Comment by simonw
6 days ago
Yeah, for all that people make fun of the "Open" in the name their API-first strategy really did make this stuff available to a ton of people. They were the first organization to allow almost anyone to start actively experimenting with what LLMs could do and it had a huge impact.
DeepMind wrote the paper, and while Google's API arrived later than OpenAI's it isn't as late as some people think. The PaLM API was released before the Gemini brand was launched.
Microsoft funded OpenAI and popularized early LLMs a lot with Copilot, which used OpenAI but now supports several backends, and they're working on their own frontier models now.
Google’s AI is not open by definition because their API’s are such a massive pain to use.
>DeepMind wrote the paper
Yeah and it was Open AI that scaled it and initiated the current revolution and actually let people play with it.
> while Google's API arrived later than OpenAI's it isn't as late as some people think.
Google would not launch an API for Palm till 2023, nearly 3 years after Open AI's GPT-3 launch.
Yeah let's not pretend Open AI didn't spearhead the current transformer effort because they did. God knows how far behind we would be if we left things to Google.