4 ms·

There's an old joke explanation about Xerox and PARC, about the difficulty of "pitching a 'paperless office' to a photocopier company". In Google's case, an ex

by neilv 3y ago

There's an old joke explanation about Xerox and PARC, about the difficulty of "pitching a 'paperless office' to a photocopier company". In Google's case, an example analogy would be pitching making something like ChatGPT widely available, when that would disrupt revenue from search engine paid placements, and from ads on sites that people wouldn't need to visit. (So maybe someone says, better to phase it in subtly, as needed for competitiveness, but in non-disruptive ways.) I doubt it's as simple as that, but would be funny if that was it.

vineyardmike 3y ago
The answer is far weirder - they had a chat bot, and no one even discussed it in the context of search replacements. They didn’t want to release it because they just didn’t think it should be a product. Only after OpenAI actually disrupted search did they start releasing Gemini/Bard which takes advantage of search.
- ec109685 3y ago
  They were afraid to release it because of unaligned output and hallucinations. ChatGPT showed that people could still get value out of something that wasn’t perfect. E.g. they had this in their labs: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... from July, 2022z
  - halflings 3y ago
    Agree re:hallucinations/safety issues, that was likely one of the main blockers. And here's the sad part: they had this back in 2019... see this paper released in Jan 2020: https://blog.research.google/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html https://blog.research.google/2020/01/towards-conversational-...
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    LaMBDA was also briefly available for public testing, but then rapidly withdrawn due to unhinged responses. One advantage that OpenAI had over Google was having developed RLHF as a way to "align" the model's output to be more acceptable. Part of Google's dropping the ball at that time period (but catching up now with Gemini) may also have been just not knowing what to do with it. It certainly wasn't apparent pre-ChatGPT that there'd be any huge public demand for something like this, or that people would find so many uses for it in API form, and especially so with LaMBDA's behavioral issues.
halflings 3y ago
This (innovator's dilemma / too afraid of disrupting your own ads business model) is the most common explanation folks are giving for this, but seems to be some sort of post-rationalization of why such a large company full of competent researchers/engineers would drop the ball this hard. My read (having seen some of this on the inside), is that it was a mix of being too worried about safety issues (OMG, the chatbot occasionally says something offensive!) and being too complacent (too comfortable with incremental changes in Search, no appetite for launching an entirely new type of product / doing something really out there). There are many ways to monetize a chatbot, OpenAI for example is raking billions in subscription fees.
- nemothekid 3y ago
  >There are many ways to monetize a chatbot, OpenAI for example is raking billions in subscription fees. Compared to Google, OpenAI's billions is peanuts, while costing a fortune to generate. GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?)
  - ro_sharp 3y ago
    > GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?) Maybe? Hardware supply isn’t perfectly elastic
  - nequo 3y ago
    Wouldn't Google be better able to integrate ads into a "ChatGoogle" service than OpenAI is into ChatGPT?
    - exitheone 3y ago
      The cost per ad is still astronomically different between search ads and LLMs
      - varjag 3y ago
        There could be an opposite avenue: ad-free Google Premium subscription with AI chat as a crown jewel. An ultimate opportunity to diversify from ad revenue.
eitally 3y ago
My take as someone who worked in Cloud, closely with the AI product teams on GTM strategy, is that it was primarily the former: Google was always extremely risk averse when it came to AI, to the point that until Andrew Moore was pushed out, Google Cloud didn't refer to anything as AI. It was ML-only, hence the BigQuery ML, Video Intelligence ML, NLP API, and so many other "ML" product names. There was strong sentiment internally that the technology wasn't mature enough to legitimately call it "AI", and that any models adequately complex to be non-trivially explainable were a no-go. Part of this was just general conservatism around product launches within Google, but it was significantly driven by EU regulation, too. Having just come off massive GDPR projects and staring down the barrel of DMA, Google didn't want to do anything that expanded the risk surface, whether it was in Cloud, Ads, Mobile or anything else. Their hand was forced with ChatGPT was launched ... and we're seeing how that's going.

by neilv 3y ago

vineyardmike 3y ago

The answer is far weirder - they had a chat bot, and no one even discussed it in the context of search replacements. They didn’t want to release it because they just didn’t think it should be a product. Only after OpenAI actually disrupted search did they start releasing Gemini/Bard which takes advantage of search.

ec109685 3y ago
They were afraid to release it because of unaligned output and hallucinations. ChatGPT showed that people could still get value out of something that wasn’t perfect. E.g. they had this in their labs: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... from July, 2022z
- halflings 3y ago
  Agree re:hallucinations/safety issues, that was likely one of the main blockers. And here's the sad part: they had this back in 2019... see this paper released in Jan 2020: https://blog.research.google/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html https://blog.research.google/2020/01/towards-conversational-...
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  LaMBDA was also briefly available for public testing, but then rapidly withdrawn due to unhinged responses. One advantage that OpenAI had over Google was having developed RLHF as a way to "align" the model's output to be more acceptable. Part of Google's dropping the ball at that time period (but catching up now with Gemini) may also have been just not knowing what to do with it. It certainly wasn't apparent pre-ChatGPT that there'd be any huge public demand for something like this, or that people would find so many uses for it in API form, and especially so with LaMBDA's behavioral issues.

halflings 3y ago

This (innovator's dilemma / too afraid of disrupting your own ads business model) is the most common explanation folks are giving for this, but seems to be some sort of post-rationalization of why such a large company full of competent researchers/engineers would drop the ball this hard. My read (having seen some of this on the inside), is that it was a mix of being too worried about safety issues (OMG, the chatbot occasionally says something offensive!) and being too complacent (too comfortable with incremental changes in Search, no appetite for launching an entirely new type of product / doing something really out there). There are many ways to monetize a chatbot, OpenAI for example is raking billions in subscription fees.

nemothekid 3y ago
>There are many ways to monetize a chatbot, OpenAI for example is raking billions in subscription fees. Compared to Google, OpenAI's billions is peanuts, while costing a fortune to generate. GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?)
- ro_sharp 3y ago
  > GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?) Maybe? Hardware supply isn’t perfectly elastic
- nequo 3y ago
  Wouldn't Google be better able to integrate ads into a "ChatGoogle" service than OpenAI is into ChatGPT?
  - exitheone 3y ago
    The cost per ad is still astronomically different between search ads and LLMs
    - varjag 3y ago
      There could be an opposite avenue: ad-free Google Premium subscription with AI chat as a crown jewel. An ultimate opportunity to diversify from ad revenue.

eitally 3y ago

My take as someone who worked in Cloud, closely with the AI product teams on GTM strategy, is that it was primarily the former: Google was always extremely risk averse when it came to AI, to the point that until Andrew Moore was pushed out, Google Cloud didn't refer to anything as AI. It was ML-only, hence the BigQuery ML, Video Intelligence ML, NLP API, and so many other "ML" product names. There was strong sentiment internally that the technology wasn't mature enough to legitimately call it "AI", and that any models adequately complex to be non-trivially explainable were a no-go. Part of this was just general conservatism around product launches within Google, but it was significantly driven by EU regulation, too. Having just come off massive GDPR projects and staring down the barrel of DMA, Google didn't want to do anything that expanded the risk surface, whether it was in Cloud, Ads, Mobile or anything else. Their hand was forced with ChatGPT was launched ... and we're seeing how that's going.