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Google was certainly completely caught of guard. Then they said there version was more powerful and released it and it was certainly not. Then they said they ha

Google was certainly completely caught of guard. Then they said there version was more powerful and released it and it was certainly not. Then they said they had a more powerful version coming out soon that would be much more powerful, and they released Bard which was far behind ChatGPT. Now they are saying Gemini is going to be as powerful but now until early 2024 and of course by then presumably will be behind what ChatGPT is so they are also now touting there is Claude coming someday that will be even more powerful, which seems as unlikely as their past attempts. ChatGPT was able to gather so much data without restrictions and now companies late to the party will have many more restrictions and their tools will be much more limited presumably. Any secret sauce Google can develop ChatGPT presumably will be able too. Apple’s may be the most limited as they may want to be the most cautious and privacy orientated but Siri can’t get any worse so excited for any improvements.

ur-whale 3y ago
> Google was certainly completely caught of guard. They weren't. Their AI research team is completely dysfunctional and unfocused. They're only interested in doing research and are entirely incapable of the engineering and product focus necessary to build something like ChatGPT. That isn't the same thing as being caught off guard.
- itchy_spider44 3y ago
  The execs were. They've been paying millions for a top-tier AI devteam hoping for something like ChatGPT, just to find out that their devteam made and freely released the transformers research that ChatGPT is based on (derp) As always, Google has incredible ideas and promise but lacks business execution
- siva7 3y ago
  So they were caught of guard, maybe not from a research pov but certainly from a product pov. They are behind and are just playing catch-up for over a year now that it's safe to say that they don't have any competitive advantage over microsoft/openai anymore
  - dietr1ch 3y ago
    It's not caught off guard. Google simply can't do products because of how career growth works. You don't get promoted for polishing things other than ad revenue. It's all about launching things built in a hasty way.
- hn8305823 3y ago
  This article was posted just a few weeks before ChatGPT was released: https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-rest-vest-days-for-sr-employees-are-over-says-ceo-its-a-brilliant-idea.html https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-rest-vest-days-for-s... Too little too late?
  - ur-whale 3y ago
    > Too little too late? Announcing things and actually executing on said announcements are two very different things. Sundar has never been able to tell the difference between the two.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Well atleast others are using all the research coming out of Google for all of this. DALLE and chatGPT are both the result of research papers directly from Google research.
- danans 3y ago
  > They weren't. Correct, but not for the reason you gave. > Their AI research team is completely dysfunctional and unfocused. The bigger problem was that they saw the major problems with trustworthiness of LLMs and felt there was still too much brand risk to Google. OpenAI had no such problem.
resource0x 3y ago
Remember this? “We should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” Geoffrey Hinton, 2016 (while working for Google). I speculate that they weren't caught off guard. More likely, they tried to find a real-life application for their AI, and failed. Improving the quality of search is not in their interests (in fact, it's the contrary)
two_in_one 3y ago
> ChatGPT was able to gather so much data without restrictions and now companies late to the party will have many more restrictions Not only that. OpenAI entered the second stage in AI development: acceleration. They are using their current models to build next generation models. Like they used 4v to build better DALE-3. No competitor is doing it, not at this scale. This and the fact that OpenAI rises the bar makes it very hard to compete even for behemoths like Google. Not even talking about Hugging Face. DALE-3 is incomparably better than Stable Diffusion. But it's artificially limited, like no nudes, no recognizable humans, etc. Making unrestricted competitor will be really hard to do. So, my prediction: OpenAI is far ahead and the gap will increase with the time. Unless there is a breakthrough somewhere else. Then history will repeat itself. Remember, Deep Mind was an indisputable leader not so long ago.
vineyardmike 3y ago
This isn’t history as I remember it. It’s also not history as the product announcement for bard reads. Bard was explicitly a smaller (cheaper) version of their model. They always said they had a bigger and better one behind the curtain (now called Gemini I guess). I expected bard to be simpler than ChatGPT because they said it’d be small and simple. I guess that still means it’s disappointing 1:1 though. The notable feature of the model that Bard has over ChatGPT (at least at time of launch) was daily updates keeping it way better for current information and events. Of course, Google has a lot more internal APIs they can/are leverage (eg search, drive, etc) so today bard has a different focus than just talking to a big model.

ur-whale 3y ago

> Google was certainly completely caught of guard. They weren't. Their AI research team is completely dysfunctional and unfocused. They're only interested in doing research and are entirely incapable of the engineering and product focus necessary to build something like ChatGPT. That isn't the same thing as being caught off guard.

itchy_spider44 3y ago
The execs were. They've been paying millions for a top-tier AI devteam hoping for something like ChatGPT, just to find out that their devteam made and freely released the transformers research that ChatGPT is based on (derp) As always, Google has incredible ideas and promise but lacks business execution
siva7 3y ago
So they were caught of guard, maybe not from a research pov but certainly from a product pov. They are behind and are just playing catch-up for over a year now that it's safe to say that they don't have any competitive advantage over microsoft/openai anymore
- dietr1ch 3y ago
  It's not caught off guard. Google simply can't do products because of how career growth works. You don't get promoted for polishing things other than ad revenue. It's all about launching things built in a hasty way.
hn8305823 3y ago
This article was posted just a few weeks before ChatGPT was released: https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-rest-vest-days-for-sr-employees-are-over-says-ceo-its-a-brilliant-idea.html https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-rest-vest-days-for-s... Too little too late?
- ur-whale 3y ago
  > Too little too late? Announcing things and actually executing on said announcements are two very different things. Sundar has never been able to tell the difference between the two.
huytersd 3y ago
Well atleast others are using all the research coming out of Google for all of this. DALLE and chatGPT are both the result of research papers directly from Google research.
danans 3y ago
> They weren't. Correct, but not for the reason you gave. > Their AI research team is completely dysfunctional and unfocused. The bigger problem was that they saw the major problems with trustworthiness of LLMs and felt there was still too much brand risk to Google. OpenAI had no such problem.

resource0x 3y ago

Remember this? “We should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” Geoffrey Hinton, 2016 (while working for Google). I speculate that they weren't caught off guard. More likely, they tried to find a real-life application for their AI, and failed. Improving the quality of search is not in their interests (in fact, it's the contrary)

two_in_one 3y ago

> ChatGPT was able to gather so much data without restrictions and now companies late to the party will have many more restrictions Not only that. OpenAI entered the second stage in AI development: acceleration. They are using their current models to build next generation models. Like they used 4v to build better DALE-3. No competitor is doing it, not at this scale. This and the fact that OpenAI rises the bar makes it very hard to compete even for behemoths like Google. Not even talking about Hugging Face. DALE-3 is incomparably better than Stable Diffusion. But it's artificially limited, like no nudes, no recognizable humans, etc. Making unrestricted competitor will be really hard to do. So, my prediction: OpenAI is far ahead and the gap will increase with the time. Unless there is a breakthrough somewhere else. Then history will repeat itself. Remember, Deep Mind was an indisputable leader not so long ago.

vineyardmike 3y ago

This isn’t history as I remember it. It’s also not history as the product announcement for bard reads. Bard was explicitly a smaller (cheaper) version of their model. They always said they had a bigger and better one behind the curtain (now called Gemini I guess). I expected bard to be simpler than ChatGPT because they said it’d be small and simple. I guess that still means it’s disappointing 1:1 though. The notable feature of the model that Bard has over ChatGPT (at least at time of launch) was daily updates keeping it way better for current information and events. Of course, Google has a lot more internal APIs they can/are leverage (eg search, drive, etc) so today bard has a different focus than just talking to a big model.