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Bard and new AI features in Search

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Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#293

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

I don't think most people realize how much infrastructure separates something like ChatGPT from Google-scale deployment. OpenAI isn't suddenly building transoceanic fiber and datacenters near most major population centers. They aren't signing production-ready contract vehicles with most major OEMs and governments. And in the gap it would take a new entrant to acquire 10% of those assets, Google has 100,000 engineers…

You are missing the Microsoft partnership. MS has a 48% stake in OpenAI and provides all the infrastructure through Azure, including purpose built machines for model training. Microsoft has also launched GitHub Copilot, summarization features in Teams, and is widely reported to be adding GPT features to Bing.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#294

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

I don't think most people realize how much infrastructure separates something like ChatGPT from Google-scale deployment. OpenAI isn't suddenly building transoceanic fiber and datacenters near most major population centers. They aren't signing production-ready contract vehicles with most major OEMs and governments. And in the gap it would take a new entrant to acquire 10% of those assets, Google has 100,000 engineers…

Based on the busy mock-up in TFA I don’t think it’ll take 100,000 engineers to beat them.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#295
post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

There is no information to give. This "announcement" is a reaction to all the stories about how ChatGPT is going to eat Google's lunch. The company needed to do something to defend against that in the market - for the sake of its shareholders and its advertising revenue.

That said, here is the chatgpt summary I generated:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces the release of their conversational AI service "Bard," which combines the world's knowledge with the company's large language models. Bard seeks to provide fresh, high-quality responses to questions and allow users to explore new information. The release is part of Google's effort to bring the benefits of AI into everyday products and deepen people's understanding of information.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#297

I agree this is bland corporate speak. But it reminded me of a question that's been floating around: A number of pundits, here on HN and elsewhere, keep referring to these large language models are "google killers." This just doesn't make sense to me. It feels like Google can easily pivot its ad engine to work with the AI-driven chat systems. It can augment answers with links to additional sources of information, be…

As an engineer my concern about "google killers" is that I can't see an easy way to scale and control/optimize them in business settings. Apart from factual misstatements happening in the ChatGPT, what about source attribution? How is the relevance of a source determined? How is the flow of information through the network preserved (sourceA => sourceB => sourceC)? With Google we also don't know exactly but I can image some version of PageRank as tuneable. Finally, how to add new pages to index and measure potential "forgetting" that could happen?

Unless somebody could clarify those for me, this is what currently petrifies me -- some uncontrolled black box presenting its clandestine view of the web with no way to follow the breadcrumbs.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#298
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say google is scrambling when they have been working on AI stuff just as impressive as OpenAI, which you could spin differently to say Microsoft “scrambled” to make a partnership with and are now attempting to cram GPT into their tech stack. FWIW I don’t think either company are really scrambling except in the performative sense of making announcements to appease the market.

Because while Google has been researching, OpenAI has been productizing. We will have to judge it once we get access to Bard, but it’s possible Google is years behind on creating a chat model that won’t spew toxic waste, as GPT-3 did when it was first released a few years ago.

Not spewing toxic waste is actually a big part of what Google has spent years working on here. The fact that someone else released the first such product allows them to do it too without solving the problem with less media flak.

Productionizing this stuff is where Google gets the most advantage because they have the hardware and software efficiencies that comes form years of experience training and running inference on the most massive AI workloads for many many years in their data centers

I don't think this is going to be what damages Google, much more optimistic about antitrust stuff.

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#299
post #13

The blog post is an example of why when you go through a number of edits and additions from various internal groups, marketing, legal, compliance etc. you end up with a message that's a lot of words but not a lot of information for any key audience. I went through the article 3 times thinking I missed the link to try out Bard, get some sense of timeline, roll-out plan...nothing. Come on Google...

[deleted]

Re: Bard and new AI features in Search

#300

Bard is such a funny name. I tried to, no pun intended, google it and it autocorrected to brad.

I don't know what to think of it, but I saw it in a comment on Hacker News by raesene9 three days ago:

> The way I've come to look at ChatGPT is via a D&D analogy.

> It's like a helpful Bard with 1 rank in all the knowledge skills and a good bluff roll.

> It'll give you good answers to a lot of basic queries, but if it doesn't know, it'll just make up something and provide that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642666

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