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Comment by halflings | Hacker News Reader

> They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization.

Not only did Google make the main breakthroughs that all LLMs still rely on today (mainly attention architecture, and large scale training of DNNs), but they had a chatbot similar to ChatGPT (Meena [1]) way before ChatGPT was a thing.

Granted: they didn't release it to the public, so there is a failure of innovation there, just not on the technical/machine learning side.

[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-age...

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Xerox Parc also invented the laser printer, the transistor was invented in Bell Labs yet Intel (et al) take advantage of it. Google seems more like history now regarding search. Also, it doesn't seem good that the company founders are not there anymore. The last auccessful companies were run by the founders until a more mature point.

Also, regarding search, there are simply worthy competitors now. This is a bigger deal than I think people credit for. There truly was a time, maybe even ~ 2 years ago where even though it was broken Google was still the best. Kagi, while costing money to use, it fantastic.

YouTube is just bollocks now too, it contains a stunning amount of junk content and clickbait.

If someone tells me they learned something from YouTube, I actively question their authority on the matter at all. I didn't feel this way 2 years ago. YT seemed to be a generally credible source of information. Words cannot describe how polluted my suggestions are. I actually find it disturbing how much fake, incorrect and bias information is being suggest to me all the time. If I took it all on face value I'd be an idiot.

I've noticed recently that even people I thought were pretty credible have upped the clickbait severely in recent times. I guess this is what it takes to get seen but it's at the point where I just don't open YouTube unless I already know what I'm looking for so I can avoid it.

I never, ever log in on YT, and I'll sometimes clear my cookies as well. I find that if I stick with channels I like and carefully consider the first two or three recommendations, I don't get too much junk. But yes, the clickbaitification of even good channels is getting pretty grating.

Innovating is "easy", getting it in production is though. If the Google models are so genius and perfect, and nobody can use or see them, it's like if they don't exist.

That should be very strong quotation marks. I would say that it is the other way around. We should be glad that not everything is immediately turned into a product.

Bingo. Getting it into production is a non-concern for non-entities with no reputation, but Google has a lot more to lose. The big guys watch and wait, and use their sizeable wallets when the time comes. I have no doubts that Apple is going to eat Meta's lunch soon, for example — a lunch Meta didn't even realize was there, for all their innovation and go-to-market.

Google puts all kinds of things into production, then takes them down again in a year. The reputation is already that google puts out experiments

They are terrified of another “people labeled as gorillas” incident. Not of later canceling the product, they don’t care about that.

Yeah I'm sure they had a really good LLM, they just decided not to show it to anyone.

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