Hasn't this always been a problem at Google?
Post-Gmail, what have they successfully taken from raw tech to successful product on their own? Hangouts/Duo/Meet? Chrome? (Although that latter they leveraged marketing pretty heavily)
They've had a helluva lot more success buying successful or nascent products, then developing the hell out of them into more successful products. E.g. YouTube, Android, Docs
>Ongoing
It’s not a successful product yet, but there’s a good case that they’ve got a strong lead in self-driving cars.
Same with AI broadly, super recent sentiment notwithstanding… ongoing shot.
>Near hits
Stadia was a huge product marketing failure that proved the (very slowly) growing and succeeding cloud gaming model.
>Non-monetized
Go lang isn’t a “product” in the same sense, but it seems pretty successful.
Similar deal with Kubernetes.
Point is… productization + adoption from incubation is hard and they aren’t just totally flopping every time. Not sure any other big tech is doing way better?
Although it's a good point for sure
I'd say Google has played it just right. They clearly have a better idea of the readiness of the tech than Microsoft, who hastily released Bing's LLM to muted ridicule.
In terms of UI, ChatGPT is a glorified text box. The hard part is the basic research, which Google can grind away on in the background until the moment is right.
The problem with current LLMs is that they are inaccurate and untrustworthy. If LLMs were search engines then ChatGPT is the Altavista or Ask Jeeves. Google wants to be the, well, Google - come in later with tech that actually works.
Is it tho? I mean everyone is dying to try it. I’m beginning to feel like all this stuff was intentional to drum up free advertising.
Linus Tech Tips picked it up on the Wan show and were blown away to some extent.
Google is taking a very conservative approach, but their work is years ahead of groups getting far more press.
…In the tech/hn echo chamber. People who have access that are not technical and that not try to trip it up seem to like it. Don’t think Bing has been used this much since its inception.
Until they actually release something and let the masses access their precious AI research there is no evidence they have anything at all.
Epic, complete blunder by Google.
It’s very nice of them to do foundational research for the industry at large, but that is not most people’s definition of business success.
*At the very least, not enough of a product to make a release sensible. If they launch Google GPT and it sucks, their product is dead. If Open AI doesn't release their "product," their company is dead and they lose funding and marketshare (that is, marketshare of a future market). Apple isn't releasing anything either; do you think they have nobody working on it? Microsoft is trying to use chatGPT in an existing product (still behind a waitlist) which is probably just to test the usefulness of thier $20 B investment in Open AI. I think Google's research speaks for itself, the lack of a product doesn't speak to anything.
Google is quiet because they can’t figure out how to release something that is 1) useful, and 2) not fatal to their core business.
Google’s entire empire is built on users having to run multiple searches and click through multiple links to find anything. Any kind of summarization/knowledge system that reduces wasted user time is necessarily bad news for Google.
Google’s research here is admirable. Their lack of productization (remember, they also claim to be years ahead) is a symptom of business mistakes coming home to roost.
I don't doubt this, but there was a HUGE marketing/news angle MS+OpenAI and big name recognition in the space for Hugging Face.
If it's about deep integration of LLM into products, I'm sure Google has been prioritizing that for awhile. If it's about making a splash with their own thing in their cloud offering, it lands a little softer than Microsoft's or AWS' news.