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.
Google (Deepmind) actually has the people and has developed the science to make the best AI products in the world, but unfortunately Bard seems to be thrown together in an afternoon by an intern, and then handed off to a hoard of marketing people. It's not good right now.
Deepmind is one of the best scientifically, they just don't really make products. OpenAI is essentially the direct opposite of that.
This is scary: Google was always proud of being on top of AI research. With so many engineers needing to outsource something so core to their mission means that their system is not as good as they want us to believe.
> Google has a high chance of being disrupted by AI-assisted search agents.
I doubt it, Google itself has some of the most advanced AI in the world, including Google Brain and Deepmind. For them to be disrupted means that something truly revolutionary has come about, and not from Google's own labs.
That’s pretty speculative and dubious (the holding back part) given the heavy bias to publication culture at Google Research and DeepMind. OpenAI has hardly been “crushed” here; PaLM and Imagen are solid, incremental advances, but given what came before them, not Earth-shattering.
If I were going to cite evidence for Alphabet’s “supremacy” in AI, I would’ve picked something more novel and surprising such as AlphaFold, or perhaps even Gato.
It’s not clear to me that Google has anything which compares to Reality Labs, although this may simply be my own ignorance.
Nvidia surely scooped Google with Instant Neural Graphics Primitives, in spite of Google publishing dozens of (often very interesting) NeRF papers. It’s not a war, all these works build on one another.
Maybe this is good news for people who fear AI is becoming too powerful. Google is attracting talent that may otherwise go to Open AI, but diverted to produce something useless/harmless.
Google's days are numbered. OpenAI showed that AI is about delivering AGI, not playing some board games and doing PR stunts. Unfortunately Google hasn't learned its lessons. It's still doing PR stunts and people are falling for it.
> Researchers will flock to the organization with the biggest wins. And right now, that's OpenAI.
It depends on the definition of a "win" in this context. Google has developed notable AI technologies such as AlphaGO, AlphaFold, and Transformers. Most of successes of OpenAI is based on Google papers. It's worth noting that Google had similar models to ChatGPT before OpenAI.
> Google could lose search revenue overnight. They should be scared to the core.
This is highly unlikely. The phrase "Google it" is widely used as a verb for searching the internet, and it would be difficult for this to change overnight. Additionally, there are currently unsolved issues such as hallucination, query cost, scalability, and toxicity that would need to be addressed for ChatGPT to replace search functionality.
> We're looking at systems that will never die.
Currently, it is not known how consciousness emerges and if it is possible to create a self-aware mechanical being, no one knows how to do it even in theory.
It's truly astounding to me that Google, a juggernaut with decades under its belt on all things AI, is only now catching up to OpenAI which is on all camps a fraction of its size.
Google is an advertising company masquerading as tech company. This disguise has served them well and they have made a lot of PR stunts to give the impression that Google is the leader in AI. Fortunately OpenAI and MS showed everyone what true AI is.
My prediction is Google will continue making PR stunts and some people will fall for it. Meanwhile OpenAI will get closer and closer to AGI. Whether that's good for humanity is a different discussion. But OpenAI's supremacy is beyond doubt at this point.
I can't understand the mindset of any AI researchers who stay at Google at this point.
You're there (presumably) because you want to make an impact. You gave them a massive lead with a novel approach... and Google failed to capitalise on that so spectacularly that they're now investing billions into their competitor who's miles ahead of Google, using Google's approach, all to try and head off another competitor who's miles ahead of everybody also using Google's approach
I hope that (counter to stories) they pay the researchers very well, because the best result I can see is Google shutting down what they can publish to try and stop this happening again.
It was Google's DeepBrain research paper that basically enabled the majority of progress we've seen in AI over the last few years.
Google has their own LLM and probably access to more data to train future models any other company in the world. What OpenAI seems to have got right was fine tuning their LLM and putting it behind a UI which the average user could use. Then more recently they've created more hype by adding APIs and plugins for their models.
Not saying that what OpenAI's done isn't impressive, but Google really isn't that far behind in terms of tech. 90% of OpenAI's lead is usability stuff.
It's incredible how Google started ahead and then shot themselves repeatedly in the face by granting so much internal power to dubious AI "ethicists". Whilst those guys were publicly Twitter-slapping each other, OpenAI were putting in place the foundations for this.
I don’t understand arguments that say google will be left in the dust when it comes to AI. There’s no network effects like Facebook, it just takes a lot of money to train the models, which google obviously has. Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI?
And here I thought that Google would achieve AI supremacy because of all the data they have been vacuuming for decades, turns out they haven't even thought to utilize it?
How did they drop the ball so hard? OpenAI has been around for less than a decade and as a smaller team with less resources was able to make a better product.
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