2023: A year of groundbreaking advances in AI and computing (opens in new tab)

Bard is a really stupid name. I get the origin of the name, and it's a short word, and in some sense it's a nice vibe with implications of a mystical poet or whatever. But it's a word that most people don't use.

As many have commented, ChatGPT is a pretty bad name too -- people get the order of the letters wrong all the time -- but at least it starts with "Chat", which explains what you're supposed to do with it.

A lot of this stuff was actually cool...but OpenAI got there first.

By the time LaMDA came out, we already had ChatGPT. Palm2 was a serious ChatGPT competitor, but by that point, we had GPT4. Imagen was trained in mid 2022 (!) and could do text and everything, but they locked it away until SD and Midjourney had claimed the market. When it finally came out, nobody found it interesting. And now we have Gemini, which appears to be equal or slightly worse than GPT4, which itself was trained in mid 2022.

They just don't ship things fast enough.

They recently released Imagen 2, but now without any sort of benchmark or other academic details.

https://deepmind.google/technologies/imagen-2/

Well, Google has a bunch of people who tell themselves they’re the best in the world. I’ve known perfectly reasonable humans start working there and by the time the left they felt they were smarter. By that I mean, in general, smarter than others. You can’t be smarter, you can be smart, but smarter isn’t a state of being. But they definitely feel they are, and assume you know that too. When discussing work I had done with one they insisted I must have based it off of a Google paper, which they weren’t sure if there was one on it, but surely I didn’t do it myself. That level.

One when confronted with the actual remit of their new job at a new company said “wow you hired an atom bomb to open a tin can.” They failed to achieve anything in two years and was fired.

Gemini Pro, with arguably comparable quality to GPT4, competes with GPT4 with its superior pricing and speed.

If you actually use Gemini Pro, you will find that it gives nearly instantaneous full responses, which makes me use it more than even GPT4 Turbo for a lot of quick questions. And certainly more than Bing AI with GPT4, which is so slow and awkward to use and which I gave up on.

It's something that doesn't get discussed: speed and pricing, with near top quality. That's maybe how Google is planning to win for now.

Google probably has at least 5x the management bloat as the competitors and it's killing them. Too many cooks in the kitchen vying to be the next AI thought leader. They're acting like IBM to be honest.

It's nice to see this. Hopefully small upstarts will make breakthroughs in different areas. Better than an AI monopoly.

This last decade, Google hasn't really made much of relevance outside AI either. The company is just milking its existing ad flows and not much else, it seems.

Google doesn’t really have much of a track record in real breakthroughs, does it?

It was built on its founders’ initial application of an eigenvector centrality algorithm to web search. The main innovation there was the application, not the algorithm - it was innovation more than invention.

Since then, perhaps the most technically impressive thing I’m aware of that Google has actually productized is their language translation system. But again, that was primarily innovation that built on existing technology and access to a lot of data, hardware, and distribution capability.

> Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.

Wasn’t that mainly because of money and the collection of smart people you mention, bought by that money? Which is not the same thing as a record of achievement.

I admit I could be wrong, I’m open to being corrected.

Are there any key indications for this? Why would it not just stop here (for a while)?

Can I extrapolate that 2025 is going to make 2023 look like 2021?