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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

I was just thinking earlier today how in an alternate universe, probably not too far removed from our own, Google has a monopoly on transformers and we are all stuck with a single GPT-3.5 level model, and Google has a GPT-4o model behind the scenes that it is terrified to release (but using heavily internally).

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This was basically almost real.

Before ChatGPT was even released, Google had an internal-only chat tuned LLM. It went "viral" because some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus. This is partially why Google was so ill equipped to even start competing - they had fresh wounds of a crazy media circus.

My pet theory though is that this news is what inspired OpenAI to chat-tune GPT-3, which was a pretty cool text generator model, but not a chat model. So it may have been a necessary step to get chat-llms out of Mountain View and into the real world.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-c...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fi...

> some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus.

Not "some of the testers." One engineer.

He realized he could get a lot of attention by claiming (with no evidence and no understanding of what sentience means) that the LLM was sentient and made a huge stink about it.

He had a history of causing noise at Google’s weekly leadership Q&A.

He was unfairly labelled as a lunatic early on. I'd implore anyone reading this thread to see what he had to say for yourself and form your own opinion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc

Now think about how often the patent system has stifled and stalled and delayed advancement for decades per innovation at a time.

Where would we be if patents never existed?

To be fair, Google has a patent on the transformer architecture. Their page rank patent monopoly probably helped fund the R&D.

They also had a patent on map/reduce.

Who knows? If we’d never moved on from trade secrets to patents, we might be a hundred years behind.

Is that really the case in the last few years/decades?

My understanding is that any company that can (read: has enough money for good lawyers), will prefer to use trade secrets for a combination of reasons, a big one being that competitors cannot use that technology after 10 years/when the patent expires.

Admittedly this was from my entrepreneurship classes in a European uni, so I'm not sure how it is in different places in the world.

Patents in the US are 20 years. Given how short sighted modern companies are, I can’t imagine anyone at any large company is even planning for something 20 years in the future, much less placing much value in an outcome that far out.

It would have been nice for me to be able to work a few more years and be able to retire

will your retirement be enjoyable if everyone else around you is struggling?

What does that mean? Everyone was going to struggle because I still had my 9 to 5 middle class job?

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