It is completely a statement to try to assure people that Google is still doing relevant work in the AI realm. It reads like a middle-of-the-night panic attack after waking from a dream that Pichai had in which Google had essentially vanished.
> We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback
Interesting; I wonder if their use of the "lightweight" model will make it less capable than ChatGPT.
Given that Google/DeepMind is one of the few labs actually trying to make smaller models that are just as performant (e.g. Chinchilla: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15556.pdf ), I'm optimistic.
ChatGPT didn't just "exist" one day. OpenAI made a half-dozen models before getting to GPT-3, and even had demos like Talk to Transformer freely available for anyone to play with long before ChatGPT was in development.
Just because you didn't hear about it until the news got there doesn't mean it's not a journey.
Sure, I think that's a fair characterization. They have AI-accelerated hardware in client and server-side devices now, as well as a decent catalog of AI-powered demos and features.
They're not exactly a leading force in the AI world, but they're dedicated to making the pilgrimage all the same.
Probably Nvidia and OpenAI, at the moment. Everyone else seems to be following in their footsteps, or putting together the pieces those companies commercialized.
Many in the investment community are touting ChatGPT as a Google-killer. I don't think it's the case, but I do think the expectation is that Sundar will drop everything to personally treat it like an existential threat. If it were anyone other than Sundar it would appear that he isn't treating it seriously enough.
>AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon.
This is actually really huge. If done right, Google will be increasing the amount of "no-click" searches an incredible amount. I'm interested to see how good of a job the "factual grounding" works - this linked blog post in the article is pretty interesting https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...
i wonder what kind of downstream effects on the ad click industry this will have. would kill for it all to die and be reinvented in a different, more personalizable and clever way
People will still visit websites that provide entertainment, social media, shopping, services, web applications, source material, porn, etc. Enough opportunity for clickable ads.
Nobody owes you a normal life but it would be a shame if society actually thought that way and we never developed social security and universal healthcare.
Using the monopoly on search to dictate how you shall present your content to the google god is still a bad thing.
Google brings visitors to your site for free or no one would find it in the first place. You can always robot opt out and then your information is “secure”.
Potentially good for users initially. But I can't see how anyone will be incentivized to create and post content for Google to scrape if they won't have any traffic from Google.
It could actually be a huge benefit in some ways if it chokes out the content mills. However, something tells me that they have little to no overhead compared to the people who actually toil away to post good, original content.
Exactly. If Google is able to provide better answers than the garbage websites with their SEO hacks, those garbage websites will not get clicks. I could see this improving the incentive system significantly
The incentive to what, be an unpaid content creator for Google? Search results lead to sources which land users on the content creators "property". Chat results, especially based on what we see right now, won't do that.
How can you call garbage SEO websites 'content creators'? I think we'll be better off with websites which spread knowledge for the sake of spreading knowledge. Down with ads and low quality copy-paste sites.
So everything being done for free except for Google taking all the profits?
Are you kidding me?
People need to make a living, creating good content isn't easy. Sure a few folks do it for free, but wholesale trying to kill off everyone who does it by making it financially non-viable is long term idiotic. What are you going to train on once everyone stops writing or letting your scrape their data to train from?
Search engines scraping your content is an agreement that they can look at it and use it, and send you traffic if it matches well with a user. Why would anyone subscribe to a deal that there is literally zero benefit except training some AI which will repurpose your knowledge.
People making a living is great ofc. People making a living off of copy-pasting content and ruining the search experience is clearly not useful and that is the only point I was ever arguing for.
This may actually be fantastic for the web. The current incentives are terrible anyway: cheat, scam and SEO your way to the first search result page and then do whatever since you'll get visits and decent ad revenue regardless of content.
Most people that make good content don't make it for money anyway. Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it". They just went and made the site regardless.
> Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it".
Google is a huge part of the reason the old web doesn't exist anymore. Artisanal websites cannot compete for visibility against corporate websites that have staff dedicated to figuring out SEO tricks from every imaginable source: page speed, HTTPS, image compression, meta tags.
The hobbyist back then didn't need to know all this. Today, not having HTTPS alone can cause your site to be hidden from search, even if it is read-only. In that kind of world, only the infinitesimally small minority will bother to make a website on their own dime.
Robots.txt to block anonymous scraping and offer google the opportunity to purchase your sites content if they value it. Web traffic can switch to another provider to index. Google search will be nothing but content mill garbage unless they want to pay for their AI fuel.
I think this could be the death knell of sites that need to make money and publish content that can be easily understood in a short ChatBot answer, both mills like geeksforgeeks and hobbyists that wouldn't do it without a financial incentive. Is that such a bad thing? We've been complaining about SEO optimized crap for years.
Sites with complex or lengthy information will not fall to LLMs, IMO. No one interested in reading Paul Graham's blog posts is going to just read the AI summary and move on, for example.
I’d rather get my information without having to click on a site. I get the need for attribution but Google can cite the sources it gets it’s content from, and I don’t really care about losing ad money.
But another issue is accuracy. Of course real sites aren’t always accurate, but they’re way more reliable than AI (and sometimes the site is ground truth like official docs so it can be trusted…unless…the official docs are wrong….).
Customers may not care, but content producers absolutely will. Chatbot like interfaces that lead to "no-click" searches are going to get sued out of existence, OR are going to lead to the establishment of lots of paywalls that lead the chatbot to have blindspots about information behind them.
News sites can reword information from other news sites, AI can train on reworded web text. It will keep the information but not learn the exact original expression, as it should be. Copyright protects expression, not ideas.
I've already banned the crawler from mine for the AMP and other crap they've been pulling. If you want to get more complete results, you'll need to use another search engine, which felt like the only thing in my power that I could actually do about their shenanigans. Now I'm glad I took this decision a few years ago: they've already got a search monopoly, but not being able to copy my content to further increase it? Yes please. I just hope the competition, with less deep pockets, is able to follow suit.
This seems like a personal dislike stance rather then principle, which of course you should fully take. But do you mind ChatGPT learning from your website?
Not sure. I don't like that I wasn't informed of them using my content, that there are no credits of any kind. I'd enjoy knowing it was useful and this info has been accessed by a chat user, the way I do when someone visits my site. That's the whole point of making it; I have no commercial interest or expectation but I enjoy helping others.
But from a "this is stealing" type of perspective? Nah, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants and everything we do is a remix of something else we've seen. A human can read my site and take "away" the content, just not at this scale. And they're more likely than a dead chat bot to let me know if my content has been valuable to them.
i for one, hope that the AI will mostly stick to analyzing the content, rather than search intent because Google has had a history of misreading my search intent, quite frequently.
I like that, and that's the one thing I enjoy most about ChatGPT, but the problem with this scenario is that it breaks the web. If a search engine can give me all the answers I want, then there’s no point in visiting sites anymore, aside for e-commerce. So if you have a site you wouldn’t want the next AI search engine to crawl your content because you get no traffic back. So either they find a way to give traffic back, or soon enough there will be no content to provide through an AI search engine.
What traffic are you getting back from commenting on HN. If you're not getting any, why are you wasting your time? Of course you can post online for other reasons, like participating in a debate, building a community, working on a project, or just for hobby. And usually that's the good part of the web. Otherwise why would people be using site:reddit.com in their searches.
Getting on HN doesn't cost me a dime though, aside from spending personal time. Having a web site costs money both to maintain the hardware, and the content. And if someone wants to index the content he should give me back traffic. That's the premise upon which search engines were build. You break that, we end-up with a walled off garden that handles all the information.
Also, if no one's site is getting human traffic would the quantity of human generated content degrade over time? And AI content will increase? And then what will the AI's scrape/learn from? Themselves? How do you change their minds when the information changes in reality, but a bunch of AIs are stuck in a consensus loop? =)
I still think I will read articles for the opinion of the writer, the vibe of the site, and the experience of reading an article. I don’t see chatGPT replacing this for me
Yeah what I totally want when I have a nuanced question is an AI that just gives me a mealy-mouthed, non-committal response, such as in the example for this post on whether guitar or piano is easier to learn.
If you asked your friend, who's a serious musician, and they gave this kind of couched answer, you would be really annoyed at them.
The side effect of too much no-click results could be mainstream sites completely disengaging from Google Search altogether. Just as sites already set no-index zones, those could expand to protect from training.
That kind of move could be the actual “Google Search killer”
My standard habbit when I don't find what I want is to append site:reddit.com site:news.ycombinator.com site:github.com site:stackoverflow.com. Mostly I get what I wanted!
Which is funny because those results get us human insight into our topics. Most top results now are completely non-sensical SEO generated word dumps. Google's search engine rating programs have failed beyond belief.
Yeah... instead of trying to give more false results with AI, Google should first try to get good result with just simple search (and give me back my booleans operators!!!!)
Quotes enclosing an expression search for an expression rather then the words (they have to appear together). And quotes enclosing a single word make that word more likely to appear verbatim.
But as long you don't select verbatim search, these are more of a recommendation to Google.
Time will tell (a few weeks, according to the article) if it's any good, as that's when it will be released to the public.
However, an interesting piece of info was
> It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
which seems like it will possibly be able to use some kind of external repository of information, instead of needing to be retrained? Very curious about that.
Perhaps it won't take information from the training data but rather take the content from the pages a regular search would return and convert it to a nice answer to your query.
The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience.
I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...
I had a Hotmail account for about a year in 2000 or so. It had a 10 MB inbox and worked quite well. I got a bit of spam, but it was obvious and manageable.
My girlfriend got a GMail invite from a friend and sent me an invite. It was huge. A 1 GB inbox, built-in Google search of your email, and incredible spam filtering.
They marketed it something like "With GMail, you don't have to delete your emails. Just search . . .". Really killer features compared to their competitors.
Later on, they added automatic email thread grouping which made using Outlook for work a chore until it got a similar feature.
No one came close to gmail's 1GB free inbox at the time. Which kept increasing and showed you at the bottom of the inbox. Plus it had amazing spam detection, and was stupid fast, and got better and better very quickly.
I remember having a gmail email was almost a litmus test to whether or not you were paying attention to what was going on in tech. Not having a gmail email indicated you might not be keeping up with the times.
Agreed on all your points! But I think offering a better service in an established sector is the opposite of "no competition" and being a "first mover".
Like how we would say a professional sports player playing against an amateur has no competition. Technically, yes, but effectively...
The context of the discussion is whether or not an "invite only" tactic works for building hype and launching a successful product. In that sense, I would attribute Gmail's success not to the "invite only" tactic, but to the fact that it was so superior that it had no competition.
Apparently the "trusted testers" are basically all internal employees
>CEO Sundar Pichai told employees Monday the company is going to need all hands on deck to test Bard, its new ChatGPT rival. He also said Google will soon be enlisting help from partners to test an application programming interface, or API, that would let others access the same underlying technology.
Having worked in big tech for a while, my written-by-a-committee alert went off quickly for this. Founders are the only ones who seem to get away without doing this when running large companies. Personality and substance are very important for communication and committees (and the folks who want to edit as part of one) never get that right.
It seems like a very reactionary move. ChatGPT went viral, and now they have to rush something to market to try and compete. So of course the product doesn't exist yet, but they've had enough time to put together a project plan and some mockups. It's not a great position to be in.
It does seem slightly amateurish. If there was more self-confidence like Apple, there wouldn't be a need to announce anything until it's ready.
EDIT: Especially if it was already available internally for several months as some others say, waiting another month or two until it's ready to go doesn't seem like a big burden.
Just picture monetizing it via embedding slant onto the answers it provides like how Alexa suggest purchases but in a way that users can barely just notice...
Or purchasing "market share space" on it in the same way that companies buy shelf space on supermarkets to place their products in...
It reminds me of a blander Yann Lecun-like response where he responded on Twitter to a bunch of people saying Facebook ai could have done this and that, without acknowledging they were beat to the (shipping) punch and are now just reacting. Building a roadmap on what is in the zeitgeist and trying to pretend you’re winning a fight you don’t realize you already lost (at least the first battle) is not a way to capture mindshare imho
What are you referring to? My overall impression of Yann Lecun is he feels quite hamstrung by all the extreme caution at Facebook (which obviously exists at Google too) of releasing anything that could produce content that is in any way objectionable to one of a million different subgroups.
I like Yann and think he’s brilliant and also generally appreciate how he engages on Twitter. However, he spent a lot of time recently downplaying openai and I don’t see why that was needed other then to try to say FAIR is important, see one of the most recent of these related tweets https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1620533783702433792
In one sense, yes, but to me that felt more like a mental illness story than anything else, which would make it much less funny (apologies to the person involved if it was not).
While I don't think LaMDA is sentient (merely based on what I understand about its architecture), what would it look like if some mega corp had a conscious AI on its hands, and an insider was trying to blow the whistle?
Google was in this position in relation to Apple and the iPhone, and that worked out all right for them. First-mover advantage isn't the be-all, end-all.
I think the real fear is that there has been a brain drain of high-level AI talent to well-funded startups because those startups can move faster without having the extreme fear/caution of a large company like Google/Facebook. E.g. my guess is that OpenAI doesn't have an "Ethical AI" team who sees their role as primarily to put up roadblocks to releasing.
Hence not surprised by the big investment in Anthropic by Google.
There was a different dynamic there. Apple was clearly focussed on the higher end of the market (price point) and unwilling to compromise on profit margins, while willing to sacrifice pure market share. Google took advantage of that to win the distribution space focussing on lower price point phones on Android (and then expanding to higher price point devices).
With ChatGPT the threat is different and both are going after expanding usage.
I don't think so. Google has had its own internal LLMs for quite some time now. Some of them are even more powerful than GPT 3.5. The only question has been: "Why release it to the public?"
Exactly. I played with "Meena" when I was an employee there and it was ... disturbingly human-like. I can understand why Google didn't want to release it. And even more so after the Blake Lemoine incident.
Google is already accused of operating a panopticon, the last thing they want to be accused of is running SkyNet.
People who think Google has fallen behind here are sorely mistaken. They just don't/haven't-had a way to make money off of it and are likely worried about reputational fallout.
I want Google's lunch to get eaten as much as the next guy, but I don't think it will be on this front.
It's not rushed to market. It already existed for years.
I've tried to say this before elsewhere, but Google has had something internally that's competitive with ChatGPT already for years, under various names. They were just naturally reticent about letting it loose on the world. Esp after the Blake Lemoine incident.
This sounds a bit like those stories about Kodak having a digital camera before anybody else did, and they just fearfully watched the thing from a distance doing nuthing until someone else brought it to market and ended the party for them.
May be an entirely different thing this time of course. But still...
Well they had a giant conversational size bigger than GPT3. It was not as safe or good at following instructions as ChatGPT. But it was as flowing as it is. So maybe it's an exaggeration (this word has two gs in english!?) to say that it's as good, but it was also extremely strong and impressive
It is a bit surprising that Google got scooped by OpenAI, but the product surely has existed before ChatGPT went public. LaMDA was the model behind the 'Our AI has become sentient' controversy last year, if you remember that [0].
Out of curiosity, I copied all the text from the website (so it got header, footer, unrelated text) into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize:
This is an article written by the CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, about the company's journey with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pichai discusses how the company has been working on AI for the past six years and how they have been advancing the state of the art in the field. The article mentions the release of an experimental conversational AI service called Bard, which seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power and intelligence of Google's large language models. The CEO also talks about how the company is working on bringing the benefits of AI into its everyday products, starting with Search, and how AI can deepen people's understanding of information and turn it into useful knowledge more efficiently.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, has announced the release of Bard, an experimental conversational AI service powered by Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of Google's large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard is initially being released with a lightweight model version of LaMDA, which requires significantly less computing power and will allow for more feedback. Google is also working to bring its latest AI advancements into its products, starting with Search, and will soon be onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises to try its Generative Language API. Google is committed to developing AI responsibly and will continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in its approach.
There is nothing concrete available today because Google is scrambling to get ahead of a major announcement from Microsoft on integrating GPT into Bing. Internal sources from MS are saying it might be the first we see of GPT-4.
Why do you say google is scrambling when they have been working on AI stuff just as impressive as OpenAI, which you could spin differently to say Microsoft “scrambled” to make a partnership with and are now attempting to cram GPT into their tech stack.
FWIW I don’t think either company are really scrambling except in the performative sense of making announcements to appease the market.
Because while Google has been researching, OpenAI has been productizing. We will have to judge it once we get access to Bard, but it’s possible Google is years behind on creating a chat model that won’t spew toxic waste, as GPT-3 did when it was first released a few years ago.
I work at google and have used their AI tools and they’re just as impressive as the OpenAI ones (which I use personally, outside of work). Both have been developing products, just google hasn’t released any of them.
That’s just it though. GPT-3 has been publicly accessible for years. ChatGPT has been public and hitting scale for months. OpenAI has collected mountains of AI chat training data and has been iterating in public. Google has nothing available to the public and you are under NDA. And you think we should be optimistic about Google’s progress? Will this new search feature last longer than Stadia?
Either way, chat interfaces in both search engines should be available to some of the public within the next few weeks. Theory is about to smack into reality at scale.
Not spewing toxic waste is actually a big part of what Google has spent years working on here. The fact that someone else released the first such product allows them to do it too without solving the problem with less media flak.
Productionizing this stuff is where Google gets the most advantage because they have the hardware and software efficiencies that comes form years of experience training and running inference on the most massive AI workloads for many many years in their data centers
I don't think this is going to be what damages Google, much more optimistic about antitrust stuff.
Yeah I keep thinking about how different the reception to ChatGPT would have been if it were released by Google. People would be way more focused on how you can make it spout total nonsense with supreme confidence. (Which imo is the major flaw in all these ML models.)
Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is a years-long affair, not something they're just starting on now. Google should have seen this coming and been able to beat them to release, but they seem to have been caught off guard with some great research projects but no product.
Both companies have been doing AI work for a long time. Do you really think google is behind on AI here just because they haven’t released any products? What do they stand to gain by pushing out half-baked toys? They have nothing to prove.
Google isn't Apple. Google's strategy for the last 10 years at least has been to throw out half baked products and see what takes off. If they had anything usable, we would know by now.
And, on the contrary, Google has everything to prove. ChatGPT exploited a years-long dissatisfaction with Google search and has millions of people using it in lieu of Google's primary product. This is the most existential threat that Google has faced since its birth, and they are not handling it well.
You’re living in a fantasy land. If I had a major criticism of Google in the past decade it’s that they don’t release early or often enough.
If you think people are dissatisfied with google search then you’re missing the point that people don’t think about google search at all, they just reflexively use it all day. I don’t know anyone who uses chatgpt with such frequency or in a way that is so central to their daily life, and I have a much more tech-savvy circle of friends than most people.
It's corporate-speak for 'we're not letting the threat going unanswered' without actually delivering anything yet. It's mostly a placeholder for shareholders and especially the media to move the story away from 'Google's in trouble'
Exactly, he announced that they are doing a thing. With a very ambiguous screenshot of the thing and zero evidence of just how good the thing is. And no link to the actual thing.
So, the thing doesn't exist yet in a form that is concrete or demoable. And it definitely isn't ready for users. Which is the same thing really. Also there's no timeline of the thing actually getting there either. So, there's nothing here really.
Why is Sundar Pichai still in charge of this company? Months of excitement around chat gpt and then the best he came up with is this?! This reads to me like "The dog ate my homework, sorry. I have nothing of substance to announce today. Or tomorrow. Or any time soon.".
Also, Bard. Really?! Cringeworthy doesn't begin to describe how bad that is as a brand name. It' sounds like Bad spelled wrong.
There is no information to give. This "announcement" is a reaction to all the stories about how ChatGPT is going to eat Google's lunch. The company needed to do something to defend against that in the market - for the sake of its shareholders and its advertising revenue.
That said, here is the chatgpt summary I generated:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces the release of their conversational AI service "Bard," which combines the world's knowledge with the company's large language models. Bard seeks to provide fresh, high-quality responses to questions and allow users to explore new information. The release is part of Google's effort to bring the benefits of AI into everyday products and deepen people's understanding of information.
This kind of no information exec-speak is very painful to read. I had to pass it through ChatGPT to summarize. THe whole article can be summarized in 1 sentence without any loss of information: "Google will name it's chatbot Bard and it be based on Lambda model, initially small size". No link, no other details, basically a lot of words to say nothing at all.
Won’t be long before ads start making their way into answers “you want to know how to make popcorn? Try this amazing air frier from company X!”. The internet is enough of a billboard as it is.
Definitely not a good name. The first similar word that came into mind was "lard" and then "retard". Also, looks like they will release smaller model to save on compute. This doesn't look like a good strategy. They need to come out solid and strong over competition, not watered down.
"The story concerns a pair of boys who dismantle and upgrade an old Bard, a child's computer whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale repertoire..."
> We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback.
Seems odd to release something worse than the competition. Is there a reason why google wouldn't just come out with the best the have? Are they afraid this will eat into their ad revenue if people no longer need to click on links? Or are they just not able to build and deploy something on the scale of OpenAI's GPT3?
Google has so many users that not even they have enough GPU's and TPU's to service them all.
I personally think they should use their best models, and just make it trigger very rarely. For example, only ~once per week per user (ie. 0.3% of queries).
Use a tiny model over the input query to decide if LaMBDA will do a far better job than regular search results, and only trigger in those cases where it will most benefit the user to begin with.
> And today, we’re [...] opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
It feels like a mistake to make the big announcement for this, but not open it up to a wide audience. It's not like ChatGPT hasn't been out for months now. Not sure how much they gain by making headlines before it's ready for people to play with it.
Was thinking the same. My hunch is that their PR department thinks this will "create a buzz" much like the old waiting list for Gmail.
But that feels like slow old thinking. The way you create a buzz these days (in the era of limited attention) is by releasing a kick-ass product for people to use and play with. I'll probably forget about Bard the second I hit submit on this comment and go right back to using ChatGPT.
The announcement is probably targeting Wall Street more than any potential "user" (aka advertising target). The press was already bad - internal "code red" at Google due to panic that people saw ChatGPT as an alternative to search.
Meta/FaceBook's head of AI, Yann LeCun, is in similar panic mode, issuing a non-stop torrent of tweets about how useless and unimpressive ChatGPT has... Presumably a reflection that FaceBook does NOT have anything comparable ready to release anytime soon.
FWIW, Facebook's AI division has made some pretty insane contributions to the field relative to Google or Apple. I wouldn't disregard the stuff they're doing, even if I personally don't have a stake in Facebook or Meta's success.
Facebook was first to the punch on AI photo tagging and facial recognition in their systems, but they also did a lot of foundational research on GANs and self-supervised learning. Plus, they do a lot of other tangential research around language and life sciences that might not get funded otherwise.
Some of it is marketing bullshit, but Facebook seems to have a genuine interest in pushing the field forward. Admittedly Google is also not the best example though, seeing as they're the Tensorflow maintainers :p
I don’t understand Yann LeCun‘s reaction considering reputation of the company he works for - they should have already copied and integrated it somewhere.
This may put it into perspective: Yann pushed for and released Galactica.org, a website that generated articles for any prompt requesting information, on 15 November, before the release of ChatGPT. Internal pressure inside Meta caused it to shut down three days later, because it was thought to risk the company’s reputation more than Libra and the Metaverse.
The issue isn’t that Yann didn’t publish an AI app; it is that they did, and it was not as good.
The reality is that OpenAI was lucky. Inside the company, there is an alignment department whose effort was driven to help models share human ethics, and that was initially a bit marginalized. However, one of their projects, RLHF, ended up producing a much superior language model, when they could have initially assumed it would be worse.
Same way they shot themselves in the foot with g+. Maybe they know being top of web search and email is already a wide enough vertical and offering a dystopian chat AI so soon would be too disruptive for them and get too much attention.
I just hope if they introduce this into search there's a way to turn this off and just get the normal search results because as it stands these models are basically just Borges Library of Babel and make up whatever they want.
The uniform natural language interface makes it impossible to make an individual judgement whether the source of what result you get is reliable at all.
Smacks of dropping the ball and not being first mover and trying to damage control. All big orgs eventually become the slow mover, it's re-assuring that Google is in the same boat and nothing really changes.
But Google's chat bot was smart enough to make people think (fool people to think?) that the AI is sentient back in Jun 2022, months before ChatGPT. Saying that Google is a slow mover is not exactly true.
Disclaimer: Google engineer but has nothing to do with the AI products.
Despite this blog obviously being written for Wall St, this line is key. This is why anyone is going to struggle to compete with Google in AI.
Google Search is used so widely and its taxonomy of meaning so vast already that once they flip this on they’ll be unstoppable. (Assuming any rate of improvement whatsoever as we search.)
I’m not mentioning all other learning data like email, photos and drive, in part because other companies have similar, albeit in more specialised forms.
Depending on how slimy they’re willing to be I’d argue there’s even more scope to push ads when “advising” user through a grey area vs straight up keyword search.
Think going several steps ahead of initial q, increased trust and reliance on responses, multiple follow up questions with more ads etc.
I’m just envisaging this based on my time with ChatGPT these last few weeks.
Doesn't seem like too much of a stretch from where they are right now, which is showing ads at the top of search results formatted to look just like search results. They do have a small sponsored tag, but nothing stops them from doing the same on ai results.
I wonder how long till they open it up to your private data stored in Google? Eg.
User: What should I be doing today?
AI: You have a court appearance at 9am. Prioritize that, because failing to appear might result in an arrest warrant. Next, prioritize your mums birthday - all the other family will be there, and with your mums cancer results last week, this might be the last. If you travel between them by bus, then you can spend the time going through your teams messages that you should have replied to last week.
Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house?
AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, nor the money to pay a plumber to do it, so I suggest you leave it leaking for now. I watched the video - its leaking down the basin, so won't do damage, and the water cost is around 8 cents a day.
> Fun exercise for the reader: how much of this is actually possible with LLMs and how much is not.
I have no idea.
But it would be nice?* if this LLM stuff could be incorporated into the telephone system for my bank, pharmacy, etc.
It's obvious that these organizations don't want to connect me with a $killed human, so instead of having me interact with an infuriating "pretend" human, maybe CVS can fuse their phone system with ChatGPT to make the experience a little less maddening.
"Hey, I already gave you my birth date. No need to ask again. And I told you 30 seconds ago that I don't need to schedule a COVID vaccine. Just tell the pharmacist <xyz>."
Reading through all your private documents and extracting the useful information to answer an open ended question like this is still a little way off.
Specifically, LLM's can generally only take into account ~8000 words of context when deciding on a response. Summarizing the question and all necessary information for the answer into 8000 words is hard when the user might have millions of words in their inbox.
Having said that, I don't think it's far off. There are already prototypes of LLM's which have information retrieval abilities (ie. it could do a keyword search of your inbox to find a few relevant documents to read to decide on a response). There are also promising efforts to make that 8000 word number far larger.
AI: You have a court appearance today, I have booked a route for you on google maps. Next buy a gift for your mum’s birthday, here are some recommendations sorted by ad spend spend. For your travel, I recommend these options, sorted by ad spend.
Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house?
AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, here is a list of contractors that can fix the leak, sorted by google ad spend.
I recall reading a very interesting short story about exactly this - handing over the entirety of your daily minutiae to AI and the moral consequences. I'm unable to find the name of it, maybe something by Ted Chiang?
Google could do this now. They already have your calendar and your contacts. Do you think that a conversational interface was what was holding them back? Thousands of engineers, but if only they could figure out how to merge Gmail and Eliza!
There are a number of decentralized AI projects in that space. However, based on how effective web3 has been competitively against other big tech competitors for search and social media, they will need to be an order of magnitude more successful than on previous efforts.
Most projects are focused on privacy, user control and being censorship resistant. Which are all important, just not that important to the majority of everyday consumers who will take features and convenience over those other benefits. If decentralized AI is going to be competitive, it must actually be better along the lines of its actual features that enhance productivity.
Thanks, I'm aware there are actually numerous decentralized AI projects, but until proven otherwise, their success is unlikely. Outside of cryptocurrency, there just hasn't been much success challenging the big tech institutions.
Decentralized search and social media never gained traction. It turns out that the majority of people just aren't that interested in privacy and freedom. Features and convenience still win. If decentralized AI is going to be successful, it will have to compete head to head for features and convenience. I do hope that it is successful.
Nonetheless, decentralization is just one major hurdle. I have numerous concerns about the application of the tech overall. Too much to put into this post, but if you are interested I've written much more here.
I don't think it's that clearcut.
These AI queries are resource intensive.
Google will have to cut a fine line between quality and profit margin. If it's no good people just won't bother and it won't gain traction.
The searches we make are already analyzed and all models tend to use billions of parameters anyway, even self generated.
Google also are limited by their risk aversion, as seen in this extremely sanitized letter by Sundar, devoid of substance. Their existing AI tool is severely limited.
If this new tool comes out looking like that prior Google tool, it's going to be very difficult for them to gain traction.
1. ChatGPT have made a decent go of it on a much smaller budget
2. Wall St tends to be very forgiving when the investment is something with a strong a moat as AI. Metaverse is an example of what happens when they don’t believe…
3. With a few exceptions like weather, their current searches provide links to static pages others have built, so much of their understanding and analysis is going to waste. Giving custom results breaks through that.
Do we actually know the budget behind ChatGPT? I know Microsoft has thrown money at them and are providing a huge amount of cloud resources but beyond that I've missed any mention of the funding/costs.
But perhaps only for now. When youtube first started taking off, Google was bleeding cash on the resources needed to support it. Perhaps the same will be true for LLMs.
Google is on a collision course with regulators over search. If they are seen to be taking yet more content and knowledge from websites and "republishing" it they are going to find themselves with large fines and sanctions.
I think they are too "big" to really push AI, it needs smaller companies willing to take a higher risk.
Fair. Moreover, what are search or even content websites for if Google gobble up all that knowledge and distil it out.
But with China, Russia and India lurking, perhaps Congress might drag their feet on reigning AI in. Google Cloud are now poised to be going for some pretty decent govt contracts.
It's an interesting conundrum because facts aren't copyrightable, but in a world with intelligent language models that can ingest facts and spit them back out in whatever phrasing or format is most useful to the user, facts are also the only valuable part of such websites.
On the flip side, trying to make facts copyrightable seems like a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons. For example, if facts were copyrightable, that would make online discussion of factual stories illegal, since it's hard to discuss a fact without revealing what it is. Also, it's not always clear who should get "credit" for a fact, since facts are by their very nature true independent of who first reported them.
Maybe journalism will eventually become similar to academia, where journalists are funded by governments and large corporations who have an interest in learning, and the resulting discoveries are (ideally) made freely available for everyone to access?
Google’s inability execute is why they will lose the AI war. The fact the CEO has to write this article to wall street shows that they were caught offguard and have no real plans. If they had plans, why would Google management declare a code red over chatGPT?
Take the difference between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft just released tools that will make your life much easier. Intelligent Recap of teams meetings, ability to assign tasks based on what was discussed etc. Microsoft will announce bing with have chatgpt integration tomorrow. MSFT is eating Goog’s lunch and Sundar needs to go.
Sundar needs to go? And who will replace him? Larry and Sergey? They figured out the early web but the web of today is the whole another beast that is waiting to be understood.
I would have kicked out Sundar after Stadia. Or failing to keep up Azure and Microsoft on cloud computing market share because he was late to game in building an enterprise sales team. Google needs to find a Satya Nadella to turn them around, i don't knfow if Larry or Sergey could that but anyone would be better than Sundar.
This is a milestone. Google has been keeping the fruits of its AI research locked away from the unwashed masses. They did not seem to be on any path to commercialization, Google Cloud access, or releasing features based on these models. OpenAI (and Microsoft most likely) forced their hand and all at once they are releasing tech-previews and talking about adding it to the search engine results page, all while opening up API access to several of their trained models.
Microsoft is rumored to be adding GPT powered features to Bing very soon and might beat Google to market.
Well not really. It's still limited to trusted testers only, so, even though they've had the tech for years they still can't bring themselves to actually make it available.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadInteresting; I wonder if their use of the "lightweight" model will make it less capable than ChatGPT.
Similarly, just open it up for everyone to use, I'm using ChatGPT now, ship your product, don't just write a blog post about it.
Just because you didn't hear about it until the news got there doesn't mean it's not a journey.
They're not exactly a leading force in the AI world, but they're dedicated to making the pilgrimage all the same.
I promise I will not break it too hard.
This is actually really huge. If done right, Google will be increasing the amount of "no-click" searches an incredible amount. I'm interested to see how good of a job the "factual grounding" works - this linked blog post in the article is pretty interesting https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/lamda-towards-safe-grounde...
Using the monopoly on search to dictate how you shall present your content to the google god is still a bad thing.
It could actually be a huge benefit in some ways if it chokes out the content mills. However, something tells me that they have little to no overhead compared to the people who actually toil away to post good, original content.
The problem right now is that the incentives have caused most of the output online to be garbage.
- encourage more content because PROFIT
- content becomes garbage
- have to pay those pesky content creators
- slowly squeeze out entire industries by inlining more and more content
- still, not squeezing the juice all the way
- introduce "AI", it just laundries copyrighted content to look original
- bye creators
- for some odd reason people cheer you for this
- creators forced to make their content private
Are you kidding me?
People need to make a living, creating good content isn't easy. Sure a few folks do it for free, but wholesale trying to kill off everyone who does it by making it financially non-viable is long term idiotic. What are you going to train on once everyone stops writing or letting your scrape their data to train from?
Search engines scraping your content is an agreement that they can look at it and use it, and send you traffic if it matches well with a user. Why would anyone subscribe to a deal that there is literally zero benefit except training some AI which will repurpose your knowledge.
Most people that make good content don't make it for money anyway. Did people back in the pre-google days think "oh I'd make this site but gosh darn there's nobody to pay me for it". They just went and made the site regardless.
Google is a huge part of the reason the old web doesn't exist anymore. Artisanal websites cannot compete for visibility against corporate websites that have staff dedicated to figuring out SEO tricks from every imaginable source: page speed, HTTPS, image compression, meta tags.
The hobbyist back then didn't need to know all this. Today, not having HTTPS alone can cause your site to be hidden from search, even if it is read-only. In that kind of world, only the infinitesimally small minority will bother to make a website on their own dime.
Sites with complex or lengthy information will not fall to LLMs, IMO. No one interested in reading Paul Graham's blog posts is going to just read the AI summary and move on, for example.
But another issue is accuracy. Of course real sites aren’t always accurate, but they’re way more reliable than AI (and sometimes the site is ground truth like official docs so it can be trusted…unless…the official docs are wrong….).
But from a "this is stealing" type of perspective? Nah, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants and everything we do is a remix of something else we've seen. A human can read my site and take "away" the content, just not at this scale. And they're more likely than a dead chat bot to let me know if my content has been valuable to them.
Conversing with chatGPT is just giving me information and facts. I don’t see it replacing the experience of engaging with a website.
BULLISH for GOOGL
If you asked your friend, who's a serious musician, and they gave this kind of couched answer, you would be really annoyed at them.
That kind of move could be the actual “Google Search killer”
I'm just trying to just get relevant results for my query man ...
Neither of which are provided by AI
Google is getting less and less helpful.
But as long you don't select verbatim search, these are more of a recommendation to Google.
Just observations, not sure how reliable. YMMV.
However, an interesting piece of info was
> It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
which seems like it will possibly be able to use some kind of external repository of information, instead of needing to be retrained? Very curious about that.
This seems to be the approach https://www.perplexity.ai/ is taking.
I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...
My girlfriend got a GMail invite from a friend and sent me an invite. It was huge. A 1 GB inbox, built-in Google search of your email, and incredible spam filtering.
They marketed it something like "With GMail, you don't have to delete your emails. Just search . . .". Really killer features compared to their competitors.
Later on, they added automatic email thread grouping which made using Outlook for work a chore until it got a similar feature.
I remember having a gmail email was almost a litmus test to whether or not you were paying attention to what was going on in tech. Not having a gmail email indicated you might not be keeping up with the times.
The context of the discussion is whether or not an "invite only" tactic works for building hype and launching a successful product. In that sense, I would attribute Gmail's success not to the "invite only" tactic, but to the fact that it was so superior that it had no competition.
>CEO Sundar Pichai told employees Monday the company is going to need all hands on deck to test Bard, its new ChatGPT rival. He also said Google will soon be enlisting help from partners to test an application programming interface, or API, that would let others access the same underlying technology.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/06/google-ceo-tells-employees-i...
EDIT: Especially if it was already available internally for several months as some others say, waiting another month or two until it's ready to go doesn't seem like a big burden.
really it's kinda a public service, maybe these models should be run that way?
Or purchasing "market share space" on it in the same way that companies buy shelf space on supermarkets to place their products in...
User: What is the most durable shoe?
AI: Some of the most durable shoes are ... Here are some affiliate links where you can buy these durable shoes...
It would be funny if Google hastily rehires him as a marketing evangelist to show people their AI is so good you think it's alive.
Wouldn't it look exactly like this?
There was even someone who thought it was sentient! https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...
You can test Claude on ios with the app "poe" (the other two bots in the app are some sort of chatGTP and OpenAI based).
Hence not surprised by the big investment in Anthropic by Google.
With ChatGPT the threat is different and both are going after expanding usage.
Google is already accused of operating a panopticon, the last thing they want to be accused of is running SkyNet.
People who think Google has fallen behind here are sorely mistaken. They just don't/haven't-had a way to make money off of it and are likely worried about reputational fallout.
I want Google's lunch to get eaten as much as the next guy, but I don't think it will be on this front.
I've tried to say this before elsewhere, but Google has had something internally that's competitive with ChatGPT already for years, under various names. They were just naturally reticent about letting it loose on the world. Esp after the Blake Lemoine incident.
May be an entirely different thing this time of course. But still...
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
This is an article written by the CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, about the company's journey with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pichai discusses how the company has been working on AI for the past six years and how they have been advancing the state of the art in the field. The article mentions the release of an experimental conversational AI service called Bard, which seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power and intelligence of Google's large language models. The CEO also talks about how the company is working on bringing the benefits of AI into its everyday products, starting with Search, and how AI can deepen people's understanding of information and turn it into useful knowledge more efficiently.
javascript:location.href='https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url='+encodeURIComponent(locati...
Note I've been using Kagi happily for several months and it has successfully replaced Google Search for me. Highly recommended.
FWIW I don’t think either company are really scrambling except in the performative sense of making announcements to appease the market.
Either way, chat interfaces in both search engines should be available to some of the public within the next few weeks. Theory is about to smack into reality at scale.
Productionizing this stuff is where Google gets the most advantage because they have the hardware and software efficiencies that comes form years of experience training and running inference on the most massive AI workloads for many many years in their data centers
I don't think this is going to be what damages Google, much more optimistic about antitrust stuff.
And, on the contrary, Google has everything to prove. ChatGPT exploited a years-long dissatisfaction with Google search and has millions of people using it in lieu of Google's primary product. This is the most existential threat that Google has faced since its birth, and they are not handling it well.
If you think people are dissatisfied with google search then you’re missing the point that people don’t think about google search at all, they just reflexively use it all day. I don’t know anyone who uses chatgpt with such frequency or in a way that is so central to their daily life, and I have a much more tech-savvy circle of friends than most people.
this is in like the 5th paragraph, right under the 'Introducing Bard' title.
So they used ChatGPT to generate it?
It's an atrocious experience. They're leaving so much money on the table.
OpenAI made that very easy, Google no doubt will make it a total pain.
So, the thing doesn't exist yet in a form that is concrete or demoable. And it definitely isn't ready for users. Which is the same thing really. Also there's no timeline of the thing actually getting there either. So, there's nothing here really.
Why is Sundar Pichai still in charge of this company? Months of excitement around chat gpt and then the best he came up with is this?! This reads to me like "The dog ate my homework, sorry. I have nothing of substance to announce today. Or tomorrow. Or any time soon.".
Also, Bard. Really?! Cringeworthy doesn't begin to describe how bad that is as a brand name. It' sounds like Bad spelled wrong.
That said, here is the chatgpt summary I generated:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces the release of their conversational AI service "Bard," which combines the world's knowledge with the company's large language models. Bard seeks to provide fresh, high-quality responses to questions and allow users to explore new information. The release is part of Google's effort to bring the benefits of AI into everyday products and deepen people's understanding of information.
More concisely, it's someone that's good with words.
> The way I've come to look at ChatGPT is via a D&D analogy.
> It's like a helpful Bard with 1 rank in all the knowledge skills and a good bluff roll.
> It'll give you good answers to a lot of basic queries, but if it doesn't know, it'll just make up something and provide that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642666
"The story concerns a pair of boys who dismantle and upgrade an old Bard, a child's computer whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale repertoire..."
What are Shakespeare's works best known for? Language.
Seems odd to release something worse than the competition. Is there a reason why google wouldn't just come out with the best the have? Are they afraid this will eat into their ad revenue if people no longer need to click on links? Or are they just not able to build and deploy something on the scale of OpenAI's GPT3?
Given that ChatGPT has hit scaling issues, a faster model with higher uptime is actually now a plus assuming quality is the same.
They literally stated the reason in the sentence you quoted.
I personally think they should use their best models, and just make it trigger very rarely. For example, only ~once per week per user (ie. 0.3% of queries).
Use a tiny model over the input query to decide if LaMBDA will do a far better job than regular search results, and only trigger in those cases where it will most benefit the user to begin with.
This isn't actually what it says? It's saying that it's a smaller model version of Lamda, there's no comparison to GPT-3.
It feels like a mistake to make the big announcement for this, but not open it up to a wide audience. It's not like ChatGPT hasn't been out for months now. Not sure how much they gain by making headlines before it's ready for people to play with it.
But that feels like slow old thinking. The way you create a buzz these days (in the era of limited attention) is by releasing a kick-ass product for people to use and play with. I'll probably forget about Bard the second I hit submit on this comment and go right back to using ChatGPT.
Meta/FaceBook's head of AI, Yann LeCun, is in similar panic mode, issuing a non-stop torrent of tweets about how useless and unimpressive ChatGPT has... Presumably a reflection that FaceBook does NOT have anything comparable ready to release anytime soon.
OpenAI and Stability-AI will be be Apple and Microsoft.
Some of it is marketing bullshit, but Facebook seems to have a genuine interest in pushing the field forward. Admittedly Google is also not the best example though, seeing as they're the Tensorflow maintainers :p
The issue isn’t that Yann didn’t publish an AI app; it is that they did, and it was not as good.
The reality is that OpenAI was lucky. Inside the company, there is an alignment department whose effort was driven to help models share human ethics, and that was initially a bit marginalized. However, one of their projects, RLHF, ended up producing a much superior language model, when they could have initially assumed it would be worse.
I don't see the same thing happening between Google and Bing
The uniform natural language interface makes it impossible to make an individual judgement whether the source of what result you get is reliable at all.
It's crazy how a company the size of Alphabet still embraces these reflexive whims.
Disclaimer: Google engineer but has nothing to do with the AI products.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...
Would you pay $20/mo for a better Google Search? ChatGPT already is.
Ad revenue is dead, long live subscription revenue.
Despite this blog obviously being written for Wall St, this line is key. This is why anyone is going to struggle to compete with Google in AI.
Google Search is used so widely and its taxonomy of meaning so vast already that once they flip this on they’ll be unstoppable. (Assuming any rate of improvement whatsoever as we search.)
I’m not mentioning all other learning data like email, photos and drive, in part because other companies have similar, albeit in more specialised forms.
Depending on how slimy they’re willing to be I’d argue there’s even more scope to push ads when “advising” user through a grey area vs straight up keyword search.
Think going several steps ahead of initial q, increased trust and reliance on responses, multiple follow up questions with more ads etc.
I’m just envisaging this based on my time with ChatGPT these last few weeks.
User: What should I be doing today?
AI: You have a court appearance at 9am. Prioritize that, because failing to appear might result in an arrest warrant. Next, prioritize your mums birthday - all the other family will be there, and with your mums cancer results last week, this might be the last. If you travel between them by bus, then you can spend the time going through your teams messages that you should have replied to last week.
Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house?
AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, nor the money to pay a plumber to do it, so I suggest you leave it leaking for now. I watched the video - its leaking down the basin, so won't do damage, and the water cost is around 8 cents a day.
At that point the line between commerce and giving the best advice is going to get REALLY messy.
Pretty creepy and a tad dystopian but thats Google for you.
From what I understand about LLMs - not directly. But it may be possible to integrate LLMs with other services such that LLMs respond this way.
I have no idea.
But it would be nice?* if this LLM stuff could be incorporated into the telephone system for my bank, pharmacy, etc.
It's obvious that these organizations don't want to connect me with a $killed human, so instead of having me interact with an infuriating "pretend" human, maybe CVS can fuse their phone system with ChatGPT to make the experience a little less maddening.
"Hey, I already gave you my birth date. No need to ask again. And I told you 30 seconds ago that I don't need to schedule a COVID vaccine. Just tell the pharmacist <xyz>."
* Be careful what you (I) wish for, I guess.
Specifically, LLM's can generally only take into account ~8000 words of context when deciding on a response. Summarizing the question and all necessary information for the answer into 8000 words is hard when the user might have millions of words in their inbox.
Having said that, I don't think it's far off. There are already prototypes of LLM's which have information retrieval abilities (ie. it could do a keyword search of your inbox to find a few relevant documents to read to decide on a response). There are also promising efforts to make that 8000 word number far larger.
AI: You have a court appearance today, I have booked a route for you on google maps. Next buy a gift for your mum’s birthday, here are some recommendations sorted by ad spend spend. For your travel, I recommend these options, sorted by ad spend.
Me: What about the leaking faucet in my house?
AI: You don't have the time to fix it yourself, here is a list of contractors that can fix the leak, sorted by google ad spend.
Most projects are focused on privacy, user control and being censorship resistant. Which are all important, just not that important to the majority of everyday consumers who will take features and convenience over those other benefits. If decentralized AI is going to be competitive, it must actually be better along the lines of its actual features that enhance productivity.
http://chat.petals.ml
I'm contributing to the project by running a node in my garage with a single RTX 3060ti in it, and you can too: https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals
It's early days, but the tech is super promising.
Decentralized search and social media never gained traction. It turns out that the majority of people just aren't that interested in privacy and freedom. Features and convenience still win. If decentralized AI is going to be successful, it will have to compete head to head for features and convenience. I do hope that it is successful.
Nonetheless, decentralization is just one major hurdle. I have numerous concerns about the application of the tech overall. Too much to put into this post, but if you are interested I've written much more here.
https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
2. Wall St tends to be very forgiving when the investment is something with a strong a moat as AI. Metaverse is an example of what happens when they don’t believe…
3. With a few exceptions like weather, their current searches provide links to static pages others have built, so much of their understanding and analysis is going to waste. Giving custom results breaks through that.
But perhaps only for now. When youtube first started taking off, Google was bleeding cash on the resources needed to support it. Perhaps the same will be true for LLMs.
I think they are too "big" to really push AI, it needs smaller companies willing to take a higher risk.
But with China, Russia and India lurking, perhaps Congress might drag their feet on reigning AI in. Google Cloud are now poised to be going for some pretty decent govt contracts.
On the flip side, trying to make facts copyrightable seems like a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons. For example, if facts were copyrightable, that would make online discussion of factual stories illegal, since it's hard to discuss a fact without revealing what it is. Also, it's not always clear who should get "credit" for a fact, since facts are by their very nature true independent of who first reported them.
Maybe journalism will eventually become similar to academia, where journalists are funded by governments and large corporations who have an interest in learning, and the resulting discoveries are (ideally) made freely available for everyone to access?
They can break antitrust laws if they go too much in a direction of delivering outright replies instead of redirecting to websites.
Take the difference between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft just released tools that will make your life much easier. Intelligent Recap of teams meetings, ability to assign tasks based on what was discussed etc. Microsoft will announce bing with have chatgpt integration tomorrow. MSFT is eating Goog’s lunch and Sundar needs to go.
Unstoppable as measured by what? More ad revenue?
They're already the #1 search engine due to two decades of general goodwill and a decade of monopoly power in mobile.
Can this be integrated for training though?
Yeah, remember Google+? they tried very hard and resorted to very intrusive UX patterns, but they ultimately failed.
IMO this is similar, ChatGPT has a huge head start, and Google needs to do A LOT of work.
Microsoft is rumored to be adding GPT powered features to Bing very soon and might beat Google to market.
Very interesting times!