Basically they realized Bard couldn’t cut it and merged DeepMind into Google Brain, and got the combined team to work on a better LLM using the stuff OpenAI has figured out since Bard was designed. Takes months to train a model like this though.
With all the talent, data, and infrastructure that Google has, I believe them. That said, it is almost comical they'd not unleash what they keep saying is the better model. I am sure they have safety reasons and world security concerns given their gargantuan scale, but nothing they couldn't solve, surely? They make more in a week than what OpenAI probably makes in a year! They seem to be sleep walking compared to the sprinting pace of development around them. You don't say that often about Google.
I wonder what makes the Chrome and Android orgs different? Those openly conduct ridiculous experiments all the time.
This is arguably the problem. OpenAI is loss leading (ChatGPT is free!) with a limited number of users. Scale and maturity work against Google here, because if they were to give an equivalent product to its billions of users, Sundar would have some hard questions to answer at the next quarterly earnings call.
https://fortune.com/2023/08/30/chatgpt-creator-openai-earnin...
ignoramous was right 5 times over!
Disclaimer: I haven't used Google Search much in a long while so my googlefu is weak. I can usually find what I'm looking for much quicker in DDG which I believe is mostly based on Bing web search results (as opposed to the chatbot) so I might just currently be better trained in Bing keywords?
While we seem to be cresting the peak of exuberance and coasting towards the trough of disillusionment, recall how freaked out everybody got a few months ago when everybody started using ChatGPT; Google's stock price tanked and they were getting slaughtered by analysts, so they needed to show a return to dominance on AI. I think if you had ChatGPT but with up-to-date information, you'd see a pretty big substitution effect from Google's search product, so it's better for them to "disrupt themselves" than have another company steal their golden goose.
OpenAI competition aside, it's just clearly (to me) going to be a massive product area in the future, and it's going to be lucrative for AdTech companies like Google if they can build the right product (chat sessions are going to be even more valuable for ad placement than search queries).
Also, as is always the case in these “established giant vs nimble newcomer” cases, they have more to lose than OpenAI, and thus have to be more careful than them in what they release.
For Google, that’s doubly so, given that they’re the portal to product search for half the world.
Let’s say they release a product that (rightfully or not) starts claiming a product of one of their large advertisers is expensive and doesn’t work? What if it stops mentioning some products because it ‘thinks’ nobody should buy them? How be confident their offering isn’t biased, racist or sexist?
> and it's going to be lucrative for AdTech companies like Google
Would it? The true disruptor would direct you to the product that’s best for you, irrespective or how much its seller is wanting to bribe it to make that suggestion.
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAi) said that they had GPT-4 model trained around 18 months before they released it. Seems like things like these take a lot of time to test, making sure it's aligned, safe etc.
You'll never see AI products being launched without a private test phase after Bing and the Sydney coverage in the NYT.
Google probably has something great and is making sure it's not too unexpected in how it's great before wide release.
What I'm really curious about though is Meta's commitment to a GPT-4 competitive model.
The more Google and OpenAI tread lightly and slowly with closed and heavily restricted models, the more it allows Meta to catch up with open models that as a consequence get greater public research attention.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23691468/google-ai-deepmi...
https://www.aiwithvibes.com/p/google-issues-code-red-respons...