They do make OpenAI look like kids in that regard. There is far more to technology than public facing goods/products.
It's probably in part due to the cultural differences between London/UK/Europe and SiliconValley/California/USA.
On one corner: IBM Deep Blue winning vs Kasparov. A world class giant with huge research experience.
On the other corner, Google, a feisty newcomer, 2 years in their life, leveraging the tech to actually make something practical.
Is Google the new IBM?
On the other hand, I think IBM’s problem is its finance focus and longterm decay of technical talent. It is well known for maintaining products for decades, but when’s the last time IBM came out with something really innovative? It touted Watson, but that was always more of a gimmick than an actually viable product.
Google has the resources and technical talent to compete with OpenAI. In fact, a lot of GPT is based on Google’s research. I think the main things that have held Google back are questions about how to monetize effectively, but it has little choice but to move forward now that OpenAI has thrown down the gauntlet.
I used to do all kinds of really cool routines and home control tasks with Google home, and it could hear and interpret my voice at a mumble. I used it as an alarm clock, to do list, calendar, grocery list, lighting control, give me weather updates, set times etc. It just worked.
Now I have to yell unnaturally loud for it to even wake, and even then the simplest commands have a 20% chance of throwing “Sorry I don’t understand” or playing random music. Despite having a device in every room it has lost the ability to detect proximity and will set timers or control devices across the house. I don’t trust it enough anymore for timers and alarms, since it will often confirm what I asked then simply… not do it.
Ask it to set a 10 minute timer.
It says ok setting a timer for 10 minutes.
3 mins later ask it how long is remaining on the timer. A couple years ago it would say “7 minutes”.
Now there’s a good chance it says I have no timers running.
It’s pathetic, and I would love any insight on the decay. (And yes they’re clean, the mics are as unobstructed as they were out of the box)
I understood this problem to be "how it manages its org chart and maps that onto the customer experience."
That starts with the demonstrations which show really promising technology, but what eventually ships doesn't live up to the hype (or often doesn't ship at all.)
It continues through to not managing the products well, such as when users have problems with them and not supporting ongoing development so they suffer decay.
It finishes with Google killing established products that aren't useful to the core mission/data collection purposes. For products which are money makers they take on a new type of financially-optimised decay as seen with Search and more recently with Chrome and YouTube.
I'm all for sunsetting redundant tech, but Google has a self-harm problem.
The cynic in me feels that part of Google's desire to over-promise is to take the excitement away from companies which ship* what they show. This seems to align with Pichai's commentary, it's about appearing the most eminent, but not necessarily supporting that view with shipping products.
* The Verge is already running an article about what was faked in the Gemini demo, and if history repeats itself this won't be the only thing they mispresented.
The comparison is between a useful shipping product available to everyone for a full year vs a tech demo of an extremely limited release to privileged customers.
There are millions of people for whom OpenAI's products are broadly useful, and the specifics of where they fall short compared to Gemini are irrelevant here, because Google isn't offering anything comparable that can be tested.
At the time, I believe IBM was still "we'll throw people and billable hours at a problem."
They had their lunch eaten because their competitors realized they could undercut IBM on price if they changed the equation to "throw compute at a problem."
In other words, sell prebuilt products instead of lead-ins to consulting. And harness advertising to offer free products to drive scale to generate profit. (e.g. Google/search)
Whereas for OpenAI there are no such constraints.
Did IBM have research with impressive web reverse indexing tech that they didn't want to push to market because it would hurt their other business lines? It's not impossible... It could be as innocuous as discouraging some research engineer from such a project to focus on something more in line.
This is why I believe businesses should be absolutely willing to disrupt themselves if they want to avoid going the way of Nokia. I believe Apple should make a standalone apple watch that cannibalizes their iPhone business instead of tying it to and trying to prop up their iPhone business (ofc shareholders won't like it). Whilst this looks good from Google - I think they are still sandbagging.. why can't I use Bard inside of their other products instead of the silly export thing.
apple is the new Nokia.
openai is the new google.
microsoft is the new apple.
Proof OpenAI has this shady monopolistic stuff: https://archive.ph/vVdIC
“What You Cannot Do. You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not: […] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.” (Hilarious how that reads btw)
Proof Microsoft has this shady monopolistic stuff: https://archive.ph/N5iVq
“AI Services. ”AI services” are services that are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using, powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.”
That 100% does include GitHub Copilot, by the way. I canceled my sub. After I emailed Satya, they told me to post my “feedback” in a forum for issues about Xbox and Word (what a joke). I emailed the FTC Antitrust team. I filed a formal complaint with the office of the attorney general of the state of Washington.
I am just one person. You should also raise a ruckus about this and contact the authorities, because it’s morally bankrupt and almost surely unlawful by virtue of extreme unfairness and unreasonableness, in addition to precedent.
AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA also all have similar Customer Noncompete Clauses.
I meekly suggest everyone immediately and completely boycott OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA, until they remove these customer noncompete clauses (which seem contrary to the Sherman Antitrust Act).
Just imagine a world where AI can freely learn from us, but we are forbidden to learn from AI. Sounds like a boring dystopia, and we ought to make sure to avoid it.
You cannot tell a customer that buying your product precludes them from building products like it. That violates principles of the free market, and it's unenforceable. This is just like non-competes in employment. They aren't constitutional.
1. I wouldn't let someone copy my code written directly by me. Why should I let someone copy the code my machine wrote?
2. There are obvious technical worries about feedback loops.
Produce results.
Market it.
They can’t enforce if it gets too big.
You obviously haven't dropped an iphone on to concrete. :)
My iPhone 4, on the other hand, shattered after one incident…
These are literally stainless steel.
The 15s with their titanium is a step back.
The 11 Pro with its older curved edges has been the most solidly built phone ever IMO.
I even dropped my iPhone 13 four floors (onto wood), and not a scratch :o
Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point.
Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now.
The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.
Was it “machine learning”? If so, I don’t think that was actually the key insight for Google search… right? Did deep blue even machine learn?
Or was it something else?
Circa-Deep Blue, we were still at Quake levels of SIMD throughput.
It was a genius move to go public with a simple UI.
No matter how stunning the tech side is, if human interaction is not simple, the big stuff doesn’t even matter.
This statement is for the mass market MBA-types. More specifically, middle managers and dinosaur executives who barely comprehend what generative AI is, and value perceived stability and brand recognition over bleeding edge, for better or worse.
I think the sad truth is an enormous chunk of paying customers, at least for the "enterprise" accounts, will be generating marketing copy and similar "biz dev" use cases.
Nokia and Blackberry had far more phone-making experience than Apple when the iPhone launched.
But if you can't bring that experience to bear, allowing you to make a better product - then you don't have a better product.
But I don't see generative AI as being particularly that way.
I'm not dumb enough to bet against Google. They appear to be losing the race, but they can easily catch up to the lead pack.
There's a secondary issue that I don't like Google, and I want them to lose the race. So that will color my commentary and slow my early adoption of their new products, but unless everyone feels the same, it shouldn't have a meaningful effect on the outcome. Although I suppose they do need to clear a higher bar than some unknown AI startup. Expectations are understandably high - as Sundar says, they basically invented this stuff... so where's the payoff?
I still use their products. But if I had to pick a company to win the next gold rush, it wouldn't be an incumbent. It's not great that MSFT is winning either, but they are less user-hostile in the sense that they aren't dependent on advertising (another word for "psychological warfare" and "dragnet corporate surveillance"), and I also appreciate their pro-developer innovations.
It makes Google look like old fart that wasted his life and didn't get anywhere and now he's bitter about kids running on his lawn.
https://www.hathitrust.org/ has that corpus, and its evolution, and you can propose to get access to it via collaborating supercomputer access. It grows very rapidly. InternetArchive would also like to chat I expect. I've also asked, and prompt manipulated chatGPT to estimate the total books it is trained with, it's a tiny fraction of the corpus, I wonder if it's the same with Google?
Whatever answer it gave you is not reliable.
Obviously, people find some value in some output of some LLMs. I've enjoyed the coding autocomplete stuff we have at work, it's helpful and fun. But "it's not qualified to answer my questions" is still true, even if it occasionally does something interesting or useful anyway.
*- this is a complicated term with a lot of baggage, but fortunately for the length of this comment, I don't think that any sense of it applies here. An LLM doesn't understand its training set any more than the mnemonic "ETA ONIS"** understands the English language.
**- a vaguely name-shaped presentation of the most common letters in the English language, in descending order. Useful if you need to remember those for some reason like guessing a substitution cypher.
