Comment by brokencode

5 hours ago

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.

20 comments

brokencode

Reply
hosh  4 hours ago

I also think the presence of Sergey Brin has been making a difference in this.

  • refulgentis  4 hours ago

    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)

    • pstuart  4 hours ago

      That makes sense. A "secret shopper" might be a better way to avoid that but wouldn't give him the strokes of being the god in the room.

  • hungryhobbit  4 hours ago

    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.

    • burgreblast  3 hours ago

      I never get the moaning about killing Reader. It was never about popularity or user experience.

      Reader had to be killed because it [was seen as] a suboptimal ad monetization engine. Page views were superior.

      Was Google going to support minimizing ads in any way?

    • jamespo  4 hours ago

      Took a while but I got to the google reader post. Self host tt-rss, it's much better

smallnix  4 hours ago

> 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

  • mullingitover  2 hours ago

    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...