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Why would Google hold back on releasing Imagen if there are competitors that are publicly available already? Imagen isn't special anymore.

by aantix 4y ago

aabhay 4y ago
Google is most interested in maintaining mind-share so that researchers don't jump ship. They could always monetize Imagen through Google Cloud but are concerned about risks (NSFW, legal issues, bias, etc.) so would rather wait for others to step into the water first.
jsnell 4y ago
A few possible theories, some might be mutually exclusive: Organizational scar tissue making them more risk averse about the PR risks of letting the genpop use AI generation tools, and create something offensive. With the safe assumption that Google will get blamed, not the user. Fear of government regulation on AI if they don't self-regulate. No need to actually release it, since this isn't the core business but just research. (While openai needs to actually create the business.) Corollary: more to lose -- a scandal around offensive content will not hurt openai's non-existent other businessess. It might make some advertisers pull their ads from Google. The opportunity cost of building a self serve platform is too high. (Can't pull in people writing those kind of apps from projects with more commercial importance. Can't make the ML researchers do that.) They misjudged how much demand there would be, and thought that building a platform would not be useful for a few years. And if it now turns out to actually be a great business it'll now take them a year to productionize and build a platform. Their compute requirements are so high that selling access is not viable, the costs are prohibitive for real users. It's not that different from e.g. self driving cars. Pretty obviously they had better tech from early on, but were not willing to take the risks that Tesla was.
danpalmer 4y ago
No one has actually figured out a business for this yet. Sure people are paying small amounts to play around with DALL-E, but it's not a business model, it's basically just a subsidised tech demo at the moment. What will the business model actually be? I imagine there's a market for a stock-photo style service that has a very large number of good images for very diverse topics, but DALL-E etc are a bit low level for that, there's a lot of product development that needs to happen on top of that. A stock photo service doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that Google would get into. Maybe it's an art-helper plugin to image editors? The Stable Diffusion based plugin sounds promising for this, but will _artists_ want to use it? Surely the point of art is (except for art making A Point) that the artist produced it with their talent? If you're not trying to make Art then maybe you need the stock photo service. Perhaps I'm just not very imaginative, but I can't think of any use-cases that aren't either extremely niche, or are better served by a higher level style service that happens to use a model like this under the hood.
- aantix 4y ago
  I think it’s really early. But my guess is that the market for “programmatically created good enough images quickly” is larger than the market for “inspired, perfected hand drawn digital images”.

Why would Google hold back on releasing Imagen if there are competitors that are publicly available already? Imagen isn't special anymore.

by aantix 4y ago

Why would Google hold back on releasing Imagen if there are competitors that are publicly available already? Imagen isn't special anymore.

aabhay 4y ago

Google is most interested in maintaining mind-share so that researchers don't jump ship. They could always monetize Imagen through Google Cloud but are concerned about risks (NSFW, legal issues, bias, etc.) so would rather wait for others to step into the water first.

jsnell 4y ago

A few possible theories, some might be mutually exclusive: Organizational scar tissue making them more risk averse about the PR risks of letting the genpop use AI generation tools, and create something offensive. With the safe assumption that Google will get blamed, not the user. Fear of government regulation on AI if they don't self-regulate. No need to actually release it, since this isn't the core business but just research. (While openai needs to actually create the business.) Corollary: more to lose -- a scandal around offensive content will not hurt openai's non-existent other businessess. It might make some advertisers pull their ads from Google. The opportunity cost of building a self serve platform is too high. (Can't pull in people writing those kind of apps from projects with more commercial importance. Can't make the ML researchers do that.) They misjudged how much demand there would be, and thought that building a platform would not be useful for a few years. And if it now turns out to actually be a great business it'll now take them a year to productionize and build a platform. Their compute requirements are so high that selling access is not viable, the costs are prohibitive for real users. It's not that different from e.g. self driving cars. Pretty obviously they had better tech from early on, but were not willing to take the risks that Tesla was.

danpalmer 4y ago

No one has actually figured out a business for this yet. Sure people are paying small amounts to play around with DALL-E, but it's not a business model, it's basically just a subsidised tech demo at the moment. What will the business model actually be? I imagine there's a market for a stock-photo style service that has a very large number of good images for very diverse topics, but DALL-E etc are a bit low level for that, there's a lot of product development that needs to happen on top of that. A stock photo service doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that Google would get into. Maybe it's an art-helper plugin to image editors? The Stable Diffusion based plugin sounds promising for this, but will _artists_ want to use it? Surely the point of art is (except for art making A Point) that the artist produced it with their talent? If you're not trying to make Art then maybe you need the stock photo service. Perhaps I'm just not very imaginative, but I can't think of any use-cases that aren't either extremely niche, or are better served by a higher level style service that happens to use a model like this under the hood.

aantix 4y ago
I think it’s really early. But my guess is that the market for “programmatically created good enough images quickly” is larger than the market for “inspired, perfected hand drawn digital images”.