Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

This has been kind of a bad year for Google AI

Feb - Bard Launched with LaMDA -- Immediately replaced by Palm 2 backend within a month.

May - Launched Palm2 with 4 different sizes, 2 of which were unusable (poor Gecko) and 1 of which was unavailable (unicorn being invite-only/ask your google rep), which replaced Palm-540. Will be replaced by Gemini Ultra apparently next year as "Bard Advanced"

Launched Duet AI for both Workspace and Cloud, still compares unfavorably to GH Copilot.

SGE basically caught up to ChatGPT web search with Bing

June - Imagen released, results were ok, and immediately superseded by DallE3 within 3 months.

November - Youtube releases AI Music generation, but only as part of their Music AI Incubator.

Gemini launches with the infamous blue duck video.

Gemini Ultra will likely be gatekept just like Palm2-Unicorn despite performance only matching GPT4/Turbo (and despite delaying their official launch by a quarter).

Bard is a really stupid name. I get the origin of the name, and it's a short word, and in some sense it's a nice vibe with implications of a mystical poet or whatever. But it's a word that most people don't use.

As many have commented, ChatGPT is a pretty bad name too -- people get the order of the letters wrong all the time -- but at least it starts with "Chat", which explains what you're supposed to do with it.

Bard sounds way too close to "bad" or "beard" depending on accent. It's a terrible name.

I always associate bard with medieval mid looking old guy playing the lute

It's a stupid name like Google or iPad was a stupid name until it's worth a billion dollars and then it's not so stupid anymore. Success makes the name, not the other way around.

A lot of this stuff was actually cool...but OpenAI got there first.

By the time LaMDA came out, we already had ChatGPT. Palm2 was a serious ChatGPT competitor, but by that point, we had GPT4. Imagen was trained in mid 2022 (!) and could do text and everything, but they locked it away until SD and Midjourney had claimed the market. When it finally came out, nobody found it interesting. And now we have Gemini, which appears to be equal or slightly worse than GPT4, which itself was trained in mid 2022.

They just don't ship things fast enough.

Chickens, home, roost. After all the skuffed products, the destroyed ecosystems, and the general plague Google has become even in their core search product, I hope their gigantic carcass feeds a new generation of hungry companies eager to succeed by making the world better.

They recently released Imagen 2, but now without any sort of benchmark or other academic details.

https://deepmind.google/technologies/imagen-2/

If those numbers were any good you know they would be all over the press with them.

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