The grandparent comment is trying to emphasize that there just isn’t a technology gap between Google and OpenAI.
Google is not sitting on their hands. They are perfectly capable of training large language models and already have. Google is just as much a leader in AI research as OpenAI.
> The grandparent comment is trying to emphasize that there just isn’t a technology gap between Google and OpenAI.
This is an entirely fair point, and I think I just missed it on my first reading of that post.
> Google is not sitting on their hands. They are perfectly capable of training large language models and already have. Google is just as much a leader in AI research as OpenAI.
This, however, I still don't think is a good place for google to be. It assumes that training the AI is the hard part. I don't think it is, at least not for google. I think the hard part for them would be marketing, ux, and supporting (as in customer support) a product that isn't search in the long term. This hasn't been their wheelhouse, and if they don't start working on the details now, they could very easily end up with a technically superior product that nobody uses.
Google has orders of magnitude more page views than OpenAI and is a top 10 brand in the world in terms of marketing.
I feel like operating the largest search engine in the world, the largest email service in the world, a top 5 cloud computing platform, etc etc qualifies them pretty well to run… a better search engine, or whatever LLMs grow to be.
> ...qualifies them pretty well to run… a better search engine, or whatever LLMs grow to be.
Running it? Absolutely. Once again, their technical chops are not in question (at least by me).
My concern is their ability to capitalize on it. I, personally, don't trust them to stick by a product that's not search long term. I don't think I know anyone that does, it's kind of a meme by this point. I mean, killedbygoogle.com is a thing for a reason. Why would I integrate a product that's just going to be killed into my workflow?
I suppose email is the exception to that, but is there a product post 2010 that they've stuck with and properly pushed.
The way I'd expect it to work would be that they launch a product, not really market it well, and then kill it a year or two afterwards. Then 5-10 years later, they'd realize that was the product they should have stuck with. They can re-launch at that point, but at that point they're 5-10 years behind and trying to get people to switch to something that's been killed once already.
Google is not sitting on their hands. They are perfectly capable of training large language models and already have. Google is just as much a leader in AI research as OpenAI.
GPT-4 is rumored to contain proprietary signals from Bing search: https://twitter.com/RamaswmySridhar/status/16056030559734538...
Google has plenty of proprietary signals of their own. OpenAI, on the other hand, could not have made its models without Microsoft.
The second that large language models are put into production for search, Google will be ready to follow suit. That is, if they don’t do it first.