Hacker News Reader

Comment by theaiquestion | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people don't understand what this is, and what google has historically done.

This is research for some math to improve the ability to do a style transfer, and they show it on their own text-to-image generator muse, which they have also published the structure of.

This is what they have typically done, and this is what they didn't do with Bard.

No, they did not release waits for it, you cannot run this on your own computer. But they typically didn't release weights for things like Lambda or Imagen either AFAIK.

This is not a product. This is not a tool for you to use. This is for researchers.

The point of this paper is not to let you run it on your computer. It's to allow other researchers to implement and build on the methods described in the paper.

View on HN

Then why make a fancy landing page instead of just linking to the paper?

Anyway, it's not 2000, you can't get away with releasing a paper without code. In the case of AI/ML, you either need to release the weights, or make some web doodad that allows you to use the model. If that's not there, I just assume that the results aren't reproducible.

> Then why make a fancy landing page instead of just linking to the paper?

Because it's worked for the longest time.

Even a year ago, Google was percieved as being so far ahead. These little papers with their landing pages were like sneek peaks into the advanced tech behind the scenes. It's marketing that brought hype to Google's brand and we were all excited for it because none of the big movers felt enough pressure to actually put stuff out so we were all excited about the possibilities.

And we are telling them now that this shtick doesn't work any longer in 2023 post-ChatGPT, post-StableDiffusion, post-LLaMA. Our expectations have clearly shifted. Other companies and organizations are creating actual products and sharing actual models. We are done inhaling vapor.

I don't mean to be rude, and to be clear I wish they did release the weights, but what did they lose here?

You don't approve - so what? Releasing the weights doesn't make them money.

I'm skeptical LLaMa is even useful for facebook commercially at least, they don't make money on it, and I doubt anyone developed brand loyalty, more then likely everyone will use whatever the next, best open model is regardless of who makes it.

Llama and SD still don't come close to midjourney/chatgpt/claude when you look at ease of use and infrastructure cost. These "99% the performance of chatgpt" are laughable if you use them (which I have extensively).

> We are done inhaling vapor.

Okay? What were you about to pay for to begin with here?

EDIT: Just to add, it's not like we got nothing from this, this can likely still be something to try with SD.

Well, it’s clearly not a good strategy since it’s what allowed OpenAI & StabilityAI to get all the credit.

The researchers want credit for their work. Google wants to stay ahed of their competitors. Google has three moves:

1) Allow publishing everything including source code => this helps the competitor directly. Bad move.

2) Disallow publishing => the researchers will be tempted to switch jobs for their competitor, since staying at Google will hurt their career. Bad move.

3) Allow publishing, but disallow everything else => this helps the competitors a little, but not too much. The researchers get credit for their work, which removes any incentive they have at switching jobs. Seems like the best compromise.

At least, that's my speculative take on this. Sure, OpenAI & StabilityAI get the credit in the public's eye, but there are also other incentives at play.

I think it's pretty obvious MBA case studies will be based on this in future, just as with Kodak inventing but not pursuing digital cameras, Xerox being responsible for the tech behind multiple billion dollar companies they didn't pursue, etc., etc.

Very interesting point! Hopefully its not the case so the trend can continue...

You’re aware that the peer review process is basically impossible without the release of weights?

Nobody (to good approximation) plays with weights during the peer review process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com