4 ms·

This seems like attributing intent where there is none. AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them they just shill whatever the latest thing is.

This seems like attributing intent where there is none. AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them they just shill whatever the latest thing is. Google has no central AI strategy because the company has weak leadership and is largely directionless. The distributed actions of a lot of people does not amount to any concerted plan.

loudmax 3y ago
Absolutely this. Google could develop an AI that's superior to GPT-4. They may have already. Under their current leadership, it wouldn't make a difference anyway as they wouldn't know what to do with it. Google is on a fast track to becoming Xerox.
- anonylizard 3y ago
  Its called Gemini. Google's own mega-multimodal model. Google merged google brain and deepmind to start developing Gemini. All the talent left at Google to go all in on this. The other AI products at google were just polishing up their old stuff to hastily release. Gemini is their real attempt at catching up to GPT-4.
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    So far I have found Bard to be significantly worse at some basic tasks. A simple request to give me the text of the opening scene of King Lear met with a badly comical rewrite in modern prose that got basic things wrong (all the daughters professed their love for their father a and received equal shares of land & dowry) I point out the inaccuracy and reinforced my request for the exact verbatim text. And then proceeded to give— still— a rewritten version albeit slightly closer to the true text. Bing and ChatGPT both complied on the first try. On the other hand, bard performed much better at a more complex task: I provided fake data spanning six years and a few rows of different categories. I left the sixth year blank. Without prompting it, reformatted the from comma do you limited into a nice table. It also gave a brief summarization and analysis of the trends. When I asked follow-up questions he gave detailed responses that were moderately insightful for anyone that would be familiar with the data domain given a few minutes to review the data set. Finally, I asked it to give a projection of what the values would be for the final column, which I had left blank. It did so, with an explanation of the trend it observed, as well as a description of the linear regression model. It used it and apologized for not being able to give more complex modeling due to the Small data set. GPT-4 provided answers and analysis that were comparable in quality, but required additional rounds of prompting and clarification.
    - aix1 3y ago
      Just to disentangle this a bit, GP's post was about Gemini and you're responding about Bard. The two are different things. Gemini hasn't been trained yet; it's the next-gen thing that's currently being worked on (Pichai mentioned it at I/O). It obviously remains to be seen how good Gemini will be. I just wanted to clear up the apparent confusion.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - reaperman 3y ago
        I'd imagine you could extrapolate from PaLM/PaLI, which are both impressive.
trasz4 3y ago
>AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Why do you assume not being explicitly paid by Google means not being part of Google's marketing strategy? Google's whole business model is getting people to do work for free ("produce content") by making them believe they are doing something else.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I think they’re getting paid. The tweets are all similar, down to the wording of the intro. It’s unlike any organic AI trend on Twitter that I’ve seen, and it reeks of “we want you to mention these three things:” prompting from a Google-sponsored PR firm. I would’ve believed the first three were coincidence, but by the time I got to tweet number 4 I was already re-reading Submarine. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  - trasz4 3y ago
    But I'm not saying they are not getting paid - I'm saying they are not getting paid by Google. They might be making money on sponsored links, or being part of some content farm. Barnacles aren't aware of how they are working for their whale.
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      How can you be sure? I agree that’s a possibility, but you seem certain. It seems more unlikely they’re not getting paid.
      - trasz4 3y ago
        Because when something is possible and the incentives are there, then it's either already happening, or will eventually happen.
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    > The tweets are all similar, down to the wording of the intro This is what happens when they are all using the same ab testing and title generation tech.
zarkenfrood 3y ago
Google are taking the time to make sure that there is not much that comes back. With being the incumbent leader comes the greater risks of regulatory problems an reputational damage. OpenAI get something wrong is annoying Google do it and it damages the business much more significantly. They will attract regulator scrutiny far harder than other operators will.
- klibertp 3y ago
  I guess that's also the reason why OpenAI is MS's in 49% and not 51%. Seems like a tried and true strategy.
asdfman123 3y ago
Covert public opinion campaigns are incredibly common, especially on Twitter. Google has billions of dollars it doesn’t know what to do with: they can certainly part with a tiny fraction of it and pay some PR firm to save face after the ChatGPT thing. What often happens is a few paid employees get the ball rolling and everyone else starts doing the hyping for free.
fakedang 3y ago
> AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them they just shill whatever the latest thing is. I thought this was the case, until I saw how identical all of the messages were, including the order of the bullet points. It was clearly some form of paid marketing - or fake accounts, except they all had blue ticks (not that that means much these days).
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > I thought this was the case, until I saw how identical all of the messages were, including the order of the bullet points. This has always been the case for all corporate fanbois on Twitter. As an ancient example: there was a time when Steve Jobs proclaimed that 3.5" screens were the perfect size, and 5.5"/6" phones were too big(!!). This was followed by suspiciously similar talking points recirculating in the "iPhone Twitter" echo-chamber[0]: including the same doctored image[1] that compared thumb-coverage of a 3.5' iPhone vs the Galaxy Note (IIRC). I don't think Apple was directly paying people to say those things: they simply confirmed their biases and they felt compelled to share the "truth". 0. Trended on Twitter, and even appeared on blogs written by Apple superfans like Marco Arment and Gruber 1. The phones were not to scale and the image was inaccurate in a way that was unfavorable towards the non-iPhone phablet.
bigcat12345678 3y ago
> Google has no central AI strategy because the company has weak leadership and is largely directionless. Evidence please？
ethbr0 3y ago
Can we also observe how ridiculous it is to be arguing over whether or not similar Twitter content is first-party astroturf... about generative AI? That's a bit like debating whether a gold miner is proficient at alchemy -- if the primary endeavor was actually successful, it would preclude needing to engage in the secondary. If you had higher-quality generative AI, wouldn't writing marketing tweets, instead of paying for them, be the first thing you used it for?
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
I think they are suffering Monopolyitis. Here's what happened to anything even decent at Microsoft: some shitty nakedly sociopathic MBA comes in and starts picking it apart for blatantly anticompetitive or monopoly protecting concerns, and the tech people behind it lose all morale and say "fuck it, it's a day job". Here's what happens to anything at Google: some shitty "product manager" (toootally different that the microsoft monopoly MBAs. Totally.) comes in and says "how do we sell more ads with this". And... well, yeah same thing happens.
r13a 3y ago
We can safely assume that a lot of YouTube/Twitter influencers get help from ChatGPT to design their titles/messages. This is documented by some prominent AI vloggers. A quick test on ChatGPT asking for YouTube titles on new Bare announcement vs ChatGPT comes back with: """ ChatGPT in Trouble: Bard's Arrival Sends Shockwaves Through the AI Community! ;) """ What you find fun is that Bard gives suggestions that are much less catchy than ChatGPT: So you still need ChatGPT to write trash about ChatGPT

loudmax 3y ago

Absolutely this. Google could develop an AI that's superior to GPT-4. They may have already. Under their current leadership, it wouldn't make a difference anyway as they wouldn't know what to do with it. Google is on a fast track to becoming Xerox.

anonylizard 3y ago
Its called Gemini. Google's own mega-multimodal model. Google merged google brain and deepmind to start developing Gemini. All the talent left at Google to go all in on this. The other AI products at google were just polishing up their old stuff to hastily release. Gemini is their real attempt at catching up to GPT-4.
- ineedasername 3y ago
  So far I have found Bard to be significantly worse at some basic tasks. A simple request to give me the text of the opening scene of King Lear met with a badly comical rewrite in modern prose that got basic things wrong (all the daughters professed their love for their father a and received equal shares of land & dowry) I point out the inaccuracy and reinforced my request for the exact verbatim text. And then proceeded to give— still— a rewritten version albeit slightly closer to the true text. Bing and ChatGPT both complied on the first try. On the other hand, bard performed much better at a more complex task: I provided fake data spanning six years and a few rows of different categories. I left the sixth year blank. Without prompting it, reformatted the from comma do you limited into a nice table. It also gave a brief summarization and analysis of the trends. When I asked follow-up questions he gave detailed responses that were moderately insightful for anyone that would be familiar with the data domain given a few minutes to review the data set. Finally, I asked it to give a projection of what the values would be for the final column, which I had left blank. It did so, with an explanation of the trend it observed, as well as a description of the linear regression model. It used it and apologized for not being able to give more complex modeling due to the Small data set. GPT-4 provided answers and analysis that were comparable in quality, but required additional rounds of prompting and clarification.
  - aix1 3y ago
    Just to disentangle this a bit, GP's post was about Gemini and you're responding about Bard. The two are different things. Gemini hasn't been trained yet; it's the next-gen thing that's currently being worked on (Pichai mentioned it at I/O). It obviously remains to be seen how good Gemini will be. I just wanted to clear up the apparent confusion.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - reaperman 3y ago
      I'd imagine you could extrapolate from PaLM/PaLI, which are both impressive.

trasz4 3y ago

>AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Why do you assume not being explicitly paid by Google means not being part of Google's marketing strategy? Google's whole business model is getting people to do work for free ("produce content") by making them believe they are doing something else.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
I think they’re getting paid. The tweets are all similar, down to the wording of the intro. It’s unlike any organic AI trend on Twitter that I’ve seen, and it reeks of “we want you to mention these three things:” prompting from a Google-sponsored PR firm. I would’ve believed the first three were coincidence, but by the time I got to tweet number 4 I was already re-reading Submarine. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- trasz4 3y ago
  But I'm not saying they are not getting paid - I'm saying they are not getting paid by Google. They might be making money on sponsored links, or being part of some content farm. Barnacles aren't aware of how they are working for their whale.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    How can you be sure? I agree that’s a possibility, but you seem certain. It seems more unlikely they’re not getting paid.
    - trasz4 3y ago
      Because when something is possible and the incentives are there, then it's either already happening, or will eventually happen.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > The tweets are all similar, down to the wording of the intro This is what happens when they are all using the same ab testing and title generation tech.

zarkenfrood 3y ago

Google are taking the time to make sure that there is not much that comes back. With being the incumbent leader comes the greater risks of regulatory problems an reputational damage. OpenAI get something wrong is annoying Google do it and it damages the business much more significantly. They will attract regulator scrutiny far harder than other operators will.

klibertp 3y ago
I guess that's also the reason why OpenAI is MS's in 49% and not 51%. Seems like a tried and true strategy.

asdfman123 3y ago

Covert public opinion campaigns are incredibly common, especially on Twitter. Google has billions of dollars it doesn’t know what to do with: they can certainly part with a tiny fraction of it and pay some PR firm to save face after the ChatGPT thing. What often happens is a few paid employees get the ball rolling and everyone else starts doing the hyping for free.

fakedang 3y ago

> AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them they just shill whatever the latest thing is. I thought this was the case, until I saw how identical all of the messages were, including the order of the bullet points. It was clearly some form of paid marketing - or fake accounts, except they all had blue ticks (not that that means much these days).

sangnoir 3y ago
> I thought this was the case, until I saw how identical all of the messages were, including the order of the bullet points. This has always been the case for all corporate fanbois on Twitter. As an ancient example: there was a time when Steve Jobs proclaimed that 3.5" screens were the perfect size, and 5.5"/6" phones were too big(!!). This was followed by suspiciously similar talking points recirculating in the "iPhone Twitter" echo-chamber[0]: including the same doctored image[1] that compared thumb-coverage of a 3.5' iPhone vs the Galaxy Note (IIRC). I don't think Apple was directly paying people to say those things: they simply confirmed their biases and they felt compelled to share the "truth". 0. Trended on Twitter, and even appeared on blogs written by Apple superfans like Marco Arment and Gruber 1. The phones were not to scale and the image was inaccurate in a way that was unfavorable towards the non-iPhone phablet.

bigcat12345678 3y ago

> Google has no central AI strategy because the company has weak leadership and is largely directionless. Evidence please？

ethbr0 3y ago

Can we also observe how ridiculous it is to be arguing over whether or not similar Twitter content is first-party astroturf... about generative AI? That's a bit like debating whether a gold miner is proficient at alchemy -- if the primary endeavor was actually successful, it would preclude needing to engage in the secondary. If you had higher-quality generative AI, wouldn't writing marketing tweets, instead of paying for them, be the first thing you used it for?

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

I think they are suffering Monopolyitis. Here's what happened to anything even decent at Microsoft: some shitty nakedly sociopathic MBA comes in and starts picking it apart for blatantly anticompetitive or monopoly protecting concerns, and the tech people behind it lose all morale and say "fuck it, it's a day job". Here's what happens to anything at Google: some shitty "product manager" (toootally different that the microsoft monopoly MBAs. Totally.) comes in and says "how do we sell more ads with this". And... well, yeah same thing happens.

r13a 3y ago

We can safely assume that a lot of YouTube/Twitter influencers get help from ChatGPT to design their titles/messages. This is documented by some prominent AI vloggers. A quick test on ChatGPT asking for YouTube titles on new Bare announcement vs ChatGPT comes back with: """ ChatGPT in Trouble: Bard's Arrival Sends Shockwaves Through the AI Community! ;) """ What you find fun is that Bard gives suggestions that are much less catchy than ChatGPT: So you still need ChatGPT to write trash about ChatGPT