14 ms·

A couple of thoughts: - This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step to mit

A couple of thoughts: - This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step to mitigating those fears. - Google has currently given ~300M to Anthropic and has a partnership with them. I assume Google continues to see potential in both avenues and won't neglect one AI team for the other. I'm guessing that DeepMind will be their primary focus because of the numerous, real-world applications already at play. - It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. They seem to be very different approaches. Yet, they both have support for language and imagery. So, perhaps they aren't that different afterall? - Still waiting to hear more from Google on how they plan to leverage their novel PaLM architecture. The API for it was released a month ago, but, to my awareness, has yet to take the world by storm. (Q: Bard isn't powered by PaLM, right?) Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area. I trust DeepMind's team and I trust Google's research teams, but Google's ability to execute and take products to market has been quite weak thus far. My gut says this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy.

Xeoncross 4y ago
Yeah, the message seems be "Wait, we're still here! Don't forget about us and we promise we'll catch up!" > Announcing Google DeepMind... launched DeepMind back in 2010 ...
notatoad 4y ago
>pushing resources into DeepMind is this a influx of resources, or consolidation and cutbacks? i read it as google used to have two different ai research teams, and now they have one fewer than they used to. they've shut down at least one deepmind office recently: https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmonton-site-as-part-of-google-layoffs/ https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmon...
GreedClarifies 4y ago
"this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy." I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google. Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research paper game and into the product game. Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward. Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment between the company's goals and those of the employees. Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine, but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't that wealthy.
- mrbungie 4y ago
  I don't know if said bureaucracy is a blessing or a curse given Google's track record in product management. If pressed I would bet towards the curse option.
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  >DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. DeepMind has researched and developed features that exist in many Google products today, e.g. Wavenet: https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/wavenet https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/waven...
  - ur-whale 4y ago
    LOL, if you look at the amount of money Google has poured into Google and how much they got back for their investment, it's laughable. Things like the Wavenet "contributions" are just Demis paying lip service to the fact that once in a while Google was nudging them to produce something, anything really that was actually useful.
    - scottyah 4y ago
      Google putting the extreme amounts of easy dollars they have into things that aren't instantly profitable is very much what the founders said they'd do though
- tempusalaria 4y ago
  In 2021 Deepmind generated $2bln in revenue. This was paid by Google for unspecified research services. But the way it’s accounted for it’s likely that it was based on some legitimate contribution. It is unlikely it would be structured this way if it was just corporate support. DeepMind has public financial filings and you can go read the exact language they use to describe the revenue they generate.
  - dougmwne 4y ago
jstx1 4y ago
> It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. Is it tough because one of these is a newly merged and rebranded team and the other is a machine learning model?
- atorodius 4y ago
  Yoo this killed me :D
neel8986 4y ago
>> Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area. Yes the team which literally created transformer and almost all the important open research including Bert, T5, imagen, RLHF, ViT don't have the ability to execute on AI /s. Tell me one innovation OpenAI bought into the field. They are good at execution but i havent seen anything novel coming out of them.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  There are plenty of products that launch on top tools and frameworks that are worth far more than the underlying will ever be. OpenAI is creating products, DeepMind was creating tools. It's not a matter of skill as much as objective. And DeepMind would still be starting at zero if they decide to pivot to products.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    Look at SIP vs Facetime. We already had SIP av calls forever, few ever heard of it.
    - ioblomov 4y ago
      I certainly haven’t! But the canonical example would be Xerox’s Alto vs the Macintosh.
- mlinsey 4y ago
  Drawing a bright line between research vs products and considering only the former to be "innovation" is a way to become quickly irrelevant.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    +1. Bell labs said hi
  - neel8986 4y ago
    Product based on no fundamental innovation is also a path to irrelevance. If there was even something remotely defensible in GPTs then OpenAI would not have sold 50% of company for 10B dollar. Only a matter of time and large about of human in the loop will bring any large transformer model into the same space as shown by recent models like alpaca and vicuña are showing that. Only thing the whole thing has done is no labs will open source any major breakthroughs anymore
throwntoday 4y ago
And here I thought that Google would achieve AI supremacy because of all the data they have been vacuuming for decades, turns out they haven't even thought to utilize it? How did they drop the ball so hard? OpenAI has been around for less than a decade and as a smaller team with less resources was able to make a better product.
- cfeduke 4y ago
  Though this is usually how it goes - big successful companies begin to bend towards regulatory capture after having their period of upstart growth and disruption. They make as much money as possible for shareholders on their cash cow and its management culture's primary objective to make sure this is not disturbed. Think about how many decades head start IBM had to perfect search, but search wasn't their core competency. Delivering advertisements is Google's core competency.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bradgessler 4y ago
This reminds me of Nest. When it was separate, it was shipping great hardware and OK software. Then Google appended "Google" in front of it, creating "Google Nest" and kicked off the slow Google Hug of Death™. The first casualty was Nest shutting down its APIs, cutting off an ecosystem of third party integrations. The next casualty was replacing the Nest app with the Google Home app. I stopped following Nest after that because I sold all the Nest stuff I owned and replaced it all with HomeKit. It's astounding how Google keeps doing this, and its shareholders seem to go along with it. I agree, given their track record, its hard to be optimistic about anything Google slaps their name in front of.
1024core 4y ago
> It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. You are comparing an organization to a DNN model? It would be tough for anybody.
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  Yeah, fair, the way I expressed myself sounded stupid. What I meant to say was something like: "I don't believe that DeepMind is openly making use of LLM technologies. They're known for their neural networks operating at a pixel-level rather than a token-level. I don't know which of these approaches has more long-term commercial viability."
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Google Brain is known for their LLMs
    - SeanAnderson 4y ago
      Okay, thanks! I need to read up more on Google Brain.
  - 1024core 4y ago
    > I don't believe that DeepMind is openly making use of LLM technologies. I think they are. e.g., https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-of-compute-optimal-large-language-model-training https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-...
kernal 4y ago
>Google is panicked about losing the AI race What a shortsighted statement for a race that has barely gotten out of the gates. But, if any one company should be panicking then it's OpenAI at the thought of losing their minimal lead and getting crushed by the company, that invented most of the technology they use, put a significant amount of resources behind their AI initiatives.
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  I don't find it to be that shortsighted? Google Search had an outage yesterday. Google just underwent its first round of layoffs ever which definitely affects internal morale and makes all employees aware of their company's mortality. Google's CEO was in the news last week for hiding communications while under a legal hold. Google stock tanked with the rushed demo of Bard. And, even if all those things weren't true, Google has continually failed to establish revenue streams independent from ads and continually abandons products that don't meet their expectations. Consumer confidence in new Google product announcements is lower than any other major tech company - the default assumption is that the product will be pulled months/years later. Microsoft is giving their full support to OpenAI through their 49% partnership. $13B investment compared to Google buying DeepMind for $500M and investing $300M in Anthropic. Microsoft has good working agreements with the US government, a long history of unreasonable support for their flagship products, clawed their way back to being one of the most valuable companies in the world by finding diverse revenue streams, and, frankly, comes across as the wise adult in the room given they already had their day in the sun with legal battles. I agree completely that if there continue to be marked revolutions in AI that invalidate current SOTA then those innovations are likely to arise from Google's research labs, but from an execution standpoint I have nothing but concerns for Google. It's crazy that I feel they need a second chance in the AI revolution when LLMs originated from inside their org just a few years ago. And it's not like they don't feel similarly - there've been countless articles about "Code Red" at Google as they try to rapidly adjust their strategy around AI. I think OpenAI has a wider leader than people are acknowledging. It's like everyone was forced to show their AI-hand the last couple of months, in an attempt to appease shareholders, and it seemed like a fair fight until GPT4 hit the ground running. Now we're looking at agents and multi-modal support ontop of $200M/yr revenue when everyone else has no business plan and has yet to announce any looming upgrades. At a certain point, first-mover advantage compounds, the foremost AI app store becomes established, and people building commercial products will become entrenched.
1-6 4y ago
AI is not a winner takes all scenario. The pond is so large that there will be many winners. One day, with AGI and autonomous agents, the goal will be to merge neural network meshes together in order to gather highly specialized datasets.
kypro 4y ago
> This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step to mitigating those fears. Google trying to "win" the super-human AGI race is even more flawed than a nation trying to "win" the nuclear arms race. At least with a nuclear arms race we all die quickly. Super-human AGI will probably just bring about unthinkable levels of suffering before finally killing us all.

Xeoncross 4y ago

Yeah, the message seems be "Wait, we're still here! Don't forget about us and we promise we'll catch up!" > Announcing Google DeepMind... launched DeepMind back in 2010 ...

notatoad 4y ago

>pushing resources into DeepMind is this a influx of resources, or consolidation and cutbacks? i read it as google used to have two different ai research teams, and now they have one fewer than they used to. they've shut down at least one deepmind office recently: https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmonton-site-as-part-of-google-layoffs/ https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmon...

GreedClarifies 4y ago

"this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy." I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google. Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research paper game and into the product game. Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward. Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment between the company's goals and those of the employees. Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine, but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't that wealthy.

mrbungie 4y ago
I don't know if said bureaucracy is a blessing or a curse given Google's track record in product management. If pressed I would bet towards the curse option.
minsc_and_boo 4y ago
>DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. DeepMind has researched and developed features that exist in many Google products today, e.g. Wavenet: https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/wavenet https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/waven...
- ur-whale 4y ago
  LOL, if you look at the amount of money Google has poured into Google and how much they got back for their investment, it's laughable. Things like the Wavenet "contributions" are just Demis paying lip service to the fact that once in a while Google was nudging them to produce something, anything really that was actually useful.
  - scottyah 4y ago
    Google putting the extreme amounts of easy dollars they have into things that aren't instantly profitable is very much what the founders said they'd do though
tempusalaria 4y ago
In 2021 Deepmind generated $2bln in revenue. This was paid by Google for unspecified research services. But the way it’s accounted for it’s likely that it was based on some legitimate contribution. It is unlikely it would be structured this way if it was just corporate support. DeepMind has public financial filings and you can go read the exact language they use to describe the revenue they generate.
- dougmwne 4y ago

jstx1 4y ago

> It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. Is it tough because one of these is a newly merged and rebranded team and the other is a machine learning model?

atorodius 4y ago
Yoo this killed me :D

neel8986 4y ago

>> Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area. Yes the team which literally created transformer and almost all the important open research including Bert, T5, imagen, RLHF, ViT don't have the ability to execute on AI /s. Tell me one innovation OpenAI bought into the field. They are good at execution but i havent seen anything novel coming out of them.

throwntoday 4y ago
There are plenty of products that launch on top tools and frameworks that are worth far more than the underlying will ever be. OpenAI is creating products, DeepMind was creating tools. It's not a matter of skill as much as objective. And DeepMind would still be starting at zero if they decide to pivot to products.
- user3939382 4y ago
  Look at SIP vs Facetime. We already had SIP av calls forever, few ever heard of it.
  - ioblomov 4y ago
    I certainly haven’t! But the canonical example would be Xerox’s Alto vs the Macintosh.
mlinsey 4y ago
Drawing a bright line between research vs products and considering only the former to be "innovation" is a way to become quickly irrelevant.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  +1. Bell labs said hi
- neel8986 4y ago
  Product based on no fundamental innovation is also a path to irrelevance. If there was even something remotely defensible in GPTs then OpenAI would not have sold 50% of company for 10B dollar. Only a matter of time and large about of human in the loop will bring any large transformer model into the same space as shown by recent models like alpaca and vicuña are showing that. Only thing the whole thing has done is no labs will open source any major breakthroughs anymore

throwntoday 4y ago

And here I thought that Google would achieve AI supremacy because of all the data they have been vacuuming for decades, turns out they haven't even thought to utilize it? How did they drop the ball so hard? OpenAI has been around for less than a decade and as a smaller team with less resources was able to make a better product.

cfeduke 4y ago
Though this is usually how it goes - big successful companies begin to bend towards regulatory capture after having their period of upstart growth and disruption. They make as much money as possible for shareholders on their cash cow and its management culture's primary objective to make sure this is not disturbed. Think about how many decades head start IBM had to perfect search, but search wasn't their core competency. Delivering advertisements is Google's core competency.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bradgessler 4y ago

This reminds me of Nest. When it was separate, it was shipping great hardware and OK software. Then Google appended "Google" in front of it, creating "Google Nest" and kicked off the slow Google Hug of Death™. The first casualty was Nest shutting down its APIs, cutting off an ecosystem of third party integrations. The next casualty was replacing the Nest app with the Google Home app. I stopped following Nest after that because I sold all the Nest stuff I owned and replaced it all with HomeKit. It's astounding how Google keeps doing this, and its shareholders seem to go along with it. I agree, given their track record, its hard to be optimistic about anything Google slaps their name in front of.

1024core 4y ago

> It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4. You are comparing an organization to a DNN model? It would be tough for anybody.

SeanAnderson 4y ago
Yeah, fair, the way I expressed myself sounded stupid. What I meant to say was something like: "I don't believe that DeepMind is openly making use of LLM technologies. They're known for their neural networks operating at a pixel-level rather than a token-level. I don't know which of these approaches has more long-term commercial viability."
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Google Brain is known for their LLMs
  - SeanAnderson 4y ago
    Okay, thanks! I need to read up more on Google Brain.
- 1024core 4y ago
  > I don't believe that DeepMind is openly making use of LLM technologies. I think they are. e.g., https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-of-compute-optimal-large-language-model-training https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-...

kernal 4y ago

>Google is panicked about losing the AI race What a shortsighted statement for a race that has barely gotten out of the gates. But, if any one company should be panicking then it's OpenAI at the thought of losing their minimal lead and getting crushed by the company, that invented most of the technology they use, put a significant amount of resources behind their AI initiatives.

SeanAnderson 4y ago
I don't find it to be that shortsighted? Google Search had an outage yesterday. Google just underwent its first round of layoffs ever which definitely affects internal morale and makes all employees aware of their company's mortality. Google's CEO was in the news last week for hiding communications while under a legal hold. Google stock tanked with the rushed demo of Bard. And, even if all those things weren't true, Google has continually failed to establish revenue streams independent from ads and continually abandons products that don't meet their expectations. Consumer confidence in new Google product announcements is lower than any other major tech company - the default assumption is that the product will be pulled months/years later. Microsoft is giving their full support to OpenAI through their 49% partnership. $13B investment compared to Google buying DeepMind for $500M and investing $300M in Anthropic. Microsoft has good working agreements with the US government, a long history of unreasonable support for their flagship products, clawed their way back to being one of the most valuable companies in the world by finding diverse revenue streams, and, frankly, comes across as the wise adult in the room given they already had their day in the sun with legal battles. I agree completely that if there continue to be marked revolutions in AI that invalidate current SOTA then those innovations are likely to arise from Google's research labs, but from an execution standpoint I have nothing but concerns for Google. It's crazy that I feel they need a second chance in the AI revolution when LLMs originated from inside their org just a few years ago. And it's not like they don't feel similarly - there've been countless articles about "Code Red" at Google as they try to rapidly adjust their strategy around AI. I think OpenAI has a wider leader than people are acknowledging. It's like everyone was forced to show their AI-hand the last couple of months, in an attempt to appease shareholders, and it seemed like a fair fight until GPT4 hit the ground running. Now we're looking at agents and multi-modal support ontop of $200M/yr revenue when everyone else has no business plan and has yet to announce any looming upgrades. At a certain point, first-mover advantage compounds, the foremost AI app store becomes established, and people building commercial products will become entrenched.

1-6 4y ago

AI is not a winner takes all scenario. The pond is so large that there will be many winners. One day, with AGI and autonomous agents, the goal will be to merge neural network meshes together in order to gather highly specialized datasets.

kypro 4y ago

> This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step to mitigating those fears. Google trying to "win" the super-human AGI race is even more flawed than a nation trying to "win" the nuclear arms race. At least with a nuclear arms race we all die quickly. Super-human AGI will probably just bring about unthinkable levels of suffering before finally killing us all.