Comment by phi0
2 years ago
I just want to underscore that. DeepMind's research output within the last month is staggering:
2023-11-14: GraphCast, word leading weather prediction model, published in Science
2023-11-15: Student of Games: unified learning algorithm, major algorithmic breath-through, published in Science
2023-11-16: Music generation model, seemingly SOTA
2023-11-29: GNoME model for material discovery, published in Nature
2023-12-06: Gemini, the most advanced LLM according to own benchmarks
Google is very good at AI research.
Where it has fallen down (compared to its relative performance in relevant research) is public generative AI products [0]. It is trying very hard to catch up at that, and its disadvantage isn't technological, but that doesn't mean it isn't real and durable.
[0] I say "generative AI" because AI is a big an amorphous space, and lots of Google's products have some form of AI that is behind important features, so I'm just talking about products where generative AI is the center of what the product offers, which have become a big deal recently and where Google had definitely been delivering far below its general AI research weight class so far.
> Google is very good at AI research. Where it has fallen down (compared to its relative performance in relevant research) is public generative AI products
In such cases, I actually prefer Google over OpenAI. Monetization isn’t everything
> In such cases, I actually prefer Google over OpenAI.
For, what, moral kudos? (to be clear, I'm not saying this is a less important thing in some general sense, I'm saying what is preferred is always dependent on what we are talking about preferences for.)
> Monetization isn’t everything
Providing a user product (monetization is a different issue, though for a for-profit company they tend to be closely connected) is ultimately important for people looking for a product to use.
Other interests favor other things, sure.
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They publish but don't share. Who cares about your cool tech if we can't experience it ourselves? I don't care about your blog writeup or research paper.
Google is locked behind research bubbles, legal reviews and safety checks.
Mean while OpenAI is eating their lunch.
The researchers at all the other companies care about the blog write-ups and research papers. The Transformer architecture, for example, came from Google.
Sharing fundamental work is more impactful than sharing individual models.
Depends on which impact and horizon you’re talking about. Advancing fundamental research — I’ll give that to Google and Microsoft Research
Advancing products that use AI and getting a consumer/public conversation started? That’s clearly (to me) in OpenAIs court
They’re both impactful, interlinked, and I’m not sure there’s some real stack ranking methodology.
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Because of Google’s walled research strategy, they now appear to be an antiquated company.
Gemini does nothing. Even if it were comparable to GPT-4, they’re late to the party.
OpenAI is blazing the path now.
this. google is like academia; you publish a lot but others who implement your work are the ones making money off of it.
To take an example from the past month, billions of users are now benefiting from more accurate weather forecasts from their new model. Is there another company making more money from AI-powered products than Google right now?
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Or, well, like many companies; all the peons doing the actual work, creation etc and the executives and investors profiting at the top. All it takes is to be lucky to be born into generational wealth apparently.