What does a leaked Google memo reveal about the future of AI? • Hacker News Board

Re: What does a leaked Google memo reveal about the future of AI?

#51

Post by UncleMeat » Mon, May 15, 2023, 12:34 AM UTC

startupsfail wrote: post #48

UncleMeat wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has nearly 200,000 employees. Almost every possible opinion is held by somebody within the company. Imagine this was written by Blake Lemoine, who believed that one of the earlier models was sentient. Would it be reasonable to present this as a company-wide belief?

No, but a company-wide belief doesn’t matter. Some 200,000 lemmings can be mistaken, along with the chief lemming. Or all of them can be right. The discussion here is regarding a particular opinion of a particular employee. And what matters is how informed and honest that particular employee is. And if ultimately that employee is right or wrong. If there is some objective truth in his or her statement. (And for a ref…

I do not believe a single headline that has attributed the doc to a single googler rather than to Google in general.

Re: What does a leaked Google memo reveal about the future of AI?

#52

Post by sitkack » Mon, May 15, 2023, 1:52 AM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #25

gumby wrote: post #24

Was it leaked or “leaked”? Google has a good, two part strategy available. First is to neutralize the threat: support the open source efforts covertly and/or overtly, as those efforts undercut the revenue of OpenAI and other potential competitors for the base technology. This is what they did with Android: at a minimum all they had to do was ensure that Apple did not become a monopoly, which they accomplished (the se…

The doc is too short and not puffy to be a normal google doc. There is a high likelihood this was placed to proactively shake off any regulation or scruitiny while they get the deck chairs in order. They might not appear to have a moat, but they definitely have an advantage that they can keep for 5+ years. They also have a "copy of the internet" that no one else does.

They also have "all of youtube" when it comes to video based learning. And GCS and Gmail, Google's moat is actually enormous.

Re: What does a leaked Google memo reveal about the future of AI?

#53

Post by fomine3 » Mon, May 15, 2023, 6:48 AM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #29

sitkack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doc is too short and not puffy to be a normal google doc. There is a high likelihood this was placed to proactively shake off any regulation or scruitiny while they get the deck chairs in order. They might not appear to have a moat, but they definitely have an advantage that they can keep for 5+ years. They also have a "copy of the internet" that no one else does.

What are the chances that their copy is more useful than CommonCrawl? It’s been the target of SEO for decades - are they even capable of separating the good content from the crap anymore? Google may already be terminal

For websites that blocks all robots.txt-compliant bots except Google, Bing and some, Googlebots can crawl but CommonCrawl bots can't

Re: What does a leaked Google memo reveal about the future of AI?

#54

Post by candiodari » Mon, May 15, 2023, 11:41 AM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #52

sitkack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doc is too short and not puffy to be a normal google doc. There is a high likelihood this was placed to proactively shake off any regulation or scruitiny while they get the deck chairs in order. They might not appear to have a moat, but they definitely have an advantage that they can keep for 5+ years. They also have a "copy of the internet" that no one else does.

They also have "all of youtube" when it comes to video based learning. And GCS and Gmail, Google's moat is actually enormous.

The points raised in the paper are that

1) algorithmic improvements beat processing capacity. One of the examples in the paper was that $100 in training compute budget was enough to get within 2% of Google Bard performance

2) data quality (even for "tiny" data sizes) beats dataset size in improvements

Hence both aspects of the moat of large companies (dataset size and available compute) matter less than you'd expect.

In contrast the advantage of "open source"/academics/"the market", the many warm bodies trying out new strategies, yields improvements at a rapid pace that Google, even with a huge team, cannot match.

Re: What does a leaked Google memo reveal about the future of AI?

#55

Post by mdp2021 » Tue, May 16, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #27

mdp2021 wrote: post #2

> AI burst into the public consciousness with the launch in late 2022 Because 70 years of named work based on centuries of interest and efforts can remain unseen if one really tries. /R > But easier access to AI also means bad actors will be able to fine-tune systems for nefarious purposes, such as generating disinformation. It means Western attempts to prevent hostile regimes from gaining access to powerful AI techn…

You are just starting a flame war.

Or we could opt for a bet that this public is selected enough to possibly avoid the «flame war» and allow some "normal" liberty and maybe instead risk some constructive exchange, even productive.