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.
Why can't Google compete in AI? They have major AI researchers with legendary experience under their belts, what is stopping Google from building something like ChatGPT to augment their search? I guess I don't understand where the threat is. They have a lot more resources than OpenAI.
Google with some of the best people in the world. Unlimited resources in almost every way, manages to fall further behind and further into irrelevance in AI.
A bunch of closed models no one can run. A mediocre bard that is way behind everyone else. Pretty pathetic. Is anyone home at Google?
Google's AI budget is higher than the total funding for AI at all US universities combined. It's just mind boggling how they can drop the ball so badly.
What a change in fortunes. Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.
Can we spin a story about Google and their failing to take advantage of AI opportunities, open AI plus Microsoft coming up crush them in search? Apparently Google hasn't really tried that hard to commercialize their AI stuff and they had worries that it would tell lies and talk about uncomfortable things like say Nazis. So Google fudged their future kind of like Xerox... and this could be what finally seriously hurts them.
I cannot wait for the true downfall of Google. Many friends I have had began working there and fell into a blackhole of arrogance. Meanwhile, nothing from a technical perspective, aside from BERT, has been contributed by them in quite a while. Their technical open source (Tensorflow, Angular, Kubernetes) has all followed the same pattern of overly complex garbage. Facebook opensource (Pytorch, React) blows the doors off Google open source.
And exactly, where are the models? Where is the AI? Bert came out what 5 years ago?
Its certainly not in Search given how unusable the results are. They are busy using models to structure everyones content so they can display it on the Search page and capture value from content they didn't create
Not one mind blowing AI product from them. The results of OpenAI are exposing FAANGs as has beens
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.
I’m curious to hear why Google isn’t going to win in this AI arms race.
The way I see it, Google:
* is effectively the gateway to the internet, owning the most popular website in the world, mobile OS, and browser
* has infinite LIVE data, both unstructured and structured (knowledge graph)
* has infinite compute resources
* employs the world’s best AI scientists and invests heavily in AI
* has decade(s) of experience in AI products
* has one of the most popular suit of apps already in people’s hands (gmail, calendar, maps, docs, YT, drive, wallet, photos etc etc)
* is a popular cloud provider (which is another vector, ie platformizing AI)
* has infinite money
* is probably the most well positioned company to actually monetize AI
Honestly I don’t see why HN seems to think it’s over for Google. Outside of tech, most people have never heard of ChatGPT or Bing. Everyone on the planet knows Google.
There's definitely something amiss. Maybe we're just not seeing the whole picture, but Google has the best potential out there still. Not only vast and fundamental research came out their door (presumably there's more), but they also have their own compute resources and an up-to-date copy of internet.zip and gmail.zip and youtube.zip which they can train on vs what small and stale stuff (compared to Google's data) OpenAI trained their stuff on (like common crawl etc.). What gives, Google? Get on it!
edit: I forgot all about google_maps.zip / waze.gz and all the juicy traffic data coming from android.. which probably already relies heavily on AI
Their data may not be that much better; however Deepmind is still one of the best institutions that study AI fundamentals. OpenAI works hard and focused towards products, but the academic research is far better from Deepmind. So since Google hasn't been trying to put any AI into products really at all for the past 10 years, they're going to have to push a little bit to make the public facing interfaces and put polish on things, but the underlying models they have made are far better than OpenAI (just not the ones made publicly accessible to anyone).
This is a milestone. Google has been keeping the fruits of its AI research locked away from the unwashed masses. They did not seem to be on any path to commercialization, Google Cloud access, or releasing features based on these models. OpenAI (and Microsoft most likely) forced their hand and all at once they are releasing tech-previews and talking about adding it to the search engine results page, all while opening up API access to several of their trained models.
Microsoft is rumored to be adding GPT powered features to Bing very soon and might beat Google to market.
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?
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.
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 (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.
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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