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They might get lucky branding it PaLM but TCL own the trademark on the word Palm (Since the original Palm went out of business, and HP sold it off) in the software space

Wonder if it will end up like the IOS/iOS thing where Apple ended up having to pay Cisco

Compared with what OpenAI and Microsoft have done over the past few days, it's hard to get excited about vague press releases.
The irony that OpenAI used a google form to launch their waitlist.
Occam's Razor says that's just an ordinary contemporary tech user/worker, who has no concept that they might not want to do it that way.

But if it happens to be OpenAI strutting in front of Google, like, "We can even hand you all our hot leads, and still beat you," that'd be something.

It’s user friendly enough to be a household name. Google’s supposed software can’t even be used yet.
I guess for computer scientists. My dad calls is ChatGDP half the time.
At least in late 2021 - Google by itself was substantially bigger than Amazon + AWS in terms of data centers.

In terms of private text, FB is orders of magnitude ahead of Amazon.

Amazon is not a 1000 pound gorilla in this space. It's just another player in a game for 5.

It was never clear to me how many books went into training GPT et al. One area where Amazon might have an advantage is if they are able to train on their library of eBooks.
I don't see how Google can get any kind of market share if all they offer is an API behind a waiting list.

OpenAI understands this. They provide a simple chat interface to interact with their language model that even my grandparents can use.

Midjourney understands this too. The Discord interface is a bit awkward to use, but the fact that any Discord user can instantly become a Midjourney user was a brilliant idea.

Google, on the other hand, is only targeting a tiny subset of all people, namely those who can make use of an API and want to sign up for its cloud offerings.

Is there any (ex?) Googler here who can explain why Google keeps squandering its immense technological advantage over its competitors again and again?

You're comparing a startup to a large corporation. My assumption here is that Google is terrified of the legal issues of raw interactions with an LLM and it saying something wrong or hateful. In terms of search it has a lot to lose if they mess up and start saying wrong things. Bing on the other hand is not the core of Microsoft and can be more tolerant of risk.

That being said I've seen plenty of instances of Bing supposedly being hateful, wrong or gaslighting folks. IE: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/15/23599072/microsoft-ai-bin...

I won't give you the welcome to google spiel. There are a couple of reasons for this imo:

* Most things are built off the internal codebase/repo (only android and a couple of others afair has it's own repo/independent setup). So when exposing something to the public not only does it have to go through layers of legal/compliance processes, it also has to go through "uniformity" processes.

* Engineers don't just build mvps, they try to build the perfect thing where every thing integrates with everything (or there needs to be a road map for this).

* Everything has to be an API first, uis are thrown on top of things.

While these aren't bad engineering philosophies these add up and need to intrinsically build and maintain umpteen layers of decorator/bridge patterns everywhere.

Now combine all this where you don't have the luxury of being the first person in the market but are reacting to a sudden competitive pressure. Lots of processes to undo or get around!

I hope you are right. Getting locked in to one vendor due to lack of choice is risky.
I assume this is only usable by online applications? If your application doesn’t have an internet connection, you can’t use PaLM?
Curious... Why would they be a bad place for that talent to go? Just their corporate culture? Facebook managed to build a LLaMa, and they're notorious...