4 ms·

The fall of Google’s reputation on ML is nothing short of spectacular. They went from having a near untouchable reputation as being far ahead of any other large

by JCM9 2y ago

The fall of Google’s reputation on ML is nothing short of spectacular. They went from having a near untouchable reputation as being far ahead of any other large tech company on ML to total shambles in a year. Everything they’ve released has been a complete popcorn worthy dumpster fire from faked demos, to racist models that try and pretend white people don’t exist, to this latest nonsense telling me put glue on my pizza. What the heck happened? Or was their reputation always just more hype than substance?

rvnx 2y ago
It could be because they actually released something. If you look back, the Google Research blog posts always have grandiose claims, but you can often never use them.
- ugjka 2y ago
  research != product
- CydeWeys 2y ago
  AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Waymo FSD are all released in the sense that you can see them actually working in the real world. Those all took much longer to put together than whatever rushed features were released to catch up with OpenAI, however.
  - tadfisher 2y ago
    They are also extremely constrained problem spaces relative to the problem space of LLMs, which is apparently "everything imaginable".
  - padthai 2y ago
    Waymo is not Google. And Deepmind operated quite independently until not long ago.
seydor 2y ago
It's not really that bad. I use gemini often and it's great. I prefer their UI
- tymscar 2y ago
  What do you like more about their ui?
  - seydor 2y ago
    faster, it has options like 'modify'. I also feel it follows my commands better, esp. when i ask to rephrase
arccy 2y ago
research != product
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
b112 2y ago
At least Elmer's white glue is edible, millions of kids agree. (The logic sort of makes sense. Glue sticks things together, and some glue is edible.)
calebkaiser 2y ago
There was an interesting interview with David Luan about this recently. For context, he was a co-lead at Google Brain, early hire at OpenAI, and is now a founder at Adept: https://www.latent.space/p/adept https://www.latent.space/p/adept The TL;DR on his take is that there are organizational and cultural issues that prevent Google from focusing their research efforts in the way that is necessary for what he calls "big swings," like training GPT-3. In regards to your second question, Google's reputation in ML is definitely not hype. Purely on the research side, Google has been behind some of the most important papers in modern ML, particularly around language model. The original Transformers paper, BERT, lots of work around neural machine translation, all of the work that DeepMind has done post-acquisition, and the list goes on. On the applied side, they also have some of the most successful/widely-adopted ML-powered products on the market (think RankBrain/anything involving a recommendation engine, Translate, Maps, a ton of functionality in Gmail, etc).

by JCM9 2y ago

rvnx 2y ago

It could be because they actually released something. If you look back, the Google Research blog posts always have grandiose claims, but you can often never use them.

ugjka 2y ago
research != product
CydeWeys 2y ago
AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Waymo FSD are all released in the sense that you can see them actually working in the real world. Those all took much longer to put together than whatever rushed features were released to catch up with OpenAI, however.
- tadfisher 2y ago
  They are also extremely constrained problem spaces relative to the problem space of LLMs, which is apparently "everything imaginable".
- padthai 2y ago
  Waymo is not Google. And Deepmind operated quite independently until not long ago.

seydor 2y ago

It's not really that bad. I use gemini often and it's great. I prefer their UI

tymscar 2y ago
What do you like more about their ui?
- seydor 2y ago
  faster, it has options like 'modify'. I also feel it follows my commands better, esp. when i ask to rephrase

arccy 2y ago

research != product

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

b112 2y ago

At least Elmer's white glue is edible, millions of kids agree. (The logic sort of makes sense. Glue sticks things together, and some glue is edible.)

calebkaiser 2y ago

There was an interesting interview with David Luan about this recently. For context, he was a co-lead at Google Brain, early hire at OpenAI, and is now a founder at Adept: https://www.latent.space/p/adept https://www.latent.space/p/adept The TL;DR on his take is that there are organizational and cultural issues that prevent Google from focusing their research efforts in the way that is necessary for what he calls "big swings," like training GPT-3. In regards to your second question, Google's reputation in ML is definitely not hype. Purely on the research side, Google has been behind some of the most important papers in modern ML, particularly around language model. The original Transformers paper, BERT, lots of work around neural machine translation, all of the work that DeepMind has done post-acquisition, and the list goes on. On the applied side, they also have some of the most successful/widely-adopted ML-powered products on the market (think RankBrain/anything involving a recommendation engine, Translate, Maps, a ton of functionality in Gmail, etc).