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Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by arnaudsm on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:22AM (#34663960)
I wonder what happened at Google. They basically invented Transformers, and had useful LLMs for a while. Bert, Lambda, Palm, Sparrow were all cutting edge.

Why didn't they ship something like ChatGPT earlier? Lack of product vision? Perfectionism?

Is this Xerox vs Apple all over again ?

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by michaellee8 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:32AM (#34664015)
They do have lamda and it is available for test in their AI test kitchen. Seems much better handling of sensetive and offensive content then ChatGPT for me, but still cannot perform basic addition like ChatGPT does. I think it is technically better than ChatGPT but maybe they are only going to release the perfect product.

Tbf ChatGPT was far from production quality for serious applications, lots of misinformation and you can make it produce very offensive content. It is a good for toying around but you cannot take the output seriously.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by visarga on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:54AM (#34664147)
I think a token effort to avoid offensive content is ok, but chatGPT should quickly detect if the human wants to go outside the box and allow it. If a human pushes it means they understand the risks and take full responsibility for the outcome.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by rvnx on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:05AM (#34664215)
This is not how Google's AI Test Kitchen is designed. AI Test Kitchen seems quite boring and very framed system, where you can ask what is the best Dyson model for example, or the old-style "GPT dungeon game", it doesn't really go off-rail (this is part of the product specifications sadly :/).
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by LoganDark on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:07AM (#34664227)
> chatGPT should quickly detect if the human wants to go outside the box and allow it

This is why "jailbreaking" is a thing. Once you convince the model that it's OK, it'll let you do anything from then on.

-Emily

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by criley2 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:14AM (#34664277)
I couldn't disagree more. ChatGPT would be extremely easy to convert to "HateGPT", and would be able to create some pretty powerful and useful political, racial, etc propaganda.

I think it's right that the owners understand what the weaponization of ChatGPT could do and prevent it, and I think we need laws (and fast) before weaponized AI like ChatGPT turns into a disaster for humanity

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by bsenftner on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:22AM (#34664333)
My experience it is like working with a genius idiot, the type that refuses to be wrong, which means the shithead (if it were human) requires verification and curation. So what if I need to verify? I do that anyway, because people have imperfect memory, documentation is often old, and who knows what unexpected whatever could be impacting my expectations.

I welcome idiot savants.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by jimmySixDOF on Sunday February 05, 2023 @10:32AM (#34665668)
People I know say the lamda Kitchen release is unbelievably limited by comparison. A Kitchen session has three sections: The 'Ask a question' prompt is limited to under 100 characters and response is like the existing Google search question snips. The 'Make a List' section is just lists like as in short bullet points. And the 'Creative' section is limited to respond with stories involving dogs for which is a little bizarre to say the least.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by k__ on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:30AM (#34664003)
Maybe they thought they could do better than just "building a bigger model".
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by londons_explore on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:47AM (#34664106)
> I wonder what happened at Google.

They suffer from "scared to release an imperfect product that damages PR"-itis.

They are so scared that an AI with Google branding might say something inappropriate, that they prefer to release nothing at all.

For context, they put a lot of engineering effort into making sure "Okay Google" for the voice assistant couldn't be modded to "Yo Dick" or something else off-brand, simply because they were worried about media backlash.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by onlyrealcuzzo on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:55AM (#34664149)
So why not lease the tech to a different company under a different brand they own and release it?

Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

Nobody is going to care if Google releases a ChatGPT bot on a different website.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by londons_explore on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:06AM (#34664226)
That's what I'd do... specifically, I'd license Google tech to ex-google employees who want to start a company, in return for an 80% ownership stake.

It would be a 'you can use all google internal code and infrastructure, for free, as long as you don't use google branding and don't use our user data' deal.

The companies would have the benefits of google tech, without being tied down by internal politics, procedures, risk management, etc.

They could afford to do things like just release a product to the world rather than have a legal and PR team go over every detail for every law in every country worldwide as part of a 6 month long review process.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by hooo on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:49AM (#34664864)
Lol, think from the founder / teams perspectives. Giving 80% ownership would be insane. How could you build a company like that? It’s not so simple.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by ignoramous on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:13AM (#34665026)
Those are called Spin-Ins. Now abandoned, Cisco once pioneered this model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348900

The closest Google had to it was Area 120, which has also been abandoned?

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by onlyrealcuzzo on Sunday February 05, 2023 @10:01AM (#34665400)
Isn't this what incubators do now?
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by fakedang on Sunday February 05, 2023 @03:01PM (#34668617)
The value add by most incubators and accelerators is minimal, compared to what a large parent company can provide though.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by unicornmama on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:08AM (#34664995)
The sort of people who would accept those terms are not the sort of people you want to build a startup.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by neilv on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:22AM (#34665095)
I might take that 80% deal, for the right killer IP that I knew how to apply in a marketable way, and a couple years of sufficient GCP credits.

I might bootstrap revenue without much hiring, so that business success means the team does better financially than the sure-thing FIRE if they'd just taken a FAANG job and grinded promotions.

This business giving away 80% equity would lean on the value of IP, and on knowing how to be very effective with solo/small teams -- not 'scale' in the sense of trying to herd hundreds of software and product and business people. (This is another thing that big orgs can have trouble doing, and so sometimes do insulated spinoffs/units instead, just to unburden people.)

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by crakhamster01 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @02:39PM (#34668297)
I think they basically employ that model already at Area 120 [0]. This interview platform called Byteboard was spun out of Area 120 a couple of years ago, and I imagine Google has a large ownership stake in it, while avoiding the brand association [1].

[0] https://area120.google.com/

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/05/technical-interview-platfo...

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by dbspin on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:08AM (#34664237)
> Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

That might have been true at some point - but a combination of their extremely loud rebranding of both to Meta, and the media constantly saying 'Instagram, which is owned by FB' or words to that effect has changed it. Even my elderly parents are aware Instagram is owned by FB / Meta.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by HWR_14 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:47AM (#34664854)
I feel like this was done so retail investors would know Instagram was owned by Meta. Not users.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by fakedang on Sunday February 05, 2023 @03:03PM (#34668630)
If that was the case, I wouldn't be greeted by the new Meta logo every time I open the WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook apps.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by HWR_14 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @10:56PM (#34673156)
That could be because Meta doesn't have the same negative connotation FB does.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by trpv on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:07AM (#34664229)
> Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

They're pretty upfront with it... It says "By Meta" on the launch screen

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by vxNsr on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:28AM (#34664372)
I know many people who use WhatsApp every day who are still surprised when I say it’s owned by Facebook/meta. They just don’t see what they don’t want to see.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by onlyrealcuzzo on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:47AM (#34664497)
I know people who I remind this to regularly, and they just don't care enough to remember.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by DJBunnies on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:17AM (#34664309)
> Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

Even my non tech friends know.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by cuteboy19 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:55AM (#34664150)
So much effort that could have gone into making it actually usable. i don't think the product has improved much since it was released. Even very basic things like "navigate to Walmart by bus" actually don't work.

More things that don't work:

1. Delete the last screenshot.

2. Set timezone to est

3. Turn on hotspot

4. Turn on nearby sharw

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by londons_explore on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:13AM (#34664269)
Most of this is due to androids permissions model. The Google app doesn't have permissions required to do any of those 4 things.

However, it should at least just ask for permission the first time you try to do that.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by acdha on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:55AM (#34665359)
It can’t be as simple as someone Googling “how to request permissions on Android” – this kind of thing is a product decision. I would assume it’s more due to their promotions culture: are any of those getting demoed on a big screen at I/O?
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by notRobot on Sunday February 05, 2023 @12:54PM (#34667013)
I don't think it's due to the permissions model. Google Play Services has almost all permissions on your device by default.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by joshxyz on Sunday February 05, 2023 @06:49AM (#34664121)
They'll shut it down anyways that's why, it's hard to trust them these days. LLMs require years of commitment, check out google graveyard for list of products that also needed that kind of commitment.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by spaceman_2020 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:03AM (#34664207)
They’re REALLY fumbling the bag with search and maps lately as well. My experience with both as a user has never been worse. I’ve flirted with exiting Google search before but this time it got bad enough that I fully committed to Kagi.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by trpv on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:09AM (#34664243)
I've used DuckDuckGo for a couple of years now, so I've gotten very used to it, and on the odd occasion I try to use Google, the amount of ads, different sections with news, images, products, and other unnecessary clutter that isnt actual search results makes for a really uncomfortable experience
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by bsenftner on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:17AM (#34664304)
> I wonder what happened at Google.

Finance and management, knowing their bread and butter is as advertising distribution company, undermine, kill, and dilute any projects that are not obviously, undeniably directly tied to improving their advertising distribution revenues. Their big problem is, they never communicated this core identity to the larger corporation, and somehow search is allowed to coast...

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by flandish on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:19AM (#34664320)
They’re a stockholder owned corporation now. Beholden to profit above all else. Making things like layoffs, hedged bets, and scared-to-execute moves all the more common. Remember when they were “don’t be evil?” - can’t be not evil, when on the market..
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by astrange on Sunday February 05, 2023 @11:25AM (#34666131)
> They’re a stockholder owned corporation now. Beholden to profit above all else.

Neither of these two things are true.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by flandish on Sunday February 05, 2023 @02:03PM (#34667816)
Your reply’s logic shows my point. 49% of the company can be purchased via the market. It is a public company.

Public companies are legally required to put shareholder interest first - that’s what the whole point of this facet of capitalism is: to provide profit to the “owner” class of society, at the cost of worker exploitation.

Get Adam Smith’s boot out of your mouth and recognize that literally anything a corporation does is for the goal of profit. Corporations are not human - and only have a decision making process that puts “return” first. Zero of them are “not evil.”

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by astrange on Sunday February 05, 2023 @05:48PM (#34670579)
> Public companies are legally required to put shareholder interest first

No, they are not. And they definitely aren't required to care about the interests of 49% of them.

> Get Adam Smith’s boot out of your mouth and recognize that literally anything a corporation does is for the goal of profit.

Is everything an animal does for the purpose of finding food? (No.)

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by Psychoshy_bc1q on Monday February 06, 2023 @02:47AM (#34674508)
everything an animal does is for the purpose of reproduction lol
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by nodja on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:19AM (#34664322)
They made T5 and released the weights, while T5 "only" goes up to 11B params, it's an efficient model for a wide variety of tasks and the base for a lot of other models/projects. Of note imagen[1] and open-assistant[2] use T5 and FlanT5.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11487

[2] https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by dna_polymerase on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:23AM (#34664341)
The outside world gets a glimpse into what is happening at Google right now by looking at the people who leave Google. I wouldn't have been surprised if Google had invested in Character, a startup which was formed by Ex-Google LM people. To cite The Information [0]:

"At Google, Character’s co-founders Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas were instrumental in developing Google’s LaMDA language model, used for natural language processing research. They decided to launch their own startup after getting frustrated with big company bureaucracies, Shazeer previously told The Information."

[0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/character-seeks-250-...

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by mrtksn on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:33AM (#34664406)
People say its to preserve the brand and be woke etc. but IMHO it is simply because doesn't fit Google's business.

ChatGPT is very cool but they don't make money from it and GPT-3 had a paid public API for a year now and I read that the money they make from it is very little, insignificant compared to the funding they get from VCs.

Currently, there's no clear path for monetisation but has the capacity to take away a lot of Google's use cases. In essence, it's like Napster destroying the Music CD business.

Maybe it's also a bit like Kodak: Invents the technology but its current business is too good to be messed around with. This new tech is the future but we are happy in the moment.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by LewisVerstappen on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:38AM (#34664444)
Well, every single executive at Google has read the Innovator's Dilemma multiple times, so I doubt that's some novel insight that no one at Google has thought of.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by risyachka on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:44AM (#34664474)
Pretty much this.

If Google wanted - they could've easily released ChatGPT version that is 100x better than current one considering they invented the technology and they have thousands times more and better data to train it.

They just weren't interested.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by 0XYZxyzXYZ0 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:02AM (#34664593)
This doesn't make sense. They did invest in PaLM, which is ~2.5 larger than GPT-3, but no where near 100x better. I do agree that the limiting factor is the data, not scale though. What data has Google that OpenAI (or any other LLM company) can't scrape from the web as well? Using Gmail data without consent would be definitely a move towards a mountain of law suits.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by CuriouslyC on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:21AM (#34665093)
Google has a lot of scanned/ocr'd books that aren't available in public data sets.

I wouldn't be surprised if they used anonymized gmail data though. Even if they removed all proper nouns it'd probably provide a lot of extra tokens for training.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by flangola7 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:23AM (#34665107)
PaLM isn't public, there's no way to know if it is better or if so how much better it is.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by epistemer on Sunday February 05, 2023 @10:14AM (#34665512)
That is a huge assumption. The simplest explanation to me is that while they have larger language models they don't have a better product than chatGPT to release. I would think building that product is what this $400m represents.

The impressive thing with chatGPT to me is how well it understand what you want even with very sparse input. Even if it gives wrong answers it still feels like you are both on the same page. That seems like the secret sauce even if a larger language model would give more correct output. I wouldn't be shocked at all if Google doesn't have anything currently that feels the way chatGPT does when it comes to interaction and now they are racing to build exactly that.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by upstarter on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:49AM (#34664509)
> People say its to preserve the brand

I don't think it's that, either, given the rate at which they are involved in overt censorship, over the last years.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by victor106 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:55AM (#34664548)
If you’ve read the innovator’s dilemma this sounds a lot like that. Highly suggest reading.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by mrtksn on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:01AM (#34664591)
I'm familiar with the core ideas but definitely should read the book, thanks.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by knowriju on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:41AM (#34664800)
What I usually never see mentioned is the fair use doctrine. As soon as some website (reddit/yelp etc) is able to prove that their data has been used to train an AI that is monetisable, they'll be up in arms.

I believe this tech is so different and revolutionary, that the lawyers have yet to wrap their head around it. I predict a million lawsuits incoming any time now. This I believe is the primary reason for Google not releasing any product before the water gets tested. For what its worth Google already has access to lots and lots of data that it owns, that it can train its AI on (Photos, Gmail, Docs, obviously Search and probably YouTube as well)

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by monkeydust on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:39AM (#34664448)
Something to be said for '“Move fast and break things.” Zuckerberg
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by richardw on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:41AM (#34664461)
* * *
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by mkl95 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:51AM (#34664522)
> Why didn't they ship something like ChatGPT earlier? Lack of product vision? Perfectionism?

The simplest answer is that the people with the know-how did not work at Google. Knowing why they didn't is not so simple, though.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by CommanderData on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:56AM (#34664551)
Probably the lack of freedom to innovate or middle management suppressing free thought stopping cool stuff being made in a devs/eng spare downtime.

I've seen so many cool ideas thrown around by devs that could actually go onto be monetized by companies go wasted. To think they'd be worked on for free (spare time) and often better then outsourcing because nothing drives true innovation than passion.

Focus on BAU, keep your head down and be lucky you're not getting fired.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by joxel on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:29AM (#34664735)
Probably only hiring people that cram leetcode instead of actual smart people.
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by peterisza on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:41AM (#34664805)
Lack of balls. Same as Kodak, etc.

The fact that they are freaking out is actually a good sign though

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by habibur on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:51AM (#34664888)
They thought it was too powerful to be considered safe for release. And their ad revenue nevertheless had been great even without it. No rush.

They back stepped, and then watched someone else capture the market.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by daydream on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:12AM (#34665013)
Google is too big to seriously innovate. No top down focus or vision just recent Stanford graduates hawking random ideas. Then there’s the promo culture where everyone is busy trying to extract as much comp as possible instead of building. (I’m guessing)
Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by hanniabu on Sunday February 05, 2023 @09:29AM (#34665162)
> Why didn't they ship something like ChatGPT earlier?

I would say they have just in different form. For a few years now when you google something you're given a quote/excerpt at the top of the results that typically answers your question.

Re:Google Invests Almost $400M in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic by onion2k on Sunday February 05, 2023 @10:01AM (#34665399)
Why didn't they ship something like ChatGPT earlier?

In order to launch something you have to need to launch it. Either because you're losing market share, or because you need the revenue, or because your customers expect it. Google rarely has any of those things.