[HN Gopher] Google DeepMind
___________________________________________________________________
Google DeepMind
Author : random_moonwalk
Score : 495 points
Date : 2023-04-20 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.deepmind.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.deepmind.com)
| alecco wrote:
| Microsoft was smart on letting OpenAI keep doing their thing.
| Pichai seems to have chosen to micromanage DeepMind. The board
| should find an actual CEO ASAP.
| woeirua wrote:
| This move makes sense from the perspective that DeepMind has some
| street cred in their ability to produce novel models that solve
| interesting problems. The only issue is that DeepMind has also
| suffered from the same problems that the mothership has: an
| inability to execute. Are there any documented success stories of
| DeepMind making serious money off their models? They've been
| great at producing interesting and valuable research, but all of
| their partnerships have failed as far as I know.
|
| Google's screwed because LLMs offer us a fundamentally different
| business model for search, and I'm not convinced though that you
| can actually make a company out of LLMs that is as wildly
| profitable as Google was during its hayday. If that's true, then
| I just don't see how any CEO could go to the shareholders and
| say: "in order for us to survive, we have to accept that we're
| going to be a much smaller company in 5 years, both in terms of
| head count and profit." Sundar would be overthrown in a matter of
| days.
| rcme wrote:
| Was making money a goal for Deep Mind?
| woeirua wrote:
| I have to assume so, if not why else did Google acquire them?
| xg15 wrote:
| I guess Google is dancing alright.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| OpenAI, Musk's whatever the name, Google Mind, the other dozen
| projects that spring up every single day. -- I just read Scott
| Alexanders Meditations on Moloch for the first time, and this mad
| rush to monetize AI seems to be right on track.
| mason96 wrote:
| [dead]
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I feel like this is a bad sign. What this announcement reads like
| is "Hey! I won this internal political struggle!". Ok, sure, not
| sure why anyone outside the company should take this as good
| news. This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis'
| team has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the
| scape goat for missing AI. Remember - what this announcement
| means is that Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who
| previously were rooting for his failure. Trying to synthesize
| those two separate teams (half of which wanted you to fail) into
| one productive and world-leading team is a hell of an ask.
| [deleted]
| jutrewag wrote:
| This sounds like poor, unsubstantiated gossip and drama from
| TMZ. Sounds like you have an axe to grind.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| File under: A. Lincoln, team of rivals
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yeah, absolutely lining him up to be the scapegoat. His chance
| for success seems severely compromised and his mission was
| always to invent AGI, not create some kind of lowly ad-search
| product. The party sounds over for him and I bet he will be out
| and off to the next research think-tank soon.
| hervature wrote:
| My outsider perspective is that DeepMind was the research arm
| and Brain was specifically tasked with making the company money
| through AI/ML applications. This appears to me that Google is
| combining the two to make sure that DeepMind starts turning a
| profit by adopting Brain's mission. Of course, DeepMind's brand
| is orders of magnitude more valuable so it makes sense to keep
| the name around. Would be happy to hear more knowledgeable
| takes on if this is an incorrect reading of the tea leaves.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Will we ever live in a world where people once again use
| first-person pronouns?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I asked GPT-4 to do it and it scattered first-person
| pronouns everywhere.
|
| https://pastebin.pl/view/77273c05
|
| Happy now?
| williamcotton wrote:
| In all seriousness, can we not agree that the version
| with the correct grammar is a better aesthetic reading
| experience?
| JLCarveth wrote:
| How is this relevant to the comment you were replying to?
| williamcotton wrote:
| What's the point of earning magic internet beans if not
| to spend them pointlessly policing bad grammar?
| loudmax wrote:
| Google has (or until very recently had) some of the best
| researchers in the industry. Google's problem isn't
| developing new stuff, it's turning stuff they come up with
| into a viable product and then developing a market around it.
| All of their most successful products (search, gmail, maps,
| youtube) were developed at least a decade ago. They've come
| up with decent technology since then, but they seem to have
| developed a catastrophic inability to actually build a
| business around any of it. The failures of Google+, Duo/Allo,
| Inbox, Stadia have nothing to do with technology and
| everything to do with managerial incompetence.
|
| Google could be sitting on the most advanced AI on the
| planet, but none of that matters as long as they're under the
| current leadership.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| They made the enormous mistake of releasing bard with a
| lightweight model. It instantly made google look like they
| were way behind, and made bard largely irrelevant.
|
| Bard should have been limited access and been the absolute
| most power model they had.
|
| Now everyone is questioning if Google actually can compete
| with OpenAI at all, despite decades headstart and far more
| research and funding.
| spokesbeing wrote:
| This is not correct. Both DeepMind and Brain had/have
| separate applied groups. A lot of Brain research was/is not
| product focused at all. Transformers I'd say are more
| impactful than any other research innovation in the current
| AI boom and came from Brain not DM. DM does do great PR.
| manux wrote:
| > Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who
| previously _were rooting for his failure_
|
| Having been in both places (Brain and DM), this feels so far
| from what I experienced that I must ask, what are you basing
| this on?
| nr2x wrote:
| Good managers insulate reports from the politics, if you
| weren't plugged into it it's either your manager did a good
| job or it's the only part of Google that isn't 90% politics.
|
| Signed, "didn't work at brain or dm but was involved in a lot
| of alphabet level decision making".
| uptownfunk wrote:
| This reads pretty normal for big tech corporate politics.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I never like the word "politics." It carries the
| association of a bunch of people just playing backstabbing
| games to further themselves.
|
| While this does occur, in general what I see is that with
| any large-enough group of people, there will be strong
| differences of opinions on how to steer the project to
| success.
|
| In fact, I don't think I can remember a single "political
| battle" that didn't stem from a legitimate concern in how
| some project was being run and what they had decided to
| focus on.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Like it or not, politics is pretty much your day to day
| life at vp+ level at these companies.
|
| But we can all pretend to live in idealism la la land
| where everything is operating on someone's best
| intention.
| caminante wrote:
| You worked there and didn't know of any of the intra-company
| autonomy infighting that leaked into the news? [0] [1]
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/20/google-consolidates-ai-
| res...
|
| [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-
| triedand-f...
| sangnoir wrote:
| If you've worked at a large organization, you'll know the
| news can paint a cartoonishly distorted picture largely
| informed by the perspective of the anonymous sources,
| journalist and news organization.
| caminante wrote:
| The WSJ article expressly considers that factor and goes
| into detail on what's under the surface.
|
| _> The end of the long-running negotiations, which
| hasn't previously been reported, is the latest example of
| how Google and other tech giants are trying to strengthen
| their control over the study and advancement of
| artificial intelligence._
| f5e4 wrote:
| Could you provide a quote from either of these articles
| that supports the statement being questioned:
|
| > Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who
| previously were rooting for his failure
| caminante wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Further, I don't understand how explicit examples of
| company infighting over autonomy doesn't already address
| your point.
| f5e4 wrote:
| Fighting between Deepmind and Google leadership over
| autonomy doesn't really directly support that Google
| Brain employees and Deepmind had infighting. They seem to
| me to be quite different things.
|
| It seems like a big leap to take these articles as
| support the statement:
|
| > Demis now has a load of people reporting to him who
| previously were rooting for his failure
|
| It certainly might be true, but I'm missing the
| connection between these articles and the statement.
| caminante wrote:
| _> They seem to me to be quite different things._
|
| Only if you use vague standards like
|
| -"doesn't really directly support"
|
| -"Google Brain employees"
|
| How are "Google Brain employees" distinct from "Google
| leadership with Google Brain personnel in their
| respective reporting line?" What is the criteria for that
| distinction?
| sangnoir wrote:
| One of HNs failure-modes is inaccuracies get voted to the top
| if they _seem_ correct to the majority of voters whose biases
| resonate with poster 's.
|
| Aside: thank you for asking. When I previously encountered
| incorrect top-level comments that I knew to be wrong (insider
| information), I'd simply ignore and move on. You've inspired
| me to push back more often.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| But not always! There are those among us who like nothing
| better than to double down in a flame war. One nice thing
| about having visited often over the past 7 years is that I
| know whom to avoid responding to (for the most part).
| hazn wrote:
| This is a accurate reflection of biases of humans in
| general. A good story trumps truth.
| nostrademons wrote:
| And also why AI and LLMs are hot right now. A good story
| trumps truth.
| return_to_monke wrote:
| this is actually what an AI would do!
| victor106 wrote:
| As much as I would like Google to compete strongly with
| OpenAI(i.e., ClosedAI) I somehow have this feeling that they
| are going to end up like IBM Watson.
| 10xDev wrote:
| ChatGPT Wouldn't even exist without Google e.g. Transformers,
| Deep RL.
| nr2x wrote:
| so sick of this line of corporate worship. "Google" didn't
| invent anything, the employees did, and the top talent are
| leaving. Ilya Sutskever was a very key person at Google
| before he left to start OpenAI, and at most one person from
| the context is all you need paper still even work there.
|
| the view of outside google of how great they are has zero
| bearing on the realities inside the company. the company is
| people - and google is no longer the place to be if you
| have talent. simple as that.
| 10xDev wrote:
| > "Google" didn't invent anything, the employees did
|
| No shit, way to be pedantic over a common simple
| abstraction. Do you want a list of every author for every
| thing that is ever invented when someone refers to
| something?
| shmoogy wrote:
| And that's the last thing they probably contribute with how
| that turned out for Google
| ErneX wrote:
| Remember Xerox PARC and the GUI.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > This announcement either means the AI outside of Demis' team
| has been neutered, or they're lining Demis up to be the scape
| goat for missing AI.
|
| I read that to mean the party is over, we are treating that as
| a strategic subject and are streamlining our organisation. As
| you rightfully pointed Google basically had two competing
| organisations with all the complexity associated with that.
| That's now over. From now on, there is only one captain
| steering the ship.
| matrix_overload wrote:
| Don't worry, they will sunset it in 3 years, like every other
| project.
| deelowe wrote:
| Do you have any prior knowledge of these teams? They weren't
| working against each other. One group focused on research and
| the other focused on products.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Not to be snarky but do you realize that what you have stated
| is the _definition_ of working against each other? Research
| teams are about getting to the paper and a deeper
| understanding, product teams are about getting something out
| the door that helps you capture value whether you understand
| it or not. Engineering research teams are notorious for being
| both ungovernable and spending so much time "understanding"
| their ideas that they miss the market window. The canonical
| book on the subject for me was "Fumbling the Future" which
| talked about Xerox PARC, I worked in Sun Labs ("where good
| ideas go to die"), hired people out of Microsoft's BARC (Bay
| Area Research Center), and worked in IBM's Watson group which
| pulled a bunch of people out of research to "make a product
| out of AI".
|
| It is a really hard problem to "commercialize" imagination or
| innovation. Two very different mindsets between "doing
| product" and "doing research." DOW Chemical did a pretty good
| job of it, but they have always been more "components of the
| solution" rather than the full solution.
| deelowe wrote:
| It wasn't engineering research, it was pure computer
| science. They published papers, attended conferences, etc.
| The other team, whom I personally interacted with more were
| engaged in solution design. They would have a goal (e.g.
| alpha go) and architect a solution for that specific
| problem. The two teams were somewhat orthogonal from what I
| recall.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Is it bad that I can't tell which one was focused on
| products? It seems like neither of them was.
| deelowe wrote:
| Why should you? Neither were public facing.
| [deleted]
| karmasimida wrote:
| Summarized by ChatGPT:
|
| > DeepMind and Google Research's Brain team are merging to form a
| new unit called Google DeepMind, which will combine their talents
| and resources to accelerate progress towards building ever more
| capable and general AI, safely and responsibly. This will create
| the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs and AI products
| across Google and Alphabet, while transforming industries,
| advancing science, and serving diverse communities. The new unit
| will be led by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, with Eli Collins
| joining the leads team as VP of Product, and Zoubin Ghahramani
| joining the research leadership team reporting to Koray
| Kavukcuoglu. A new Scientific Board for Google DeepMind will also
| be created to oversee research progress and direction.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| Google has to be freaked out at the rapidity with which OpenAI
| and Microsoft are taking their generative language models into
| various markets. Look at the way Microsoft is (fairly
| successfully) grabbing attention-share through the efforts of
| Peter Lee and others in healthcare with GPT-4, e.g. - Google is
| floundering in comparison (despite having a huge head start,
| particular through DeepMind). I don't know that I'm convinced
| Microsoft can actually make good on the promises they are
| suggesting, but it's be a daft bet on Google's part to assume
| they can't.
| aix1 wrote:
| A lot of folks here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that
| this means that DeepMind is losing its independence.
|
| Other than the addition of the word "Google" - which could simply
| be a rebranding exercise - I am yet to see any evidence in
| support of that.
|
| P.S. In particular, there haven't been any indications that
| Demis's reporting line is changing.
| Mandatum wrote:
| We're still a long, long, long way from AGI.
|
| Releases like this are more about stock price and investment than
| anything else.
|
| I'm glad we've put more investment into this area as ultimately
| AGI will be able to uplift a large sector of the population that
| historically went underserved, or at least level the playing
| field.
|
| But statements like this are meaningless wank.
| krn wrote:
| I am a big fan of Alphabet as a company, but this is how I read
| the first two paragraphs...
|
| > When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many
| people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction
| technology that was decades away from being a reality.
|
| Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI
| saw back in 2015".
|
| > Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is
| advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately
| AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social,
| economic and scientific transformations in history.
|
| Translation: "Now we live in a time in which AI research and
| technology has advanced exponentially thanks to the great
| achievements by our competitors - and we clearly feel left
| behind."
| auggierose wrote:
| Right. You know that DeepMind did AlphaGo, right? It made its
| entrance in 2015.
| krn wrote:
| And how does that compare with what OpenAI has accomplished
| since 2015?
|
| I'm not blaming DeepMind here.
|
| It was Google's job not to start loosing ground to Microsoft
| in the age of AI.
| scottyah wrote:
| What has OpenAI accomplished other than a lot more
| publicity for AI? If I've been following the story right,
| Google and a few others have created all the tech
| breakthroughs and OpenAI just created a way for common folk
| to play with it then sold out to Microsoft.
| krn wrote:
| Microsoft has been an investor in OpenAI since 2019[1].
|
| Now Samsung is considering replacing Google with Bing as
| the default search engine on all Galaxy phones[2].
|
| I think that's a big accomplishment for OpenAI. And it's
| still and independent company.
|
| [1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-and-microsoft-extend-
| partners...
|
| [2] https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-galaxy-phones-
| tablets...
| auggierose wrote:
| Personally, I feel AlphaGo was the biggest deal ever. It
| put AI truly on the map. OpenAI is just a corollary to
| that, and would not exist without DeepMind in the first
| place.
| krn wrote:
| That's probably true, because OpenAI was formed just two
| months after AlphaGo defeated the European Go champion
| Fan Hui.
|
| But Google has missed a lot of opportunities since then,
| and is now trying to catch up.
| nicetryguy wrote:
| > Personally, I feel AlphaGo was the biggest deal ever.
|
| Right, but the cashier at McDonalds is using ChatGPT for
| night school.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| > Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is
| advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately
| AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social,
| economic and scientific transformations in history.
|
| I'm not an AI Doomer, but is there some kind of scenario where
| the coming of AGI doesn't trigger a communist revolution and a
| lot of death and destruction along the way? I dunno, maybe it
| could be a Fabian revolution, but seems pretty unlikely. Seems
| more like AGI - everyone is pissed off that they still have to
| work for a living - a lot of rich people with heads on pikes. Is
| there some other scenario that's more likely? Doesn't feel that
| way to me. Then again, I'm the creator of
| https://bellriots.netlify.app/, so maybe I'm a Revolution Doomer.
| scottyah wrote:
| It'll get a lot of people off the internet, and wreck the lives
| of those who stay addicted.
| rvba wrote:
| Reorganizing two teams that did their own thing will not reap
| immediate benefits. It will take time.
|
| Sounds like a PR move.
| waselighis wrote:
| There's an interesting history behind the RCA CED (Capacitance
| Electronic Disk), an attempt to put video on vinyl. While the
| full history behind it's failure is complicated, a large factor
| was the differing priorities between research and other
| departments that delayed the product by several years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA
|
| Considering some of the other comments about merging two AI
| departments together (DeepMind and Brain) and injecting more
| bureaucracy into DeepMind, it seems to have some parallels with
| the story of the RCA CED. You can't just let researchers do
| research. There needs to be a clear goal/priority that this
| research can eventually be converted into a profitable product or
| service. Otherwise, the researchers will continue to work on
| "cool projects" and publishing papers with their name on them,
| with little consideration given to how to monetize this research.
|
| Personally, I'm not a fan of this AI gold rush trying to inject
| AI into everything. It's just interesting to ponder.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I remain confident that it is impossible for a "startup" or
| properly competitive standalone org to exist under the roof of
| Google.
|
| From reading these comments, it looks like this is at best
| mitigating some internal conflict.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Two specifics here that seem problematic for me and I am curious
| about
|
| 1) DeepMind was given very significant autonomy since day 1 it
| was acquired. I find it very hard to believe that any attempt to
| take that away won't result in huge internal problems and / or
| attrition
|
| 2) Sundar Pichai has been coming in for a lot of criticism in
| general because he seems to be constantly out-maneuvered by
| Microsoft and we have seen very little new emerge from Google
| under his watch. Putting himself at the helm of this is going to
| really accentuate this and actually seems high risk - if he is
| the the reason Google is struggling to deliver elsewhere then
| positioning himself at the apex of an existentially important
| effort could be lethal.
|
| Added together, there seems like a high risk this could go
| catastrophically wrong for Google, and Pichai in particular.
| Maybe it will work, but the downside is enormous.
| astrange wrote:
| Do you think they'll remember they own Waze now?
| schappim wrote:
| TL;DR: * DeepMind and Google Research's Brain
| team merging into single unit: Google DeepMind * Goal:
| accelerate progress in AI and AGI development safely and
| responsibly * Demis Hassabis leading the new unit *
| Close collaboration with Google Product Areas * Aim:
| improve lives of billions, transform industries, advance science,
| serve diverse communities * Greater speed, collaboration,
| and execution needed for biggest impact * Combining world-
| class AI talent with resources and infrastructure *
| DeepMind and Brain teams' research laid foundations for current
| AI industry * New Scientific Board for Google DeepMind
| overseeing research progress and direction * Upcoming town
| hall meeting for further information and clarity
| dahwolf wrote:
| It all sounds so fancy, such grand vision.
|
| In reality, this is just Sundar looking through the org chart and
| saying: wow, these things seem related. Let's combine them
| because surely that will mean that it starts working. Just so
| that he can announce "something" as a growing army of sharks are
| snapping at his feet.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| I hear that Demis had been fighting this for a while. I guess he
| lost.
|
| Which..... of course he did. They don't make any money. That's
| ultimately how these decisions are made.
|
| I talked to one of their in-house recruiters (or HR or whatever)
| some 5-6(?) years ago. I asked them how they make money, they
| gave me a really muddled answer. It had the word "clients" in
| there. I didn't understand, so I tried to clarify, I said "oh,
| you make revenue from consulting for your clients?". Then they
| gave me a crystal clear answer, they said: "No, we're a lab". I
| noped outta there really fast.
|
| In retrospect, I was right that I wouldn't have made any money,
| but might've been a good boost for my CV to do for a couple of
| years.
| paxys wrote:
| I have commented this many times on such articles, and will say
| it again:
|
| Google still thinks of AI as a research project, or at best a way
| to produce better search results. They essentially created the
| entire current generation of the AI space and then... gave it
| away, because no one on the product side understood what they had
| actually built. Handing the reins to the DeepMind team - who have
| never launched a single product in their history - seems to be a
| doubling down on that same failed strategy.
|
| Google doesn't need more smart AI researchers, academics or
| ethicists. They need product managers who understand the
| underlying technology and can commercialize it. They need
| pragmatic engineers who can execute, launch and maintain
| services. That has always been their problem as a company.
| momojo wrote:
| I don't doubt your analysis of Google, but what was OpenAI able
| to do differently to get them here? Aren't they just another
| research hub?
| bartwr wrote:
| As someone who's been at Google Research ~5y, this nails is it
| 100%.
|
| I was at the non-Brain part of Research and it was seen as
| Google Brain is the "cool", pure research one, dealing with
| some future abstract AI and not caring for the products,
| feasibility, or even if the research "could" be made practical
| any day.
|
| Deepmind was an "extreme" version of it, with some animosities
| and politics between the two, which I didn't follow too
| closely. There were attempts at making Deepmind useful, called
| "Deepmind for Google", but the people there were... clueless.
| Though one really cool thing came out of it (XManager).
|
| (I was at a closer to the product part, "Perception", which I
| loved. And still got to publish, explore, pursue my own
| research goals, etc.)
| dmix wrote:
| That's what great about competition. It kicks you in the
| pants and reminds you you need to try.
|
| iPhone scared the shit out of the phone market and today we
| have great phones from Samsung and Google which dominate the
| market. If everyone was trying to predict the smartphone
| market in 2007 they'd be talking about how Nokia missed the
| boat but excited to see their response (or
| Motorola/Sony/Blackberry etc). The market today won't
| necessarily be the market in 10yrs from now. It might be
| Google, they have a solid head start to be #2 and future #1,
| but who knows what will happen and whether that
| talent/advantage stays in Google.
|
| It could just as easily be other companies we don't even
| consider serious players today.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Ilya _was_ at Google Brain, so something doesn't add up
| there. I believe people wanted to launch things, but higher
| management stopped it.
|
| I was next to the team that created Allo's chat bot, but they
| said that they had to take out most cool stuff because legal
| didn't allow it to launch, so they had to dumb it down
| totally.
|
| I believe the main problem was all the ethics/safety teams
| that just hired a lot of non-programmers, while OpenAI
| management treated safety as an engineering problem that has
| to be solved with a technical solution.
| fnbr wrote:
| Yeah, but Ilya left. Doesn't that prove your point?
| safog wrote:
| The cat's out of the bag now, it doesn't take a genius PM to
| work it out. Maybe a genius PM could've worked out how
| revolutionary generative AI is going to be pre- chat GPT
| release but I really doubt that a random MBA who knows nothing
| about AI can do that. Every single day there's a cool new AI
| application. The problem space is fairly fleshed out. It's a
| matter of executing.
|
| How do you make enterprise tools better? (Photoshop + AI, Code
| + AI etc.) How do you make consumer tools better? (YT tools +
| AI) How do you make search better?
|
| etc. etc.
| medler wrote:
| Is there anyone who has successfully productized AI? ChatGPT
| isn't a profitable product, at least not yet. Google Photos and
| Spotify recommendations are the best AI products I can think of
| with clear revenue, and in these examples AI is just a cherry
| on top of a product people would use anyway.
| paxys wrote:
| OpenAI is growing revenues from ~0 in 2022 to $300M in 2023
| to $1B in 2024. That sounds like a product to me.
| okdood64 wrote:
| It's not 2024 yet, and 2023 just started.
| tensor wrote:
| "Hopes to grow" revenues. Current estimates put hardware
| costs alone at $700k/day, so even if they hit $300M in 2023
| that won't make them profitable. This isn't even counting
| the people costs and other operation costs required to run
| a company.
|
| edit: order of magnitude was wrong on costs per day.
| vasco wrote:
| Do you have the order of magnitude right at $700/day?
| That's not much at all.
| generalizations wrote:
| And yet, $300M is only 1.25M subscribers at the current
| $20/mo rate. If we say that they need a $1B / year to be
| comfortably profitable, that's ~4.2M subscribers. A good
| rule of thumb is that you can hope to convert about 10%
| of your free user base to paid; one random source says
| they have 100M monthly active users - which at 10%
| conversion, is $2.4B / year. I think they'll be fine.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| 10% is insanely high conversion for B2C freemium. It's
| closer to 1% for most products.
| illiarian wrote:
| How much money will they spend servicing requests for
| those 4.2M subscribers?
| medler wrote:
| It is currently April 2023. "~0 in 2022" is the only part
| of that that seems credible. I not convinced of OpenAI's
| rosy predictions of future explosive growth.
| brokencode wrote:
| The fact that Microsoft is baking GPT into all of their
| products guarantees explosive growth.
|
| ChatGPT is also one of the fastest growing consumer
| products in history by number of users. At $20 a month
| for plus, it could be a significant revenue stream.
|
| Then add all the companies like Duolingo and Snapchat
| that are using GPT as well.
|
| If you don't see this as explosive growth, then I don't
| know what to tell you.
| illiarian wrote:
| Revenues mean nothing if your expenses outpace them. What's
| the net profit?
| dougmwne wrote:
| Github Copilot seems like a pretty clear example. They charge
| a subscription that's in excess of the marginal cost of
| inference.
| medler wrote:
| That's a good point. I forgot about Copilot.
| deanc wrote:
| I'd be astonished if they're even close to breaking even on
| copilot. In its current incarnation it wouldn't even lace
| the boots of what's coming out of OpenAI.
|
| CopilotX with its OpenAI collab will be the real winner -
| if it ever gets released to those on the waitlist. I'm not
| aware of anyone who got in yet, which leads me to believe
| it doesn't yet exist.
| [deleted]
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| I got access to the Copilot CLI, which is supposed to be
| part of the full package eventually. Dunno anyone who has
| gotten access to Copilot Chat yet, which I expect is what
| everyone really wants.
| andygeorge wrote:
| curious if/when MS will get desirable returns on the
| significant investment needed to run/train copilot
| dougmwne wrote:
| It's a good question, but also helpful to point out that
| one of the beauties of these models is that you can train
| them once and deploy to many use cases. The same model
| can be used by Github, Bing, Office 365, Azure and so on.
|
| And as for the big multi-billion investment in OpenAI,
| they may have more than made that back up on their
| valuation already. Plus the deal was structured that
| OpenAI would pay it's revenues into Microsoft till the
| investment was paid back and MS would sill end up with a
| 49% stake.
|
| All in all, sounds like a smart investment from MS and,
| cerry on top, managed to majorly embarrass a main rival.
| andygeorge wrote:
| agree on it being a good play by MS. will interesting to
| see if they do spin it out to their other realms
| Takennickname wrote:
| GPT API is a successful product. All those start ups that are
| just a thin layer over GPT that are funded by YCombinator are
| paying for API use and that's profitable for OpenAI.
| nomel wrote:
| > and that's profitable for OpenAI.
|
| Reference?
|
| "Profitable" means they're making more money than they're
| using, at this moment.
| Takennickname wrote:
| Are you implying openai is selling access to their API at
| a loss?
| nomel wrote:
| No, I would like facts, not assumptions. It's definitely
| not safe to assume they are making a profit, as a whole,
| or per transaction. It's more complicated than that.
|
| Profit has a strict definition of $revenue - $cost, for a
| business operation as a whole, which leaves money in the
| bank at the end of the month.
|
| They could be making more money for a single query than
| the cost of compute time for that single query, but that
| may not cover the engineering and idle servers. They
| could be running at a loss with the assumption that they
| can improve efficiency per transaction soon. They could
| be running at a "loss" because they're giving some of the
| compute away for free right now, to improve the training
| with the user responses. Or maybe they are making
| fistfuls of money. "Profitable" has a strict meaning,
| shouldn't be assumed, and definitely isn't required, at
| this point in their operation.
|
| I'm very interested to know if they are profitable, at
| the moment, but I don't think that's been publicly
| disclosed yet, and I can't find anything. A reference is
| required.
| riffraff wrote:
| if you consider Spotify recommendations as AI then you should
| consider also Youtube and every social network based on a
| non-time based timeline and ads, no?
| gilbetron wrote:
| I've seen MidJourney's estimated revenue at about
| $750k/month. Not bad.
| yunwal wrote:
| This seems likely lower than their costs. Is there a
| breakdown somewhere?
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| I completely agree. I was involved as a tech executive at a
| large medical center trying to get collaborative work with both
| Google per se, and DeepMind, to a usable or product stage, and
| it was essentially impossible. DeepMind in particular was more
| interested in pushing the research envelope, and getting more
| papers in Nature, than in building products.
|
| I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which this is by design,
| from the very top of Google. Different Google and other
| Alphabet companies' executives more than once told me they just
| weren't interested in products that didn't have an obvious path
| to more than 1 billion users. The companies don't have a clue
| how to make money retail. If they can't print money with an
| idea, they don't have the tools and skills to bring it to
| market.
| lallysingh wrote:
| They're the new Xerox, looking at PARC's output and asking,
| "How will this make our copiers better?"
|
| Internally, everyone's asking "How will this help my promo
| packet?"
| wmeredith wrote:
| Absolutely. You could also sub in Microsoft, looking at the
| internet in 2002 and asking, "how could this make Windows
| desktop better"?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| IE was already dominant by 2002. Microsoft didn't ignore
| the Internet. They went hell bent on it during Gates era
| and won decisevely. It's only when they had no competition
| IE got stuck and then surpassed.
| paxys wrote:
| If talking about bundling a web browser inside their OS,
| sure. It was more that Microsoft missed the entire
| potential of the internet as a whole and how
| fundamentally transformational it could be. They had no
| presence in online services, e-commerce, search and more
| until they saw competitors eating their lunch, and have
| been lagging behind ever since.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| They had a presence in online services, MSN is older than
| even IE.
| paxys wrote:
| AOL was already dominant by the time MSN launched. Yahoo
| was close behind. Even back then Microsoft was playing
| catch up in the space.
| attractivechaos wrote:
| > _they need product managers who understand the underlying
| technology and can commercialize it._
|
| I would say they more need engineers who care about and can
| make good products. In my limited experience, it takes time to
| turn a research-focused group into a product-oriented team.
| Research vs production requires different skill sets.
| pcj-github wrote:
| Will Google stop sharing progress in foundational AI research to
| it's competitors now?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why? The foundational research papers have all come from Google
| Brain/Google Research and not from DeepMind.
| ugh123 wrote:
| I'm curious what this will mean for DeepMind's work in medical
| and bioscience applications vs. now what may be more aligned with
| Google products and Anthropic which seem to be prioritizing
| commercializing consumer applications over science.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| There's always Isomorphic Labs.
| xnx wrote:
| I'm surprised to see so many comments in this thread criticizing
| Google for not milking more money out of their AI research
| sooner. Not being a shareholder, I'm pretty happy with how they
| catalyzed the modern AI revolution and have worked on very hard
| and meaningful problems like protein folding.
| dougmwne wrote:
| People can be negative and critical for no reason. In this
| case, I think criticism is due because Google's failure to
| productize has lead them to a potential existential disaster.
| Most of their revenue depends on search and there being an
| ecosystem of websites to link to and display even more of their
| ads. Generative AI is an existential risk to their current
| search interface, the ability to insert ads into that
| experience and there even being any ad-supported websites with
| free content to link to.
|
| With the reports that Samsung may switch to Bing, you could
| quickly see an exodus in users over to chat search. It wouldn't
| take much lost revenue to implode Google's business model and
| the business model of every ad-supported site on the internet.
| xnx wrote:
| Fair. ChatGPT is definitely the most serious event in
| Google's long and utterly dominant history of web search.
| Samsung is definitely using ChatGPT as a negotiating tactic
| with Google. I assume that ad revenue share is part of the
| arrangement. There's no way that Bing Ads could match the
| amount that Google Ads pays out to Samsung. This whole space
| is moving excitingly fast, but it's still too early to claim
| that anyone has "won" the space. If I had to bet who had the
| most advanced and most used AI service 5 years from now, I
| would definitely bet on Google.
| fudged71 wrote:
| I hear there's office space they could use in Edmonton ;)
| gojomo wrote:
| Sure, a reorg'll fix things.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Refactoring for directors.
| felixfurtak wrote:
| Good name. I guess 'Deep Thought' was already taken
| javier_e06 wrote:
| [flagged]
| nwoli wrote:
| Sounds like a smart decision short term questionable long term
| (more focus on product instead of fundamental research).
| luma wrote:
| Their existing "all research/no product" approach is becoming
| increasingly untenable. This had to happen if Google wants to
| remain a going concern.
| nwoli wrote:
| Transformers were fundamental research that ended up having
| huge side benefits. (Google has plenty of money to keep
| spending on fundamental research, especially focused on smart
| things like ML.)
| dougmwne wrote:
| Inventing transformers may prove to be Google's undoing.
| Being a research paper factory doesn't seem to be good for
| shareholders.
| politician wrote:
| Still, inventing XMLHttpRequest wasn't Microsoft's
| undoing, but for many years we suspected it might be.
| This might be a similar situation.
| dflock wrote:
| If only Sundar Pichai was a good at executing on product &
| strategy as he is at winning internal fights at Google.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Expecting all their products to get cancelled in ~6months.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| If Google were to go on a startup acquisition spree in this hot
| new competitive space in a further attempt to catch up - how
| would they locate and assess potential companies?
|
| Asking for a friend.
| ipaddr wrote:
| They would buy someone they have started a relationship with
| already most likely.
|
| Your friend needs an introduction
| mebazaa wrote:
| For context: this is pretty surprising, given the significant
| amount of independence Deepmind had within Google. So much so, in
| fact, that they tried for a long time to be spun off from Google:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-triedand-f...
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah. DeepMind has sought more independence than they had, but
| now they have lost it completely. It seems there was an
| internal power struggle and Google won.
| pneumonic wrote:
| Sounds like some key people will be leaving "Google Deepmind"
| in the next few months.
| mFixman wrote:
| One of the biggest liberties DeepMind had was a completely
| separate hiring process and pipeline than Google.
|
| Their open positions mysteriously disappeared on November last
| year and they are still closed outside of specific senior roles
| and a very open ended "register your interest if you have a
| PhD".
|
| Big loss for DeepMind if the separate pipeline is lost. Being
| able to hire for their priorities instead of whatever Google's
| hiring for is one of the reasons it was so successful.
| bgirard wrote:
| > When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many
| people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction
| technology that was decades away from being a reality.
|
| Well it was at least a decade away.
| skilled wrote:
| I apologize for the confusion.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| > Sundar, Jeff Dean, James Manyika, and I have built a fantastic
| partnership as we've worked to coordinate our efforts over recent
| mo We're also creating a new Scientific Board for Google DeepMind
| to oversee research progress and direction of the unit, which
| will be led by Koray and will have representatives from across
| the orgs. Jeff, Koray, Zoubin, Shane and myself will be
| finalising the composition of this board together in the coming
| days.
|
| How is it different from Google's structure of having reviewing
| committees over everything? I hope that this is not yet another
| layer of gatekeepers. In a large enough organization, the high-
| level leads have such fragmented attention and such ingrained
| tendency towards avoiding political mistakes that they mainly
| contribute concerns instead of ideas, especially product ideas.
| As a result, they become gatekeepers and projects slow down. The
| larger an oversight committee is, the more concerns a project
| will receive, and the more mediocre the project will be because
| the team will focus on making the committee happy instead of
| making hard trade-offs with fast iterations. Of course, the
| Scientific Board consists of people way over my caliber, so they
| may well do a fantastic job for Google.
| rvz wrote:
| About time and finally for some very _serious_ competition
| against OpenAI.com but unsurprising that DeepMind would be
| directly involved [0] and merged with Brain.
|
| Now lets get on with accelerating the real AI race to zero and
| the big fight against OpenAI.com, X.AI and the other stragglers.
|
| Stay very tuned to this.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508997
| open592 wrote:
| Funnily your comment made me wonder who owns "ai.com" - So I
| tried it out, and got redirected to "https://chat.openai.com/".
| cpeterso wrote:
| ai.com's domain registration doesn't seem to be owned by
| OpenAI. And, ironically, ai.com's registrar (not registrant)
| is Google LLC.
|
| https://whois.domaintools.com/openai.com
|
| https://whois.domaintools.com/ai.com
| endorphine wrote:
| They're probably renting it from the original owner.
| SXX wrote:
| I guess we can just call them that without "open" part.
| vessenes wrote:
| Sundar's email mentions something critical - Jeff Dean is going
| to be the Chief Scientist in DeepMind, and coordinate back to
| Sundar. This is a big deal; that move tells you that Google is
| taking being behind on public-facing AI seriously, Dean is an
| incredibly valuable, incredibly scarce resource.
|
| If we wind way back to Google Docs, Gmail and Android strategy,
| they took market share from leaders by giving away high quality
| products. If I were in charge of strategy there, I would double
| down on the Stability / Facebook plan, and open source PaLM
| architecture Chinchilla-optimal foundation models stat. Then I'd
| build tooling to run and customize the models over GCP, so open +
| cloud. I'd probably start selling TPUv4 racks immediately as
| well. I don't believe they can win on a direct API business model
| this cycle. But, I think they could do a form of embrace and
| extend by going radically open and leveraging their research +
| deployment skills.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Jeff Dean is clearly one of the greatest software
| developers/engineers ever but there isn't much evidence that he
| is a brilliant ML researcher
|
| And indeed Google AI has achieved very little product wise
| during his time as CEO. Kind of suggests he is a big part of
| bureaucratic challenges they have faced
| karmasimida wrote:
| He had the perfect balance of being legendary engineer and an
| ML researcher
|
| Can't emphasize more on how much rigorous engineering
| practice could accelerate research delivery. It is THE key to
| have a productive research oriented team.
|
| Good research engineers are underrated, and very difficult to
| find.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >Jeff Dean is clearly one of the greatest software
| developers/engineers ever but there isn't much evidence that
| he is a brilliant ML researcher
|
| Google have oversupply of brilliant ML researchers. What they
| need is a engineer that sees the applications of the
| technology so it can be turned into a product. Someone that
| can bridge the gap between the R&D team and the Bureaucracy.
|
| Want an idea for a stupid product - input - description of a
| girl, hobbies, some minor flaws - output - create a poem.
| Have been using Vicuna quite successfully for that purpose.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > Jeff Dean is clearly one of the greatest software
| developers/engineers ever
|
| Based on what? I've heard all the Chuck Norris type jokes,
| but what has Jeff Dean actually accomplished that is so
| legendary as a software developer (or as a leader) ?
|
| Per his Google bio/CV his main claims to fame seem to have
| been work on large scale infrastructure projects such as
| BigTable, MapReduce, Protobuf and TensorFlow, which seem more
| like solid engineering accomplishments rather than the stuff
| of legend.
|
| https://research.google/people/jeff/
|
| Seems like he's perhaps being rewarded with the title of
| "Chief Scientist" rather than necessarily suited to it, but I
| guess that depends on what Sundar is expecting out of him.
| ericjang wrote:
| Jeff was very early on in the "just scale up the big brain"
| idea, perhaps as early as 2012 (Andrew Ng training networks
| on 1000s of CPUs). This vision is sort of summarized in
| https://blog.google/technology/ai/introducing-pathways-
| next-... and fleshed out more in
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12533, but he had been
| internally promoting this idea since before 2016.
|
| When I joined Brain in 2016, I had thought the idea of
| training billion/trillion-parameter sparsely gated mixtures
| of experts was a huge waste of resources, and that the idea
| was incredibly naive. But it turns out he was right, and it
| would take ~6 more years before that was abundantly obvious
| to the rest of the research community.
|
| Here's his scholar page (H index of 94) https://scholar.goo
| gle.com/citations?hl=en&user=NMS69lQAAAAJ...
|
| As a leader, he also managed the development of TensorFlow
| and TPU. Consider the context / time frame - the year is
| 2014/2015 and a lot of academics still don't believe deep
| learning works. Jeff pivots a >100-person org to go all-in
| on deep learning, invest in an upgraded version of Theano
| (TF) and then give it away to the community for free, and
| develop Google's own training chip to compete with Nvidia.
| These are highly non-obvious ideas that show much more
| spine & vision than most tech leaders. Not to mention he
| designed & coded large parts of TF himself!
|
| And before that, he was doing systems engineering on non-ML
| stuff. It's rare to pivot as a very senior-level engineer
| to a completely new field and then do what he did.
|
| Jeff certainly has made mistakes as a leader (failing to
| translate Google Brain's numerous fundamental breakthroughs
| to more ambitious AI products, and consolidating the
| redundant big model efforts in google research) but I would
| consider his high level directional bets to be incredibly
| prescient.
| panabee wrote:
| thanks for this insightful perspective.
|
| 1. what was the reasoning behind thinking
| billion/trillion parameters would be naive and wasteful?
| perhaps part are right and could inform improvements
| today.
|
| 2. can you elaborate on the failure to translate research
| breakthroughs, of which there are many, into ambitious AI
| products? do you mean commercialize them, or pursue
| something like alphafold? this question is especially
| relevant. everyone is watching to see if recent changes
| can bring google to its rightful place at the forefront
| of applied AI.
| summerlight wrote:
| > large scale infrastructure projects such as BigTable,
| MapReduce, Protobuf and TensorFlow
|
| If you initiated and successfully landed large scale
| engineering projects and products that has transformed the
| entire industry more than 10 times, that's something
| qualified for being a "legend".
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| It seems like that being an incredible software engineer is
| more important these days, look at Greg Brockman's
| background.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| That's my bias as well. To me, it seems like every day
| someone releases a new AI toy, but the thing you would
| actually want is for a real software engineer to take the
| LLM or whatever, put it inside a black box, and then write
| actually useful software around it. Like off the top of my
| head, LLM + Google Calendar = useful product for managing
| schedules and emailing people. You could make it in a day
| of tinkering as a langchain demo, but actually making a
| real product that is useful and doesn't suck will require
| good old fashioned software engineering.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Based on the multitask generalisation capabilities shown
| so far of LLMs I'm kinda in the opposite camp - if we can
| figure out more data efficient and reliable architectures
| base language models will likely be enough to do just
| about anything and take general instructions. Like you
| can just tell the language model to directly operate on
| Google calendar with suitable supplied permissions and it
| can do it no integration needed
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Exactly this. There is a reasonable chance the GUI goes
| the way of the dodo and some large (75% or something)
| percentage of tasks are done just by typing (or speaking)
| in natural language and the response is words and very
| simple visual elements.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| What you're describing is AGI levels of autonomy. There
| are quite a lot of missing pieces for that to happen I
| think.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Have you used GPT-4? People are already building agents
| to do things the above comment refers to.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Right but Ilya is the Chief Scientist of OpenAI not Greg
| Brockman
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I heard Ilya wasnt behind the big innnovations at OpenAI.
| It was lesser known scientists
| tempusalaria wrote:
| OpenAI from a research point of view haven't really had
| any "big innovations". At least I struggle to think of
| any published research they have done that would qualify
| in that category. Probably they keep the good stuff for
| themselves
|
| But Ilya definitely had some big papers before and he is
| widely acknowledged as a top researcher in the field.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I think the fact that there are no other systems publicly
| available that are comparable to GPT-4 (and I dont think
| Bard is as good), points to innovation they havent
| released
| forgot-my-pw wrote:
| He worked on TensorFlow. So even if the doesn't do ML
| research himself, at least he works on the tooling.
| modeless wrote:
| TensorFlow was honestly not that good. It had a lot of
| effort put into it, so it worked, but there are reasons
| people moved away from it.
|
| I think Jeff Dean is a great engineer, but I wouldn't hold
| up TensorFlow as a great example.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I always thought he pair programmed so it's been Jeff +
| Sanjay.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| But who uses TensorFlow -- really -- these days.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| What else are people using then?
| acmj wrote:
| PyTorch everywhere
| modeless wrote:
| Or JAX
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Of course he is someone any technology organisation would
| want to have as a resource. But probably not as chief
| scientist or ceo of an ML company based on the available
| evidence
| kortilla wrote:
| Being a brilliant ML researcher has approximately zero
| overlap with making products for people to use.
| bartwr wrote:
| Furthermore, Jeff is not a great (or even good...)
| manager/director/leader. There were a lot of internal and
| external dramas because of his leadership, that he failed to
| address. How often you hear about dramas about other Chef
| Scientists at other, comparably sized, companies?
|
| He should stay a Fellow, in a "brilliant consultant" role.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > How often you hear about dramas about other Chef
| Scientists
|
| I know this is a typo, but I would _love_ to hear about
| high drama involving Chef Scientists at large companies.
|
| It would have all the nonstop action of _Iron Chef_ ,
| combined with the multilayered scheming of _Succession_...
| I think there 's something there.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There was also a separate DeepMind announcement made by
| Hassabis:
|
| https://www.deepmind.com/blog/announcing-google-deepmind
|
| It seems that DeepMind has now gone from what had appeared to
| be a blue sky research org to almost a product group, with
| Google Research now being the primary research group.
|
| Jeff Dean's reputation has always been as an uber-engineer, not
| any kind of visionary or great leader, so it's not obvious how
| well suited he's going to be to this somewhat odd role of Chief
| Scientist both to Google DeepMind and Google Research.
|
| How things have changed since OpenAI was founded on the fear
| that Google was becoming an unbeatable powerhouse in AI!
| neximo64 wrote:
| Jeff Dean is the reason OpenAI has beaten Google as it stands
| today. Not much weight in it being a good decision. He was too
| risk averse.
| [deleted]
| uptownfunk wrote:
| The AI primitives are pretty basic. The real brains are
| figuring out how to make the best model. The engineering
| integration are pretty straightforward
| dougmwne wrote:
| That sounds like a fairly brilliant counter to "Open"AI.
| Something tells me that Google is still too scared of this tech
| in the hands of the public to go there though.
| owlglass wrote:
| What indicates that Google is "too scared" as opposed to
| merely lagging behind?
| dougmwne wrote:
| Piles of previous statements talking about safety and a
| general unwillingness to put any of its models in the hands
| of anyone not under NDA. Bard is the first counterexample I
| can think of and that was forced by OpenAI.
| scottyah wrote:
| Anecdotally, Bard is much better at guiding the responses
| than chatGPT. They're slowly releasing more and more
| "features" as they feel comfortable. You can see what
| they're up to with the TestAI kitchen app.
|
| I kinda liked how open chatGPT was before the heavy
| filtering, but I see why we need to reign in chaos overall.
| jstx1 wrote:
| This announcement, including the leadership changes, sounds
| more like they've shut down DeepMind and moved everyone over to
| Google Brain. Keeping the DeepMind name for the new team is a
| clever trick to make it look like more positive news than it
| actually is.
| aix1 wrote:
| Demis remains at the helm though, doesn't he?
| andygeorge wrote:
| ehhhhhhh sure but for how long? these statements stick out
| to me:
|
| - "I'm sure you will have lots of questions about what this
| new unit will look like" aka we're not going to talk about
| specifics in public comms
|
| - "Jeff Dean will take on the elevated role ... reporting
| to me. ... Working alongside Demis, Jeff will help set the
| future direction of our AI research" aka Demis isn't the
| only Big Dog in the room anymore
| soVeryTired wrote:
| Honestly is Demis that big a deal? I always figured it was
| the researchers a layer or two down (e.g. David Silver) who
| were doing the real work.
| aix1 wrote:
| He is key to defining the culture (secrecy etc). There is
| a huge culture difference between Brain and DM and, with
| Demis at the helm, I'm concerned that it'll be Brain
| moving towards DM culture, not vice versa.
| [deleted]
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| A couple of thoughts:
|
| - This does not seem unexpected. Google is panicked about losing
| the AI race and pushing resources into DeepMind is a logical step
| to mitigating those fears.
|
| - Google has currently given ~300M to Anthropic and has a
| partnership with them. I assume Google continues to see potential
| in both avenues and won't neglect one AI team for the other. I'm
| guessing that DeepMind will be their primary focus because of the
| numerous, real-world applications already at play.
|
| - It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4.
| They seem to be very different approaches. Yet, they both have
| support for language and imagery. So, perhaps they aren't that
| different afterall?
|
| - Still waiting to hear more from Google on how they plan to
| leverage their novel PaLM architecture. The API for it was
| released a month ago, but, to my awareness, has yet to take the
| world by storm. (Q: Bard isn't powered by PaLM, right?)
|
| Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I
| don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area. I
| trust DeepMind's team and I trust Google's research teams, but
| Google's ability to execute and take products to market has been
| quite weak thus far. My gut says this action will hamstring
| DeepMind in bureaucracy.
| jstx1 wrote:
| > It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4.
|
| Is it tough because one of these is a newly merged and
| rebranded team and the other is a machine learning model?
| atorodius wrote:
| Yoo this killed me :D
| 1-6 wrote:
| AI is not a winner takes all scenario. The pond is so large
| that there will be many winners.
|
| One day, with AGI and autonomous agents, the goal will be to
| merge neural network meshes together in order to gather highly
| specialized datasets.
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| "this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy."
|
| I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has
| made _very_ impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to
| add one dollar of revenue to Google 's bottom line. Further
| they have drained billions from Google.
|
| Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research
| paper game and into the product game.
|
| Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward.
| Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment
| between the company's goals and those of the employees.
|
| Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn
| Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine,
| but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't
| that wealthy.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| Different people excel at different types of work
| (particularly where deep experience is the most significant
| contributor to performance). Tasking academic researchers
| with building product is the pathway to hell.
|
| The existing, top-performing product teams at Google should
| be taking that research and building products around it. If
| Google has any top-performing product teams left, that is...
| ahzhou wrote:
| Yeah, Google needs to make sure that their research doesn't
| go the way of Xerox PARC.
| Closi wrote:
| > DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but
| they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom
| line. Further they have drained billions from Google.
|
| You could say the same about OpenAI and Microsoft, they
| drained money for years until about 6 months ago when
| suddenly the partnership started to pay back big style.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| OpenAI is still massively unprofitable and MSFT is (rightly
| IMO) going to invest way more money in them so it's
| definitely still a drain. A modest drain relative to MSFTs
| overall resources
| CydeWeys wrote:
| At least the path to profitablity is super clear though:
| selling GPT-4 access. What's the path to profitablity on
| AlphaGo or whatever?
| freedomben wrote:
| As much as I'd love an OpenAI-style API from Google, I'm
| not expecting that. It will probably be "profitable" to
| them in the unseen backend making Search, Google
| Assistant, etc better. I've been playing with Bard a lot
| and it's pretty good, but OpenAI's API offering just
| makes them so much more useful to me since I can use
| whatever app I want (or even write my own) to consume the
| product, and it's easy for me to see the value for my
| dime.
| chaxor wrote:
| "Papers have little/no impact on perf" - this is a ridiculous
| and false claim. Almost every single advancement in any field
| has come from academia. Sure, it may not be recognized as
| such by the general public because they aren't experts in the
| area - but the fact remains that academia is pretty much the
| only way to progress as a society. Companies just take what
| academia gives them and make products out of it for their own
| profit (not to completely trivialize that - it still comes
| with it's own set of challenges), but the private sector is
| completely misaligned with making real progress towards hard
| problems. Deepmind is one of the examples that continues to
| show this despite being a 'corporate entity' in that the
| large advancements seen are out of their employment (i.e.
| giving their excess of capital) of professors at universities
| who focus on their research.
| spokesbeing wrote:
| Huh? None of this is true for a lot of core recent work. A
| very obvious example is transformers, which did not come
| out of academic research (or DeepMind for that matter) at
| all.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| > Almost every single advancement in any field has come
| from Academia
|
| This sounds like you need far more evidence. If you say
| academia as the institution where you share papers, sure
| but then that's just a sharing mechanism. Almost like
| saying all advancements came out of Internet because arxiv
| is where research is shared.
|
| If you want to say professors and Universities have been
| heralding AI advancement, that has not been true for at
| least 10 years possibly more. Moment industry started
| getting into Academia, Academia couldn't compete and died
| out. Even Transformers the founding paper of the modern GPT
| architectures came out of Google Research. In Vision,
| ResNet, MaskRCNN to Segment Anything came out of Meta /
| MIcrosoft. The last great academic invention might have
| been dropout and even that involved Apple. After that I
| fail to see Academia coming up with a single invention in
| ML that the rest of the community instantly adopted because
| of how good it was.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| >DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they
| have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom
| line.
|
| DeepMind has researched and developed features that exist in
| many Google products today, e.g. Wavenet:
| https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-
| research/waven...
| ur-whale wrote:
| LOL, if you look at the amount of money Google has poured
| into Google and how much they got back for their
| investment, it's laughable.
|
| Things like the Wavenet "contributions" are just Demis
| paying lip service to the fact that once in a while Google
| was nudging them to produce something, _anything_ really
| that was actually useful.
| scottyah wrote:
| Google putting the extreme amounts of easy dollars they
| have into things that aren't instantly profitable is very
| much what the founders said they'd do though
| mrbungie wrote:
| I don't know if said bureaucracy is a blessing or a curse
| given Google's track record in product management. If pressed
| I would bet towards the curse option.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| In 2021 Deepmind generated $2bln in revenue.
|
| This was paid by Google for unspecified research services.
| But the way it's accounted for it's likely that it was based
| on some legitimate contribution. It is unlikely it would be
| structured this way if it was just corporate support.
|
| DeepMind has public financial filings and you can go read the
| exact language they use to describe the revenue they
| generate.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Sounds like corporate funny money to me, not real revenue.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| If it was, it probably wouldn't be accounted for in
| taxable fashion as it is today.
|
| DeepMind is profitable and paying tax on that profit.
| It's public information that you can see in its UK
| regulatory filings.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Fair point. I didn't realize it was taxable as I am used
| to only profits being taxed and assumed Deepmind is run
| at a loss.
| jstx1 wrote:
| It's like bragging about earning a good salary and then it
| turns out that you work for your dad.
| HybridCurve wrote:
| I feel like google crossed some point about a decade ago
| where they stopped making innovative stuff and started
| focusing on squeezing revenue out of everything else. A bit
| like when Carly turned HP into a printing/ink racket. Both
| the decline of google maps and the inability of google to
| filter out noise from their search results are strong
| indicators of this for me. Scrambling to field a competing
| product to maintain relevancy in this emerging market would
| be consistent with this assessment as well. The old google
| would have fielded the product first because it was useful,
| but the current google seems to do it because they don't want
| to lose revenue.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| I'd say that point was a bit less than a decade ago - Aug
| 10, 2015.
| bradgessler wrote:
| This reminds me of Nest. When it was separate, it was shipping
| great hardware and OK software. Then Google appended "Google"
| in front of it, creating "Google Nest" and kicked off the slow
| Google Hug of Death(tm).
|
| The first casualty was Nest shutting down its APIs, cutting off
| an ecosystem of third party integrations.
|
| The next casualty was replacing the Nest app with the Google
| Home app. I stopped following Nest after that because I sold
| all the Nest stuff I owned and replaced it all with HomeKit.
|
| It's astounding how Google keeps doing this, and its
| shareholders seem to go along with it. I agree, given their
| track record, its hard to be optimistic about anything Google
| slaps their name in front of.
| 1024core wrote:
| > It's tough for me to compare Google DeepMind to OpenAI GPT4.
|
| You are comparing an organization to a DNN model? It would be
| tough for anybody.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Yeah, fair, the way I expressed myself sounded stupid. What I
| meant to say was something like: "I don't believe that
| DeepMind is openly making use of LLM technologies. They're
| known for their neural networks operating at a pixel-level
| rather than a token-level. I don't know which of these
| approaches has more long-term commercial viability."
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Google Brain is known for their LLMs
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Okay, thanks! I need to read up more on Google Brain.
| [deleted]
| neel8986 wrote:
| >> Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively
| beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale
| in this area.
|
| Yes the team which literally created transformer and almost all
| the important open research including Bert, T5, imagen, RLHF,
| ViT don't have the ability to execute on AI /s. Tell me one
| innovation OpenAI bought into the field. They are good at
| execution but i havent seen anything novel coming out of them.
| why_only_15 wrote:
| 7/8 of the transformer authors are gone, BERT author is at
| OAI, two first authors of T5 are gone, imagen team left to
| make their own startup, etc. etc.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| This is I think a caricature of how engineers think.
|
| Yes yes that's right the algorithm is the most important
| part.
| galactus wrote:
| Because of course Xerox PARC, which literally invented the
| GUI, desktop computer, the mouse, freaking Ethernet, etc
| executed the commercialization of all their innovation
| flawlessly....
| throwntoday wrote:
| There are plenty of products that launch on top tools and
| frameworks that are worth far more than the underlying will
| ever be. OpenAI is creating products, DeepMind was creating
| tools.
|
| It's not a matter of skill as much as objective. And DeepMind
| would still be starting at zero if they decide to pivot to
| products.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Look at SIP vs Facetime. We already had SIP av calls
| forever, few ever heard of it.
| ioblomov wrote:
| I certainly haven't! But the canonical example would be
| Xerox's Alto vs the Macintosh.
| [deleted]
| ianbutler wrote:
| Being able to produce research is a very different skill from
| being able to produce a very successful product. We have not
| seen google do that very successfully for over a decade.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I think in this context "execute" implies "create traction
| with a real-world product". Given that even politicians and
| comedy shows are talking about ChatGPT, I think it's fair to
| acknowledge that Google is lacking in this area.
| Takennickname wrote:
| Are you implying that inventing something is the same as
| being able to bring it to market?
| mlinsey wrote:
| Drawing a bright line between research vs products and
| considering only the former to be "innovation" is a way to
| become quickly irrelevant.
| bushbaba wrote:
| +1. Bell labs said hi
| neel8986 wrote:
| Product based on no fundamental innovation is also a path
| to irrelevance. If there was even something remotely
| defensible in GPTs then OpenAI would not have sold 50% of
| company for 10B dollar. Only a matter of time and large
| about of human in the loop will bring any large transformer
| model into the same space as shown by recent models like
| alpaca and vicuna are showing that. Only thing the whole
| thing has done is no labs will open source any major
| breakthroughs anymore
| dopamean wrote:
| These are capitalist enterprises here. I'd argue that
| product is almost all that matters. Sure someone has to
| innovate but the final product that can be sold is what
| keeps people and companies relevant.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| What do you mean? Most VC-backed startups sell far _more_
| than 50% of their company for far _less_ than 10B.
| neel8986 wrote:
| This is not a typical VC based company. According the HN
| crowd this is the one company who can execute on AI and
| challenge Google and all other trillion dollar AI labs.
| In my opinion they themselves are aware of the fact they
| are one trick pony. Given how astute a VC SamAltman is,
| if there was any thing remotely innovative and defensible
| about the product they would have never done that.
| hot_gril wrote:
| > Product based on no fundamental innovation is also a
| path to irrelevance
|
| Microsoft has been doing, like, negative innovation and
| is still relevant.
| jerpint wrote:
| GPT, CLIP, Dalle, RLHF, these are all novel
| qumpis wrote:
| Rlhf wasn't introduced by openai. And GPT is a pretty
| standard transformer, no? Yes they did it at scale and it
| speaks volumes on their production skills, but OP was
| asking about research
| WanderPanda wrote:
| People at OpenAI came up with PPO, arguably the most used
| deep RL algorithm
| avereveard wrote:
| Well, what better demonstration that engineering without
| business vision is sterile
|
| While PaLM demolished benchmarks scores openai with a chat
| tune of a sizeable but not unwieldy model took the world by
| storm.
| zamnos wrote:
| Well, I've heard a lot about a ChatGPT thing in the news,
| isn't that made by OpenAI?
| jpeg_hero wrote:
| Have you tried Bard?
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| And yet no one is talking about Google AI. None of it is a
| house hold name.
|
| So OpenAI it is.
| querez wrote:
| DeepMind clearly is a household name. Think of AlphaGo or
| AlphaFold, those were legendary. Google Brain as well is a
| household name. Think of the Transformer, or BERT. Those
| are legendary, as well.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| I'm sorry, but no. DeepMind might be well known to AI
| nerds, but it's not a household name the same way
| ChatGPT/OpenAI has become.
| tempest_ wrote:
| In the grand scheme and from the outside looking in being
| `good at execution` might be the most important thing.
|
| There were plenty of touch screen phones before the iphone.
| neel8986 wrote:
| Outside world is looking at AI innovation only in recent
| times forgetting the entire journey of last decade. If
| there was any remotely defensible technology in OpenAI they
| wouldn't have sold 50% of their company for 10B.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Yes, we saw your other comment stating the same thing.
|
| You are doing a whole lot of tea leave reading with
| basically zero visibility, which I can't really reconcile
| with how absolute you're being with your language.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yes the team which literally created transformer and almost
| all the important open research including Bert, T5, imagen,
| RLHF, ViT don't have the ability to execute on AI /s.
|
| This, but non-sarcastically. Google has spectacularly, so
| far, failed to execute on products (even of the "selling
| shovels" kind, much less end-user products) for generative
| AI, despite both having lots of consumer products to which it
| is naturally adaptable _and_ a lot of the fundamental
| research work in generative AI.
|
| The best explanation is that they actually are,
| institutionally and structurally, bad at execution in this
| domain, because they have all the pieces and incentives that
| rule out most of the other potential explanations for that.
|
| > OpenAI bought into the field. They are good at execution
| but i havent seen anything novel coming out of them.
|
| Right, OpenAI is good at execution (at least, when it comes
| to selling-shovels tools, I don't see a lot of evidence
| beyond that yet), whereas Google is, to all current evidence,
| _not_ good at execution in this space.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Numerous individuals have since transitioned away from
| Google, with reports suggesting their growing
| dissatisfaction as the company appeared indecisive about
| utilizing their technological innovations effectively.
|
| Moreover, it has been quite some time since Google
| successfully developed and sustained a high-quality product
| without ultimately discontinuing it. The organizational
| structure at Google seems to inadvertently hinder the
| creation of exceptional products, exemplifying Conway's Law
| in practice.
|
| Read more about this topic here:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-ai-chatbot-bard-
| chatgpt-...
| nostrademons wrote:
| They're getting Innovator's Dilemma'd, the same way that
| Bell Labs, DEC, and Xerox did. When you have an
| exceptionally profitable monopoly, it biases every
| executive's decision-making toward caution. Things are
| good; you don't want to upset the golden goose by making
| any radical moves; and so when your researchers come out
| with something revolutionary and different you bury it,
| maybe let them publish a few papers, but certainly don't
| let it go to market.
|
| Then somebody else reads the papers, decides to execute on
| it, and hires all the researchers who are frustrated at
| discovering all this cool stuff but never seeing it launch.
| spunker540 wrote:
| Are researchers actually frustrated to never see it
| launch, or are they mostly focused on publishing papers?
|
| I thought OpenAI's unique advantage over many big tech
| companies is that they've somehow figured out how to fast
| track research into product, or have researchers much
| more willing to worry about "production".
| dmix wrote:
| The typical solution to this (assuming there is one
| internally) is setting up a sub-company and keeping the
| team isolated from the parent company aka
| "intrapenuership" but also keeping them well resourced by
| the parent.
|
| It seems like that's what they were doing with DeepMind
| for the last decade. But it's also possible DeepMind as
| an institution lacked the pressure/product
| sense/leadership to produce consumable products/services.
| Maybe their instincts were more centered around R&D and
| being isolated left them somewhat directionless?
|
| So now that AI suddenly really matters as a business, not
| just some indefinite future potential, Google wants to
| bring them inside.
|
| They could have created a 3rd entity, their own version
| of OpenAI, combining DeepMind with some Google
| management/teams and other acquisitions and spinning it
| off semi-independently. But this play basically _has_ to
| be from Google itself for their own reputation 's sake -
| maybe not for practicality's sake but politically/image-
| wise.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The problem with the intrapreneurship idea is that it's
| really hard to beat desperation as a motivator. I have
| seen people behave very differently in the context of a
| startup vs a corporate research lab thanks to this
| dynamic. Some people thrive in the corporate R&D
| environment, but the innovator's dilemma eventually gets
| to their managers.
|
| Cisco has done a great job balancing this, actually -
| they keep contact with engineers who leave to do
| startups, and then acquire their companies if they become
| successful enough to prove the product.
| majani wrote:
| In today's age of multimillion dollar seed rounds, I
| don't think there's much difference between a buzzy
| startup and a corporate R&D department
| nprateem wrote:
| Lack of major owner equity basically means few
| intrapreneur efforts will succeed unless the 'founder'
| really couldn't succeed without the daddy company
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > But it's also possible DeepMind as an institution
| lacked the pressure/product sense/leadership to produce
| consumable products/services. Maybe their instincts were
| more centered around R&D and being isolated left them
| somewhat directionless?
|
| It seems like this is more a Google problem than a
| DeepMind problem though, no? Google created one of the
| most successful R&D labs for ML/AI research the world has
| ever known, then failed to have their other business
| units capitalize on that success. OpenAI observed this
| gap and swooped in to profit off all of their research
| outputs (with backing from Microsoft).
|
| IMO what they're doing here is doubling down on their
| mistakes: instead of disciplining their other business
| units for failing to take advantage of this research,
| they're forcing their most productive research team to
| assume responsibility and correct for those failures. I
| expect this will go about as well as any other instance
| of subjecting a bunch of research scientists to internal
| political struggles and market discipline, i.e. very
| poorly.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Yeah. It doesn't really work all that well. Xerox tried
| it with Xerox PARC, Digital with Western Digital, AT&T
| with Bell Labs, Yahoo with Yahoo Brickhouse, IBM with
| their PC division, Google with Google X & Alphabet &
| DeepMind, etc.
|
| Being hungry and scrappy seems to be a necessary
| precondition for bringing innovative products to market.
| If you don't naturally come from hungry & scrappy
| conditions (eg. Gates, Zuckerburg, Bezos, PG), being in
| an environment where you're surrounded by hungry &
| scrappy people seems to be necessary.
|
| For that matter, a number of extremely well-resourced
| startups (eg Color, Juicero, WebVan, Secret, Pets.com,
| Theranos, WeWork) have failed in spectacular ways. Being
| well-resourced seems to be an anti-success criteria even
| for independent companies.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| That may have been true in the 70's and 80's. However, I
| worked for a 2000 person (startup) software company in
| the 90's that was acquired at 1.8B, another 4000 person
| (startup) software company in the 90's that was acquired
| at 3.4B, and then a few years ago, the acquirer of both
| was itself acquired for 18B.
|
| I survived ALL the layoffs somehow. Boots on the ground
| agrees with "doesn't really work all that well" but the
| people collecting rents keep collecting. Given the size
| all of these received significant DOJ reviews though the
| only detail I remember is basketball sized court rooms
| filled with printed paper for the depositions. I'm sure
| they burned down the Amazon to print all that legalese,
| speaking of scaling problems.
| pneumonic wrote:
| > Digital with Western Digital
|
| Digital (DEC) had no substantial connection with Western
| Digital; see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital#History
| nostrademons wrote:
| I got the name wrong; officially it was Digital's Western
| Research Lab [1], hence colloquially "Western Digital".
|
| [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/1
| 0275038...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _getting Innovator 's Dilemma'd_
|
| They're also paying for their product managers'
| cancellation culture. (Sorry.) I'm seeing a lot of AI
| pitch decks; none suggest trusting Google. That saps not
| only network effects, but what ill term earned research:
| work done by others on your product. Google pays for all
| its research and promotion. OpenAI does not.
| tomComb wrote:
| I'm puzzled that stuff like alpha Fold count for nothing in
| this discussion (having just browsed through most of it).
|
| I saw quotes from independent scientists referring to it as
| the greatest breakthrough of their lifetime, and I saw
| similarly strong language used in regard to the potential
| for good of alpha fold as a product.
|
| So they gave it away, but it is still a product they
| followed through on and continue to.
|
| Was it wrong of them that they gave it away, and right,
| that Microsoft's primary intent with their open AI
| technology, seems to be to provoke an arms race with
| google?
| djtango wrote:
| Who cares about protein folding when a hyped up ELIZA can
| confidently tell you lies
|
| /s
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Alpha Fold is a game changer, but nowhere near the game
| changer ChatGPT(4) is, even if ChatGPT was only available
| for the subset of scientists that benefit from Alpha
| Fold. We are literally arguing semantics if this is AGI,
| and you're comparing it to a bespoke ML model that solves
| a highly specific domain problem (as unsolvable and
| impressive as it was).
| adammarples wrote:
| The domain is the domain of protein structure, something
| which potentially has gigantic applications to life.
| Predicting proteins may yet prove more useful than
| predicting text.
| visarga wrote:
| Could be interesting to correlate DNA with text produced
| by people. Both are self replicating, self evolving
| languages.
| theragra wrote:
| If so, where are application of this? Is it too early?
| misnome wrote:
| > We are literally arguing semantics if this is AGI,
|
| And if it isn't? Literally every single argument I've
| seen towards this being AGI is "We don't know at all how
| intelligence works, so let's say that this is it!!!!!"
|
| > nowhere near the game changer ChatGPT(4) is, even if
| ChatGPT was only available for the subset of scientists
| that benefit from Alpha Fold
|
| This is utter nonsense. For anyone who actually knows a
| field, ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking
| nonsense. Conferences are putting up ChatGPT answers
| about their fields to laugh at because of how
| misleadingly wrong they are.
|
| This is absolutely okay, because it can be a useful tool
| without being the singularity. I'd sure that in a couple
| of years time, most of what ChatGPT achieves will be in
| line with most of the tech industry advances in the past
| decade - pushing the bottom out of the labor market and
| actively making the lives of the poorest worse in order
| to line their own pockets.
|
| I really wish people would stop projecting hopes and
| wishes on top of breathless marketing.
| rockinghigh wrote:
| > ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking
| nonsense.
|
| I use ChatGPT daily to generate code in multiple
| languages. Not only does it generate complex code, but it
| can explain it and improve it when prompted to do so.
| It's mind blowing.
| BlackSwanMan wrote:
| GPT4 can pass the the neurosurgical medical boards, most
| of the people laughing at it are typically too dumb to
| note the difference between 3.5 and 4.
|
| >pushing the bottom out of the labor market and actively
| making the lives of the poorest worse in order to line
| their own pockets.
|
| This makes zero sense. GPT4 has little effect on a
| janitor or truck driver. It doesn't pick fruit, or wash
| cars.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Exams are designed to be challenging to humans because
| most of us don't have photographic memories or RAM based
| memory, so passing the test is a good predictor of
| knowing your stuff, i.e. deep comprehension.
|
| Making GPT sit it is like getting someone with no
| knowledge but a computer full of past questions and
| answers and a search button to sit the exam. It has
| metaphorical written it's answers on it's arm.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| This is essentially true. I explained it to my friends
| like this:
|
| It _knows_ a lot of stuff, but it can 't do much
| _thinking_ , so the minute your problem and its solution
| are far enough off the well-trodden path, its logic falls
| apart. Likewise, it's not especially good at math. It's
| great at _understanding your question_ and _replying with
| a good plain-english answer_ , but it's not actually
| _thinking_
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| FWIW, as a non-pathologist with a pathologist for a
| father, I can almost pass the pathology boards when taken
| as a test in isolation. Most of these tests are _very
| easy_ for professionals in their fields, and are just a
| Jacksonian barrier to entry. Being allowed to sit for the
| test is the hard part, not the test itself.
|
| As far as I know, the exception to this is the bar exam,
| which GPT-4 can also pass, but that exam plays into
| GPT-4's strengths much more than other professional
| exams.
| Quarrel wrote:
| > the exception to this is the bar exam
|
| FWIW, this is more true for CA than most states.
| astrange wrote:
| > I'd sure that in a couple of years time, most of what
| ChatGPT achieves will be in line with most of the tech
| industry advances in the past decade - pushing the bottom
| out of the labor market and actively making the lives of
| the poorest worse in order to line their own pockets
|
| This is not what any of the US economic stats have looked
| like in the last decade.
|
| Especially since 2019, the poorest Americans are the only
| people whose incomes have gone up!
| nicetryguy wrote:
| > ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking
| nonsense.
|
| Absolutely not! I created a powershell script for
| converting one ASM label format to another for retro game
| development and i used ChatGPT to write it. Now, it
| fumbled some of the basic program logic, however, it
| absolutely nailed all of the specific regex and obtuse
| powershell commands that i needed and that i merely
| described to it in plain English.
|
| It essentially aced the "hard parts" of the script and i
| was able to take what it generated and make it fit my
| needs perfectly with some minor tweaking. The end result
| was far cleaner and far beyond what i would have been
| able to write myself, all in a fraction of the time. This
| ain't no breathless marketing dude: this thing is the
| real deal.
|
| ChatGPT is an extremely powerful tool and an absolute
| game changer for development. Just because it is
| imperfect and needs a bit of hand holding (which it may
| not soon), do not underestimate it, and do not discount
| the idea that it may become an absolute industry
| disrupter in the painfully near future. I'm excited
| ...and scared
| robotresearcher wrote:
| >> ChatGPT generates unhelpful, plausible-looking
| nonsense. > Absolutely not!
|
| It does, quite often. Not _only_ that, as you describe.
| But it does.
|
| For example, I asked it what my most cited paper is, and
| it made up a plausible-sounding but non-existent paper,
| along with fabricated Google Scholar citation counts.
| Totally unhelpful.
|
| It also can produce very useful things.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I find it's better at really mainstream things. The web
| is riddled with Powershell examples.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Your experience and my experience do not align.
|
| I asked GPT-4 to give me a POSIX compliant C port of
| dirbuster. It spit one out with instructions for
| compiling it.
|
| I asked it to make it more aggressive at scanning and it
| updated it to be multi-threaded.
|
| I asked it for a word list, and it gave me the git
| command to clone one from GitHub and the command to
| compile the program and run the output with the word
| list.
|
| I then told it that the HTTP service I was scanning
| always returned 200 status=ok instead of a 404 and asked
| it for a patch file. It generated that and gave me the
| instructions for applying it to the program.
|
| There was a bug I had to fix: word lists aren't prefixed
| with /. Other than that one character fix, GPT-4 wrote a
| C program that used an open source word list to scan the
| HTTP service running on the television in my living room
| for routes, and found the /pong route.
|
| This week it's written 100% of the API code that takes a
| CRUD based REST API and maps it to and from SQL queries
| for me on a cloudflare worker. I give it the method
| signature and the problem statement, it gives me the
| code, and I copy and paste.
|
| If you're laughing this thing off as generating unhelpful
| nonsense you're going to get blind sided in the next few
| years as GPT gets wired into the workflows at every layer
| of your stack.
|
| > pushing the bottom out of the labor market and actively
| making the lives of the poorest worse in order to line
| their own pockets.
|
| I'm in a BNI group and a majority of these blue collar
| workers have very little to worry about with GPT right
| now. Until Boston Dynamics gets its stuff together and
| the robots can do drywalling and plumbing, I'm not sure I
| agree with your take. This isn't coming for the "poorest"
| among us. This is coming for the middle class. From brand
| consultants and accountants to software engineers and
| advertisers.
|
| Software engineers with GPT are about to replace software
| engineers without GPT. Accountants with GPT are about to
| replace accountants without GPT.
|
| > Literally every single argument I've seen towards this
| being AGI is
|
| Here is one: it can simultaneously pass the bar exam,
| port dirbuster to POSIX compliant C, give me a list of
| competing brands for conducting a market analysis, get
| into deep philosophical debates, and help me file my
| taxes.
|
| It can do all of this simultaneously. I can't find a
| human capable of the simultaneous breadth and depth of
| intelligence that ChatGPT exhibits. You can find someone
| in the upper 90th percentile of any profession and show
| that they can out compete GPT4. But you can't take that
| same person and ask them to out compete someone in the
| bottom 50th percentile of 4 other fields with much
| success.
|
| Artificial = machine, check. Intelligence = exhibits Nth
| percentile intelligence in a single field, check General
| = exhibits Nth percentile intelligence in more than one
| field, check
|
| This is AGI, now we are nit-picking. It's here.
| l33tman wrote:
| Maybe it's heavily biased towards programming and
| computing questions? I've tested GPT-4 on numerous
| physics stuff and it fails spectacularly at almost all of
| them. It starts to hallucinate egregious stuff that's
| completely false, misrepresents articles it tries to
| quote as references etc. It's impressive as a glorified
| search engine in those cases but can't at all be trusted
| to explain most things unless they're the most canonical
| curriculum questions.
|
| This extreme difficulty in discerning what it
| hallucinates and what is "true" is what it's most obvious
| problem is. I guess it can be fixed somehow but right now
| it has to be heavily fact-checked manually.
|
| It does this for computing questions as well, but there
| is some selection bias so people tend to post the
| success-stories and not the fails. However it's less
| dangerous if it's in computing as you'll notice it
| immediately so maybe require less manual labour to keep
| it in check.
| visarga wrote:
| > This is AGI, now we are nit-picking. It's here.
|
| Hahaha, if you want nit-picking, all the language tasks
| chatGPT is good at are strictly human tasks. Not general
| tasks. Human tasks are all related to keeping humans
| alive and making more of us, they don't span the whole
| spectrum of possible tasks where intelligence could
| exist.
|
| Of course inside language tasks it is as general as can
| be, yet still needs to be placed inside a more complex
| system with tools to improve accuracy, LLM alone is like
| brain alone - not that great at everything.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| On the other hand if you browse around the web you will
| find various implementations of dirbuster, probably in C
| for sure in C++ which are multi-threaded , it's not to
| take away from your experience but I mean, without
| knowing what's in the training set it may have already
| been exposed to what you asked for, even several times
| over.
|
| I have a feeling they had access to a lot of code on GH,
| who knows how much code they actually accessed. The
| conspiracy theorist in me wonders if MS just didn't
| provide access to public and private code to train on,
| they wouldn't have even told Open AI, just said, "here's
| some nice data", it's all secret and we can't see the
| models inputs so I'll leave it at that. I mean they've
| obviously prepared the data for copilot, so it was there
| waiting to be trained on.
|
| So yeah I feel your enthusiasm but if you think about it
| a little more, or maybe not so hard to imagine what you
| saw being actually rather simple ? Every time I write
| code I feel kind of depressed because I know almost
| certainly someone has already written the same thing and
| that it's sitting in GitHub or somewhere else and I'm
| wasting my time.
|
| ChatGPT just takes away the knowing where to find
| something (it's already seen almost everything the
| average person can think of) you want and gives it to you
| directly. Have you never thought of this already ? Like
| you knew all the code you wanted already was there
| somewhere, but you just didn't have an interface to get
| to it? I've thought about this for quite a while and I
| knew there would big data people doing experiments who
| could see that probably 80-90% of code on GitHub is
| pretty much identical.
|
| Nothing is magic, right ?
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I guess my response to that is: so what?
|
| Regardless of the truthiness of your assertion, that
| general description of work is a majority of my
| profession. Novel contribution is a very small percentage
| of the work I do. I'm looking forward to that shifting
| significantly in the coming years.
|
| It doesn't matter if the "POSIX compliant C" version of
| dirbuster was in it's training set. Or if my cloudflare
| wrangler JS API <-> Neon.tech SQL database implementation
| was. (Copyright arguments withstanding for sure.)
|
| What matters is that it did 100% of the work of
| generating the code. All I did was guide it, code review
| it, and ship it. It felt like I had a team of junior
| engineers working in the trenches on the problem for me
| and I was getting to have fun playing at a level up the
| stack. It can generate 100LoC faster than I can type it,
| and I can code review it as it generates it. I can fix
| the code up in the editor and paste it back in with the
| next prompt for another round of work.
|
| This is with the current model.
|
| Unlike GP's assertion that people are falling for
| marketing, I actually don't know what OpenAI's marketing
| is. 100% of my belief in GPT-4 comes from it doing my
| real day-to-day tasks along side me. I don't need a
| crystal ball to predict what AI is going to do, I'm
| already using it as a partner in writing my code. It's
| already well enough adept at my profession to pair-
| program through problems with me.
|
| This week I had a particularly hairy problem I needed to
| solve, and I was already behind schedule on the project.
| ChatGPT and I knocked it out in ~30 minutes. I suspect,
| if I were alone, it would have taken me several hours.
| The velocity boost came from: ChatGPT correctly
| identifying it as a binpacking problem (which I had
| missed), listing out several algorithms for approaching
| binpacking, and giving me an initial (incorrect) first
| implementation. I was able to go back and forth on that
| response and get the rough constraints figured out for a
| solution, ask it to generate that solution, and then
| clean it up in my editor.
|
| The flow I'm using today is already a 100% increase in
| effective "workforce" for a software organization with a
| $20 per month per employee subscription to ChatGPT.
| Everyone gets a real-time, always available, pair
| programmer.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >We are literally arguing semantics if this is AGI
|
| It isn't and nobody with any experience in the field
| believes this. This is the Alexa / IBM Watson syndrome
| all over again, people are obsessed with natural language
| because it's relatable and it grabs the attention of
| laypeople.
|
| Protein folding is a major scientific breakthrough with
| big implications in biology. People pay attention to
| ChatGPT because it recites the constitution in pirate
| English.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| ChatGPT cannot reason from or apply its knowledge - it is
| nowhere near AGI.
|
| For example, it can describe concepts like risk neutral
| pricing and replication of derivatives but it cannot
| apply that logic to show how to replicate something non-
| trivial (i.e., not repeating well published things).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So they gave it away, but it is still a product
|
| Except its not, because they gave it away without any
| kind of commercialization. Its possible to give something
| away for free in some context and still have it be a
| product (Stable Diffusion is doing quite a bit of that,
| though its very unclear if they'll be able to do it
| sustainably), but AlphaFold doesn't seem to be an
| example. It seems to be an example of something cool they
| did that they had no desire to make into a product. Which
| is great! But isn't the same as executing on product in a
| space.
| kernal wrote:
| >This, but non-sarcastically. Google has spectacularly, so
| far, failed to execute on products
|
| Android is the biggest OS in the world
|
| Chrome is the biggest browser in the world
|
| Gmail is the biggest email service in the world
|
| YouTube is the biggest video platform in the world
|
| Google is the biggest search engine in the world
|
| Google is the biggest digital advertiser in the world
|
| and I'm probably missing more things they're #1 in.
|
| Not bad for a company that has "spectacularly failed to
| execute on products"
| tester756 wrote:
| I'd add Maps
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Uh, you snipped in the middle of a clause so you could
| argue against something it didn't say.
|
| Here's the whole thing (leaving out a parenthetical that
| isn't important here):
|
| "Google has spectacularly, so far, failed to execute on
| products [...] for generative AI"
|
| You listed a bunch of products in other domains, some of
| which are the reasons why it has institutional incentives
| _not_ to push generative AI forward, even if it also
| stands to lose more if someone else wins in it.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Which of those do you think is a product "for generative
| AI"?
| Fricken wrote:
| The youngest of those products is 15 years old.
| neel8986 wrote:
| Generative AI at its current state is still a very new area
| of research with many issues including hallucination, bias
| and legal baggage. So for the first few version we are
| looking at many new startups like open ai, stability,
| anthropic etc. It is yet to be seen if any of the new breed
| of startups actually starts to make sizeable revenue. But
| again there is nothing defensible here unless all the major
| labs stop publishing paper.
| nullc wrote:
| Is it just execution or did they gaze deeply into their
| navels and convince themselves that delivering tools like
| GPT4 would be 'unethical'?
| jsnell wrote:
| When did anyone realize that there generative AI was
| actually a product with wide consumer appeal? Or how many
| use cases there were for it as an API service? I'd say it
| wasn't really obvious until around Q4 last year, maybe Q3
| at the earliest.
|
| That's a pretty short time ago. So it seems that so far it
| hasn't really been a failure to execute, but more about
| problems with product vision or with reading the market
| right leading to not even _attempting_ to have actual
| products in this space. That 's definitely a problem, but
| not one that's particularly predictive of how well they'll
| be able to execute now that they're actually working on
| products.
| cbzoiav wrote:
| The bigger problem is cost.
|
| The hardware costs alone of running something like GPT
| 3.5 for real time results is 6-7 figures a year. By the
| time you scale for user numbers and add redundancy... The
| infra needs to be doing useful work 24/7 to pay for
| itself.
|
| It's more than possible Google knows exactly what it can
| do, but was waiting for it to be financially viable
| before acting on that. Meanwhile Microsoft has decided to
| throw money at it like no tomorrow - if they corner the
| market and it becomes financially viable before they lose
| that it could pay off. That is a major gamble...
| nullc wrote:
| > The hardware costs alone of running something like GPT
| 3.5 for real time results is 6-7 figures a year.
|
| Can you unpack your thinking there? Even at 5% interest
| for ownership costs to be six figures a year you're
| talking about millions of dollars in hardware. Inference
| is just not that expensive, not even with gigantic
| models.
|
| To the extent that there is operating cost (e.g.
| energy)-- that isn't generated when the system is
| offline.
|
| I don't know how big GPT 3.5 is, but I can _train_ LLaMA
| 65B on hardware at home and it is nowhere near that
| expensive.
| Keyframe wrote:
| 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
| danans wrote:
| > gmail.zip
|
| Despite what people often write and believe here, the
| access controls on PII data at Google are incredibly
| strict. You can't just arbitrarily train on people's
| personal data. I know, because when I was there, working on
| search backend data mining, in order to get access to
| _anonymized_ search and web logs, I had to sign paperwork
| that essentially said I 'd be taken to the cleaners if I
| abused the access.
|
| > What gives, Google? Get on it
|
| It's a very difficult decision to intentionally destabilize
| the space you are the leader in, for all the reasons you
| can imagine. In a sense, Google needed someone else with
| nothing to lose to shake up the space. How they execute in
| the new reality is yet to be seen. The biggest challenge
| they may have right now isn't technological, but that
| "ChatGPT" has become a sort of brand, like Kleenex and
| well, Google.
| illiarian wrote:
| > Despite what people often write and believe here, the
| access controls on PII data at Google are incredibly
| strict. You can't just arbitrarily train on people's
| personal data.
|
| And yet Google is the largest online advertiser in the
| world. And yet, GMail used to (I don't know if it still
| does) push ads into people's inboxes.
|
| I have as much belief in their PII controls as in their
| "Don't be evil" motto.
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| [dead]
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| i used gmail since the beta and never saw an ad there,
| what are you talking about?
| paulkon wrote:
| Well put, the brand awareness of ChatGPT is the biggest
| challenge they have now.
| dmix wrote:
| Meh people would much prefer to be typing their prompts
| into a Google search box than opening a separate GPT app.
| I doubt there real issue here is a marketing one. Despite
| ChatGPT's massive growth numbers the market is pretty
| immature, it's still very much open and not yet decided.
|
| Many markets had early leaders who got stomped by later
| entrants.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| I don't think it is.
|
| I'd prioritize their problems like this:
|
| 1. LLM's don't have a lucrative business model that
| Google needs.
|
| 2. The quality of their language model is really lacking
| as of now.
|
| You fix 1 and 2, ChatGPT's branding is nothing. Google is
| the biggest advertisement machine in the world and they
| can market the hell out of their product. Just see how
| Chrome gained ground on Firefox for example.
|
| Google is still used several folds more than ChatGPT and
| if you resolve 1 and 2, Google will make their money and
| their users have no incentive to go to ChatGPT.
| Keyframe wrote:
| You're right on both accounts.
|
| However, whatever's going on inside I still strongly
| believe in that company! Sometimes though it just feels
| like they don't themselves.
| anileated wrote:
| Google could stop sending traffic to webmasters and pivot
| to directly providing answers based on scraped data long,
| long ago, but Google knew webmasters would be up in arms
| over such a blatant bait and switch taking away their
| traffic and revenue.
|
| OpenAI subverted this by riding on the "open" part of their
| name at first--before doing a 180-degree turn and selling
| out to Microsoft.
| arcatech wrote:
| Google is great at technology and bad at making actual
| products. This all makes sense to me.
| narrator wrote:
| The announcement felt cautious and political, like they are
| running for technological ruler of the world and not a
| company trying to make money. This is probably why they are
| not going to not get very far against their competitors
| despite having so much potential. They care too much about
| what the EU and governments everywhere think of them now.
| They are no longer a profit making entity that disrupts and
| pushes the rules. They are part of maintaining the status
| quo.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The difference between OpenAI and Google is that the
| latter's ethical concerns with AI are more deeply held.
| Google gave us the Stochastic Parrots paper[0] -
| effectively a very long argument as to why they _shouldn
| 't_ build their own ChatGPT. OpenAI uses ethics as a
| handwave to justify becoming a for-profit business selling
| access to proprietary models through an API, citing the
| ability to implement user-hostile antifeatures as a
| _deliberate prosocial benefit_.
|
| To be clear, Google _does_ use AI. They use it so heavily
| that they 've designed four generations of training
| accelerators. All the fancy knowledge graph features used
| to keep you from clicking anything on the SERP are powered
| by large language models. The only thing they didn't do is
| turn Google Search into a chatbot, at least not until
| Microsoft and OpenAI one-upped them and Google felt
| competitive pressure to build what they thought was
| garbage.
|
| And yes, Google's customers share that belief. Remember
| that when Google Bard gets a fact about exoplanets wrong,
| it's a scandal. When Bing tries to gaslight its users into
| thinking that time stopped at the same time GPT-4's
| training did, it's _funny_. Bing can afford to make
| mistakes that Google can 't, because nobody uses Bing if
| they want good search results. They use Bing if they can't
| be arsed to change the defaults[1].
|
| [0] Or at least they did, then they fired the woman who
| wrote it
|
| [1] And yes that is why Microsoft really pushes Bing and
| Edge hard in Windows.
| binkHN wrote:
| > ...nobody uses Bing if they want good search results.
|
| Sadly, I think I'd argue that nobody has good search
| results anymore. Google's results have been SEO'd to the
| hilt and most of the results are blog spam garbage
| nowadays.
| richardw wrote:
| OpenAI releasing imperfect products is exactly what they
| said they would do. We need society to understand what
| the state and risks are. The 6-month-wait shitstorm is
| what happens when society gets the merest glimmer of the
| potential. I applaud them for this, rather than focusing
| on protecting their brand.
| tarsinge wrote:
| It was not some anecdotal fact that Bard got wrong, it
| was during their official public demo. It was a "scandal"
| because it showed Google was indeed unprepared and had no
| better product, not even preparing and fact checking
| their demo before was the cherry on the top.
|
| Ethics is a false excuse because rushing that out show
| they never cared either. It was just PR and their bluff
| was called.
|
| Also I skimmed over that Stochastic Paper and I'm
| unimpressed. I'm unfamiliar with the subject but many
| points seems unproven/political rather than scientific,
| with a fixation on training data instead of studying the
| emerging properties and many opinions notably regarding
| social activism, but maybe it was already discussed here
| on HN. Edit: found here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34382901
| nullc wrote:
| > The only thing they didn't do is turn Google Search
| into a chatbot,
|
| No, they turned google search into what it is now.
|
| For me, trying google bard was an instant reminder of the
| change in behavior in google search from 15 years ago to
| today.
|
| We used to have a search that you could give obscure
| flags to Linux commands and find their documentation or
| source code. Today we have a google search that often
| only tell you about how some kardashian or recent
| political drama is a sounds-alike with the technical term
| that you were searching for.
|
| GPT4 has some of the same "excessively smart" failure
| modes, but it's (and GPT3.5 for that matter) are so much
| more useful for bard that they're a useful addition to
| the toolbox. Too bad the toolbox hardly includes plain
| search anymore.
| neel8986 wrote:
| >> To be clear, Google does use AI. They use it so
| heavily that they've designed four generations of
| training accelerators.
|
| This +100 Somehow there is a perception that chat bots
| are the only example of AI research or product that
| matters and all AI organisations ability will be judged
| by their ability to create chatbots.
| visarga wrote:
| LLMs are the end-game for almost all NLP and CV tasks.
| You can freely specify the task description, input and
| output formats, unlike discriminative models. You don't
| need to retrain, don't need many examples, and most
| importantly - it works on tasks the developers of the LLM
| were not aware of at design time - "developer aware
| generalisation". LLMs are more like new programming
| languages than applications, pre-2020 neural nets were
| mostly applications.
| criley2 wrote:
| This feels like someone negging Apple in 2007 "Palm invented
| the smartphone, what has Apple done" lol
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Even in '07, Apple had a track record for doing things
| right, not doing things first.
|
| Current-day Google churns out sterile, uninspiring
| products, and kills them.
|
| If your argument is "this company is going to act out of
| character and do something innovative!" then...yeah, sure.
| That's a good way to be right, sometimes. Just don't let
| everyone see the majority of the time where you've been
| wrong.
| outside1234 wrote:
| well in early 2007 that would have been fair feedback :)
| crakenzak wrote:
| Every single member of the research team that invented the
| transformer architecture have left Google to go to OpenAI, or
| make their own startups (character.ai, anthropic, cohere)
| simonster wrote:
| Nope, Llion Jones is still at Google.
| kortilla wrote:
| Producing research is not executing for a company. Executing
| is later in the pipeline and google is failing.
|
| Reread the comment you are replying to. It explicitly said
| that the research is good.
| hbn wrote:
| > They are good at execution
|
| You're reiterating their point. Yeah, Google has competent AI
| people but that means nothing for their own success if they
| can't execute. OpenAI has proven that.
| HyprMusic wrote:
| Proximal Policy Optimization
| [deleted]
| kiratp wrote:
| > They are good at execution but i havent seen anything novel
| coming out of them.
|
| Execution is 9/10 of the battle.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I suspect recency-bias may be tripping people up: LLMs and
| ChatGPT are not the final word in AI, and there is no reason
| for Google to bet the farm on them.
|
| _I_ wouldn 't bet against Google DeepMind originating the
| next big thing, at the very least, their odds are higher than
| OpenAIs.
|
| Edit: this may yet turn out to be a Google+ moment, where an
| upstart spooks Google into thinking it is fighting an
| existential battle but winds up okay after some major
| missteps that take years to fix (YouTube comments as a real-
| name social network. Yuck)
| yttribium wrote:
| "Sun Microsystems literally invented Java and has done a ton
| of open research on RISC, how are they not able to execute as
| those technologies are exploding"
| gorgoiler wrote:
| _They are good at execution..._
|
| It might help to reflect on what the upsides of this have
| been for OpenAI, re execution.
|
| On the face of it, execution is often all that matters. FB v
| myspace, AMD v Intel (eventually), Uber v Lyft, MS v Apple
| (pre 2001), Apple v MS (post 2001) etc.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| You could say the same about Xerox in the late 70s. And they
| conclusively showed that they couldn't execute and squandered
| all of their amazing original research. Looking at how
| laughably bad Bard is, Google has a long way to prove they
| aren't Xerox 2.0 at this point. I'm amazed that Sundar hasn't
| been pushed out yet by Larry and Sergey.
| gman83 wrote:
| This thread is full of people saying that what Xerox did
| was some terrible mistake, but I think that it was much
| better that they could afford to do all this research which
| spawned a massive industry as a result than had they become
| this massive monopoly which controlled everything.
|
| If Google spends billions of it's ad money doing original
| research that spawns a new industry with thousands of
| companies, that would seem to be a great result to me.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| That might be true on a societal level, but is small
| solace to XRX shareholders, not to mention the many
| researchers who contributed these brilliant creations
| only to see them exploited by others while their own
| company just ignored them and let them die on the vine.
| moyix wrote:
| RLHF is from Google? The reference I know of is OpenAI:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.01325.pdf
|
| CLIP also seems novel?
| neel8986 wrote:
| Original idea for the paper coming from deepmind https://pr
| oceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/d...
| moyix wrote:
| Seems marginal - half of those authors, including the
| lead author, are from OpenAI!
| neel8986 wrote:
| They were in Deepmind when the research were done.
| moyix wrote:
| I'm sure you're right but the only note attached to the
| author list is in the opposite direction - Tom B Brown
| has an asterisk with "Work done while at OpenAI".
| hot_gril wrote:
| I would go on about how much execution matters, but it's not
| just about execution, cause ChatGPT is actually a better AI
| than anything Google has put out so far. So unless Google is
| hiding something amazing...
| pigscantfly wrote:
| 95% of those people have left Google because the ethics and
| safety teams prevented them from releasing any products based
| on their research. We have those ex-Googlers to thank for
| ChatGPT, Character.ai, Inceptive, ... which you'll notice are
| _not_ Google products but rather competitors.
| panarky wrote:
| I, for one, appreciate a megacorp purposely sacrificing
| revenue when they're not confident that the negative
| externalities of that revenue would be minimized.
|
| Google could have built a search engine where paid results
| were indistinguishable from organic results, but the
| negative externalities of that were too great.
|
| Google could have remained in China, but the negative
| externalities of developing and managing a censorship
| engine were too great.
|
| Google could have productized AI before the risks were
| controlled, but they sacrificed revenue and first-mover
| advantage to be more responsible, and to protect their
| reputation.
|
| This behavior is so rare, it's hard to think of another
| megacorp that would do that.
|
| Google's far from perfect, they've made ethical lapses,
| which their competitors love to yell and scream about, but
| their competitors wouldn't hold up well under the same
| scrutiny.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Google could have built a search engine where paid
| results were indistinguishable from organic results, but
| the negative externalities of that were too great.
|
| Have you not used Google search in the past 5 years?
| panarky wrote:
| When it says "sponsored" in bold text, prominently
| displayed right at the top of the result, you know it's
| an ad.
|
| Before Google, search engines didn't do this. Paid
| results were indistinguishable from organic results.
|
| Here's an example --> https://imgur.com/a/bSJTBeD
|
| If you have a counter-example, please share!
| illiarian wrote:
| > When it says "sponsored" in bold text, prominently
| displayed right at the top of the result, you know it's
| an ad.
|
| Prominently? Bold text?
|
| Here's how they repeatedly made ads indistinguishable
| from search results:
| https://atechnocratblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/color-
| fade-...
|
| Or this: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1648496
| 387640938496
|
| To quote from the above, here's what they said in the
| beginning: "we expect that advertising funded search
| engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers
| and away from the needs of the consumers"
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It sounds like you were either not around or didn't use
| Google in the early 00s. Back then, there _was_ a very
| clear, bright color difference between ads and organic
| search results: a yellow bar at the top with at most two
| ads, and a side bar. But organic results were easy to
| identify and took up the majority of screen real estate.
|
| Now, when I search any even slightly remotely commercial
| search term on mobile, about the entire first page and a
| half of results are ads. Yes, they're identified with a
| "Sponsored" message, but as you can see from the
| "evolution" link the other commenter replied, this was
| obviously done to make the visual treatment between ads
| and organic results less clear.
|
| The reason I'm thrilled about Google finally getting
| competition in their bread-and-butter is _not_ because I
| want them to fail, but I want them to stop sucking so
| bad. For about the past 10 or so years Google has gotten
| so comfy with their monopoly position that the vast
| majority of their main search updates have been extremely
| hostile to _both_ end users and their advertisers as
| Google continually demands more and more of "the Google
| tax" by pushing organic results down the page.
|
| In the meantime I've switched to Bing, not because I
| think Microsoft is so much better, because I desperately
| want multiple search alternatives.
|
| Edit: Great article from a couple years ago about how
| Google tried to make ads _even more_ indistinguishable
| from organic results:
| https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-
| ad-d...
| richardw wrote:
| That sounds like Google is the the Xerox Parc of AI. Still
| need to execute.
| candiodari wrote:
| The original transformer team very much _has_ executed on
| making successful implementations of transformers ... just
| not for Google. Clearly something went a bit wrong at Google
| brain in 2017.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashish-vaswani-99892181/
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/noam-shazeer-3b27288/
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikiparmar/
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakob-uszkoreit-b238b51/
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidangomez/
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser/
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/illia-polosukhin-77b6538/
|
| Only one remains at Google:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/llion-jones-9ab3064b
| hintymad wrote:
| > Yes the team which literally created transformer and almost
| all the important open research including Bert, T5, imagen,
| RLHF, ViT don't have the ability to execute on AI /s
|
| Yet Google does not have a slam-dunk product despite so many
| great research results. This looks a gross failure of the
| CEO, especially given that he's been chanting AI First in the
| past few years.
| throwntoday wrote:
| 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.
| cfeduke wrote:
| Though this is usually how it goes - big successful companies
| begin to bend towards regulatory capture after having their
| period of upstart growth and disruption. They make as much
| money as possible for shareholders on their cash cow and its
| management culture's primary objective to make sure this is
| not disturbed.
|
| Think about how many decades head start IBM had to perfect
| search, but search wasn't their core competency.
|
| Delivering advertisements is Google's core competency.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| Yeah, the message seems be "Wait, we're still here! Don't
| forget about us and we promise we'll catch up!"
|
| > Announcing Google DeepMind... launched DeepMind back in 2010
| ...
| kernal wrote:
| >Google is panicked about losing the AI race
|
| What a shortsighted statement for a race that has barely gotten
| out of the gates. But, if any one company should be panicking
| then it's OpenAI at the thought of losing their minimal lead
| and getting crushed by the company, that invented most of the
| technology they use, put a significant amount of resources
| behind their AI initiatives.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I don't find it to be that shortsighted?
|
| Google Search had an outage yesterday. Google just underwent
| its first round of layoffs ever which definitely affects
| internal morale and makes all employees aware of their
| company's mortality. Google's CEO was in the news last week
| for hiding communications while under a legal hold. Google
| stock tanked with the rushed demo of Bard. And, even if all
| those things weren't true, Google has continually failed to
| establish revenue streams independent from ads and
| continually abandons products that don't meet their
| expectations. Consumer confidence in new Google product
| announcements is lower than any other major tech company -
| the default assumption is that the product will be pulled
| months/years later.
|
| Microsoft is giving their full support to OpenAI through
| their 49% partnership. $13B investment compared to Google
| buying DeepMind for $500M and investing $300M in Anthropic.
| Microsoft has good working agreements with the US government,
| a long history of unreasonable support for their flagship
| products, clawed their way back to being one of the most
| valuable companies in the world by finding diverse revenue
| streams, and, frankly, comes across as the wise adult in the
| room given they already had their day in the sun with legal
| battles.
|
| I agree completely that if there continue to be marked
| revolutions in AI that invalidate current SOTA then those
| innovations are likely to arise from Google's research labs,
| but from an execution standpoint I have nothing but concerns
| for Google. It's crazy that I feel they need a second chance
| in the AI revolution when LLMs originated from inside their
| org just a few years ago. And it's not like they don't feel
| similarly - there've been countless articles about "Code Red"
| at Google as they try to rapidly adjust their strategy around
| AI.
|
| I think OpenAI has a wider leader than people are
| acknowledging. It's like everyone was forced to show their
| AI-hand the last couple of months, in an attempt to appease
| shareholders, and it seemed like a fair fight until GPT4 hit
| the ground running. Now we're looking at agents and multi-
| modal support ontop of $200M/yr revenue when everyone else
| has no business plan and has yet to announce any looming
| upgrades. At a certain point, first-mover advantage
| compounds, the foremost AI app store becomes established, and
| people building commercial products will become entrenched.
| notatoad wrote:
| >pushing resources into DeepMind
|
| is this a influx of resources, or consolidation and cutbacks? i
| read it as google used to have two different ai research teams,
| and now they have one fewer than they used to.
|
| they've shut down at least one deepmind office recently:
| https://betakit.com/alphabet-company-deepmind-shutters-edmon...
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| I wonder if this change has any implications for the TensorFlow
| vs. JAX situation/transition. IIRC I read that DeepMind mainly
| used JAX, but not sure about the Brain. Any insights from the
| people in the know? It seems JAX is the future, but TF dominates
| current production stacks.
| simple10 wrote:
| > I'm sure you will have lots of questions about what this new
| unit will look like for you.
|
| Can any HN Googlers comment on what this announcement means? Is
| this announcement just a PR move to get people to pay attention
| to upcoming announcements? Or does it actually have deeper impact
| to the way Google functions with internal teams?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I'm a Googler in the Research PA (Health AI), and as far as I
| can tell this will have ~0 impact on my life.
|
| Jeff Dean gave himself a promotion and doesn't want to run an
| org any more; aside from that, :shrug:?
| simple10 wrote:
| Ah. Maybe this is just PR cover to ease external fears that
| DeepMind team will leave Google.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Jeff never really wanted to run orgs anyway, so that's not
| any different either!
| usrnm wrote:
| People who don't want to run an org just don't run one.
| It's not like someone forced him to take all that money
| DannyBee wrote:
| ??? It's never that simple, and he didn't get more money
| for running the org?
| ra7 wrote:
| Is Jeff Dean not running this new org? What is his new role
| now?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Chief Scientist, apparently.
| ipnon wrote:
| DeepMind is going to stop making models to do MineCraft
| speedruns, and instead start making models to improve search
| results and ad click through rates.
| simple10 wrote:
| Lol. Makes sense. Any idea why they're queuing this up for a
| multiple announcement PR stunt? Seems a bit out of character
| for Google to tease out announcements like this.
|
| My guess is they have a bigger announcement coming next week.
| Otherwise, it seems like a bad PR move... it positions Google
| as playing catchup in AI... which is accurate, but strange
| PR.
| dougmwne wrote:
| PR blitz because it's going to look good to investors.
| Google is killing the vanity projects and moonshots and
| rolling those resources into teams that aim to launch
| products in the next 6-12 months.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Bingo. This feels like Google is _trying to get serious_
| about leveraging DeepMind to create better products right now
| (and generate more revenue) instead of: "Look at this robot
| play soccer. Cool, huh?"
| DataJunkie wrote:
| Googler here, opinion my own.
|
| In some sense, it's PR, but not in the typical gimmicky way.
| Alphabet has had DeepMind for a while, and at this point with
| all of the competition in AI, it doesn't make sense to keep
| DeepMind at arm's length. I personally think it's a good move
| and gives me more confidence, but it doesn't affect me
| directly. I do worry what redundancies this causes with Brain
| and Research though.
| xyst wrote:
| ChatGPT changed the game. Big G getting scared of falling behind.
|
| G bought out DeepMind a long time ago. I wonder what they offered
| C-level execs this time around.
| rhyme-boss wrote:
| Accelerating AI development and improving safety are inherently
| contradictory. It's pretty annoying and disingenuous when someone
| says "this move will speed us up and make us safer".
| abraxas wrote:
| I wonder where this puts Geoff Hinton in this new hierarchy. He
| still works for Google, doesn't he?
| cmarschner wrote:
| Somebody got a bad performance review
| robbiemitchell wrote:
| How does this fit in with Bard? I see no mention of Jack Krawczyk
| here, who is listed as its product lead.
| dormento wrote:
| I think they'll google-news the name "Bard" due to bad
| reception caused by unrealistic expectations (and a market
| primed by vastly superior alternatives).
| w10-1 wrote:
| Google politics and history aside, it's much better to link
| research with products for software. Unlike physics and biology,
| software is basically what we say it is, so there isn't a natural
| ordering to research (and it can wander forever, all too much
| like literary criticism).
|
| What both Google research and product missed, and ChatGPT
| provided almost accidentally, is that people need a way to answer
| ill-formed questions, and iteratively refine those questions.
| (The results are hit-or-miss, but far better than traditional
| search.)
|
| What both OpenAI, Bing, and now Google realize, is that the race
| is not to a bigger model but to capturing the feedback loop of
| users querying your model so you can learn how to better
| understand their queries. If Microsoft gets all that traffic,
| Google never even gets the opportunity to catch up.
|
| If Google were really smart, they would take another step: to
| break the mold of harvesting free users and instead pay
| representative users to interact with their stuff, in order to
| catch up. Just the process of operationalizing the notion of
| "representative" will vastly improve both product and research,
| and it would build goodwill in communities everywhere - goodwill
| they'll need to remain the default.
|
| Progressive queries are just the leading edge of entire worlds of
| behavior that are yet ill-fitted to computers, but could be
| accommodated via AI. And if your engineers consider the problem
| as "fuzzy" search or "prompt engineering" or realism, you need to
| get people with more empathy, a minimal understanding of
| phenomenology, and enough experience with multiple cultures and
| discourses to be able to relate and translate
| [deleted]
| rollinDyno wrote:
| When was the last time Google was proactive rather than reactive?
| It feels that this is the same for all big Tech firms except for
| Microsoft.
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| The Metaverse is (was?) definitely proactive.
| [deleted]
| ulfw wrote:
| What metaverse does Google proactively pursue?
| [deleted]
| pb7 wrote:
| >It feels that this is the same for all big Tech firms
| except for Microsoft.
|
| Meta is a big tech firm.
| gojomo wrote:
| Thy've been proactive in deleting chat logs that they were
| ordered by courts to keep for pending litigation.
| Takennickname wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks this is Sundar screwing up big time?
| If there's only one AI team, and it fails, then you blame whoever
| is leading them. If there's multiple teams, and they all fail,
| there's only Sundar to blame.
| Abecid wrote:
| Looks like DeepMind will no longer be able to pursue academic
| research with the pressure to monetize. Talent exodus could
| happen similar to what happened at Google AI where many prominent
| researchers either went to OpenAI or started their own companies
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Agreed. I'm seeing multiple other comments here suggesting
| DeepMind was somehow a waste when they have done a lot of very
| impressive research. "Solving" protein folding. Retrieval
| transformers. Novel solutions to math problems using ML? What
| about beating fucking Lee Sedol in go? No? None of that
| matters? C'mon.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Arguably none of that made a comparable difference to the
| life of a common man as ChatGPT did. It's necessary to do
| fundamental research, but imperative to maintain focus on
| delivering real world value to real world people.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Those are towering achievements that don't add to Google as a
| business. It was an important part of Google's reputation,
| but now that reputation is in the mud as Microsoft and OpenAI
| become king in the eyes of the public.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > started their own companies
|
| Do you know if there's a list of such companies floating
| around? Really curious to see where the research talent in the
| space is heading, especially if they're leaving the warm
| embrace of their BigCo...
| alecco wrote:
| Musk recruiters for X.ai must be salivating.
| imranq wrote:
| I wonder what will happen to isomorphic labs which Demis is also
| leading
| macns wrote:
| .. _Sundar is announcing that DeepMind and the Brain team from
| Google Research will be joining forces as a single, focused unit
| called Google DeepMind_
|
| This would be enough as an anouncement, rest of it is just sugar
| coating.
| owenbrown wrote:
| I wonder if they will converge on using Trax (Google Brain) or
| Tensor Flow / PyTorch.
|
| I use Trax is my NLP class, so I hope it gets more adoption.
| querez wrote:
| Both DeepMind and Brain use Jax, so they will definitely use
| Jax. However, they use different high level frameworks: All of
| DeepMind uses Haiku, while on the Brain side there are
| competing frameworks, with flax currently being the most often
| used one AFAIK. I'm not aware of anyone using trax there, and I
| would not expect it to get more adoption, on the contrary.
| ur-whale wrote:
| About fucking time someone cracked the whip and get the money
| sinkhole that is deepmind to producing something that contributes
| to the bottom line.
|
| Only took something that can potentially take out Google (GPT4)
| to make it happen.
| dougmwne wrote:
| While ultimately I think this is probably a very good
| organizational change, to have similar teams working on similar
| projects under the same leadership, it does seem to spell trouble
| in the short term.
|
| I can read between the lines that Google is done having Deepmind
| floating out there independently creating foundational research
| and not products. Sounds like this is a sign that they've
| internally recognized they are behind and need all their
| resources pulling in the same directions towards responding to
| the OpenAI/Microsoft threat.
|
| It also seems to signal that they won't have their answer to Bing
| in the short term. As they say, nine women can't make a baby in a
| month and adding people to a late project makes it later.
| version_five wrote:
| This sounds about right. I think it's acknowledged that
| OpenAI's strength has been product rather than just pure
| research - google and facebook both have way more publications
| and deeper benches, but aren't really commercializing anything.
|
| The shift to commercialization (by companies) was inevitable.
| It's also a bit sad though. Somebody still has to do the
| fundamental stuff, and Google (along with Facebook) have been
| amazing for the ecosystem, especially open source. If everyone
| is going the OpenAI route, the golden age of AI is going be be
| over as we to the profit extraction phase
| sangnoir wrote:
| > google and facebook both have way more publications and
| deeper benches, but aren't really commercializing anything.
|
| I am absolutely certain that Google and Facebook are
| productizing their AI research and integrating it with their
| money-making products and measurably earning more money from
| the effort. Perhaps what you mean by "commercializing" is
| packaging AI in direct-to-consumer APIs? IMO, that market is
| not currently large enough to be worth the effort, but is
| almost certain GCloud will continue to expand ML support.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I see your point, though I think it's ultimately going to be
| good for AI progress. So far the research has been mostly a
| vanity project for these companies. Who knew if there was
| really any gold at the end of those rainbows. Eventually the
| appetite for participating in the research paper olympics was
| going to run out, probably right at the same time that
| monetary policy stayed tight for too long.
|
| The possibility of building a trillion dollar company on this
| tech means a whole lot more investment, more people entering
| the field. More people excited to tinker in their spare time
| and more practical knowledge gained. More GPUs in more data
| centers. Eventually things will loop back around to pure
| research with that many more resources applied.
|
| It sure beats an AI winter, which probably would have been
| the alternative had LLMs not taken off.
| [deleted]
| Etheryte wrote:
| So statistically [0], expect this product to be shut down in
| 2027?
|
| [0] https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/
| QuercusMax wrote:
| It's not a product, it's a research organization.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Department of Research Simulation
| chevy90 wrote:
| Cant believe when i heard this news of google lacking ai
| development despite being front runner in tech for too long and
| with all that talent under the hood.
|
| How times changes or is it true that nothing good lasts long?
| omot wrote:
| From this blog post, I could already feel the bureaucratic nature
| of their org. My money's still on OpenAI. I think their
| motivation is more pure, their objectives more focused, and their
| org more simple. I usually think of product dominance in two
| vectors: first to market and benchmarks.
|
| Google took over the world as something like the 11th search
| engine to hit the market, but some of their benchmarks were 10x
| better.
|
| OpenAI has both going for them right now and I don't think that's
| going to change.
| seydor wrote:
| Google Mind or Deep Brain?
| rasengan wrote:
| Google, did you really just copy OpenAI's website layout [1]?
|
| Google isn't the leader anymore.
|
| -_____-
|
| [1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
| okdood64 wrote:
| Seems like a pretty cookie cutter start-up style website in
| 2023...
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| Does anyone else feels some sort of "corporate-speak-blindness"
| when reading these statements from Google? They are just
| informing that some orgs are being rearranged, but for some
| reason they had to make the text have super low information
| density.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Google still researching lol
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| It's an embarrassment to Google to have two independent AI
| research teams. It looks like a failure of management and
| oversight. I'm very surprised it took this long for them to be
| merged.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| End of the day, the best product innovation has come from hungry
| passionate and capable founders with a solid mix of science,
| engineering and product.
|
| As we are now seeing before our eyes, Google has aged. Big tech
| cushy culture does no longer creates an environment that yields
| innovation.
|
| The MSFT move was probably brilliant most for this reason. They
| saw the writing on the wall. ChatGPT would never have been
| invented at any big tech co.
|
| Goog investment in anthropic is just taking msft sloppy seconds
| and kind of copy cat play. Who knows maybe anthropic will make a
| happy mistake and create something surprising.
|
| You are likely reading the result of a lot of corporate reorg
| that was a big political battle and the victors are now patting
| themselves on the back.
|
| That said, reorg can be good to refocus the company, but you're
| bleeding out massively while the infection spreads, putting a
| little bandaid is no reason to celebrate.
|
| Anyways wish them the best of luck. As a kid it was always one of
| those companies we all dreamed to work for. Now it is like an
| aged grandparent who needs a cane to walk and encouragement when
| they are able to walk by themselves.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| This is what panic looks like.
| ulfw wrote:
| Same as the Google Plus days under wonderful Vic Gundotra.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Competition is such a beautiful catalyst.
| sva_ wrote:
| I'm worried that OpenAI has started a trend of these AI companies
| being a lot more secretive about their research in the future. I
| mean basically OpenAI took Deepmind's/Google's public research on
| transformers and ran with it, not publishing back the results of
| improving it.
|
| This probably sent a bad message with consequences for the whole
| public research field.
| layer8 wrote:
| Isn't this a given as soon as there's serious money in it?
| nomel wrote:
| Related, are there any examples of an "open" field of
| business, with public disclosure of the secret sauce that
| gives competitive advantage?
| neel8986 wrote:
| I agree with this. Last decade was golden age of AI where all
| major players including Google brain, deepmind, FAIR, Microsoft
| Research contributed a lot. To honest OpenAI had the least
| intellectual contribution of them all except of few marketing
| material masquerading as papers. From now on we can expect all
| labs to secretive and not publish anything. This is really bad
| considering all this models are black box and research is
| needed to understand them better. Hope government comes into
| picture and forces this labs to explain details of each model
| tempusalaria wrote:
| FAIR will continue to publish. Nvidia and Uber also. Then you
| have open source oriented labs who should continue
| publishing. Google is the big one. They have made more
| research contributions than all other labs combined
| basically.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| I'm not _that_ plugged-in to the AI world (though doing my
| best to catch up)... but is Uber really viewed as a
| powerhouse on the same level as FAIR?
| singhrac wrote:
| No, not really. It was never really as large, and most of
| their output was in probabilistic programming (e.g. Pyro)
| and work that was relevant to self-driving cars (point
| cloud compression, etc.). But they shut down Uber AI in
| the layoffs last year.
| generalizations wrote:
| That trend started at about the moment when Llama was leaked.
| We didn't really take the good-faith limited access in good
| faith ourselves, and as a result lost trust.
| sva_ wrote:
| I disagree. Meta released a research paper and the model (the
| latter only to researchers.) OpenAI won't even release an
| actual paper detailing the specifics of their research. Thats
| a much lower bar, and I highly doubt those two incidents are
| really related.
| mcast wrote:
| You mean Microsoft, right? OpenAI was publishing research
| papers until the MSFT partnership.
| return_to_monke wrote:
| research papers yes, models no.
| neximo64 wrote:
| This demonstrates to shareholders of Alphabet that Sundar is
| actually not a good CEO. The focus is not on the product or
| quality but organising resources. The resources are already the
| best at Google but led by a moron.
| whywhywhydude wrote:
| Exciting time for AI. A little competition from OpenAI is finally
| forcing google AI researchers to actually focus on real world
| applications instead of just publishing papers and patting
| themselves on the back.
| galaxytachyon wrote:
| What do you mean? The attention based transformer architecture
| was created by Google. AlphaFold took the biotech world by
| storm. Tensorflow is significant platform for AI developers.
| Chinchilla pioneered new method to improve LLM.
|
| "Just publishing paper" is such an ignorant and dismissive
| attitude to one of the most significant contributors to AI
| development in the world. Without Google research and
| publication, OpenAI would not have the foundation to build its
| GPT to the current level.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >Without Google research and publication, OpenAI would not
| have the foundation to build its GPT to the current level.
|
| Right, and shareholders are asking Sundar "Why is OpenAI
| launching our product and taking our ( _massive_ ) commercial
| success?"
|
| Honestly I think Sundar should be let go over this, he should
| have been let go years ago, but now I definitely don't see
| what leadership sees in him. The dude is a better fit for
| running General Mills than a tech company. No innovation,
| just sell the same thing over and over.
| mrbungie wrote:
| The whole point is that all the progress you mention is worth
| peanuts to Google's shareholders. Hence this decision and
| blog post about it.
|
| If anything it allowed competitors to raise above Google.
|
| PS: Not saying Deepmind's research is not worthy, nor that
| this is fair. Just that it appears that Alphabet/Google (and
| by extension Deepmind) is being reminded that its main goal
| is making money.
| pb7 wrote:
| Ah, classic damned if you, damned if you don't.
|
| Search is being ruined by the pursuit of maximizing ad
| revenue but AI research is being wasted because it's not
| used in pursuit of maximizing revenue. Can't really win,
| huh? There should be nothing but gratitude that Google uses
| its ad revenue to pay for research that greatly benefits
| everyone.
| mrbungie wrote:
| I'm not judging. I'm grateful of Alphabet/Google and that
| its research is being extremely useful in AI/ML, just
| saying shareholders may not think that way.
| turnsout wrote:
| Another Google AI announcement with no product in sight
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| While AI ethicists and safety researchers are urging for a pause
| to understand the implications of what we have already built,
| Google is announcing they will invest more in the acceleration of
| Artificial Intelligence.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >AI ethicists and safety researchers
|
| Aka grifters. Those are the new DEI consultants.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| My take:
|
| 1. All fundamental AI research now falls under Demis. So
| basically what was Brain is now Deep Brain. 2. Jeff will lead the
| product build out of a multi-modal AI (LLM). 3. Google research
| under James will continue with everything else not directly AI
| related.
| Imnimo wrote:
| It wasn't very long ago that we were reading articles saying that
| Deepmind wanted more independence from Google
| (https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-unit-deepmind-
| triedand-f...).
|
| Feels a bit like China absorbing Hong Kong.
| galaxyquanta wrote:
| What does this mean for JAX (light-weight ML library from Google
| Brain) vs Tensorflow (from Deepmind)?
| tarvaina wrote:
| Tensorflow is also from Google Brain, not DeepMind.
| johnmoberg wrote:
| DeepMind already seem to be using JAX quite extensively:
| https://www.deepmind.com/blog/using-jax-to-accelerate-our-re...
| dahwolf wrote:
| "Combining our talents and efforts will accelerate our progress
| towards a world in which AI helps solve the biggest challenges
| facing humanity"
|
| ...which is that we're not looking at enough ads.
| divyekapoor wrote:
| "Sundar is announcing"... not "we are announcing"... speaks
| volumes as to the fact that this was a unilateral decision.
| gsatic wrote:
| Obviously. Who wants to work on adtech? Only ppl without a
| choice or a clue.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Hah! Good catch. I doubt that was unintentional. Demis doesn't
| sound too pleased about having his merry band of misfits sucked
| into the mothership.
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