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This gets attention due to being a leak, but it’s still just one Googler’s opinion and it has signs of being overstated for rhetorical effect. In particular, d

This gets attention due to being a leak, but it’s still just one Googler’s opinion and it has signs of being overstated for rhetorical effect. In particular, demos aren’t the same as products. Running a demo on one person’s phone is an important milestone, but if the device overheats and/or gets throttled then it’s not really something you’d want to run on your phone. It’s easy to claim that a problem is “solved” with a link to a demo when actually there’s more to do. People can link to projects they didn’t actually investigate. They can claim “parity” because they tried one thing and were impressed. Figuring out if something works well takes more effort. Could you write a product review, or did you just hear about it, or try it once? I haven’t investigated most projects either so I don’t know, but consider that things may not be moving quite as fast as demo-based hype indicates.

Animats 4y ago
It comes across as something from an open source enthusiast outside Google. Note the complete lack of references to monetization. Also, there's no sense of how this fits with other Google products. Given a chat engine, what do you do with it? Integrate it with search? With Gmail? With Google Docs? LLMs by themselves are fun, but their use will be as components of larger systems.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Yeah, but there are open source enthusiasts inside Google, too. People don’t necessarily change their opinions much when they start working at Google.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  Inside or out, it sounds like someone with an agenda to convince Google to release its model in the wild. I feel that all the more so because it is never stated explicitly but it's the obvious conclusion from reading between the lines. Things like hinting that Meta is a huge winner from LLaMa getting released (this isn't obvious to me at all). The pitch being that if Google makes its models public it can race back to the forefront of "owning" the AI space and then capture the value of owning the underlying platform, like Android and Chrome. The kind of scenario I imagine is that this is an insider who wants out but a huge amount of their work / investment / value is tied up with models they can't take with them.
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  I mean, all this talk about "moats" is directly tied to monetization. The leaker is saying "no matter what product we build with AI, equivalent open-source products will pop up free of charge, so we won't be able to charge for our product". And while integrating a LLM into, say, Google Docs can be a selling point, it's not going to be a moat if OSS developers have access to their own LLMs; end users are going to choose Google Docs over FoobarOffice Online™ because Google Docs has a slightly better auto-complete or whatever. So even if Google decides to integrates their LLM into Doc, it's not clear that it wouldn't benefit from open-sourcing that LLM and encouraging people to experiment on it.
- generalizations 4y ago
  Honestly, it kinda fits my perception of Google, which is that they don't really have good business sense for creating new products - they invent first, find applications after. This 'leak' feels like it has that same kind of perspective.

Animats 4y ago

It comes across as something from an open source enthusiast outside Google. Note the complete lack of references to monetization. Also, there's no sense of how this fits with other Google products. Given a chat engine, what do you do with it? Integrate it with search? With Gmail? With Google Docs? LLMs by themselves are fun, but their use will be as components of larger systems.

skybrian 4y ago
Yeah, but there are open source enthusiasts inside Google, too. People don’t necessarily change their opinions much when they start working at Google.
zmmmmm 4y ago
Inside or out, it sounds like someone with an agenda to convince Google to release its model in the wild. I feel that all the more so because it is never stated explicitly but it's the obvious conclusion from reading between the lines. Things like hinting that Meta is a huge winner from LLaMa getting released (this isn't obvious to me at all). The pitch being that if Google makes its models public it can race back to the forefront of "owning" the AI space and then capture the value of owning the underlying platform, like Android and Chrome. The kind of scenario I imagine is that this is an insider who wants out but a huge amount of their work / investment / value is tied up with models they can't take with them.
PoignardAzur 4y ago
I mean, all this talk about "moats" is directly tied to monetization. The leaker is saying "no matter what product we build with AI, equivalent open-source products will pop up free of charge, so we won't be able to charge for our product". And while integrating a LLM into, say, Google Docs can be a selling point, it's not going to be a moat if OSS developers have access to their own LLMs; end users are going to choose Google Docs over FoobarOffice Online™ because Google Docs has a slightly better auto-complete or whatever. So even if Google decides to integrates their LLM into Doc, it's not clear that it wouldn't benefit from open-sourcing that LLM and encouraging people to experiment on it.
generalizations 4y ago
Honestly, it kinda fits my perception of Google, which is that they don't really have good business sense for creating new products - they invent first, find applications after. This 'leak' feels like it has that same kind of perspective.