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I assume this is just a PR/IR-driven project to stay the "Google is Dead" headlines hence the budget, especially considering an oversized chunk was spent on the

I assume this is just a PR/IR-driven project to stay the "Google is Dead" headlines hence the budget, especially considering an oversized chunk was spent on the scaling law, doesn't seem they were serious about building a GPT4-killer. I wasn't aware autoregressive LLMs were still considered an existential threat to Google. What's the threat supposed to be, ChatGPT is just going to keep eating Google search market share burning Microsoft capital on infra a la the Uber model or do they make money off of that at some point? Seems farfetched OpenAI can compete with Google's resources, vertical integration down to the TPU and access to significantly more training data.

sanxiyn 3y ago
I agree that if training data is what matters, it is likely that no one can compete with Google with Google Books, which scanned 25 million volumes (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/arts/international/google-books-a-complex-and-controversial-experiment.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/arts/international/google-...), which is approximately all the books. DeepMind's RETRO paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04426 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04426 mentions a dataset called MassiveText, which includes 20 million books of 3T tokens. So we know Google is using Google Books, since there is simply no other source of 20 million books. Also as far as I know 3T tokens is more than publicly known to be used by anyone so far: Google could train on more data than anyone else, solely from Google Books, even without using its web crawl. Edit: it was 2005(!), so it is possible that many of you haven't heard of this. George Dyson, in Turing's Cathedral written in 2005 says: > My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral: not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI." https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-turings-cathedral https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-turings-cathe... Read the whole thing. It is not an accident Google got Google Books to train AI. That was the plan from the start.
- fomine3 3y ago
  And YouTube. It's quite big datasets. Books is great for higher quality source.

sanxiyn 3y ago

I agree that if training data is what matters, it is likely that no one can compete with Google with Google Books, which scanned 25 million volumes (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/arts/international/google-books-a-complex-and-controversial-experiment.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/arts/international/google-...), which is approximately all the books. DeepMind's RETRO paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04426 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04426 mentions a dataset called MassiveText, which includes 20 million books of 3T tokens. So we know Google is using Google Books, since there is simply no other source of 20 million books. Also as far as I know 3T tokens is more than publicly known to be used by anyone so far: Google could train on more data than anyone else, solely from Google Books, even without using its web crawl. Edit: it was 2005(!), so it is possible that many of you haven't heard of this. George Dyson, in Turing's Cathedral written in 2005 says: > My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral: not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI." https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-turings-cathedral https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-turings-cathe... Read the whole thing. It is not an accident Google got Google Books to train AI. That was the plan from the start.

fomine3 3y ago
And YouTube. It's quite big datasets. Books is great for higher quality source.