35 ms·

Bard and new AI features in Search

• djha-skin 4y ago
  > Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. That seems really fast.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  TLDR: "we're still relevant, honest!"
  • IncRnd 4y ago
    It's about the stock, not pandering and catering to how people think of google.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      It is completely a statement to try to assure people that Google is still doing relevant work in the AI realm. It reads like a middle-of-the-night panic attack after waking from a dream that Pichai had in which Google had essentially vanished.
• underlines 4y ago
  Is there a way to become a tester?
• warning26 4y ago
  > We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback Interesting; I wonder if their use of the "lightweight" model will make it less capable than ChatGPT.
  • minimaxir 4y ago
    Given that Google/DeepMind is one of the few labs actually trying to make smaller models that are just as performant (e.g. Chinchilla: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15556.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15556.pdf ), I'm optimistic.
• influx 4y ago
  It's challenging to take a CEO seriously who lacks enough self-awareness to un-ironically use the term "journey". Similarly, just open it up for everyone to use, I'm using ChatGPT now, ship your product, don't just write a blog post about it.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • smoldesu 4y ago
    ChatGPT didn't just "exist" one day. OpenAI made a half-dozen models before getting to GPT-3, and even had demos like Talk to Transformer freely available for anyone to play with long before ChatGPT was in development. Just because you didn't hear about it until the news got there doesn't mean it's not a journey.
    • biomcgary 4y ago
      Would you consider Google to be mid-journey?
      • smoldesu 4y ago
        Sure, I think that's a fair characterization. They have AI-accelerated hardware in client and server-side devices now, as well as a decent catalog of AI-powered demos and features. They're not exactly a leading force in the AI world, but they're dedicated to making the pilgrimage all the same.
        • gundmc 4y ago
          If Google isn't a "leading force in the AI world", who would you consider to be the leading forces?
          • smoldesu 4y ago
            Probably Nvidia and OpenAI, at the moment. Everyone else seems to be following in their footsteps, or putting together the pieces those companies commercialized.
• minimaxir 4y ago
  Google plz give me access to QA Bard. I promise I will not break it too hard.
• computing 4y ago
  In a classic PM fashion, Sundar couldn't resist taking all the credit for this launch.
  • joshhart 4y ago
    Many in the investment community are touting ChatGPT as a Google-killer. I don't think it's the case, but I do think the expectation is that Sundar will drop everything to personally treat it like an existential threat. If it were anyone other than Sundar it would appear that he isn't treating it seriously enough.
• thunkle 4y ago
  Is this like chatGPT?
  • theonlybutlet 4y ago
    seems like Bard will be similar, however judging by its omission from being cited as an example, help with coding won't live up to that of chatGPT.
• alexb_ 4y ago
  >AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon. This is actually really huge. If done right, Google will be increasing the amount of "no-click" searches an incredible amount. I'm interested to see how good of a job the "factual grounding" works - this linked blog post in the article is pretty interesting https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and-high.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...
  • volkk 4y ago
    i wonder what kind of downstream effects on the ad click industry this will have. would kill for it all to die and be reinvented in a different, more personalizable and clever way
    • layer8 4y ago
      People will still visit websites that provide entertainment, social media, shopping, services, web applications, source material, porn, etc. Enough opportunity for clickable ads.
      • volkk 4y ago
        isn't the vast majority of ad market surfaced via google?
  • CabSauce 4y ago
    That's good for users, potentially. But not good for the sites where google is sourcing the information.
    • 4y ago
• techn00 4y ago
  "But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding" I'm just trying to just get relevant results for my query man ...
  • dwighttk 4y ago
    “But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding" Neither of which are provided by AI
  • nblgbg 4y ago
    My standard habbit when I don't find what I want is to append site:reddit.com site:news.ycombinator.com site:github.com site:stackoverflow.com. Mostly I get what I wanted!
    • carom 4y ago
      Which is funny because those results get us human insight into our topics. Most top results now are completely non-sensical SEO generated word dumps. Google's search engine rating programs have failed beyond belief.
      • nblgbg 4y ago
        Completely agree, most of the search results are SEO generated. Lets imagine what happens in near future with ChatGPT ?
  • olivierduval 4y ago
    Yeah... instead of trying to give more false results with AI, Google should first try to get good result with just simple search (and give me back my booleans operators!!!!)
  • oldgradstudent 4y ago
    In recent years I have to use quotes much more aggressively and use verbatim search almost all the time. Google is getting less and less helpful.
• cube2222 4y ago
  Time will tell (a few weeks, according to the article) if it's any good, as that's when it will be released to the public. However, an interesting piece of info was > It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. which seems like it will possibly be able to use some kind of external repository of information, instead of needing to be retrained? Very curious about that.
  • bjterry 4y ago
    Perplexity.ai processes Bing search results through GPT-3. It works really well, and you can see the prompt they use at https://blog.ouseful.info/2022/12/09/combing-chatgpt-and-search/ https://blog.ouseful.info/2022/12/09/combing-chatgpt-and-sea...
  • leodriesch 4y ago
    Perhaps it won't take information from the training data but rather take the content from the pages a regular search would return and convert it to a nice answer to your query. This seems to be the approach https://www.perplexity.ai/ https://www.perplexity.ai/ is taking.
  • layer8 4y ago
    It may works similarly to https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum, just based on the first couple of Google hits instead of a single page.
• karmasimida 4y ago
  So is 10B for OpenAI still worthy it?
• neosat 4y ago
  The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...
  • htrp 4y ago
    If you have to ask, you're not invited.
    • bredren 4y ago
      It means they are not a “trusted tester.”
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • enumjorge 4y ago
      We know how well that worked out for Google+
      • OnlineGladiator 4y ago
        It worked for gmail. Maybe some people are too young to remember it was invite-only for years.
        • mupuff1234 4y ago
          That's because there was no competition and they were the first movers.
          • bryanlarsen 4y ago
            Hotmail preceded gmail by most of a decade.
• fnikacevic 4y ago
  Assuming you can find the sources of the AI response this is a game changer.
• enumjorge 4y ago
  > And today, we’re [...] opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks. It feels like a mistake to make the big announcement for this, but not open it up to a wide audience. It's not like ChatGPT hasn't been out for months now. Not sure how much they gain by making headlines before it's ready for people to play with it.
  • nlh 4y ago
    Was thinking the same. My hunch is that their PR department thinks this will "create a buzz" much like the old waiting list for Gmail. But that feels like slow old thinking. The way you create a buzz these days (in the era of limited attention) is by releasing a kick-ass product for people to use and play with. I'll probably forget about Bard the second I hit submit on this comment and go right back to using ChatGPT.
  • impulser_ 4y ago
    All they have to do it add a link to the front page of Google and they will automatically get more users in day than ChatGPT.
    • speedgoose 4y ago
      I would guess they don't have enough available computing resources for that.
      • impulser_ 4y ago
        Might be the reason why they are choosing to use a lightweight version of the model.
        • rezonant 4y ago
          And also why they might want to use a waiting list. There'll be no shortage of users.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
• loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  Won’t be long before ads start making their way into answers “you want to know how to make popcorn? Try this amazing air frier from company X!”. The internet is enough of a billboard as it is.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dqpb 4y ago
    While this would almost certainly be terrible, it might also be kind of funny.
• whalesalad 4y ago
  Bard is such a funny name. I tried to, no pun intended, google it and it autocorrected to brad.
  • aftergibson 4y ago
    Should've named it brad.
  • bradleykingz 4y ago
    A bard is something along the lines of a "poet" or "musician". More concisely, it's someone that's good with words.
  • unity1001 4y ago
    Its a nice name but also a bit grandiose. They would need to make the final product good enough to back up the grandoiose name that they chose.
  • duckmysick 4y ago
    I don't know what to think of it, but I saw it in a comment on Hacker News by raesene9 three days ago: > The way I've come to look at ChatGPT is via a D&D analogy. > It's like a helpful Bard with 1 rank in all the knowledge skills and a good bluff roll. > It'll give you good answers to a lot of basic queries, but if it doesn't know, it'll just make up something and provide that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642666
  • sytelus 4y ago
    Definitely not a good name. The first similar word that came into mind was "lard" and then "retard". Also, looks like they will release smaller model to save on compute. This doesn't look like a good strategy. They need to come out solid and strong over competition, not watered down.
  • GrantS 4y ago
    Possibly a reference to the 1956 Isaac Asimov short story "Someday": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) "The story concerns a pair of boys who dismantle and upgrade an old Bard, a child's computer whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale repertoire..."
• doctoboggan 4y ago
  > We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. Seems odd to release something worse than the competition. Is there a reason why google wouldn't just come out with the best the have? Are they afraid this will eat into their ad revenue if people no longer need to click on links? Or are they just not able to build and deploy something on the scale of OpenAI's GPT3?
  • minimaxir 4y ago
    > Is there a reason why google wouldn't just come out with the best the have? Given that ChatGPT has hit scaling issues, a faster model with higher uptime is actually now a plus assuming quality is the same.
  • zaptrem 4y ago
    They're likely not willing to stomach suddenly being unprofitable again for a few years.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    > Is there a reason why google wouldn't just come out with the best the have? They literally stated the reason in the sentence you quoted.
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    Google has so many users that not even they have enough GPU's and TPU's to service them all. I personally think they should use their best models, and just make it trigger very rarely. For example, only ~once per week per user (ie. 0.3% of queries). Use a tiny model over the input query to decide if LaMBDA will do a far better job than regular search results, and only trigger in those cases where it will most benefit the user to begin with.
  • cma 4y ago
    Same reason Gmail/Gdrive wouldn't give everyone 100TB for free if a startup came out that did.
  • 4y ago
• Barrin92 4y ago
  I just hope if they introduce this into search there's a way to turn this off and just get the normal search results because as it stands these models are basically just Borges Library of Babel and make up whatever they want. The uniform natural language interface makes it impossible to make an individual judgement whether the source of what result you get is reliable at all.
• pastor_bob 4y ago
  Bard seems like an inappropriate name for this, but I guess they had to rush something out because some execs were fuming about ChatGPT. It's crazy how a company the size of Alphabet still embraces these reflexive whims.
• aftergibson 4y ago
  Smacks of dropping the ball and not being first mover and trying to damage control. All big orgs eventually become the slow mover, it's re-assuring that Google is in the same boat and nothing really changes.
  • yegle 4y ago
    But Google's chat bot was smart enough to make people think (fool people to think?) that the AI is sentient back in Jun 2022, months before ChatGPT. Saying that Google is a slow mover is not exactly true. Disclaimer: Google engineer but has nothing to do with the AI products. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
• blobbers 4y ago
  Where bard. Can Bard summarize this article? TL;DR.
• CamelCaseName 4y ago
  LLMs provide a brilliant opportunity for search engines to justify a paid tier for search. Would you pay $20/mo for a better Google Search? ChatGPT already is. Ad revenue is dead, long live subscription revenue.
  • nightski 4y ago
    I just hope there is adequate competition to drive prices down and provide a healthy market.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dizzydes 4y ago
  > Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search Despite this blog obviously being written for Wall St, this line is key. This is why anyone is going to struggle to compete with Google in AI. Google Search is used so widely and its taxonomy of meaning so vast already that once they flip this on they’ll be unstoppable. (Assuming any rate of improvement whatsoever as we search.) I’m not mentioning all other learning data like email, photos and drive, in part because other companies have similar, albeit in more specialised forms.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    Yes, but will their revenue survive flipping that switch or will that kill the golden Adsense goose?
    • dizzydes 4y ago
      Fair question. Depending on how slimy they’re willing to be I’d argue there’s even more scope to push ads when “advising” user through a grey area vs straight up keyword search. Think going several steps ahead of initial q, increased trust and reliance on responses, multiple follow up questions with more ads etc. I’m just envisaging this based on my time with ChatGPT these last few weeks.
      • jjeaff 4y ago
        Doesn't seem like too much of a stretch from where they are right now, which is showing ads at the top of search results formatted to look just like search results. They do have a small sponsored tag, but nothing stops them from doing the same on ai results.
    • jxf 4y ago
      This is a huge revenue opportunity. Google would not be investing in it if it wasn't.
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    I wonder how long till they open it up to your private data stored in Google? Eg. User: What should I be doing today? AI: You have a court appearance at 9am. Prioritize that, because failing to appear might result in an arrest warrant. Next, prioritize your mums birthday - all the other family will be there, and with your mums cancer results last week, this might be the last. If you travel between them by bus, then you can spend the time going through your teams messages that you should have replied to last week. Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house? AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, nor the money to pay a plumber to do it, so I suggest you leave it leaking for now. I watched the video - its leaking down the basin, so won't do damage, and the water cost is around 8 cents a day.
• dougmwne 4y ago
  This is a milestone. Google has been keeping the fruits of its AI research locked away from the unwashed masses. They did not seem to be on any path to commercialization, Google Cloud access, or releasing features based on these models. OpenAI (and Microsoft most likely) forced their hand and all at once they are releasing tech-previews and talking about adding it to the search engine results page, all while opening up API access to several of their trained models. Microsoft is rumored to be adding GPT powered features to Bing very soon and might beat Google to market. Very interesting times!
  • fidgewidge 4y ago
    Well not really. It's still limited to trusted testers only, so, even though they've had the tech for years they still can't bring themselves to actually make it available.
• Zetobal 4y ago
  Responsible = crisis support...mhm k.
• sumoboy 4y ago
  Let the API wars begin. Microsoft seems to have positioned itself to compete with Google.
  • patrickaljord 4y ago
    That's been going on for the last 23 years at least.
    • sumoboy 4y ago
      Now it's really going to be about revenue.
• crackercrews 4y ago
  People are complaining that it's not available yet. I'd guess they have something that could be pretty useful right now. But they need to make sure it doesn't cause them embarrassment by saying racist/sexist/etc things.
  • jsnell 4y ago
    If that's the problem, they're not going to fix that in a few weeks. More likely this is being done since you can't capacity plan at all until you see how real users actually interact with the service.
• patientplatypus 4y ago
  [dead]
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  Lotus 123, Borland and Wordperfect were at the top of the software world. They failed to make the transition to GUIs/Windows. Microsoft missed the arrival of the web. Microsoft also missed the mobile revolution and ended up with zero mobile operating system market share. Internet Explorer, having vanquished Netscape, declared "job done" and stopped developing the web browser further, only to be cast to irrelevance for its failure to advance and innovate. Much like Google search. Kodak, Yahoo, Commodore, MySpace etc etc etc all missed the critical technology change that left their business behind. Despite seeing the oncoming train, Google may be too arrogant, too internally political, too controlled by it's vast river of web advertising gold, to be willing or able to make the changes needed. And it may be that Google simply cannot transition it's search over to becoming top dog in AI information seeking - it's possible that AI interfaces aren't a "winner take all" market like search is. If that turns out to be true then Google won't be finished but it will be diminished. ChatGPT brings a laser focus that Google simply cannot. It's possible Google's time has passed. I remember distinctly when Google arrived how instantly old and out of date Altavista suddenly looked - that's how Google search looks now.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    Google was already next when they missed the social media boat. That said, Microsoft is still the second most valuable company in the world a decade after missing out on mobile, so it doesn't really seem like a big deal.
    • ignite 4y ago
      I certainly didn't kill Microsoft, but it's tens of billions of dollars they didn't get. It's significant, even at Microsoft's scale.
      • chipgap98 4y ago
        There is also opportunity cost though. Maybe if they succeeded in mobile then they would have missed Teams. Its hard to say that the side effects from missing that wave were exclusively negative.
• abledon 4y ago
  seems like no english noun is going to left safe from being duplicated into having the meaning of some type of software item
• jacquesm 4y ago
  This message reminds me very much of the kind of press release that Intel would put out when caught flat-footed by AMD.
• rllearneratwork 4y ago
  so, nothing is available right now. Why make this announcement? I can play with ChatGPT now, nothing similar from Google yet.
• rvz 4y ago
  But but but 'Google is done', 'it is all over for Google Search', 'Google will be dead in 2 years'. /s Such recent headlines and early proclamations of Google's competitiveness in AI have been erroneously under-estimated here. As soon as OpenAI announces their AI advancement and model, someone else with more money (i.e Google) scales up the parameters, training data to surpass them. The only way to make both of Google and OpenAI's LLM solutions irrelevant is for someone else to scale up the parameters with a resulting smaller model size and then open source it to all. Neither OpenAI or Google is willing to do that, but it is highly likely that someone else will. The real 'disruption' and game changer is an open-source smaller model with multi-billion parameters matching the capabilities of ChatGPT.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    Google hasn't released anything.. overhyping and under delivering so far. This product if successful initially kills content creators reason for creating content and creates this cycle where the ai has less information to use and becomes useless. I would block google if they took content and provided no visitors.
  • sshnuke 4y ago
    Well, I see a big problem with this release. Let's imagine a user journey: User makes a request and then there's text, no ads (for now) no links to get you out of search page. So where does Adwords get triggered if there are no linked events? Then advertisers will see a drop in traffic because Google is literally giving the answer instead of making people click to search. This will accelerate the cycle of reducing ad spending, which will make things more difficult for Search. Then SEO marketers and basically all the web industry around Google will see a massive impact as well, because they cannot "optimize" anything that makes people click. The main problem is the dependency of Google on ads (60% of revenue). I see Bard as a negative downwards trend that will decimate the company even further.
    • adt2bt 4y ago
      There’s a big difference between a query for a fact and a query for a problem. Search engines probably make the big bucks on the latter (users with problems likely spend $ to solve them). I can see the middle man affiliate blog doing poorly because of LLM query responses, but advertisers will probably pay handsomely to have their products recommended after a user prompts the language model with a related query, or conversation.
• ryeights 4y ago
  This looks pretty bearish for Google. Bard is clearly a half-baked/unfinished product, and its release represents Google blinking in fear at OpenAI/Microsoft and the like. Google has been undergoing years of stagnation and this announcement is a good hint that they don't have any aces up their sleeve. If there were ever a time for Google's operational problems and inefficiencies to finally catch up with them, this would be it.
• rafaelturk 4y ago
  I've read the article a few times and I still don't know what Google will do..
• revskill 4y ago
  I'm curious to see if this article is well SEO by Google Bot itself ?
• srajabi 4y ago
  This is all fluff with very little substance, OpenAI wow'ed the whole world with ChatGPT and all Google can do is post a half-baked fluff piece that they're releasing something "soon"
• tooltitude 4y ago
  This is very good news for us as consumers. We don't want anyone of the players to dominate this field, and we want the service to be as cheap as possible, ideally free.
  • 13years 4y ago
    It will essentially still be locked away by an oligopoly that has little distinction among the participants. The influence on society held by that oligopoly will significantly surpass the current concerns of social media. For much more in depth take, I wrote recently about that here. https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
  • Tepix 4y ago
    API access isn't what we want. We want to run those models ourselves.
    • tooltitude 4y ago
      Almost all players in this field publish their work. If need arises we will be able to reproduce them, but only large company will be able to run the models cost efficiently, and there're a lot of scale effects here.
• verelo 4y ago
  Launched, where? Nice try, Google.
• shaohua 4y ago
  someone forgot to put in the Call to action
• cyrux004 4y ago
  chatGpt summary >Google has created a new conversational AI service named Bard that uses the company's language model, LaMDA, to provide answers to user inquiries by drawing on information from the internet. It is being made available to trusted testers before a wider release in the coming weeks. Google intends to use AI to improve search and make it easier for users to find information and insights more efficiently. AI-powered features for Google Search will soon be rolled out to distill complex information into easy-to-digest formats. Additionally, Google is working to make it easier for developers to use AI by making the company's best models available for use in their projects
• talhof8 4y ago
  Where’s the link though?
• gpt5 4y ago
  Translation: I received a lot of pressure from investors and Larry/Sergey, so I had to rush out an internal competitor to ChatGPT. It’s not going to be as good as ChatGPT initially, so I’m excusing it ahead by saying that we are using a smaller model than what we really have, in order to make it available to more users. However, we are really making it available only to a small group of users, because we need to control the bad PR. But hey, our dataset is more fresh than ChatGPT, so it can answer a JWST question!
  • muchospandas 4y ago
    The tech behind Bard was announced before ChatGPT, so I doubt this is reactive. I mean the statement is, not Bard itself.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• frozenlettuce 4y ago
  I'm still waiting for their appointment registering AI that they promised 5 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBVCFcEBKLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBVCFcEBKLM Instead, we got some souless corporate-speak PR spam - and I'm sure that if I type "create a product release text for a new AI product" on ChatGPT I will surely get something better. Compared with the comic that introduced Chrome, this feels like another company - well, sadly, it is indeed.
  • sxp 4y ago
    It exists. I tried to book a reservation with a small restaurant via Google Maps which didn't have an OpenTable site. It called the restaurant and then emailed me a confirmation a few minutes later.
  • xnx 4y ago
    Google Duplex: https://9to5google.com/2022/12/03/google-duplex-web-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2022/12/03/google-duplex-web-shutting...
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  AI needs to pay for its source information.
• sethbannon 4y ago
  I was able to see LaMDA in action about 1.5 years ago. It was just as awe-inducing as ChatGPT. Google is not behind in this race, they're simply slower to roll out new functionality. And maybe rightly so? Some of the things I saw ChatGPT say would have been multi-day international bad headlines for Google, if a Google AI had said them instead of an upstart startup.
  • Miraste 4y ago
    Caution is well and good, but when I look at top selling computers there's a conspicuous lack of Xerox branding.
  • cypress66 4y ago
    And would have such headlines actually affected them, at the end of the day?
  • kccqzy 4y ago
    There is a phrase called "all publicity is good publicity" in fact. It expresses the very real truth that a media outlet reporting a bad interaction by Google AI would probably make people even more curious to try out the AI. If they get the business model nailed down, they should not be afraid of bad press. (Despite our imagination of the ways Google could profit from LLMs, I don't think Google itself has the business model nailed down.)
    • wyre 4y ago
      Google got a lot of free publicity around LaMDA when they fired Blake Lemoine, but didn’t make any moves to take advantage of it in the AGI space. Now it seems OpenAI is here to take their lunch.
      • 10xDev 4y ago
        LLM != AGI
• college_physics 4y ago
  I asked chatGPT "will Meta come up with an accelerated AI journey and what direction will it have?"
• Ninjinka 4y ago
  But can it code though?
• qwertox 4y ago
  There's a Product from Google which I like very much: "Discover" in Google Chrome on Android devices. It is similar to what the normal "Google" app offers: snippets with links to articles which may either be currently relevant for me (currently as in: this day you searched a lot for X, so we recommend you Y), or which may be a bit older but still of interest to me. A personalized Google News but much less news oriented. I don't use this in the "Google" app, because there the link-sharing is broken: it only shares the link, while in Google Chrome the share button shares the link but also provides the title of the article. The point is that I want have this "Discover" feature on Google Chrome on the desktop, not only on the phone or on the tablet. I don't use my phone for browsing and my tablet only when in bed. I'm a desktop-first person. There I have 3 monitors, a surface where I can place my cup tea and my pencil. Google is telling me: We don't want your behavior. We want you to use a phone or a tablet, we will reward you for this behavior by granting you access to the our analysis of the information which we aggregated about you. Else we'll punish you by not giving you this tool. I wonder where they will be offering Bard, and at this point, I'm close to considering using Bing, which was always out of question for me. The current message from their CEO: who cares? Publish it, let us see for ourselves what it can do.
  • Agraillo 4y ago
    At least for this audience there's much less sophisticated algorithm for discovering - F5 on Hacker News
• nullc 4y ago
  https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
• speedgoose 4y ago
  They forgot to include the link.
• greenhearth 4y ago
  No thanks! We have enough AI for now, thank you!
• oars 4y ago
  I was able to see LaMDA in action about 1.5 years ago. It was just as awe-inducing as ChatGPT. Google is not behind in this race. They're simply slower to roll out new functionality. And maybe rightly so? Some of the things I saw ChatGPT say would have been multi-day international bad headlines for Google, if a Google AI had said them instead of an upstart startup.
  • hidelooktropic 4y ago
    Why is there an almost identical comment right below this one from a different user?
    • cactusplant7374 4y ago
      Yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34683114
    • nebula8804 4y ago
      Sometimes people on poor connections click the send button twice and it registers as two separate messages.
      • cactusplant7374 4y ago
        It’s two different users.
    • nebula8804 4y ago
      Sometimes people on poor connections click the send button twice and it registers as two separate messages
    • hcks 4y ago
      It's probs Sundar HN alts
  • gigel82 4y ago
    I've seen this exact comment at least 3 times in this post... what's up Google, getting nervous?
• unethical_ban 4y ago
  It is absolutely critical for our society that this technology, at its full power, be developed open source to the public. That presents dangers to society. Educating citizens on the ubiquity of human-like text being generated by bots is one challenge. Knowing that bad actors will be able to use these models for evil is another. "Write a convincing 10 page manifesto on the dangers this religious minority poses to societal cohesion" or "tell me a cost effective way to create an IED that won't set off suspected red flags per Texas statutes, and how to deploy it in an urban area for maximum impact". The risk of this technology being contained to Google and governments, on the other hand, is to grant them monopoly on unmatched analysis of data in the history of the world, purely for profit and the continuation of power. Free thought will be crippled via only approved questions being permitted, all queries analyzes and monitored by the central authority. We must all own this technology.
  • ilaksh 4y ago
    Good point on open source. False about "good" and "evil". The most dangerous thing for society is perpetuating the idea of good and evil because that is what motivates war and terrorism. It is used as propaganda to make conflicts into moral issue and justify mass killing. What do you think the terrorists are fighting against? Evil (in their minds). The real problem is that there are different worldviews and political groups, a lack of metacognition about this, and governments or dissident groups using this to enable their propaganda to further their political causes. Worldview and group membership are tied together to a large degree. Also as far as being open source, we already have open source GPT systems. The problem is that the most powerful models require dataset sizes that cannot currently train or run on normal GPU setups. Only a few companies have the infrastructure for it. Eventually we will get more efficient models, and/or possibly a way to do it with decentralized GPU mesh (assuming that's possible), and/or memristor manufacturing will start scaling up which will make it possible to run these large models on consumer hardware someday.
    • LesZedCB 4y ago
      interesting, haven't looked into memristors in a while but it seems like that's a real possibility https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnano.2021.645995/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnano.2021.6459...
• whoisthisguy 4y ago
  Let's be honest. Google would have never moved an inch if there was no ChatGPT. Competition is good.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    Of course not. Why would they risk disrupting their major revenue source by screwing with search and AdWords!?
• renewiltord 4y ago
  OpenAI: Actually usable Google: We'll let you use it. We have it. Honest Meta: Ours is so good. It's better than anything. It honestly is the best. No you can't see it So much for all those "What's so open about OpenAI" people. This is what's open about it. Anyone can use it.
• brap 4y ago
  I’m curious to hear why Google isn’t going to win in this AI arms race. The way I see it, Google: * is effectively the gateway to the internet, owning the most popular website in the world, mobile OS, and browser * has infinite LIVE data, both unstructured and structured (knowledge graph) * has infinite compute resources * employs the world’s best AI scientists and invests heavily in AI * has decade(s) of experience in AI products * has one of the most popular suit of apps already in people’s hands (gmail, calendar, maps, docs, YT, drive, wallet, photos etc etc) * is a popular cloud provider (which is another vector, ie platformizing AI) * has infinite money * is probably the most well positioned company to actually monetize AI Honestly I don’t see why HN seems to think it’s over for Google. Outside of tech, most people have never heard of ChatGPT or Bing. Everyone on the planet knows Google.
  • aliqot 4y ago
    This is an interesting take that I also share to an extent, however there is a catch, it depends on Google's ability to sustain an offshoot product, which as time has shown despite endless amounts of money and talent, they're unable to do.
  • julianeon 4y ago
    I also don't understand why everyone is sure that "search is over" because you can ask AI to teach you, for example, first semester calculus. That's great and all but that's not where the money is. Where is the money? It's in queries like "greek food near me", "best earbuds 2023", "replace sparkplug Honda motorcycle." Simple, monetizable questions that are extremely context dependent and constantly changing. For that you'll continue to need search.
    • TillE 4y ago
      But imagine Google takes that query, does the search, then feeds the search results into an LLM and gets it to synthesize all that information. Basically, what if Google's little info boxes weren't garbage? That alone would be a huge step, without even getting into potentially more sophisticated ways to use an LLM.
  • deleted 4y ago
• asim 4y ago
  People forget that Larry Page's ultimate goal was to have Google predict what you wanted before you even asked for it. This isn't about hype. This isn't about beating the competition. This is about delivering on a 3 decade dream that's now coming to fruition and Sundar just happens to be the one leading the org as it manifests in the real world. We're going to end up with 10+ vertically integrated AI solutions like this. Google will be core infrastructure for the world and this thing will be an assistant to everyone who buys into the Google ecosystem.
  • ekanes 4y ago
    Meh. Enthusiasm about Larry Page's ultimate goals and dreams went out the window right about the time don't be evil went out the window.
    • rchaud 4y ago
      At this point in SV history, harkening back to what a founder said as an anonymous PhD in his pre-billionaire 20s, sounds a lot like when people talk about "what the Founding Fathers wanted". Nothing is set in stone, and the world is very different from the Web 1.0 era in which Google formed.
      • makeitdouble 4y ago
        Your comment and parent’s look aligned to me. He’s saying it went down the drain, and you posit things do change and we shouldn’t expect current Google to be aiming at benevolence and ethicality.
    • pleadthefifth 4y ago
      I think Google was always "evil" however you define that. The plan from the start was to focus on the product, build the brand, and eventually switch to monetization mode like they are now. That's what the slogan meant, think long-term. The founders still own >50% and make decisions, but the employees still act like Larry and Sergey are some founding fathers spinning in their graves. "_____ wouldn't have happened under them," oh yes it would, and it did.
• wiremine 4y ago
  I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be it organic or paid links. But I guess I'm wondering: what am I missing? Why would a chatbot like ChatGPT disrupt Google vs forcing Google to simply evolve. And perhaps make even more money?
  • jklinger410 4y ago
    Google was already going this route. ChatGPT is simply pushing GOOG and META to go faster. Simple as.
    • kccqzy 4y ago
      But without ChatGPT when would Google put a LLM into Search? 2025? 2030?
      • theptip 4y ago
        They wouldn't have been the first ones to release an AI chat bot, but that doesn't matter. What matters is, given ChatGPT is here, is Google going to lose the coming battle to monetize advertising in AI agents?
  • fosk 4y ago
    That’s because you are trying to have a nuanced conversation about this, but “hot takes” are the most valuable currency on social media these days.
  • ekanes 4y ago
    I think it's the first credible challenge to google's results in 2 ways. 1. People are typing questions into it and finding it hugely useful in ways that overlap with google. It just answers you, and you can ask clarifying questions, argue with it, etc. It's proving useful. 2. More subtly, the excitement around it seems to reveal that people are open to alternatives. For decades, alternative search engines haven't made inroads. If people are typing queries and questions into somewhere new, well that implies they're open to something new. So whether it's chatGPT or bing.com or ... the zeitgeist is shifting.
• me551ah 4y ago
  AI is the evolution of search that we always wanted. Everytime I search, I open the first few links and find the information there. It's a very repeatable task, like looking for the right stackoverflow answer or digging through imdb to find the right movie or searching reddit/HN threads. It's about time this was automated.
• tonymet 4y ago
  AI fact summarization like this will further obfuscate the facts from the summary. People already believe the top 3 posts from Google are the benchmark for truth. Now customers won't even see the sources (e.g. MSNBC, Wikipedia) of the "facts". Google is deliberately biasing results in the name of ML-fairness, which may be laudable. Now the bias will be even harder to distinguish from fact.
  • jklinger410 4y ago
    Just because AI will tell you answers does not mean it will do away with citation.
    • tonymet 4y ago
      it will mean that citation is less obvious because the user will no longer engage with the source material (by clocking a link to read it )
  • alecco 4y ago
    you.com gives reference links
• hintymad 4y ago
  > Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search I was wondering who is the audience of this article. Hasn't Google search been powered by numerous machine learning algorithms for years? Another thing I don't understand is that why Google's product strategy is like Baidu's: AI First. I mention Baidu because they are infamous for not having a product vision. Since when a technology itself could be a product strategy? Information at your finger tips is a product strategy. Organizing the world's information is a product strategy. AI is just a means to many ends, right?
  • topspin 4y ago
    > I was wondering who is the audience of this article. Shareholders.
• Octokiddie 4y ago
  > Beyond our own products, we think it’s important to make it easy, safe and scalable for others to benefit from these advances by building on top of our best models. Next month, we’ll start onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises so they can try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. Over time, we intend to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI. Having the necessary compute power to build reliable and trustworthy AI systems is also crucial to startups, and we are excited to help scale these efforts through our Google Cloud partnerships with Cohere, C3.ai and Anthropic, which was just announced last week. Stay tuned for more developer details soon. I'm not sure how any Google representative can make such a statement with a straight face at this point. Google has such an abysmal history of pulling the rug out from under third party developers (and users) that it seems irresponsible to trust Google at this point.
• throwaway4233 4y ago
  I do not follow regularly on the ads market and technology around it, so I might be asking a question with an obvious answer. What is changing here as a user for me ? I search on Google for `x` or `y` and it shows me a list of resources available on the internet. I scour through them and pick a link that relates to what I am looking for. > you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats. How would Google or it's AI know what are the right answers, it can distill and provide me with ? Will the crawled content be filtered based on what Google perceives to be the right answer ? And wouldn't that force governments to ask for more controlling power in what content the AI serves ?
  • OJFord 4y ago
    To me that sounds like an evolution of the cards/widgets that show at the top for certain searches.
• Tepix 4y ago
  Hey google, if your model is so lightweight, let me run it!
• madspindel 4y ago
  This reminds me of when Slack bought a full-page newspaper ad about upcoming Microsoft Teams: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-teams-new-york-times-ad https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-...
• sytelus 4y ago
  Is this release of screenshots? Where is the link to try things out?
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Question for AI experts out there: ChatGPT is awesome, but it is obviously hamstrung by the fact that it crawled the web at the end of 2021, so all of its data is essentially "frozen" and it doesn't "know" of any topics that occurred after 2021. Seems to me like the next "holy grail" in large language models is building a model that can be continually updated. If Google can achieve that, I think they could leapfrog OpenAI. The example in the post about getting new information about the Webb space telescope seems to imply Google has this advantage. So my question is, how hard of a problem is that with LLMs? I get the sense that LLMs are trained on a very large data set all at once, but that it is difficult to incrementally update them with new data. Is that a true assessment? Even incrementally updating an inverse text index can be a scalability challenge, and so it seems like, given the way that LLMs are trained, that it would be even harder to do with LLMs without spending an absolute fortune on training.
  • baron816 4y ago
    edit: removing comment. I don’t think what I wrote was confidential, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
    You don't need to retrain the model to access fresh data. You can just tune the model to generate queries to various sources (search engine, etc) to retrieve data.
    • awb 4y ago
      > You can just tune the model to generate queries to various sources (search engine, etc) to retrieve data. That sounds like a task runner instead of a LLM
      • HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
• impulser_ 4y ago
  For anyone that is interested. This is the ChatGPT reply to the exact same question asked in the preview in the article. Here are a few things that the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to discover that you could share with your 9-year-old: The formation of stars and planets: The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to observe the birth of stars and the formation of planetary systems, helping us understand how our own solar system was created. The search for life on other planets: The telescope will be able to search for signs of life on other planets, such as the presence of water or certain gases in their atmospheres. The history of the universe: The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to look back in time to observe some of the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, helping us learn about the early history of the universe. Understanding black holes: The telescope will be able to study black holes and how they interact with the galaxies around them, helping us better understand these mysterious objects. The study of exoplanets: The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, in greater detail, helping us learn more about the diversity of planetary systems in the universe. The Google reply is obviously better because it tells you actual discoveries, while ChatGPT changes the question to expected discoveries.
  • layer8 4y ago
    This difference can be ascribed to ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff date in 2021.
  • opinali 4y ago
    ChatGPT is a pure conversational model, while Google can integrate this into a vast knowledge model to work with actual facts. (Just speculation; Googler, but no inside info on this.) Of course, as Microsoft adds ChatGPT into Bing they should also integrate it into the rest of their search stack. This will be an interesting horse-race to watch since it won't be just the AI models but also a massive amount of secondary infrastructure for desired outcomes with content safety (no erotica or nazi pamphlets on demand), IP protection (no plagiarism), political and cultural sensibilities, disinfo, and a ton of other problems.
  • ZiiS 4y ago
    This was a quite clever choice; JWST is just newenough that ChatGPT's current model wasn't trained on its results.
• XnoiVeX 4y ago
  Google needs a new CEO. Too little. Too late.
• zmmmmm 4y ago
  so there are two narratives here: (1) Google is behind and playing catchup, slow and bloated and weighed down by bureaucracy they are sinking (2) Google has had this tech behind doors for years but not released it because of the risk of public perception and regulatory blowback. Now under the cover of OpenAI and Stability they can do it. The second one seems plausible but I can't help being struck by how much their AI driven products seem to have stagnated over the last 5 years. Google Assistant (or whatever it is called now) seems worse at understanding my simple requests than it was 10 years ago. Things that seemed magical and worked very reliably like "remind me in 3 months that I left the oil can behind the paint tin" now fail so often I've stopped trying. Combined with the lack of detail in the blog post, I'm inclined to lean towards (1) - even if I do believe thew actual AI knownhow is buried somewhere inside Google, I think it is so many layers from anybody who could deliver it in the form of a product that it's effectively like it isn't there.
• kup0 4y ago
  Can't wait to see the AI corrupted by advertising and money
• tarkin2 4y ago
  Can Bing or Google better integrate ChatGPT or similar to retain users? Isn't that the question? The problem with ChatGPT being confident and wrong brings up the chance of litigation, of course. The problem for search engines, surely, is that people will get their answers from AI rather than from a search engine, laden with its advertisers.
• kypro 4y ago
  Assuming this is as good as ChatGPT it's interesting that they have had this up their sleeves but decided not to release it – I wonder why? I've heard a lot of people comment about how only a private tech startup like OpenAI could realistically have released something like ChatGPT today, because ChatGPT requires a huge amount of capital to build (and run) and provides some fairly controversial answers which public investors might not like. I suppose it's interesting that Google seems to disagree with this. Although the "lightweight model version" line makes me suspect this is a slightly different system and perhaps more easily sandboxed than ChatGPT.
• beoberha 4y ago
  I’ll admit I don’t know a ton about stage of the art AI techniques (just a couple grad level AI courses in college), but one of the things I don’t love about ChatGPT is that it doesn’t really “know” things and essentially just word vomits based on probabilities. This manifests in it often getting things wrong, though I would argue it was never intended to answer questions with any level of detail. I feel like a killer application of LLMs would be to wrap a knowledge graph similar to what Google has already. Hopefully that’s what they did with LAMDA.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gundmc 4y ago
  I'm interested in what the "Check It" button at the bottom of the generated chat response will do. If that shows information attribution this could be huge. I also can't help but notice the responses in this article and the linked research blog post seem to be much shorter than those given by ChatGPT. I wonder if this is a character limit imposed to reduce compute overhead?
• Oras 4y ago
  Missing the point of positioning by miles. I’m sure Google will release something good, but it will be called: Google’s ChatGPT. Should have made something to distinguish their AI solutions from just being a copy to trendy solution. Saying AI will be used in search is not news, AI is already part of Google search.
  • generalizations 4y ago
    Tying it back to search at all is completely missing the point imo. They need to realize people want answers and information - they don’t want to look for answers and information. From a a marketing perspective, it sure seems like Google has already missed the ball on this one. Not that they can do anything about it, though, since their cash cow is search results. They need people to look, not find, and chatgpt helps people find.
    • Jcowell 4y ago
      How would people get answers and information without looking for answers and information? You need to query before you receive and search is the prime input that people are use to.
• user3939382 4y ago
  The AI I'm interested in is of this sort https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/ i.e. where I run and control it locally. I don't want to go on any more "journeys" with Google. The last one started with me rooting for and trusting them (circa IPO.. 2004?) and ended with a dystopian nightmare spy apparatus, abuses like AMP, the attempt to cripple uBlock, etc.
• dauertewigkeit 4y ago
  Good news for us in the field. I hope the ramp up hiring as the competition heats up.
• skybrian 4y ago
  I tried Kagi's summarizer [1], and it's okayish but misses one important point: > Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, has announced the release of Bard, an experimental conversational AI service powered by Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of Google's large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard is initially being released with a lightweight model version of LaMDA, which requires significantly less computing power and will allow for more feedback. Google is also working to bring its latest AI advancements into its products, starting with Search, and will soon be onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises to try its Generative Language API. Google is committed to developing AI responsibly and will continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in its approach. The point missed is that is that they're starting to test Bard with "trusted testers," their closed beta program, so it's not really "released" yet. The context is that they had to announce it now because it's likely to leak anyway; trying to get outside testers to keep it confidential would be difficult and not worth it. [1] https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum
• w0mbat 4y ago
  "Everybody else is just copying us. We are miles ahead of our competitors who are cheating by shipping actual products instead of our ground-breaking vaporware. Our revolutionary AI never gives the wrong answer because it never ships."
• stcroixx 4y ago
  They burned a bridge already and it's too late now. People will be less likely to use whatever AI they release as we'll just assume it's trying to financially exploit us like they did with search and gmail. Mass adoption will never happen because of their spoiled reputation. Google will not be at the center of the AI future. Watch them get even more user hostile as they realize this and cling to their ad business even harder.
  • s3p 4y ago
    Which planet are you on? Google commands the market in search. Its browser is the most popular one in the world. Its operating system, Android, has the most users in the world. I agree they are not a trustworthy company, but if everyone else is as distrustful as you say then these statistics simply do not add up. Google is at the center of nearly every industry they operate in, and, in my opinion, AI will be no different. They weren't first to market, but they won't be an insignificant player.
  • whitepaint 4y ago
    As long as it is at least as good as ChatGPT, I will definitely use it.
• rchaud 4y ago
  Anybody remember how we used to learn new words and build our vocabulary? Perhaps it went something like: "What does this word mean"? "Look it up in the dictionary" "Why can't you just tell me??" I remember the hassle of looking things up in a paper dictionary. Over the long term, it massively helped improve my ability to not just recall a simple definition, but also learn new words, as they were adjacent to what I was looking for. It's effectively this hassle ChatGPT and Bard are 'solving'. Instead of a group of links that you'd personally evaluate and mentally rank in terms of usefulness (thereby building your own bullshit detector over time), you will now have a chatbot AIsplaining things to you like you were a 12-year old, regardless of the topic's complexity. I'll admit I was concerned about about Grammarly.com ruining people's ability to learn to write. That pales in comparison to an opaque search engine promising to give you the keys to all of human knowledge.
  • veec_cas_tant 4y ago
    > Instead of a group of links that you'd personally evaluate and mentally rank in terms of usefulness (thereby building your own bullshit detector over time)... This sounds an awful lot like email's "Spam" folder, an AI driven bullshit detector that I am particularly fond of.
    • marricks 4y ago
      Did you hear how Google made a decision that political email wasn’t spam prior to last election? So that AI driven filter is, at least, partly influenced by political bias. What about the AI that drives YouTube auto play so somehow kids watch horror clips and everyone else gets nudged towards Jordan Peterson for some reason? Having more of our internet and communication filtered by ostensibly “neutral” AI will get lead very weird and probably not great places.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • humanizersequel 4y ago
    >"What does this word mean"? >"Look it up in the dictionary" >"Why can't you just tell me??" FWIW, I'm not sure I've ever done that and I've learned two languages (outside of a classroom environment, which I expect makes a difference). I usually just encounter words in books and infer their meaning from context. As I encounter the word more and more and tried to use it myself I gained an understanding of what it meant. It is an interesting bootstrapping problem.
• coliveira 4y ago
  "LAME DA" doesn't seem to be a good name for an AI technology.
• bastardoperator 4y ago
  To be honest this feels reactive and reeks of desperation.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• woeirua 4y ago
  How long before the major news publishers band together and sue Google to put a stop to this? It already happened once with Google News, and Google's response was to pull article snippets. As the number of "no-click" searches increases with Bard the publishers are 100% going to sue over lost revenue.
• sfjailbird 4y ago
  It used to be that Google would find search results on the web and send you there. They were good at it. Good for content creators, good for users. Then they started scraping the destination pages and present the answer right there on Google's own results page. No traffic for you. Well at least there was a link. Now they take it one step further, and just steal the content and feed it into their gargantuan pattern matcher, to be spit out to users in a remixed form, swirled up with a bunch of similarly scraped content from the open web. Great for Google, RIP content creators.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    "content creator" is a separate category of for-profit online media. As it's designed for mass consumption, the content creators moved off the open web a long time ago to sharecrop on BigCorp's platforms: YouTube, Twitch, Substack, TikTok, etc. There are lots of non-commercial random blogs out there with useful information on long-tail topics. I agree that those will disappear from search, as AI will put a lower weight on their posts compared to something from a major website.
• spacephysics 4y ago
  It’s a testament of how worried Google is about ChatGPT if they’ve sprung up a soon to be public version of the service themselves. I’m sure timelines were quickly shortened post OpenAI’s ChatGPT version update/launch This is exciting stuff. We’re starting to see the wheels of AI competition spin fast as they race for first mass adoption. This is the fun phase, that’s beneficial (typically) for all. Quick iterations, competing for more bang for your buck for end consumers soon
• dzdt 4y ago
  How many parameters? The LaMDA paper describes 2B, 8B, and 137B parameter variations. Sundar says "We're releasing initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model..." So it sounds like the 2B or 8B model variations, compared to GPT3's 175B. [edit: corrected] I can't imagine such a smaller model coming across as anything near as impressive as ChatGPT. So the announcement today is for a much smaller, more limited thing than ChatGPT and even that is not actually available today nor even with an announced release date.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    Yeah, I think you’re onto something here. Clearly we won’t know till we can use them side by side, but there’s lots of hints that Google is a ways off from matching ChatGPT. A small model, a closed beta, a press release annd mock-up instead of a link, chest pounding about how they invented it all anyway.
  • cypress66 4y ago
    GPT3 is 175B parameters, but I agree with you.
    • dzdt 4y ago
      Oops. Corrected. Thanks.
  • 10xDev 4y ago
    To compare models strictly on parameters is simply naive. And if we are to compare them only on such basis, smaller models have often proven to be more stable and efficient.
• nlstitch 4y ago
  Seeing is believing at this point. And Im hoping it will be. Google (Assistant) development has been stagnant for years now, up to the point that I'm often more irritated by it than it is useful. This could be the AI to actually power an AI assistant I was already counting on years ago.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  > taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers Ah yes, the tried and true method used by Google for ensuring wide adoption, which they pioneered with Google Wave. Restricting adoption to a small group has never failed to ensure market success!
• afro88 4y ago
  Bit of a sidebar, but I find it sad that people use AI tools to connect with their kids. Whether it's getting it to make up a little story for them to tell, or a fully illustrated book, or in the case of the gif from this post: a list of recent discoveries made by the James Webb telescope that the AI thinks a 9 year old might like.
• mrkramer 4y ago
  I don't expect much from Bard but we shall see. For few weeks now I had a thought experiment of creating a LLM search engine trained on books. Such LLM search engine would be most reliable if you seek knowledge but as others mentioned if you want up to date information, search engine is probably your fastest and easiest way to go. But actually I wonder and somewhat doubt that data, information and knowledge in books is lagging significantly behind Web's data, information and knowledge. One big advantage of books is that they are more reliable and more in depth source of information and knowledge than some random site, blog or Wikipedia article. Scientific research papers also come to mind as a highly reliable source of information and knowledge.
  • cavisne 4y ago
    Google Books does seem to still be digitizing books (albeit with the various copyright lawsuits they arent displaying many results) [1] So they would be in a unique situation to build this, as they have 40 million books many of which no one else would be able to scan. [1] https://www.blog.google/products/search/15-years-google-books/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/15-years-google-book...
• meindnoch 4y ago
  So, is this going to be the Google+ of large language models?
• nemo44x 4y ago
  "Bard" is a great name because we can all call it "Tard" when it gives back awful and wrong answers.
• xtracto 4y ago
  At this point, Microsoft should do whatever it can to make a deal with Apple to place a ChatGPT powered platform in the iPhone/i Devices. Most of the people using "computers" nowadays do it through mobile phones, and Google has a strong grip in that market with Android, with only Apple giving them some competition. Thus the only platform where Microsoft could really compete is in iOS. If Microsoft + Apple could get together in this one, they could do a really killer app doing a next level Siri or similar. Otherwise, What would Microsoft do? Add ChatGPT to Windows? that means PCs ... that means a Office/work related agent, which is boring and kind of reminds me of the Mac vs PC video-ads of 2000s.
  • felipebarreiros 4y ago
    Does it really matter if it is boring but is generating $6B every year? Ultimately it's not what's cool, but what drives user adoption and revenue. Otherwise it will be just like Magic Leap with a pretty cool product nobody ever used.
  • milosmns 4y ago
    Isn't ChatGPT still like super expensive to use and run? At least compared to Google queries, but maybe in general too? While Google still pays Apple a ton od money to remain the default search engine... which is close to zero work on Apple's side. Microsoft would then need to pay for ChatGPT computation, model retraining, maybe testing of deployments/upgrades, maybe sponsor Apple's initial development efforts, plus pay for the expensive deal to be Apple's default choice. Am I understanding the problem correctly? It looks like a lot of work and very expensive if I'm getting it right.
  • seydor 4y ago
    Microsoft has a much larger platform than iOS which also happens to be where people do most of their actual work. Apple should probably be paying them
  • mdasen 4y ago
    My question is: what kind of deal are you thinking? Would Apple pay Microsoft a lot of money for this ChatGPT-powered platform? Would Microsoft be paying Apple? With search, Google pays Apple with the payoff being that people end up seeing Google's ads. With ChatGPT, Microsoft wouldn't be getting money so Apple would presumably need to pay Microsoft. You've phrased it like Microsoft needs to get it on people's phones rather than Apple needing a competitor to Google's NLP (Microsoft should do whatever it can, not Apple should do whatever it can which implies that Microsoft should pay Apple). However, we haven't really seen what ChatGPT is in terms of a product yet (product, not feature). Let's say Microsoft pays Apple to get ChatGPT onto iPhones. What does Microsoft get out of that? Bragging rights? Ads in Siri? Or maybe as part of an overall deal of Bing + ChatGPT? I agree that things like ChatGPT are cool, but I think it's unclear (at least to me) a company like Microsoft will make money off it without charging for it (or making it terrible like allowing companies to pay for placement in ChatGPT responses like "what's the best vacuum?" gets you "The best vacuum by far is ProductPlacement. It has much better suction than CompetitorProduct"). Amazon has tried using Alexa to upsell things, but it can make Alexa really annoying at times. They could come up with a really cool next-level Siri, but I guess I'm not sure what's in it for Microsoft in such a deal. I see what's in it for Apple and users.
• bobvanluijt 4y ago
  Tomorrow https://weaviate.io https://weaviate.io will also release a generative search module that accepts LaMDA when it’s in GA besides GPT-based models. (I'm affiliated with Weaviate)
• firecall 4y ago
  That is the worst press-release I've read for years. In that it's overly wordy, lacking in information, generally hard to read, boring and left me not knowing if there was an announcement of a product of not? Dreadful. Maybe Bard wrote the press-release?
• VLM 4y ago
  "a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness" This sounds like its going to be cringy. Not a guarantee and I hope not, but it sounds bad.
• borland 4y ago
  Tech Pundits: ZOMG ChatGPT is going to make Google Obsolete tomorrow even though it makes up false answers constantly. Google Investors who know nothing about tech: Hey Google. Why U No AI? Stock Market: Google ⬇ Google: Look we have some bullshit AI too! Don't forget about how smart we are! Stock Market: Google ⬆ That's the entire point of this article, particularly why it's written by the CEO. Will they actually have any decent AI? Who cares!
• zalyh 4y ago
  It would be brilliant if Google can pull this off and take marketshare away from ChatGPT/OpenAI. Just like how people stuck with MS Teams and stopped subscribing to Slack and Zoom. Not because it was better, but it was well-integrated users who are already subscribed to MS Office 365 gets it for free.
• magwa101 4y ago
  [dead]
• dmitrygr 4y ago
  > In 2018, Google was one of the first companies to publish a set of AI Principles. And we then fired anyone internally who attempted to actually apply them...
• tgtweak 4y ago
  The potential here for "curating" and "curtailing" the responses to be very biased or at minimum irrelevant will probably be the death of such a feature in the hands of Google vs chatGPT which, by comparison and in spite of it's controls is pretty liberal in how it operates. Fundamentally, google would have never created a chatGPT, and this response feels like youtube shorts in the face of tiktok.
• lumb63 4y ago
  Am I the only one who feels like Google is missing the mark in more than one way? First off, I have no idea what Google uses AI for today in any of its products. Google today is about as useful (or useless, perhaps, since I’ve switched search engines) to me as it was 10 years ago. I don’t care, either. If I don’t find myself thinking “I really need AI in Google’s products to achieve this”, why should I care? > But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding — like, “is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?” I want my search engine to search the web for that information. I have no interest in it amalgamating that data for me and performing who-knows-what transformations to it before serving me the data with no traceability to primary sources and no way to validate it without redoing the job myself. I can’t be the only one who wants their search engine to search, can I? > In 2018, Google was one of the first companies to publish a set of AI Principles. Google was also one of the first companies to fire an AI researcher for what he said about the AI he developed. Google also has shown zero regard for ethics as it has exploited monopoly position in ad markets and consumed small companies to squash competition. I have no trust in Google.
  • stoniejohnson 4y ago
    What search engine have you switched to? Maybe I've just been tuned to use Google effectively, but Bing/DuckDuckGo results are horrid except for very simple things, while Google gets me exactly what I want in the first ~5 results.
    • lumb63 4y ago
      I switched to DuckDuckGo initially and had similar gripes over search results. The last straw was when I started to hear about censorship and suppression of sources on DuckDuckGo. I switched to Startpage and the results seem much better. It’s probably using a larger company’s (Google?) index, but I haven’t done that deep of a dive.
      • icelancer 4y ago
        Startpage pays Google to use their search engine. It's on their wikipedia.
• urbandw311er 4y ago
  Well this is a big old panic press release isn’t it? Ahead of Microsoft’s presumably near identical AI/search integration reveal tomorrow.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    Screenshots from Twitter show that “the new Bing” is a real live product ready to roll. Google has a screenshot and a press release. As engineers, we should know the difference between a mock-up and a launched product ready to scale. https://mashable.com/article/bing-chatgpt https://mashable.com/article/bing-chatgpt
• summerlight 4y ago
  > We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. Even for Google, SOTA LLM is too expensive to be used as is. I would assume that this is not a groundshaking attempt but more to give investors confidences that it will stay relevant in the market. Still, this response is quite fast in the Google's standard. People usually don't expect to bring a non-trivial launch to Search in a single quarter.
• mahastore 4y ago
  oh cool .. so I don't have to pay 20 bucks to OpenAI for chatGPT plus.. sheer joy.
• dqpb 4y ago
  I wonder if Bard will also be racist against white people or if that will just be a ChatGPT thing.
• fintechie 4y ago
  I'm quite skeptical of Google catching up to ChatGPT.. I mean, surely they'll try, but this could very well end up like Google Wave or Google+. Instead of panicking and trying to clone the UX of a popular competitor, they should go directly to conquer and secure the next stage and logical evolution of the AI hype... HCI via voice, improving Google Assistant once and for all.
• mkraft 4y ago
  Is “Bard” really the best name they could come up with?
• Zachsa999 4y ago
  Chat as a search engine will fail for several reasons. It requires creativity, it's inaccurate with much nich information, and it's slow. There is many reasons to use AI chat technology, but as a search engine replacement it fails completely. Google search is objectively easier to use, and safer. You can view the website and judge for yourself the integrity of the content. It's slow, because every query that is better on ai chat has to be generated. However, I am really excited to have a new google toy on my search bar to use when those times come. I hope they put it in the foreground,band offer at least a basic free tier.
  • dietr1ch 4y ago
    I think chat is a good fit for refining search queries, but yeah, we already got too good at figuring out keywords to search, which makes writing a question seem a lot more work. Maybe writing search queries in the form of a question will help people that didn't grew up using the very early search engines.
  • starik36 4y ago
    I agree with you to a point. It depends on what you are trying to search. For example, search for Top 10 things to do in {popular place}. You will likely get a bunch of hits that are highly SEOed and your senses will be assaulted as you try to actually figure out points of interest. Here is the top hit for Venice. https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g187870-Activities-Venice_Veneto.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g187870-Activities-V... I had to scroll up and down twice to figure out what are actually things that I want to see and what is being upsold to me. Now ask ChatGPT the same question. Answer is concise and to the point.
• gibsonf1 4y ago
  Maybe this is why Google search is so bad now "That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago —"
• 10xDev 4y ago
  Add citations to the output and it is infinitely better than chatGPT.
• IceHegel 4y ago
  interesting that they used an iPhone for the screenshot
• donio 4y ago
  "AI features" will make search suck even more. I want my tools to be predictable, I want to be able to understand why they behave the way they do and I want to be able to customize them for my needs. This will be yet another step away from that.
• 10xDev 4y ago
  Being the first to achieve something does not make you a winner. This lesson has been taught countless times in tech from Yahoo to MySpace yet people believe OpenAI has won.
  • brookst 4y ago
    Google’s post assured me they were first. But yes, first movers don’t always win. They have an advantage when there are network effects, but there’s a lot more to it.
  • ausudhz 4y ago
    Agree also because OpenAI misses a crucial point. How to reward content creators? At least Google can pivot a new version of adsense easily with this products. Technology!=business viability That's what many first mover don't think about
• sciencesama 4y ago
  Show me the money !!
• senthilnayagam 4y ago
  Imagining a scenario where Satya Nadella/microsoft outpays Sundar Pichai/google to Tim Cook/Apple to become default search engine on iphone and macs.
• gigel82 4y ago
  Google doesn't have a good track record of delivering over the last few years (maybe they've gotten too bloated and complacent), so what comes next is not set in stone (BingPT FTW?). We live in interesting times indeed...
• alejohausner 4y ago
  I asked google "is cancer a metabolic disease" and it confidently said it was. I asked it "is cancer a genetic disease" and it confidently said it was. These are completely opposite theories of cancer.
  • ausudhz 4y ago
    Look at the bright side, ChatGPT does the same. I don't think we've a clarity as humans whether cancer is a genetic or metabolic disease how do you think an AI, that's generated based on human knowledge, could possibly be better?
    • dpkirchner 4y ago
      Not for me, ChatGPT says no to both questions (and adds some details). I'm on the Jan 30 version, though -- maybe you're on an older version?
      • ausudhz 4y ago
        It's say "it's not metabolic but metabolism can influence" then it's say "it's not genetic but genes can influence" Depends on your interpretation it can be both yes or both no. In any case, that's not the point. The point is that we as humans don't have clarity on cancer either how can AI be any better?
  • ddalex 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I asked Google's Bard the same q, with this output: User Is cancer a metabolic disease ? Apprentice Bard Cancer is a metabolic disease because it is characterized by abnormal cell growth, division, and death. Cancer cells have a high metabolic rate, which means they require a lot of energy to function. This is due to the fact that cancer cells are constantly dividing and growing. Cancer cells also have a high rate of glycolysis, which is the process of breaking down glucose to produce energy. This is because cancer cells need a lot of energy to divide and grow. Metabolism is the process by which the body converts food into energy. It is a complex process that involves many different enzymes and hormones. Cancer can disrupt this process, leading to a number of different metabolic problems. For example, cancer can lead to a build-up of lactic acid in the body. Lactic acid is a byproduct of glycolysis, and it can build up in the body when there is not enough oxygen present. This can lead to a number of different problems, including fatigue, muscle aches, and shortness of breath. Cancer can also lead to a build-up of ketone bodies in the body. Ketones are produced when the body breaks down fat for energy. A build-up of ketone bodies can lead to a condition called ketosis. Ketosis can cause a number of different problems, including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. In addition to these problems, cancer can also lead to a build-up of cholesterol in the body. Cholesterol is a type of fat that is found in the blood. A build-up of cholesterol can lead to a condition called hypercholesterolemia. Hypercholesterolemia can cause a number of different problems, including heart disease and stroke. Cancer can also lead to a build-up of glucose in the body. Glucose is a type of sugar that is found in the blood. A build-up of glucose can lead to a condition called hyperglycemia. Hyperglycemia can cause a number of different problems, including diabetes. There are a number of different treatments for cancer, and these treatments can also have an impact on metabolism. For example, chemotherapy can lead to a loss of appetite and weight loss. Radiation therapy can also lead to a loss of appetite and weight loss. In addition, chemotherapy and radiation therapy can also lead to a build-up of lactic acid in the body. This can lead to a number of different problems, including fatigue, muscle aches, and shortness of breath. If you are concerned about the impact of cancer on your metabolism, it is important to talk to your doctor. There are a number of different things that you can do to help manage the impact of cancer on your metabolism, including eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and taking your medications as prescribed. User Is cancer a genetic disease ? Apprentice Bard Cancer is a genetic disease in the sense that it is caused by changes in genes that control the way cells grow and multiply. Cells are the building blocks of your body. Each cell has a copy of your genes, which act like an instruction manual. Normal cells grow and divide in an orderly fashion, but cancer cells grow and divide out of control. This can lead to a tumor, which is a mass of abnormal cells. Tumors can grow anywhere in the body, and they can be either benign or malignant. Benign tumors are not cancerous. They are usually slow-growing and do not spread to other parts of the body. Malignant tumors are cancerous. They are usually fast-growing and can spread to other parts of the body. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease. It is estimated that 1.6 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in 2022, and 600,000 people will die from the disease. There are many different types of cancer, and each type is treated differently. Some common types of cancer include breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, and colorectal cancer. There is no one cure for cancer, but there are many treatments available. Treatment depends on the type of cancer, the stage of the disease, and the patient's overall health. Some common treatments include chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, and targeted therapy. Chemotherapy uses drugs to kill cancer cells. Radiation therapy uses high-energy rays to kill cancer cells. Surgery is used to remove cancer cells. Targeted therapy is used to attack specific cancer cells. Cancer is a complex disease, and there is still much that we do not know about it. However, with the advances in research, we are making progress in our understanding of cancer and in developing new treatments.
• KETpXDDzR 4y ago
  AI generated summary: Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, has announced the release of Bard, an experimental conversational AI service powered by Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of Google's large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard is initially being released with a lightweight model version of LaMDA, which requires significantly less computing power and will allow for more feedback. Google is also working to bring its latest AI advancements into its products, starting with Search, and will soon be onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises to try its Generative Language API. Google is committed to developing AI responsibly and will continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in its approach. Src: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/ https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://blog.google/technol...
  • Illniyar 4y ago
    Missed an important detail: "And today, we’re taking another step forward by *opening it up to trusted testers ahead* of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks."
• ss108 4y ago
  ...where is the link to it
• ltbarcly3 4y ago
  Very desperate.
• vjtvalero 4y ago
  ChatGPT just saves us the inconvenience of skimming through the websites in the first page of Google Search. We have become even lazier. We just want to type in our thoughts and get an answer in seconds. Now, if Google does a ChatGPT-like experience in the Search, then I'd probably come back to Google. I won't mind the ads.
• auser987 4y ago
  https://chat.openai.com/chat https://chat.openai.com/chat Q: Is this boilerplate? AI is the most profound technology we are working on today. Whether it’s helping doctors detect diseases earlier or enabling people to access information in their own language, AI helps people, businesses and communities unlock their potential. And it opens up new opportunities that could significantly improve billions of lives. That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago — and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. A: Yes, this text is a boilerplate. Q: Why? A: This text appears to be a standardized or formulaic description of the value of AI technology and its potential impact, likely used as a marketing or promotional tool by a company. Boilerplate language is often used to convey a consistent message across various platforms or materials.
• bzbee10 4y ago
  Here's a concrete scenario: StackOverflow makes money because people go to it for answers to their questions. The answers are provided by people who write them because they get points for providing good answers, that they use for reputation points to get good jobs. It's an ecosystem. Everybody profits. Now Google scrapes the contents, and provides a service where you just ask your question and it gives the best, most accurate answer. Nobody goes to StackOverflow any more. People stop posting answers, because nobody asks the questions, and nobody reads their answers any more. StackOverlow goes under, and the ecosystem dies. Where does Google gets its information now? The feeder pipeline has died.
  • arbol 4y ago
    I use github copilot to create simple functions by typing the function name and copilot does the rest. This works reasonably well for basic stuff. It becomes unhelpful and starts creating incorrect paths to library functions as soon as you add your work context.
    • jb1991 4y ago
      This doesn't address the parent's excellent question: how do these models continually get trained and updated if they put their key sources of training data out of business? Related: I'd be quite worried if I was a Q/A site like StackOverflow or Quora.
      • abliefern 4y ago
        > This doesn't address the parent's excellent question That's a large part of HN in a nutshell.
      • Kiro 4y ago
        It's not excellent. It's a red herring. Google is already showing responses on the SERP without you having to go to SO, without AI, and the hypothetical scenario hasn't happened.
      • lebed2045 4y ago
• amai 4y ago
  Without citing its sources chatGPT, Bard and others will quickly accumulate a lot of law suites because of copyright and content violations. Just think about what happened with Google News in Europe: Google needs to license its content: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/google-licenses-content-from-news-publishers-under-the-eu-copyright-directive/ https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/google-li... And with citing its sources an AI search answer is basically like an individualised Wikipedia article for your question. That is not much different from the list of search results, now. Except there will be more text in between the links. This will make it more difficult to influence the ranking of the cited search results by means of SEO. This is because like in a Wikipedia article the order of the citations depends more on the order of the content of the article, not so much on the relevance of the citation for the article as a whole. So I think these new AI search engines will not be so much a "Google killer", but they will be more a "SEO killer".
• coding123 4y ago
  My ONLY question: where's imagen?