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Freed4ever t1_j7brdep wrote

Reply to comment by 7366241494 in [N] "I got access to Google LaMDA, the Chatbot that was so realistic that one Google engineer thought it was conscious. First impressions" by That_Violinist_18

And Kodak invented the digital camera. Just because Google invented it first, it doesn't necessarily mean anything commercially. Contrary to your statement about "not a threat to Google", the fact that they invented it, but didn't release it, it means that they thought the technology would be a threat to them, just like Kodak. Now with the cat out of the bag, Google for sure won't repeat the same mistakes as Kodak, but it remains to be seen how this will affect them in long term. It takes 6 months to form a habit, right? Bing will go live in a few weeks, how long will it take for Google to go live?

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gatorling t1_j7c1b0y wrote

I think the motivations for the two companies differ. What would Google gain from releasing a chat bot ? Instead, Google likely aims to introduce LLM capabilities into their search engine in (most likely) subtle, measured and careful ways. Opting for incremental improvements in search backed by rigorous A/B experiments.

Whereas OpenAI gains a lot to release an awesome chat bot. They get to generate buzz and secure next rounds of funding.

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Freed4ever t1_j7c28dx wrote

Agreed, but they are forced to play catch up now, and not sure if they are ready. It's not just about the pure tech, it's about the UX, the scalability, the liability, etc. It's safe to say Bing has worked on this before ChatGPT went public, so several months already. Also, OpenAI uses Azure, so they know exactly the loads and plan to scale. The fact that they have way less users currently helps as well.

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Competitive-Rub-1958 t1_j7dhy93 wrote

Google is a leader in DL research. That's a fact. They chose to keep most of their research internal because as above commenters said, they don't have much to gain through it - marketing and hype lasts only so long.

> It's about the UX

what UX? its just a normal frontend mate

> scalability

You do realize Google were serving LLMs before OAI was even hypothesized? Or that they have TPUs which are far more scalable and cost efficient, which could already rip major players apart.

> liability

OAI have fought nothing liability or legality-wise. They just remain in a gray area and hopes no one focuses on them (bad luck, they got caught in the AI art lawsuits too)

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geeky_username t1_j7chxwk wrote

>the fact that they invented it, but didn't release it, it means that they thought the technology would be a threat to them

I slightly disagree with this.

Imo, from what I know of Google from people that do or used to work there - they likely didn't care or didn't think of it.

Inside Google is a researcher's playground and there's little to no pressure to ever go to market. I've seen things that are extremely impressive that's never been published or put into a product. Asking why - they just don't care to do so.

The higher-ups lack imagination now, and unless something can directly obviously improve ads, they don't care.

So for years you've had engineers not caring to make something marketable, and leadership not caring but still throwing money at it. My impression is that leadership was looking for something that was so obviously a home run they didn't want to bother with releasing and iterating.

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Freed4ever t1_j7cr91y wrote

I don't work at Google, but I can see there are truths in it. Look at Waymo, they were the leader but now what? Their science might still be the best, but without taking the risk, and iterating (the engineering part), they will fall behind. ChatGPT might be the wake up call that they need. How they re-act in the next couple of years will define Google as a company.

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I_will_delete_myself t1_j7cn00u wrote

They benefit from releasing the paper because it gives other researchers inspiration and allows Google to get free R&D. The researcher then releases another paper and Google gets to benefit from that.

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Yankee_Fever t1_j7bt0ov wrote

If chatGPT was a threat to Google they would have beat Microsofts investment.

At the end of the day this is consumer tech anyway and the government has likely had access to this tech for a long time.

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