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Re:Google I/O 2023 by motoboi on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @01:54PM (#35890871)
So funny to see google stressing EVERYTIME that they have been using AI for years.

Dude, you were seated in the pot of gold and let your organizational disfuncionality block you from really using that.

And now you come trying to get the crown of AI? Catch up and them we can talk.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by onlyrealcuzzo on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @01:56PM (#35890903)
I mean, Google Translate has been basically completely AI powered for 5+ years, and it's one of the most used products in the world...

The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.

This idea that Google sucks at AI and is clearly a million miles behind is intriguing.

Google is currently the company everyone loves to hate like MSFT was 5-10 years ago.

THAT is a bad sign regardless if anything the people are saying has any truth to it.

MSFT has been the king of enterprise software since the 80s. But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking about how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete garbage.

None of that was true. But, MSFT was in for some relatively bad times for a decade or so.

I suspect the same thing is going to happen to Google just because sentiment is powerful.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by motoboi on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @02:42PM (#35891582)
You now that, I know that, everyone knows that. And yet, google stresses it everytime, like the company is anxious that people is looking for OpenAI and not google.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by nr2x on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @02:53PM (#35891737)
Some of the key people behind translate founded OpenAI. Don’t forget it’s always been about the people, not the brand.

Google was good at attracting and retaining the best and brightest. Now they aren’t.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by eclipxe on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @04:52PM (#35893345)
Citation needed?
Re:Google I/O 2023 by nr2x on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @05:05PM (#35893505)
Ask and ye shall receive:

“Based in part on his work with Hinton, Sutskever was hired by Google. There, he implemented a neural-network-driven approach to language translation that produced fewer errors than competing efforts. His work provided the basis for a major upgrade to Google Translate. “Researchers didn’t believe that neural networks could do translation, so it was a big surprise when they could,” he says.”

https://magazine.utoronto.ca/people/alumni-donors/heard-it-t...

Hinton left last week as well.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by krackers on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @02:44PM (#35891624)
>and it's one of the most used products in the world...

And they had their lunch completely eaten by deepL

Re:Google I/O 2023 by onlyrealcuzzo on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @03:00PM (#35891864)
Did they? I've never heard of deepL, and Google Translate still has close to 1 billion users.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by krackers on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @03:03PM (#35891899)
In terms of wider userbase Google Translate is still de facto, but anyone who uses MTL heavily knows that DeepL beats Google Translate for most languages, especially east asian ones.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by onlyrealcuzzo on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @03:07PM (#35891976)
Sure - and Ubuntu is better than Windows. In business, it doesn't really matter.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by coolspot on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @06:55PM (#35894594)
> But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking about how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete garbage. > None of that was true.

Ummm… In 2000s MSFT was producing complete garbage. Internet Explorer, Windows XP then ME, Windows Phone, ASP, Bing.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by lmm on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @10:02PM (#35896404)
> I mean, Google Translate has been basically completely AI powered for 5+ years, and it's one of the most used products in the world...

It's also the single clearest example of a product that's been left behind by the "AI revolution" - while Google may still have the numbers (like Yahoo Search did back in the day), DeepL is what serious people use.

> The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.

It's also got subjectively worse and worse over that same time period. Demand for a better search engine is higher than it's been for decades.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by jiggawatts on Thursday May 11, 2023 @12:23AM (#35897450)
And DeepL translate is blown out of the water by Chat GPT 4.

I tested GPT 3.5, GPT 4.0, Google Translate, and DeepL on some "difficult" sentences, and GPT 4 was the only one that could translate them correctly. Not only that, it could do style shifts in non-English languages, such as "make this more formal", "less formal", "idiomatic", etc...

I suspect that GPT 4 is so good at translation is because it understands what it is translating at a near-human level.

I like this snippet:

"John Bear from Bear Stearns was bearish about bear pelt futures on the Bear City bear markets."

Which GPT 4 can round-trip from English -> Hungarian -> Chinese -> English again and outputs this:

"John Bell comes from Bellsterns and has a very strong bearish sentiment on the future value of bear skins in the Bear City bear market."

Interesting to note that it used a sounds-alike-to-Chinese-speakers "Bell" for "Bear" in proper names. Other than that, this is pretty good, which is very impressive. DeepL and Google Translate shreds the first step and have no hope on a round-trip this long across such unrelated languages. For example, DeepL outputs some gibberish about bear claws (the pastry) and bear cubs!?

Re:Google I/O 2023 by dmix on Thursday May 11, 2023 @01:09AM (#35897815)
Google could also integrate their translation service into their consumer AR product that's coming out in 2024 to do live translations, directions, and other real-time image "AI" analysis stuff. A ChatGPT type assistant built into your day-to-day life could be interesting. If not for Q&A other use cases we don't yet know about.

https://www.techradar.com/features/google-glass-2-everything...

Apple is apparently announcing their AR glasses in June

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-04-02/when-i...

Re:Google I/O 2023 by kernal on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @01:59PM (#35890961)
OpenAI must be sweating profusely after viewing that I/O presentation. Not only do they not have the integration, scale and user base of Google, but the migration of Bard to PaLM 2 it will exceed whatever OpenAI currently has. Also, it's only a matter of time before their top employee's are poached by Apple and Google.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by motoboi on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @02:40PM (#35891565)
Yeah. If people get access to It. In the meantime, OpenAI is hoarding GPUS for the next iteration while happily collecting 20 dollars from users and loads of free work from free users.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by satvikpendem on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @02:19PM (#35891245)
Well I guess that internal memo was true, there is no moat in AI, for Google, OpenAI, or any other, as long as AI continues to improve.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by bo-tao on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @04:32PM (#35893079)
What does it mean to have no moat?
Re:Google I/O 2023 by ducttapecrown on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @04:46PM (#35893257)
A "moat" is the protection company A has against company B building a clone of company A's product. For example, YouTube has the set of people who have a habit of logging on to YouTube to watch content. A competitor has to convince all those people to change their habits. This is known to be a hard problem, so it's a moat!

Netflix thought they had a similar moat of user-habits. But it turns out that the more important moat in the streaming market is a moat of content.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by satvikpendem on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @04:48PM (#35893279)
Here's the article I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
Re:Google I/O 2023 by sweeds on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @04:56PM (#35893396)
No competitive advantage that protects the business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat

Re:Google I/O 2023 by sebzim4500 on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @05:40PM (#35893899)
>but the migration of Bard to PaLM 2 it will exceed whatever OpenAI currently has

I really doubt that. If Google had anything that could seriously compete with GPT-4 they would be shouting about it from the mountains. Not publishing a comparison where they only include GPT-4 in the two benchmarks that they win.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by int_19h on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @06:08PM (#35894148)
Here's my entirely non-scientific comparison:

https://imgur.com/a/HWLgu3c

If that is really the best that Google can do after working for several months on one-upping GPT-4, that's just sad, and doesn't bode well for them.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by chaxor on Saturday May 13, 2023 @02:41AM (#35926193)
Google in some ways is far better than OpenAI in their AI capabilities, but it mostly comes down to the fact that they weren't making products, when OpenAI was.

Deepmind has probably the best research in the AI area fundamentally, and the capabilities they have shown academically are much better than any other group. However, they have been seemingly completely disinterested in making any product usable for the public in the area - which takes a good deal of engineering and glue. So it will take a bit of time for them to make that happen. For example, OpenAI was not the first to use RLHF to train a language model (Sparrow from Deepmind was the first to conceive of this idea). Additionally, Deepmind has far better people in the general GNN and algorithmic reasoning area, which is going to shape up to be far more important in the coming years. That's of course not to say OpenAI doesn't have excellent research or people (Sutskyver is integral to an incredible number of monumental achievements in NNs), but the company as a whole focuses on product far more than fundamental academic research, and that has a potential to creep up on them.

Obviously Bard from the scientific side seems like it was probably hastily thrown together in an afternoon by one guy, and then sent to the marketing/we dev/etc group to put it public facing.

Re:Google I/O 2023 by dzader on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @06:11PM (#35894173)
> Not only do they not have the integration, scale and user base of Google, Sure, but MSFT does. Well beyond the scale and user base google has.
Re:Google I/O 2023 by nonfamous on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @07:49PM (#35895213)
> OpenAI must be sweating profusely after viewing that I/O presentation. Not only do they not have the integration, scale and user base of Google ...

Good thing OpenAI has a distribution partner in Microsoft Azure, then.