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There's definitely something amiss. Maybe we're just not seeing the whole picture, but Google has the best potential out there still. Not only vast and fundamen

There's definitely something amiss. Maybe we're just not seeing the whole picture, but Google has the best potential out there still. Not only vast and fundamental research came out their door (presumably there's more), but they also have their own compute resources and an up-to-date copy of internet.zip and gmail.zip and youtube.zip which they can train on vs what small and stale stuff (compared to Google's data) OpenAI trained their stuff on (like common crawl etc.). What gives, Google? Get on it! edit: I forgot all about google_maps.zip / waze.gz and all the juicy traffic data coming from android.. which probably already relies heavily on AI

danans 3y ago
> gmail.zip Despite what people often write and believe here, the access controls on PII data at Google are incredibly strict. You can't just arbitrarily train on people's personal data. I know, because when I was there, working on search backend data mining, in order to get access to anonymized search and web logs, I had to sign paperwork that essentially said I'd be taken to the cleaners if I abused the access. > What gives, Google? Get on it It's a very difficult decision to intentionally destabilize the space you are the leader in, for all the reasons you can imagine. In a sense, Google needed someone else with nothing to lose to shake up the space. How they execute in the new reality is yet to be seen. The biggest challenge they may have right now isn't technological, but that "ChatGPT" has become a sort of brand, like Kleenex and well, Google.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  You're right on both accounts. However, whatever's going on inside I still strongly believe in that company! Sometimes though it just feels like they don't themselves.
- paulkon 3y ago
  Well put, the brand awareness of ChatGPT is the biggest challenge they have now.
  - emilsedgh 3y ago
    I don't think it is. I'd prioritize their problems like this: 1. LLM's don't have a lucrative business model that Google needs. 2. The quality of their language model is really lacking as of now. You fix 1 and 2, ChatGPT's branding is nothing. Google is the biggest advertisement machine in the world and they can market the hell out of their product. Just see how Chrome gained ground on Firefox for example. Google is still used several folds more than ChatGPT and if you resolve 1 and 2, Google will make their money and their users have no incentive to go to ChatGPT.
  - dmix 3y ago
    Meh people would much prefer to be typing their prompts into a Google search box than opening a separate GPT app. I doubt there real issue here is a marketing one. Despite ChatGPT's massive growth numbers the market is pretty immature, it's still very much open and not yet decided. Many markets had early leaders who got stomped by later entrants.
    - twobitshifter 3y ago
      I once thought google+ would start grabbing everyone visiting google’s homepage and catch up to facebook’s network effect.
      - amf12 3y ago
        Social space vs enterprise space. How many companies would want llms integrated with their corporate data, but need trust about the data not being leaked? Microsoft and Google both have the capability and trust to make this available. When corporates start paying for LLMs, per user, or for applications, both Google and Microsoft and the two companies are in the best position. All other industries will be users paying for LLMS model access.
- illiarian 3y ago
  > Despite what people often write and believe here, the access controls on PII data at Google are incredibly strict. You can't just arbitrarily train on people's personal data. And yet Google is the largest online advertiser in the world. And yet, GMail used to (I don't know if it still does) push ads into people's inboxes. I have as much belief in their PII controls as in their "Don't be evil" motto.
  - JeremyBanks 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    i used gmail since the beta and never saw an ad there, what are you talking about?
    - illiarian 3y ago
      --- start quote --- https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads. ... To opt-out of the use of personal information for personalized Gmail ads, go to the Ads Settings page --- end quote --- They literally train their datasets on people's personal data.
      - Lacerda69 3y ago
        oh my bad i probably opted out right from the start then + heavy use of adblockers
anileated 3y ago
Google could stop sending traffic to webmasters and pivot to directly providing answers based on scraped data long, long ago, but Google knew webmasters would be up in arms over such a blatant bait and switch taking away their traffic and revenue. OpenAI subverted this by riding on the “open” part of their name at first—before doing a 180-degree turn and selling out to Microsoft.
- mejutoco 3y ago
  I think it is more a case of the advertisers, since there would be little opportunity to show ads. Receiving traffic to sites is nice, especially for already highly-ranked results, but these are not the people buying the ads.
  - anileated 3y ago
    They could just as easily show ads in answers, the advertisers wouldn’t care. In fact, I can see how a major advertiser would rather prefer that an ad is shown in Google’s own trusted UI rather than on some random website next to who knows what sort of content (that motivation is behind YouTube’s “demonetization”).
    - mejutoco 3y ago
      I was referring to google‘s one ui but I agree with you. I am wondering if all the going back and forth by not finding what you are looking for increased the ad numbers (even if short term).
arcatech 3y ago
Google is great at technology and bad at making actual products. This all makes sense to me.
narrator 3y ago
The announcement felt cautious and political, like they are running for technological ruler of the world and not a company trying to make money. This is probably why they are not going to not get very far against their competitors despite having so much potential. They care too much about what the EU and governments everywhere think of them now. They are no longer a profit making entity that disrupts and pushes the rules. They are part of maintaining the status quo.
kmeisthax 3y ago
The difference between OpenAI and Google is that the latter's ethical concerns with AI are more deeply held. Google gave us the Stochastic Parrots paper[0] - effectively a very long argument as to why they shouldn't build their own ChatGPT. OpenAI uses ethics as a handwave to justify becoming a for-profit business selling access to proprietary models through an API, citing the ability to implement user-hostile antifeatures as a deliberate prosocial benefit. To be clear, Google does use AI. They use it so heavily that they've designed four generations of training accelerators. All the fancy knowledge graph features used to keep you from clicking anything on the SERP are powered by large language models. The only thing they didn't do is turn Google Search into a chatbot, at least not until Microsoft and OpenAI one-upped them and Google felt competitive pressure to build what they thought was garbage. And yes, Google's customers share that belief. Remember that when Google Bard gets a fact about exoplanets wrong, it's a scandal. When Bing tries to gaslight its users into thinking that time stopped at the same time GPT-4's training did, it's funny. Bing can afford to make mistakes that Google can't, because nobody uses Bing if they want good search results. They use Bing if they can't be arsed to change the defaults[1]. [0] Or at least they did, then they fired the woman who wrote it [1] And yes that is why Microsoft really pushes Bing and Edge hard in Windows.
- neel8986 3y ago
  >> To be clear, Google does use AI. They use it so heavily that they've designed four generations of training accelerators. This +100 Somehow there is a perception that chat bots are the only example of AI research or product that matters and all AI organisations ability will be judged by their ability to create chatbots.
  - visarga 3y ago
    LLMs are the end-game for almost all NLP and CV tasks. You can freely specify the task description, input and output formats, unlike discriminative models. You don't need to retrain, don't need many examples, and most importantly - it works on tasks the developers of the LLM were not aware of at design time - "developer aware generalisation". LLMs are more like new programming languages than applications, pre-2020 neural nets were mostly applications.

danans 3y ago

> gmail.zip Despite what people often write and believe here, the access controls on PII data at Google are incredibly strict. You can't just arbitrarily train on people's personal data. I know, because when I was there, working on search backend data mining, in order to get access to anonymized search and web logs, I had to sign paperwork that essentially said I'd be taken to the cleaners if I abused the access. > What gives, Google? Get on it It's a very difficult decision to intentionally destabilize the space you are the leader in, for all the reasons you can imagine. In a sense, Google needed someone else with nothing to lose to shake up the space. How they execute in the new reality is yet to be seen. The biggest challenge they may have right now isn't technological, but that "ChatGPT" has become a sort of brand, like Kleenex and well, Google.

Keyframe 3y ago
You're right on both accounts. However, whatever's going on inside I still strongly believe in that company! Sometimes though it just feels like they don't themselves.
paulkon 3y ago
Well put, the brand awareness of ChatGPT is the biggest challenge they have now.
- emilsedgh 3y ago
  I don't think it is. I'd prioritize their problems like this: 1. LLM's don't have a lucrative business model that Google needs. 2. The quality of their language model is really lacking as of now. You fix 1 and 2, ChatGPT's branding is nothing. Google is the biggest advertisement machine in the world and they can market the hell out of their product. Just see how Chrome gained ground on Firefox for example. Google is still used several folds more than ChatGPT and if you resolve 1 and 2, Google will make their money and their users have no incentive to go to ChatGPT.
- dmix 3y ago
  Meh people would much prefer to be typing their prompts into a Google search box than opening a separate GPT app. I doubt there real issue here is a marketing one. Despite ChatGPT's massive growth numbers the market is pretty immature, it's still very much open and not yet decided. Many markets had early leaders who got stomped by later entrants.
  - twobitshifter 3y ago
    I once thought google+ would start grabbing everyone visiting google’s homepage and catch up to facebook’s network effect.
    - amf12 3y ago
      Social space vs enterprise space. How many companies would want llms integrated with their corporate data, but need trust about the data not being leaked? Microsoft and Google both have the capability and trust to make this available. When corporates start paying for LLMs, per user, or for applications, both Google and Microsoft and the two companies are in the best position. All other industries will be users paying for LLMS model access.
illiarian 3y ago
> Despite what people often write and believe here, the access controls on PII data at Google are incredibly strict. You can't just arbitrarily train on people's personal data. And yet Google is the largest online advertiser in the world. And yet, GMail used to (I don't know if it still does) push ads into people's inboxes. I have as much belief in their PII controls as in their "Don't be evil" motto.
- JeremyBanks 3y ago
  [dead]
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  i used gmail since the beta and never saw an ad there, what are you talking about?
  - illiarian 3y ago
    --- start quote --- https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads. ... To opt-out of the use of personal information for personalized Gmail ads, go to the Ads Settings page --- end quote --- They literally train their datasets on people's personal data.
    - Lacerda69 3y ago
      oh my bad i probably opted out right from the start then + heavy use of adblockers

anileated 3y ago

Google could stop sending traffic to webmasters and pivot to directly providing answers based on scraped data long, long ago, but Google knew webmasters would be up in arms over such a blatant bait and switch taking away their traffic and revenue. OpenAI subverted this by riding on the “open” part of their name at first—before doing a 180-degree turn and selling out to Microsoft.

mejutoco 3y ago
I think it is more a case of the advertisers, since there would be little opportunity to show ads. Receiving traffic to sites is nice, especially for already highly-ranked results, but these are not the people buying the ads.
- anileated 3y ago
  They could just as easily show ads in answers, the advertisers wouldn’t care. In fact, I can see how a major advertiser would rather prefer that an ad is shown in Google’s own trusted UI rather than on some random website next to who knows what sort of content (that motivation is behind YouTube’s “demonetization”).
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    I was referring to google‘s one ui but I agree with you. I am wondering if all the going back and forth by not finding what you are looking for increased the ad numbers (even if short term).

arcatech 3y ago

Google is great at technology and bad at making actual products. This all makes sense to me.

narrator 3y ago

The announcement felt cautious and political, like they are running for technological ruler of the world and not a company trying to make money. This is probably why they are not going to not get very far against their competitors despite having so much potential. They care too much about what the EU and governments everywhere think of them now. They are no longer a profit making entity that disrupts and pushes the rules. They are part of maintaining the status quo.

kmeisthax 3y ago

The difference between OpenAI and Google is that the latter's ethical concerns with AI are more deeply held. Google gave us the Stochastic Parrots paper[0] - effectively a very long argument as to why they shouldn't build their own ChatGPT. OpenAI uses ethics as a handwave to justify becoming a for-profit business selling access to proprietary models through an API, citing the ability to implement user-hostile antifeatures as a deliberate prosocial benefit. To be clear, Google does use AI. They use it so heavily that they've designed four generations of training accelerators. All the fancy knowledge graph features used to keep you from clicking anything on the SERP are powered by large language models. The only thing they didn't do is turn Google Search into a chatbot, at least not until Microsoft and OpenAI one-upped them and Google felt competitive pressure to build what they thought was garbage. And yes, Google's customers share that belief. Remember that when Google Bard gets a fact about exoplanets wrong, it's a scandal. When Bing tries to gaslight its users into thinking that time stopped at the same time GPT-4's training did, it's funny. Bing can afford to make mistakes that Google can't, because nobody uses Bing if they want good search results. They use Bing if they can't be arsed to change the defaults[1]. [0] Or at least they did, then they fired the woman who wrote it [1] And yes that is why Microsoft really pushes Bing and Edge hard in Windows.

neel8986 3y ago
>> To be clear, Google does use AI. They use it so heavily that they've designed four generations of training accelerators. This +100 Somehow there is a perception that chat bots are the only example of AI research or product that matters and all AI organisations ability will be judged by their ability to create chatbots.
- visarga 3y ago
  LLMs are the end-game for almost all NLP and CV tasks. You can freely specify the task description, input and output formats, unlike discriminative models. You don't need to retrain, don't need many examples, and most importantly - it works on tasks the developers of the LLM were not aware of at design time - "developer aware generalisation". LLMs are more like new programming languages than applications, pre-2020 neural nets were mostly applications.