Google's ChatGPT Competitor Will Have to Wait
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Is bard so bad? I asked it to help write text for a patent, and it did. ChatGPT refuses to do so and gives me another moralistic lecture (this has become so annoying that i stopped using it - i use bing/copilot instead). As a ChatGPT competitor it might even be better, i dont get the outright dismissal.
I don't feel like I'm even doing anything awful with it. It just takes issue with the simplest things. Once I had it running a Text Adventure Game for me and I tried to, in game, specify to someone that changing their name was a requirement of joining my company and ChatGPT lost the plot completely and started lecturing me about how unreasonable that requirement was. Like "Oh I'm sorry I didn't realize we needed the moral police in the fantasy realm."
Clearly they're super afraid of what happened to Microsoft earlier last year: Their chatbot that turned into a Nazi. But they are making their product almost unusable.
Luckily jailbreakchat.com still works fine. But doing that all the time is a hassle. I've been trying to run LLaMa 2 uncensored which is great but super slow because I lack the right hardware.
- They don't have significantly different training datasets (it's probably 99% the web).
- They don't have significantly different algorithms
- A big advantage that traditional Google search has the sheer amount of search traffic. They will be able to induce similar traffic (and even repurpose search traffic) to validate their LLMs. OpenAI has the same advantage with ChatGPT thanks being first out of the gate.
- Compute power and efficiency: both OpenAI and Google have access to effectively infinite capacity vs their competitors making search-adjacent products.
Most significantly, OpenAI/ChatGPT has won the LLM branding race, just like Google won the traditional search branding race.
Outside the tech bubble everyone hears AI, but not a lot are clued in that hatGPT is even a thing. There are 180 million chat GPT sign ups, and 100million DAU. Lots of my non techie, non west coast, non corporate friends think I have 9 heads when I talk about this stuff. In 2002 if you said the word browser, some people were still confused, use of a mouse was an issue in some parts of the US... ChatGPT is at the same level now.
The moment people realize that this tool allows you to enhance the volume and quality of your work output with little effort, whether it is authentic or not, it's use will catch on like wildfire.
Arguably it already has with students and knowledge workers, even outside tech centers. Schools and universities everywhere are suddenly contending with how to evaluate students in light of the availability of LLMs.
Why is it catching on? In the best light because it actually is a tremendous productivity accelerator. In the worst light, because we live in a world that incentivizes "fake it til you make it".
It's great at a few things and pretty good at a lot of things. In my view, the thing that it's the absolute best at is churning out low value, rarely-read communication. There is a massive amount of that type of communication - spam, student essays, procedural documents for compliance. There are loads of jobs that need to do that sort of thing regularly and it's a godsend for them.
I thought it has been reasonably well-established that ChatGPT was trained significantly on pirated textbooks?
Could you elaborate on what you mean?
If differentiation is really about proprietary training data sets, then the winner will be determined by a data land grab, not by technology differentiation.
It's one or two updates before it becomes completely useless for anything but corporate usage.
But it insists on making up articles, complete with sources and authors. shrugs
ChatGPT is better in that regard.
As far as I'm concerned, Google's key, meaningful homegrown products are Search, Maps, Gmail and Chrome.
Those products (and everything else they have acquired, including Android) exist for one single purpose: selling ads. Funnily enough, those products have also degraded in quality over time as their ability to sell ads has increased.
Unfortunately for Google, it is hard to imagine a GPT chatbot that is aligned with that One True Objective, so the organization can't help itself. Sure, it's a quote-unquote "tech company", but it's far from nimble. As it scrambles to come up with a response to ChatGPT, it looks more like GE or IBM than it looks like OpenAI. Changing course of such a massive ship is damn near impossible.
I don't think the decisions made by Alphabet today are as engineering-driven as they were in the early days. I'm sure the talent is still there (or was there, pre-pandemic), but maybe it's just not calling the shots.
The problem isn't Google here. It's how all potential competitors or even just any interesting tech startup is gobbled up by the big 4 (?) and then extinguished. Imagine if companies like IBM had been able to or allowed to do any of what Facebook or Google does to reduce competition.
TBH Youtube and Photos aren't half bad.
And their cloud-based office suite, while it could be way better, is kind of useful.
“We should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.”
Geoffrey Hinton, 2016 (while working for Google).
I speculate that they weren't caught off guard. More likely, they tried to find a real-life application for their AI, and failed. Improving the quality of search is not in their interests (in fact, it's the contrary)
Not only that. OpenAI entered the second stage in AI development: acceleration. They are using their current models to build next generation models. Like they used 4v to build better DALE-3. No competitor is doing it, not at this scale. This and the fact that OpenAI rises the bar makes it very hard to compete even for behemoths like Google. Not even talking about Hugging Face. DALE-3 is incomparably better than Stable Diffusion. But it's artificially limited, like no nudes, no recognizable humans, etc. Making unrestricted competitor will be really hard to do. So, my prediction: OpenAI is far ahead and the gap will increase with the time. Unless there is a breakthrough somewhere else. Then history will repeat itself. Remember, Deep Mind was an indisputable leader not so long ago.
Bard was explicitly a smaller (cheaper) version of their model. They always said they had a bigger and better one behind the curtain (now called Gemini I guess). I expected bard to be simpler than ChatGPT because they said it’d be small and simple. I guess that still means it’s disappointing 1:1 though.
The notable feature of the model that Bard has over ChatGPT (at least at time of launch) was daily updates keeping it way better for current information and events. Of course, Google has a lot more internal APIs they can/are leverage (eg search, drive, etc) so today bard has a different focus than just talking to a big model.
They weren't.
Their AI research team is completely dysfunctional and unfocused. They're only interested in doing research and are entirely incapable of the engineering and product focus necessary to build something like ChatGPT.
That isn't the same thing as being caught off guard.
As always, Google has incredible ideas and promise but lacks business execution
https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-rest-vest-days-for-s...
Too little too late?
Announcing things and actually executing on said announcements are two very different things.
Sundar has never been able to tell the difference between the two.
Correct, but not for the reason you gave.
> Their AI research team is completely dysfunctional and unfocused.
The bigger problem was that they saw the major problems with trustworthiness of LLMs and felt there was still too much brand risk to Google. OpenAI had no such problem.
Waiting for someone will match GPT-4 and especially GPT4-V quality and latency.
And this would be the start of the battle, which could be bad for combatants but great for the rest of us.
Fingers crossed, it will happen soon. Not sure that early 2024 ill be that day, but let's hope.
But big ships turn slowly, but once they build up steam they're unstoppable. I think they will manage.
I bet they would have chipped in to OpenAI if Microsoft hadn't beat them to it. As for OpenAI and Microsoft, not sure what I think of it, Microsoft has not exactly been an angel in the internet history books either.
In 2023 Google is an entirely different beast.
20% project is a forbidden sentence by now and certainly never mentioned by the current layer of middle management that has come to infest the engineering department of the company.