s all different story.

It's not true, OpenAI has an insanely efficient research team, they even captured some of the original transformers team members, when these people had a choice between staying in Google or going to OpenAI.

Also, they have a platform running with 50 or 100 million users and all these people are feeding real-world data to improve the model.

They also have agility; also because they are not publicly-listed, they can take more reputational risk.

Regarding secret sauce, doing LLMs is easy now, as everything is open-source and documented. At least for the main parts.

However, doing LLMs that works really well is very difficult and the secret sauce/tricks/dataset that were used to refine the model are not public.

Regarding Google Search organic, it's not that sure anymore, it was true before; but now it gets a bit painful to navigate among so much SEO spam.

Nowadays, Bing organic search results are great (less spammy in my observations), and if you compare Google Images and Yandex Images, then Google is not so shiny.

Sometimes your strategic advantage is having an organization that is not dysfunctional and is primed to execute. Google’s problems with follow-through are legendary and they have just come off a round of morale-sapping layoffs.

The organization doing the cutting edge research and the one doing productization are often not aligned. Sounds like OpenAI is the first to have a critical mass of talent in both disciplines aligned in a startup like environment. Probably they have promised the researchers that papers will be allowed after a blackout period, but in the meantime here’s $MegaBucks and the chance to be first to real world deployment.

OpenAI has capital and revenue. The $20/month I’m paying them is a ridiculous no brainer - pays for itself in one work-related inference. One 30min session yesterday has me set up for the first half of my work week. It’s truly incredible.

With the caveat that I'm not a machine learning expert, my understanding is that there can be a lot of manual tweaking that goes into building neural net models. Whatever OpenAI is doing with ChatGPT is not something Google has been able to replicate with Bard. And I don't think that's for a lack of trying. I don't mean to come off as a doomsayer for Google, I'm really not, but I don't think Google's success here is inevitable.

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