Hacker News Reader

Comment by d3nj4l | Hacker News Reader

People love to rag on OpenAI for not being open (and they're right to do so!) but when I read posts like this I'm still thankful that OpenAI at least has APIs. What Google AI product can you actually use for your day to day programming? I don't care if you have a fancy blog post and your system is 100x better than Copilot, at least I can use copilot!

View on HN

Hasn't the latest batch of AI's (gpt etc) all stemmed from work Google did years ago (transformers), and released white papers for, for free? No company has to offer APIs for you to play with, most don't in fact.

Sure, but chatgpt is so large in the public conscious because anyone can freely use gpt-3.5-turbo or pay a measly $20 for gpt-4. Some whitepapers made years ago pushed AI forward but didn't showcase its capabilities.

*Anyone not from a blocked country*

Kind of rich to say about OpenAI when Bard is still blocked in so many countries

Didn't mention Bard, but OpenAI will never be available in my country(Egypt). Bard is available tho.

It's not a product announcement. It's a description of research that appears to have been integrated into their internal day to day tooling.

Do you also complain about e.g. research papers that are published on systems that you can't use?

> What Google AI product can you actually use for your day to day programming?

Well there is bard that is available in many locations.

...and if you want APIs there is a plethora of them on GCP.

Especially that Bard was recently updated explicitly to support helping with coding tasks. https://blog.google/technology/ai/code-with-bard/amp/

While it's true that it's not directly useful, this take seems very self-centered. Sometimes it's interesting to read about the research companies are doing even if it's not generally available yet.

hadoop comes to mind.

Hadoop is a great counterexample. They took some papers that loosely described an obsolete system that already had one foot in the grave, and reimplemented it badly for the public. It's what I like to call an "industry-disabling paper".

If you would like to use some 2002 technology by all means adopt Hadoop.

But hdfs is now the backend storage for all Apache Spark systems.

That's been true for a decade and it was already obsolete the moment they wrote it.

I might be wrong, but iirc Transformers were invented/designed by google, so these research “papers” are being used in some way.

I think it’s a VERY good thing that they’re sharing this knowledge to the people instead of being stored internally. You know there will be someone who will take inspiration from this to create software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com