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Re:Google Bard enters open beta by axegon_ on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:11AM (#35247351)
Google has the tendency to do this when they aren't the first to set foot on new land. Don't get me wrong, they get a lot of things very right: Gmail works perfectly, I can't find a single reason to change my pixel for anything else, search, although there's been a lot of deterioration in the past couple of years, is still second to none. That said, self driving cars, google+, duo and all the other services they launched as competitors failed miserably. While some of them eventually managed to catch up in terms of functionality and even outperform the products they were competing with, they never really managed to catch up on the hype side of things. Most people are creatures of habit I guess..
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by ithkuil on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:19AM (#35247479)
But AI is their turf!

Google was always a ML company masquerading as a search engine.

I guess that the art of "generating text" is not their kind of AI?

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by zeven7 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:36AM (#35247708)
Right, my expectation was they had something better than OpenAI they were sitting on and afraid to release / didn't know how to make money with it and were essentially forced to show what they had once Chat GPT became a threat to search. I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe", but there's a reason for expectations to be high for Google here, and it really needs to clearly outperform Chat GPT in the same way GPT 4 clearly outperforms GPT 3.5.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by dragonwriter on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:55AM (#35248010)
> I assume it's still possible they have something better and this is the nuked version that's "safe"

Its explicitly a smaller model to save on compute costs for scaling up to more users; but that’s a questionable decision given the situation with OpenAI’s accessible models and, if you are going to do that, why also do a slow-roll waitlist? I think both are signs of the kind of caution that will hurt Google in this market, even though the tech is near to the heart of what they do, the product isn’t, and they’ve gone very established-corp-cautious on products outside of their core.

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by robwwilliams on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @10:34PM (#35256053)
DeepMind in their back pocket. LLMs need higher order supervisory logic and recursive attention/control systems. I suspect Hassabis and colleagues willl be able to wake LMMs from their semi-conscious dream states.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by Palpatineli on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @12:00PM (#35248083)
I mean they may have a better base model but if there is no business case, there is no resource to do RLHF with mass human labeling.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by muskmusk on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @03:10PM (#35251016)
In the olden days before Satya Nadella. Microsoft was a bloodsucking vampire of a company that couldn't execute anything of significance, but they had a pretty solid research department.

Google could ofcourse sit on a much better version that isn't safe or economic, but they could also just be unable to do better. Good research department, but unable to execute anything significant. Time will tell I guess :)

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by jstx1 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:36AM (#35247715)
Let's take it easy on them, they only wrote the paper on transformers and have access to more data than anybody else. I'm sure the people leading Google Brain and Deepmind had something else to do in the past few months.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by hn_20591249 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:52AM (#35247958)
Sounds like after the last decade and a half of Google flexing their AI muscle, maybe they are a search company masquerading as an AI company?
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by akomtu on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @07:08PM (#35254056)
It's a Ad Exchange (AdX) with many tentacles to hoard PII. Search is one of those tentacles, just as Android and Chrome.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by hbn on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @12:00PM (#35248073)
Google is an ad company.

ML just happens to be good for targeting ads.

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by deltree7 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @09:21PM (#35255424)
Google's cloud revenue is almost same as Oracle.

If Google Cloud was it's own company, it'd be a fortune 100 firm.

But you keep doing you, living with outdated information and grandma tales. I bet you'd still be telling this joke to your grandkids too

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by logicchains on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @04:33AM (#35258329)
>Google's cloud revenue is almost same as Oracle.

What about their profits?

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by manojlds on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @04:29PM (#35252066)
The whole basis of current innovation is from Google, let's not forget.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by guardian5x on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @05:10AM (#35258581)
For me, Google was always an Ad company first. But don't get me wrong, they do some great research on the side for AI, like AlphaZero, AlphaGo, etc. But also been early with the Transformer models. There just seems to be a lack to put this into workable products lately.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by dageshi on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:25AM (#35247562)
Is anyone doing better than Google at self driving cars right now?

I agree with the other products you mentioned but it seems like nobody has "won" self driving cars yet but google might be the furthest along?

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by pb7 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:41AM (#35247794)
Waymo is far in the lead. Best track record, transparent reporting, and actually on the road driving passengers around without a driver in the car.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by minutillo on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:32AM (#35247667)
Yes, many cars with various levels of self-driving are available. Almost every car maker now has basic lane following and adaptive cruise control. Some add navigation, lane changing, and the ability to obey traffic signals. GM has a system called Super Cruise that allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel. Mercedes has Drive Pilot which is the first level 3 self driving system.

Google has not released anything.

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by zeven7 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:42AM (#35247808)
Google has taken the approach they have very deliberately. They believe in full self driving only. It's not that they couldn't do lane changing and autopilot. It's that they believed it was the wrong approach. No steering wheel, no dependence on a human driver is what they want.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by LamaOfRuin on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @12:11PM (#35248250)
Also they don't have a business selling cars that they can put it in as a desirable feature that is not the core value proposition.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by chewmieser on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:41AM (#35247798)
Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities (no person in the front seat at all). Honestly they seem quite advanced compared to the competition.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by 1024core on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @04:58PM (#35252464)
> Waymo has fully self-driving taxi services in various cities

Only 2: Phoenix and SF.

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by adt on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @05:45PM (#35253025)
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by pb7 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:39AM (#35247763)
Waymo is driving passengers around a real city without a driver in the car as a service. Automatically changing lanes is cute by comparison.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by JohnnyMarcone on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @02:14PM (#35250153)
I just took a 20 minute ride to the airport in a Waymo yesterday. They are operating in two locations in Arizona and expanding to San Francisco.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by rnk on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @04:49PM (#35252313)
Do the cars drive at freeway speeds, 60 mph plus on the freeway? My impression was they don't go on roads with speeds that fast, they limit themselves to roads with speedsmaybe up to 40.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by ra7 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @03:31PM (#35251319)
Driver assistance and fully autonomous driving are very different things.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by qgin on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:47PM (#35256576)
I think Cruise is plausible competitor for them. Waymo and Cruise both would be tied for first, each with different aspects that seem to be ahead at the moment.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by COMMENT___ on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @12:47PM (#35248853)
> Gmail works perfectly

Is this a joke? Gmail now is an awful email client. E.g., now you just can’t compose a rich text email when you need to copy paste lists from other emails. In certain cases, you can’t correctly format an email if you copy paste without formatting or plain text. And there is a lot of such annoying stuff, that makes my life painful.

Perhaps, searching my mailbox with gmail is OK, but the part of composing emails is in bad state.

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by com2kid on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @12:47PM (#35248857)
> I can't find a single reason to change my pixel for anything else,

Fingerprint reader on the Pixel 7 works about half the time. I had to program one finger in 4 times to make it work that often. My Oneplus 6 (immediately previous phone) had a functional fingerprint reader.

OnePlus used to have a better UI as well, minor improvements on the stock Android UI that made it just a little bit nicer in places.

When I got my Pixel 7 though, I realized that for whatever reason, gboard on my oneplus 6 is unusually terrible. Like, 80% accurate typing terrible, and that gboard isn't always that bad.

> Gmail works perfectly

Gmail was the first good web email client. Everyone else realized they had to stop sucking, and now they are good. Gmail was realized in 2004 and is from a completely different era of Google.

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by jvolkman on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @01:13PM (#35249251)
My Pixel 7's fingerprint reader works near 100% of the time. The only time I have problems is if my finger or the screen are wet.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by com2kid on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @01:39PM (#35249634)
* * *
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by jvolkman on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @02:01PM (#35249949)
I usually use my left thumb after taking it out of my left pant pocket.

I also use a TPU screen protector, not glass. I've read that various glass protectors can interfere.

Re:Google Bard enters open beta by com2kid on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @02:35PM (#35250489)
* * *
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by chatmasta on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @01:35PM (#35249562)
There was an HN thread the other day where people were arguing ChatGPT would be nowhere without Google's AI research. That might be true, but clearly there is a significant gap in productization ability...
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by LightBug1 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @05:21PM (#35252738)
Deproductization black belts.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by pratikch1253 on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @05:44PM (#35253018)
From recent memory I don't recall a single Google product that has garnered mass appeal perhaps the cloud office suites but that's again debatable. Gmail was like 2004. Remember Stadia they axed that as well could have licensed the tech behind it to other companies but nope.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by tonguetrainer on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @06:28PM (#35253583)
Google must compete with ChatGPT though. Failure is not an option here. Microsoft has put Google in a corner and it is fight or die.
Re:Google Bard enters open beta by smadge on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @11:29PM (#35256449)
I don’t know if it’s fair to say Google is just stepping into generative language models. They invented transformers!