Comment by phkahler
4 hours ago
Google has been doing more R&D and internal deployment of AI and less trying to sell it as a product. IMHO that difference in focus makes a huge difference. I used to think their early work on self-driving cars was primarily to support Street View in thier maps.
There was a point in time when basically every well known AI researcher worked at Google. They have been at the forefront of AI research and investing heavily for longer than anybody.
It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research.
But they are in full gear now that there is real competition, and it’ll be cool to see what they release over the next few years.
I also think the presence of Sergey Brin has been making a difference in this.
Ex-googler: I doubt it, but am curious for rationale (i know there was a round of PR re: him “coming back to help with AI.” but just between you and me, the word on him internally, over years and multiple projects, was having him around caused chaos b/c he was a tourist flitting between teams, just spitting out ideas, but now you have unclear direction and multiple teams hearing the same “you should” and doing it)
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Please, Google was terrible about using the tech the had long before Sundar, back when Brin was in charge.
Google Reader is a simple example: Googl had by far the most popular RSS reader, and they just threw it away. A single intern could have kept the whole thing running, and Google has literal billions, but they couldn't see the value in it.
I mean, it's not like being able to see what a good portion of America is reading every day could have any value for an AI company, right?
Google has always been terrible about turning tech into (viable, maintained) products.
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> It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research.
I always thought they deliberately tried to contain the genie in the bottle as long as they could
Their unreleased LaMDA[1] famously caused one of their own engineers to have a public crashout in 2022, before ChatGPT dropped. Pre-ChatGPT they also showed it off in their research blog[2] and showed it doing very ChatGPT-like things and they alluded to 'risks,' but those were primarily around it using naughty language or spreading misinformation.
I think they were worried that releasing a product like ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it might mess up their money printing operation over in advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer children: little did they know they could run an operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it wouldn't make above-the-fold news.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
[2] https://research.google/blog/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and...
It has always felt to me that the LLM chatbots were a surprise to Google, not LLMs, or machine learning in general.
Not true at all. I interacted with Meena[1] while I was there, and the publication was almost three years before the release of ChatGPT. It was an unsettling experience, felt very science fiction.
[1]: https://research.google/blog/towards-a-conversational-agent-...
The surprise was not that they existed: There were chatbots in Google way before ChatGPT. What surprised them was the demand, despite all the problems the chatbots have. The pig problem with LLMs was not that they could do nothing, but how to turn them into products that made good money. Even people in openAI were surprised about what happened.
In many ways, turning tech into products that are useful, good, and don't make life hell is a more interesting issue of our times than the core research itself. We probably want to avoid the valuing capturing platform problem, as otherwise we'll end up seeing governments using ham fisted tools to punish winners in ways that aren't helpful either
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Well, I must say ChatGPT felt much more stable than Meena when I first tried it. But, as you said, it was a few years before ChatGPT was publicly announced :)
Google and OpenAI are both taking very big gambles with AI, with an eye towards 2036 not 2026. As are many others, but them in particular.
It'll be interesting to see which pays off and which becomes Quibi