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I think the examples you bring up demonstrate fairly precisely why Google should be afraid. Google is at a stage in its corporate life where they are extremely

I think the examples you bring up demonstrate fairly precisely why Google should be afraid. Google is at a stage in its corporate life where they are extremely risk-averse. Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue, to upsetting regulators, to getting bad PR. It's why they publish papers about their in-house tech but never have the guts to put it out there for the general public to experiment with. A contender who shows up with a brand new way to access the knowledge on the internet, but with none of the regulatory / PR / lawyer / legacy product baggage of Google or Meta, is a serious risk. And on some level, it doesn't matter if the "OpenAI assistant" gets things wrong every now and then if they can manage expectations accordingly - something that Google, with their legacy brand and reputation, can't really pull off.

MattGaiser 4y ago
Are they at risk as long as they can replicate the competitor quickly? Plenty of companies don't invest in R&D to avoid cannibalizing existing business. Google does the R&D, but just does not deploy it to customers immediately.
- sowbug 4y ago
  In the case of a large company like Google, "immediately" can take years.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    I think you overestimated it. Google's LaMDA is already ready and running, it's just that it's behind the corporate firewall available only to employees. Years? That's way too long for them to scale up the service and flip a switch to open it to the public.
    - thefourthchime 4y ago
      Large corporations are great at failing to exploit their own strengths because they are afraid of anything rocking how they make money. I would be far more surprised if google reinvents itself using a transformer-based AI than I would some unknown company.
      - sowbug 4y ago
        Yeah, this is more where I'm coming from. Even if the product's technology were fully ready to launch, there are so many layers of stakeholders, existing overlapping product lines, branding questions, and, yes, pure politics to overcome. That's all in addition to the classic Christensen innovator's dilemma whether the company even wants to disrupt its own business model. It's a lot more than removing an ACL on a server.
  - visarga 4y ago
    Well, chatGPT demo managed to put Azure GPUs on their knees, and that was just a million users. When you got a billion users you need a smaller model or many more datacentres.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- nailer 4y ago
  > quickly Google’s major products were either built or acquired in the mid 2000s.
Kamq 4y ago
> Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue I think this is the big one. The other ones are dangerous, but I don't think they're an existential threat to google. Not wanting to take a hit to existing revenue, however, is the same impulse that resulted in Kodak sitting on digital photography instead of becoming a pioneer in the field.
- chefandy 4y ago
  My circa 15 year ago experience as an IBMer had that vibe. Press-release-innovative but operationally a lumbering bureaucracy bending over backwards to cater to their fellow lumbering bureaucracies... And they're still around. Given, they have a lot more inertia than Google.
- mc32 4y ago
  Just a nit pick but those who usurped Kodak’s ceded digital camera market only had about ten to fifteen years of market left. Most people gave up their point and shoots as soon as phone cameras achieved near parity with dedicated cameras. Today phone cameras are better than dedicated point and shoots and only full frame 35mm and above are better (in raw format). Phone do a lot of fancy processing to make up for the small lenses. The point is that profit wasn’t in cameras or devices but in the multi-purpose handheld computers connected to captured services.
  - bpye 4y ago
    Whilst true it seems likely that had sensor technology not evolved with point and shoots, phones wouldn't have been able to include cameras - certainly not as quickly as they did.
  - CobaltFire 4y ago
    Phones are only better than the entry point and shoots, and have absolutely demolished that market. Where they compete with more advanced point and shoots (I.e. the 1” sensor class) is in their ability to take the picture, edit it, and publish it seemlessly. They only match those cameras if you are consuming on a phone as well; as soon as anything higher quality comes into play their shortcomings become clear very quickly. I’m a hobby photographer and haven’t bothered with a pocket camera for years due to this. I have a full frame Canon and my iPhone and that’s a good enough divide for me.
kccqzy 4y ago
Google is rightfully protective of its own brand. It's unlike OpenAI or other startup where the brand isn't as established. Believe it or not, because people trust Google Search so much they rightfully could allow a very slim margin for erroneous content in their AI product. That said, they already have the right corporate structure in place; make a new company with its own brand under the Alphabet umbrella.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Have you searched on Google? It’s full of erroneous content
  - selfmodruntime 4y ago
    Not in the way you‘re thinking. When googling, you very often get exactly what you searched for. The correctness lies in matching the query to the result, not in the correctness of the result‘s content.
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      This is not hugely different to ChatGPT though? If you search for "how do COVID vaccines and 5G networks let Bill Gates control your mind", you'll get junk results in both Google and ChatGPT. The difference is that Google gives you a selection of results, while ChatGPT only gives one so it seems more authoritative -- but still not too different from Google's AI-powered info boxes, which also famously get things wrong sometimes.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        Oh I don't know. ChatGPT gives unambiguous refutations of all the common lunatic theories I could think of, but Google presents all sides. When I asked Google for the significance of gold fringe on the American flag (answer: no significance) Google gave me 6 results for generic flag information followed by several wackadoodle tales about states of emergency and admiralty law. Only a severely stupid person believes there is a secret set of parallel laws in force when a flag is decorated with fringe, but Google is saying: you figure it out.
mindcrime 4y ago
It's the oldest story in the book (well, one of them). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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dragonwriter 4y ago
> A contender who shows up with a brand new way to access the knowledge on the internet But a technology which Google pioneered specifically for that purpose, continues to invest in, and which are a natural fit for Google’s long-term, long-announced strategy, are probably not the innovation that is going to catch them flat-footed.
resource0x 4y ago
There are degrees of "wrongness". OpenAI sometimes gives answers that are laughably wrong. It's exactly this degree of wrongness that google can't afford. Example: > What is the weight of 1 kilogram of nails? ChatGpt> The weight of 1 kilogram of nails will depend on the size and type of nails being used. On average, a kilogram of nails will weigh between 2.2 and 4 pounds (1-2 kg), depending on the size and type of nails. For example, a kilogram of small finishing nails may weigh less than a kilogram of large framing nails. The weight of the nails can also vary depending on the material they are made of, with steel nails being heavier than aluminum or plastic nails. BTW, when I ask the same question in Russian, the response is ... 7kg.
- lumost 4y ago
  These examples of wrongness seem cherry picked. I recently had a discussion with chatGPT where it succinctly clarified how functions of differential operators are defined and their properties. I didn’t know operator valued functions existed at the start of the conversation.
  - LastTrain 4y ago
    It is the very correct answers that are cherry picked.
    - jjcon 4y ago
      Have you had many conversations with it? For me it took an hour before I found it saying anything particularly wrong and even then it was more subtle than the above.
      - grogenaut 4y ago
        It often doesn't seem wrong but it's also not right, it's very vague in a lot of places, when you get down to specifics it starts getting really wrong or flip flopping a lot. I had issues with this almost off the bat. It's like Dunning Kruger as a service really.
      - 4y ago
noobermin 4y ago
>It's why they publish papers about their in-house tech but never have the guts to put it out there for the general public to experiment with. You must live on another planet. What other company half-asses myriad products where the engineer in charge gets a promotion only for them to die out in a few years, and all in public?

MattGaiser 4y ago

Are they at risk as long as they can replicate the competitor quickly? Plenty of companies don't invest in R&D to avoid cannibalizing existing business. Google does the R&D, but just does not deploy it to customers immediately.

sowbug 4y ago
In the case of a large company like Google, "immediately" can take years.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  I think you overestimated it. Google's LaMDA is already ready and running, it's just that it's behind the corporate firewall available only to employees. Years? That's way too long for them to scale up the service and flip a switch to open it to the public.
  - thefourthchime 4y ago
    Large corporations are great at failing to exploit their own strengths because they are afraid of anything rocking how they make money. I would be far more surprised if google reinvents itself using a transformer-based AI than I would some unknown company.
    - sowbug 4y ago
      Yeah, this is more where I'm coming from. Even if the product's technology were fully ready to launch, there are so many layers of stakeholders, existing overlapping product lines, branding questions, and, yes, pure politics to overcome. That's all in addition to the classic Christensen innovator's dilemma whether the company even wants to disrupt its own business model. It's a lot more than removing an ACL on a server.
- visarga 4y ago
  Well, chatGPT demo managed to put Azure GPUs on their knees, and that was just a million users. When you got a billion users you need a smaller model or many more datacentres.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nailer 4y ago
> quickly Google’s major products were either built or acquired in the mid 2000s.

Kamq 4y ago

> Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue I think this is the big one. The other ones are dangerous, but I don't think they're an existential threat to google. Not wanting to take a hit to existing revenue, however, is the same impulse that resulted in Kodak sitting on digital photography instead of becoming a pioneer in the field.

chefandy 4y ago
My circa 15 year ago experience as an IBMer had that vibe. Press-release-innovative but operationally a lumbering bureaucracy bending over backwards to cater to their fellow lumbering bureaucracies... And they're still around. Given, they have a lot more inertia than Google.
mc32 4y ago
Just a nit pick but those who usurped Kodak’s ceded digital camera market only had about ten to fifteen years of market left. Most people gave up their point and shoots as soon as phone cameras achieved near parity with dedicated cameras. Today phone cameras are better than dedicated point and shoots and only full frame 35mm and above are better (in raw format). Phone do a lot of fancy processing to make up for the small lenses. The point is that profit wasn’t in cameras or devices but in the multi-purpose handheld computers connected to captured services.
- bpye 4y ago
  Whilst true it seems likely that had sensor technology not evolved with point and shoots, phones wouldn't have been able to include cameras - certainly not as quickly as they did.
- CobaltFire 4y ago
  Phones are only better than the entry point and shoots, and have absolutely demolished that market. Where they compete with more advanced point and shoots (I.e. the 1” sensor class) is in their ability to take the picture, edit it, and publish it seemlessly. They only match those cameras if you are consuming on a phone as well; as soon as anything higher quality comes into play their shortcomings become clear very quickly. I’m a hobby photographer and haven’t bothered with a pocket camera for years due to this. I have a full frame Canon and my iPhone and that’s a good enough divide for me.

kccqzy 4y ago

Google is rightfully protective of its own brand. It's unlike OpenAI or other startup where the brand isn't as established. Believe it or not, because people trust Google Search so much they rightfully could allow a very slim margin for erroneous content in their AI product. That said, they already have the right corporate structure in place; make a new company with its own brand under the Alphabet umbrella.

scarface74 4y ago
Have you searched on Google? It’s full of erroneous content
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Not in the way you‘re thinking. When googling, you very often get exactly what you searched for. The correctness lies in matching the query to the result, not in the correctness of the result‘s content.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    This is not hugely different to ChatGPT though? If you search for "how do COVID vaccines and 5G networks let Bill Gates control your mind", you'll get junk results in both Google and ChatGPT. The difference is that Google gives you a selection of results, while ChatGPT only gives one so it seems more authoritative -- but still not too different from Google's AI-powered info boxes, which also famously get things wrong sometimes.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Oh I don't know. ChatGPT gives unambiguous refutations of all the common lunatic theories I could think of, but Google presents all sides. When I asked Google for the significance of gold fringe on the American flag (answer: no significance) Google gave me 6 results for generic flag information followed by several wackadoodle tales about states of emergency and admiralty law. Only a severely stupid person believes there is a secret set of parallel laws in force when a flag is decorated with fringe, but Google is saying: you figure it out.

mindcrime 4y ago

It's the oldest story in the book (well, one of them). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

deleted 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago
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dragonwriter 4y ago

> A contender who shows up with a brand new way to access the knowledge on the internet But a technology which Google pioneered specifically for that purpose, continues to invest in, and which are a natural fit for Google’s long-term, long-announced strategy, are probably not the innovation that is going to catch them flat-footed.

resource0x 4y ago

There are degrees of "wrongness". OpenAI sometimes gives answers that are laughably wrong. It's exactly this degree of wrongness that google can't afford. Example: > What is the weight of 1 kilogram of nails? ChatGpt> The weight of 1 kilogram of nails will depend on the size and type of nails being used. On average, a kilogram of nails will weigh between 2.2 and 4 pounds (1-2 kg), depending on the size and type of nails. For example, a kilogram of small finishing nails may weigh less than a kilogram of large framing nails. The weight of the nails can also vary depending on the material they are made of, with steel nails being heavier than aluminum or plastic nails. BTW, when I ask the same question in Russian, the response is ... 7kg.

lumost 4y ago
These examples of wrongness seem cherry picked. I recently had a discussion with chatGPT where it succinctly clarified how functions of differential operators are defined and their properties. I didn’t know operator valued functions existed at the start of the conversation.
- LastTrain 4y ago
  It is the very correct answers that are cherry picked.
  - jjcon 4y ago
    Have you had many conversations with it? For me it took an hour before I found it saying anything particularly wrong and even then it was more subtle than the above.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      It often doesn't seem wrong but it's also not right, it's very vague in a lot of places, when you get down to specifics it starts getting really wrong or flip flopping a lot. I had issues with this almost off the bat. It's like Dunning Kruger as a service really.
    - 4y ago

noobermin 4y ago

>It's why they publish papers about their in-house tech but never have the guts to put it out there for the general public to experiment with. You must live on another planet. What other company half-asses myriad products where the engineer in charge gets a promotion only for them to die out in a few years, and all in public?