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A perfect example that illustrates the problem. The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that com

A perfect example that illustrates the problem. The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not. Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity) But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it. They had a goldmine and they wasted it.

crazygringo 2y ago
> They had a goldmine and they wasted it. What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley. Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.
- mountainriver 2y ago
  No they weren’t nearly as invested in it which is why OpenAI won and Gemini still isn’t great. They had a massive lead which they squandered
- deanCommie 2y ago
  In the LLM space, there is a definitive 1st (OpenAI), a definitive 2nd (Anthropic), and then there's "everyone else". Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category. Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not). But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket. When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.

crazygringo 2y ago

> They had a goldmine and they wasted it. What are you talking about? They launched Gemini. They didn't waste anything. And you can't force employees to stay. Employees leaving to compete is as old as Silicon Valley. Google was just being more conservative about launching it until their hand was forced by OpenAI. And for good reason too, considering all the hallucinations. But then they launched. They didn't "waste" anything.

mountainriver 2y ago
No they weren’t nearly as invested in it which is why OpenAI won and Gemini still isn’t great. They had a massive lead which they squandered
deanCommie 2y ago
In the LLM space, there is a definitive 1st (OpenAI), a definitive 2nd (Anthropic), and then there's "everyone else". Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category. Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not). But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket. When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.