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Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

> I have zero proof, but I suspect Google for instance has models that would literally obliterate what openai has shown capability wise. They're probably not necessarily language models though. Again, nothing to stand on here but I doubt their search and analytics for example are driven by hard coded algorithms these days.

Then why is Bard so bad? Bard feels like GPT-2 or LLaMA 7B with no finetuning most of the time (I tried it two or three times over the course of a week and went back to ChatGPT)

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Googler here, opinions my own, etc.

From my perspective, Bard went from "literally didn't exist" to "released" over the course of about a month. GP seems correct in that it very much felt like something picked up off the shelf, slightly dusted off, and released. Is it as good as chatGPT? From my testing, no. Is it the pinnacle of what Google can create, given motivation? I'm pretty sure also no. In comparison to the state of all the research papers Google and Deepmind release, it definitely feels rushed. So I'd suggest not judging Google on its initial fast -follow project: either Google will come out with something compelling in the next 6mo or so, or we can conclude it really was leapfrogged and has fallen behind. But judging it now seems a bit too conveniently pessimistic, IMO.

(There's a legit chance Google will flub this, don't get me wrong. It's just too early to properly conclude one way or the other.)

Google is in a weird spot. I suspect they are capable of doing so much more, but there is a serious risk to cannibalizing their 99% revenue model (search), which they probably don't yet know if they can monetize in the same way.

Unfortunately for them, OpenAI has forced the question down their throat, which I think is exactly what they intended or at least hoped for.

I feel like it's more like that quote/trope

"I don't think about you at all" (from OpenAI's perspective, obviously)

Sure, if you understand the underlying point of that quote - if you have to say it, you're probably thinking about the person.

well my thought is that they 'whipped it up' real quick to attempt to downplay it a bit. Did that backfire? Yeah, I think so. But personally, I think people are missing where the real money is. OpenAI will do great for awhile until every damn product and service is using it, and then it's a race to the bottom. But that's just like my opinion...

I dunno, the stock price hasn't really tanked, so it didn't really backfire that much and it allowed them to get a bit of feedback as they try to figure out how to maintain revenue.

What if they put out this insanely great model and people just stopped using search? That would be a backfire most likely.

You mean open ai put out a model and people stopped using search? Or Google?

What Open ai offers currently can't really compete with search - I understand the data it's being fed gets newer and newer, but it's not really real time like the search engines are. Indexing and presenting data is so different than NLM. Even if it is fed data that's new it's going to have to infer a lot because of a lack of history. It might be able to summarize recent events I guess. Way dumbed down here, but I consider chatgpt like a really smart encyclopedia that can search fast and stay in context across "searches."

If you meant Google, that's sort of what I'm saying - they wouldn't release something that could blow open ai out of the water. But I suspect what open ai offers as a product is something Google could've built long ago, or maybe did and couldn't figure out how to monetize it. They've instead invested in ai to make their products and services better, not as much to offer ai as a service.

What I meant by bard not working out so great was that Google quickly dusted off or slammed together some shenanigans to be relevant, even though what openai is doing doesn't appear to be a part of their master plan.

It can compete with search by integrating it as part of its internal workflow when answering the question, which is exactly what Bing and web browsing mode in ChatGPT already do.

And yeah, this means that it still needs the search engine. But it also means that ads are out of the picture for the user.

Well, I stopped using Google personally, except for online docs.

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