[HN Gopher] Google to invest up to $2B in Anthropic
___________________________________________________________________
Google to invest up to $2B in Anthropic
Author : fofoz
Score : 374 points
Date : 2023-10-28 08:24 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| siquick wrote:
| Seems like an odd thing to do when all we've been hearing about
| for the last 10 years is how great Google's AI capabilities are
| ("but you're not allowed to actually see or use them") - even
| more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a few weeks
| ago.
| arkitaip wrote:
| I think their primary goal is to make life difficult for OpenAI
| by investing in a competent competitor that brings a level of
| agility that Google just can't deliver.
| ritabratamaiti wrote:
| Speculating... but maybe Anthropic is about to come up with
| something big
| refulgentis wrote:
| Nope
| edgyquant wrote:
| Can you maybe elaborate since you're clearly in the know?
| tjpnz wrote:
| Simplest explanation is it was all PR hype.
| schleck8 wrote:
| You are telling me Google Assistant and Alexa aren't sentient
| ASI?
| refulgentis wrote:
| Let's not flatten the differences between ChatGPT and those
| (your humble source worked on Google Assistant and
| appreciates your kindness)
| yreg wrote:
| But Google did discover the tech the current AI craze is
| based on.
| m00x wrote:
| Doesn't mean they know how to make it into a product.
| tjpnz wrote:
| A common failure mode for startups and a reminder of how
| universal those lessons are. Whether it would be the
| death knell of Google we'll have to wait a bit longer.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Whether it would be the death knell of Google we'll
| have to wait a bit longer.
|
| I don't understand the trope on HN that OpenAI is a
| competitor to Google. I do not think Google has the
| appetite or DNA to be purely an AI API vendor; I don't
| think selling APIs is as profitable as Google current
| business. Google investing in Anthropic is a good, cheap
| hedge against the low-probability (IMO) event that LLMs
| somehow displace the search results page and display ads.
| yreg wrote:
| Still not just "PR hype".
| pzo wrote:
| xerox as well invented computer mouse and GUI as we know
| it.
| yreg wrote:
| And you wouldn't accuse Xerox of doing "PR hype". Xerox
| did the exact opposite thing, they had not realized the
| value of research done in PARC.
| billythemaniam wrote:
| Google engineers invented most of the primary innovations in
| NLP in the last decade, such as transformers and word2vec
| which started it all, that led to the current stack that
| OpenAI is built on. Their best public models certainly lag
| OpenAI, but it certainly isn't vaporware.
| m00x wrote:
| Researchers, not engineers.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Researchers are engineers in most industry jobs
| fidotron wrote:
| The simplest is Google's caste of middle managers are more
| obstructive to the company than enabling it.
| strangesmells02 wrote:
| Caste is an accurate word to describe it.
| typon wrote:
| ouch
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Anthropic, like OpenAI, has a big lead in Google in terms of
| productization, but lags behind OpenAI in visibility, posing a
| big risk of OpenAI getting so much mindshare that even if
| Google were to catch up in productization, everyone in the
| market would already be tied ti what was visibly the only game
| in town.
|
| Helping fund Anthropic and assuring that there is visible
| competition also makes it more likely that LLM-backend-agnostic
| services will exist and a culture of evaluating offerings
| rather than just automatically going to OpenAI is established,
| which puts Google in a better position if they really are ahead
| in basic science and just suffering from a past lack of
| commeecialization focus that is remedied by the recent reorg
| and refocusing of Google's AI efforts.
|
| (Also, it may help avoid the situation where Google's lack of
| product and and the financial relationship between other cloud
| providers and the AI vendors that have competitive product
| means that Azure is the favored enterprise platform for OpenAI,
| Amazon works out something similar with Anthropic, and Google
| Cloud loses competitive position because Google AI isn't
| competitive and Google doesn't have the right partnerships.)
| infecto wrote:
| Anthropic lacks more than visibility. I don't know if it's an
| issue with compute or leadership but it's been really
| difficult getting access. Of course I guess you can run it on
| bedrock now? I signed for api access on Anthropics site maybe
| 6 months ago. Never any follow up, not even to tell me I can
| use bedrock to run it.
| jasondclinton wrote:
| Not sure how this happened, really sorry that this happened
| to you. Please reach out again, we've gotten through all of
| our backlog.
| lvl102 wrote:
| It could very well be that they lost the talent.
| visarga wrote:
| They lost most of top talent, it is their people who created
| OpenAI and Anthropic.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Google Cloud and Google DeepMind have different goals.
|
| The goal of Cloud is to sell as much compute as possible to the
| rest of the world. So, they want as many foundational models
| that are running on their cloud.
|
| Since OpenAI is married to Azure, Google and Amazon are trying
| hard to get the remaining. Of course GCP can just bet on
| Gemini, but if you are the head of GCP you wouldn't put all
| your eggs in one basket. I mean the essence of cloud is
| redundancy and load distribution. It applies to business
| strategies too
| Yoric wrote:
| Interesting take.
|
| I was analyzing this as not putting all your eggs in one
| basket in terms of AI capabilities, but you are right that
| it's probably also true in terms of cloud sales.
| kromem wrote:
| They are keeping the landscape from becoming too centralized
| around another direct competitor.
|
| Open AI is now basically Microsoft. Copilot in all your docs,
| etc.
|
| If only Amazon was the large investor in Anthropic it
| encourages a similar exclusive partnership to develop where
| Anthropic ends up powering Alexa with proprietary access to its
| SotA models.
|
| Google throwing money that way keeps Anthropic from becoming
| too siloed into a partnership with one cloud direct competitor,
| and also helps fund another competitor to the company in the
| lead who is partnered with a different cloud direct competitor.
|
| I wouldn't read into it beyond that, and certainly not in
| thinking this reflects product shortcomings or advantages.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| 1. OpenAI is too large a supplier for LLMs, and they are trying
| to create supplier diversity
|
| 2. $2B is a drop in the bucket for Google. Even after the
| severe fall this month, the Google Market Cap is $1.536
| Trillion. Consider the investment as a % of market cap
|
| 3. It is undeniable that small players can move fast, so even
| if Google's AI is amazing, the slope is probably not as high as
| a fast moving startup
|
| 4. These products have 2nd order revenue boosters -- you might
| use Anthropic's marketplace app, as a theoretical example, but
| you end up spending much more on compute/storage/cloud in doing
| so, helping the cloud majors
| HNDen21 wrote:
| I would not consider the investment as a % of market cap
| since Google doesn't own all that market cap... I would
| consider the non float shares + short term investments + cash
| on hand or Revenue/Profit better
| WrongAssumption wrote:
| Not seeing how that distinction matters. Google's owners
| (shareholders) do own all that. And google represents the
| collective financial interests of the shareholders.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Google's shareholders own stock. Nothing more nothing
| less.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I would not consider the investment as a % of market cap
| since Google doesn't own all that market cap.
|
| Market cap does matter because you can use it to gauge how
| easily Google could hypothetically raise the same amount[1]
| by issuing additional shares without a shareholder revolt.
|
| 1. Or complete an all-stock deal or acquisition.
| state_less wrote:
| It's not odd, this is how big capital extends itself into the
| future. Alphabet and Amazon are giant tech conglomerates that
| have been doing this for years. Alphabet bought Youtube,
| Android, DoubleClick, DeepMind, Maps, etc. Plenty of things,
| and maybe the best things people think of when they think of
| Google are actually bought from the marketplace and integrated
| into the giant.
|
| They buy whatever they want that might help their cause. This
| quarter alone Alphabet's free cash flow is $22B. This is a
| small bet for them. Why wouldn't they spend a small fraction in
| a key area for them?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| And that is why they should have been broken up many years
| ago. The lack of teeth of us anti competitive laws goes
| against capitalism.
| Yoric wrote:
| I don't feel that capitalism is an end to be pursued, but I
| agree that these conglomerates should be broken, for the
| sake of avoiding irreversible concentration of power.
| naillo wrote:
| Not really irreversible unless they get a monopoly on
| violence, so as long as the overton window from the
| publics perspective shifts dominantly towards breaking
| them up in the future we'll be able to get a better
| situation.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| When you can reliably tell they have a monopoly on
| violence, it's far to late to do something about it.
|
| However, Very Bad Things(tm) can happen long before they
| have monopoly on violence. And violence where? Large
| companies operate in weak jurisdictions, not only in
| their home states of Maryland and Ireland.
| brookst wrote:
| Maybe propose an alternate system that is 100% free from
| any similar hypothetical future abuse?
| jondwillis wrote:
| Did you mean Delaware instead of Maryland?
| troyvit wrote:
| They (search, social media, advertising companies) are
| gaining a monopoly on truth. With that they indirectly
| control the government, which is the one with the
| monopoly on violence.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You are never given the real truth in the media. There's
| never been an incentive for that.
| Yoric wrote:
| To emphasize, all human productions are biased, that's
| human nature, and news media are not exempt, despite many
| outlets making serious attempts to produce unbiased news.
|
| Part of the job of being a consumer of media is
| understanding the bias of what we're consuming,
| determining whether it skews the news, and possibly
| counter-balancing by consuming other media with different
| bias. And yes, it's lots of work and most people aren't
| willing to spend the time doing that.
| Yoric wrote:
| Well, historically, there have been a number of companies
| with the right to violence. The East Indies and West
| Indies Companies, for instance, or more recently United
| Fruit. I haven't bothered to check, but I'd be surprised
| if Big Oil didn't have mercenaries on call in hot zones,
| with little to no oversight.
|
| Nobody (company, nation or gang) needs a _monopoly_ on
| violence to become dangerous.
| Jensson wrote:
| Those companies didn't have the right to violence in
| their home countries, they waged wars in other countries
| instead. Companies overthrowing their home country hasn't
| really been a thing.
| Yoric wrote:
| True. However, please don't forget that the conglomerates
| being discussed initially do exist and have considerable
| influence in other countries than the US, so my remark
| remains :)
|
| Also, the Medici family was initially a wool company,
| then grabbed power in their homeland, kept it for about
| three centuries and somewhere along the way produced
| descendants that ruled over much of Europe. Similarly,
| the fascist uprising that gave power to Franco over Spain
| was largely privately funded by a bank [1] and I seem to
| remember that the German Nazi party was largely funded by
| industrialists and bankers [2] until reached power.
|
| So, I'd say that companies overthrowing their home
| country's government has unfortunately been a thing for
| quite some time.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_March
|
| [2] https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/wall
| _street...
| nomel wrote:
| > for the sake of avoiding irreversible concentration of
| power
|
| In the context of capitalism, it's for the same reasons.
| calderknight wrote:
| hmmm isn't it just exactly capitalism? and government
| intervening would maybe be against capitalism?
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| What. Deploying capital to make investments is the central
| conceit of capitalism. It's right there on the tin.
| treprinum wrote:
| Those parts would still end up bought by Blackrock,
| Vanguard or whatever index fund is in fashion and steered
| by these funds that have the easiest business model but no
| capacity to innovate.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Then maybe funds like Blackrock, Vanguard, should be
| dismantled as well.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why? "Owned by Vanguard" is the closest possible thing to
| "owned by the American public". What do you think
| Vanguard is and where do you think their money comes
| from?
| peyton wrote:
| Downvoting because parent is clearly referring to corp
| gov activities and it's insulting to insinuate they don't
| know what an asset manager is.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Everyone should be their own asset manager? The
| devolution of voting has already started, so not sure
| that direction has much merit.
| treprinum wrote:
| Maybe just restrict index funds from interfering with
| whatever business they own? Index funds are ultimately a
| dumb momentum-based business model that just buys
| whatever companies are doing well at the moment and sells
| whichever aren't, but bear no risk themselves outside the
| economy shrinking. Not sure why they should have any say
| in how the companies they own operate, it seems like a
| complete competence mismatch (dumb ones with little risk
| controlling the smart ones with the skin in the game).
| bushbaba wrote:
| This is by no means a small bet.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Google is sitting on $120B in cash.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/balance-sheet?p=GOOGL
| eldritch_4ier wrote:
| Maybe it's semantics, but generally with fund allocation
| when you're deploying more than 1% of your AUM towards a
| single thesis that's a significant bet.
| n2d4 wrote:
| The closest equivalent to "AUM" for a company like that
| would be the market capitalization, not cash reserves, so
| over 1.5 trillion.
|
| Then again, shareholders usually have less risk tolerance
| with companies than investors with hedge funds, so the
| two aren't really comparable either. (But I assume your
| 1% number is for more risk-averse funds? Hedge funds
| regularly make much bigger bets than that)
| FieryTransition wrote:
| Maybe someone can explain this, because I never
| understood it. When a company sits on so much cash, I
| guess it doesn't mean cash which is liquid, but rather a
| variety of assets, right?
|
| So when they just have to pull x billions out, it's not
| just liquid assets, but they will have stage and sell
| assets representing those funds.
|
| So since it's not just cash, how does a company of this
| size, then determine what assets to sell? And if those
| assets are actually invested in something, or
| representing an entity of some sorts, how do they assess
| whether or not it will cause any damage or loss of
| profitability? The crux is, is the risk two fold? First
| let go of whatever the assets were invested in (one), and
| then buy a new company and hope it has ROI (two).
|
| Or is it actually possible to have 1.5 billion dollars
| laying around in cash somehow? I know money is a made up
| idea, but that is still a big number for a
| bank/banks/asset holding company to just say good for and
| expect some kind of real monetary tangible value behind
| the symbolic currency.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >Or is it actually possible to have 1.5 billion dollars
| laying around in cash somehow?
|
| Yes. 1.5 billion is less than Google's weekly operating
| expense.
|
| >So since it's not just cash, how does a company of this
| size, then determine what assets to sell? And if those
| assets are actually invested in something, or
| representing an entity of some sorts, how do they assess
| whether or not it will cause any damage or loss of
| profitability?
|
| There's a lot of smart people under CFO that determine
| that.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It's described in various articles as $121bn of cash,
| cash equivalents (debt instruments and marketable
| securities with maturities of < 90 days) and other short-
| term investments (which I think includes government
| bonds.) Short term investments make up more than 80% of
| it.
| dmoy wrote:
| > When a company sits on so much cash, I guess it doesn't
| mean cash which is liquid, but rather a variety of
| assets, right?
|
| Cash is a very specific thing on a balance sheet. It has
| to be cash or very close to cash. "Equivalent", something
| like a <90d treasury that has virtually zero interest
| rate risk.
|
| So when someone says "Google has 100B cash" it would mean
| literally cash or close enough to cash that it doesn't
| matter.
|
| You'll note, if you read the 10Q, it's also wrong. Google
| has 30B in cash and cash equivalents, and an additional
| 90B in marketable securities - stocks, and bonds with
| >90d maturity.
|
| That said, "marketable securities" are extremely liquid.
|
| > Or is it actually possible to have 1.5 billion dollars
| laying around in cash somehow?
|
| Yes? Depending on what you mean by "laying around in
| cash". It's not literal physical dollar bills, it's
| numbers in a computer.
|
| 1.5B is not much for a company that size. I'd image that
| is payroll and accounts payable for like a week or two?
|
| > I know money is a made up idea, but that is still a big
| number for a bank/banks/asset holding company to just say
| good for and expect some kind of real monetary tangible
| value behind the symbolic currency.
|
| Bank of America alone has like 2 trillion in US deposits.
| jungturk wrote:
| Most larger companies will use treasury management
| software within their finance organization to handle
| these issues (asset mix, risk, prediction, transfer,
| etc...).
|
| Scanning the players will show you how some of them solve
| some of the problems you mention.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_management_system
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Alphabet has 190k employees. Let's assume the average
| salary is 5k/month, that's already close to a billion
| just going to employees accounts each month.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| But this investment seems different from all the other ones
| as Google isn't actually taking over Anthropic. Amazon is an
| even larger shareholder and I think Anthropic has made a
| commitment to prioritise AWS. So what is Google trying to do
| here? Offer Anthropic to GCP customers as yet another option?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Enemy of my enemy? Google and Microsoft have much greater
| competitive surface area than either of them have with
| Amazon. It would make sense for G and A to both prop up an
| alternative to OpenAI. If Google could integrate quality
| LLMs into their assistant, that would boost their position
| relative to Apple too.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| That would make sense if Google didn't have its own AI
| offering and research that is supposed to be first rate
| and a strategic priority of the company.
|
| Of course Google would prefer Anthropic to beat (or at
| least be competitive with) OpenAI, but only if they can't
| do it themselves.
|
| Has Google management lost confidence in its own AI
| capability? Or are there so many leading AI researchers
| that refuse to work for Google?
|
| To me this looks like Google could be in big trouble.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Google has astronomical sums of cash and so many hands
| that the left hand often doesn't know what the hundreds
| of right hands know. My point is $2B can be considered a
| side bet to make sure if their own efforts fail there is
| a serious competitor to open ai to buy or license by
| finance people without knowledge of how their own
| internal modeling efforts are going.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _>...a side bet to make sure if their own efforts fail
| there is a serious competitor..._
|
| My point is that this is not how a healthy company can
| think about its most strategic activities. This sort of
| failure is not something you can hedge against.
|
| It's like Apple hedging against the risk of failing to
| keep iPhone competitive by investing in some other device
| maker that might be able to compete with Samsung.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I don't think it's anything like that example, google is
| an advertising conglomerate not an LLM api company.
| Anthropic is like a camera company when apple first
| started making phones in your analogy. Going to become a
| very important feature to be sure, but not a competing
| device maker.
|
| By failure I don't mean they can't make an LLM product, I
| mean the LLM product doesn't have majority market share
| to be used as an ad surface (or other monetization
| strategy). That's only partly dependent on their research
| and modeling efforts. The revenues they could make from
| an LLM api business are too small to register for them
| right now, the market share and product work is also
| important.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I disagree. Google's entire advertising business depends
| on them being the best at "organising the world's
| information". (Apple says Google is the best, so it must
| be true, right? :)
|
| If Google fails to compete in AI, they will lose search
| and some competitor will siphon off all their advertisig
| revenue.
|
| This is all coinciding with regulators taking a closer
| look at all the other ways in which Google protects its
| search monopoly. You know, the ones that are not so much
| based on merit.
|
| Google is at risk of losing both its technology
| leadership and its grip on distribution channels at the
| same time.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I don't see the risk at all. Google has a LLM product
| with much more reach and better monetization than
| anthropic already. If you think the DOJ is going to break
| up google or otherwise destroy their market share in
| search that's another story altogether, but if they keep
| it they'll be well positioned to make a lot of money
| buying anthropic and getting their models onto their
| infrastructure and in their channels. It'd be like buying
| YouTube, which had absolutely nothing to do with needing
| their video hosting infrastructure but because they were
| winning market share with their product decisions.
| Jensson wrote:
| Google isn't a focused company, they typically run many
| parallel bets that often competes with each other. See
| all their chat apps etc. Betting both on an inhouse and
| an external solution is normal for them.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Name one other example of Google betting on an external
| solution in a key strategic area where that bet is a
| minority interest in a company co-owned by a big
| competitor.
| Jensson wrote:
| Google invested in Anthropic before Amazon did, so not
| sure what you mean. This is just Google strengthening
| their bet.
|
| You should first ask yourself why Amazon became a
| minority shareholder in a company already invested in by
| Google.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| It makes far more sense for Amazon to prop up an OpenAI
| competitor to secure access to state of the art models
| for AWS. Amazon doesn't compete on excelling in AI.
| Jensson wrote:
| AWS and Google Cloud invested in it for exactly the same
| reason, to enlarge their cloud businesses. Googles
| previous investment came with a cloud partnership, then
| AWS also gave them a cloud partnership, and now Google
| strengthened their cloud partnership to ensure AWS
| doesn't take it all.
|
| So this bet doesn't have anything to do with AI, it is a
| competition between AWS and Google cloud. They are
| competing over who gets to sell shovels in a gold rush.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| This makes absolute sense when looking at GCP and AWS in
| isolation.
|
| But Google is at the same time propping up a competitor
| while Amazon is propping up a purely complementary
| service.
| Jensson wrote:
| But Google is very fragmented as I said, what cloud does
| has little to do with what other parts of Google does.
| This investment makes sense for cloud so they make it. It
| is a weakness and a strength of the company, Amazon is
| much more top down and that leads to other problems.
| dageshi wrote:
| Google probably knows how to do pretty good AI powered
| replacement search.
|
| It doesn't know how to keep new information flowing into
| the AI.
|
| If AI replaces the need to visit the original website and
| everyone just stays on google.com then a great deal of
| the web will just stop being updated because nobody is
| reading it and nobody will read it.
|
| That's googles problem. Frankly it's a problem for every
| company who wants to try and supplant google search with
| AI.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Money shouldn't sit around? It should be invested to make
| more money. Perhaps Google just thought this was a good
| investment that would likely provide a good return? It
| wouldn't be the first time a company did that.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Do you ever think how much better the world would be off if
| Alphabet wasn't allowed to buy all those things? I do.
| Antitrust has to come back in a big way.
| SanderNL wrote:
| This is the only thing they _can_ do. They don't produce
| anything. They buy. Their AI is a joke and all they earn money
| on is ads. MS is beating them on the AI front, hard, and they
| have multiple interesting avenues like having an actual OS,
| basically all the world's code and all the world's business.
|
| 2B is too little too late as well. It's almost embarrassing. MS
| dumped 10B into OpenAI. 2B is a lukewarm, visionless move.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I don't think 2B is too little. Anthropic already has a
| competitive LLM they lack a competitive dataset I think and
| need to scale. 2B can allow them to do this. I don't know
| that Google wants Claude to be theirs they just don't want
| Microsoft to own the generative AI market
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Why do you say that MS beating Google on AI? OpenAI is not
| part of MS (49% ownership is nice but it doesn't give MS
| control of the company). MS by itself doesn't own any of
| foundational models competitive with Google. MS has a solid
| AI research team, but it's not ahead of Google DeepMind.
| Microsoft Azure beats Google Cloud, but I don't think you
| count GPU rentals as AI?
|
| If MS actually bought OpenAI, it would be a different story.
| visarga wrote:
| Looks like Google has better hardware for AI than anyone
| else, and they are the only company having both AI research
| and AI hardware. OpenAI+Microsoft and Anthropic+Amazon are
| much less integrated, working at arms length.
|
| > Google will have multiple very large clusters across their
| infrastructure for training and by far the lowest cost per
| inference, but this won't automatically grant them the keys
| to the kingdom. If the battle is just access to compute
| resources, Google would crush both OpenAI and Anthropic.
|
| > Being "GPU-rich" alone does not mean the battle is over.
| Google will have multiple different clusters larger than
| their competitors, so they can afford to make mistakes with
| pretraining and trying more differing architectures. What
| OpenAI and Anthropic lack in compute, they have to make up in
| research efficiency, focus, and execution.
|
| https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-anthropic-poison-
| pill-...
| buildbot wrote:
| AWS has trainwave, which is less off the ground that TPUs
| but does exist.
| pzo wrote:
| > Looks like Google has better hardware for AI than anyone
| else, and they are the only company having both AI research
| and AI hardware
|
| On top of that they have lots of training data: youtube,
| gmail, google docs, google drive, indexed www for google
| search, lots of data from those fancy cars driving around
| for google street project and probably still some data from
| google+
| makestuff wrote:
| In addition to what others have said about them having so much
| capital to invest, another angle is that AI is a hot topic
| right now. It is a much worse PR headline for it to come out
| that Google's AI did something bad. If a headline comes out
| that Anthropic's model did something bad, very few people will
| connect the dots to Anthropic's investors.
| ta988 wrote:
| They are starting to let people try their "capabilities" and it
| isnt great from having tried them.
| datadeft wrote:
| It is a diversification bet I guess.
| cushychicken wrote:
| When you're pulling down $15 billion in profits a quarter, it's
| not nuts to drop a chunk on an opportunity that might end up
| winning the whole market.
|
| Safe hedge imo.
| lr1970 wrote:
| > even more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a
| few weeks ago.
|
| Amazon invested not $1.5B but $4B in Anthropic one month ago
| [0].
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-steps-up-ai-
| rac...
| modeless wrote:
| Isn't this just laundering money into the cloud division? GOOG
| was decimated after the last earnings call by poor cloud
| results. This is at least a billion in revenue for Google
| Cloud, right?
| ttul wrote:
| They are buying upside and they are funding a competitor to
| OpenAI and Microsoft. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. There
| are only so many groups in AI that have the chops to take on
| OpenAI and Anthropic is one of them - if not the most
| promising.
| Karupan wrote:
| Is this google indirectly admitting that it cannot compete in the
| current AI landscape (e.g bard), or is it just to keep OpenAI in
| check by funding its closest competitor?
| teleforce wrote:
| Really surprised that Google didn't outright buy OpenAI perhaps
| the price is already too much now even for Google. Previously,
| Google has no problem buying direct competitors to its products
| for example Youtube and Waze.
|
| ChatGPT with Bing search is just very good, intuitive and
| convenient that I highly recommend it if you have not tried it.
| Imagine a version of ChatGPT that has tight integration with
| Google Search, Google Scholar, Google Patent, Google Books,
| Google Deepmind, etc.
|
| Early last year or so I've read that people were lamenting on
| how Google at the time was struggling to monetize Deepmind
| products and suddenly OpenAI ChatGPT 3 came and changed the
| game forever, while the game changing algorithm is right under
| their nose, so to speak. It's quite telling that none of the
| original authors of the Attention paper is still with Google
| for now.
|
| To showcase the powerful nature of ChatGPT 4 with Bing search
| I've queried where the original authors of the Attention paper
| are working now and the answers are as follows:
|
| "As of 2023, here are the current affiliations or recent
| activities of the original authors of the "Attention is All You
| Need" paper:
|
| Ashish Vaswani: Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Adept AI
|
| Noam Shazeer: Co-founder and CEO of Character.AI
|
| Niki Parmar: While there isn't specific information about Niki
| Parmar's current affiliation, it's known that both Vaswani and
| Parmar were authors at Google when the paper was published in
| 2017
|
| Jakob Uszkoreit: CEO and co-founder of Inceptive Nucleics, Inc
|
| Llion Jones: Left Google Japan in July 2023 to launch a
| startup, Sakana AI, alongside David Ha, the former head of
| Google's AI research arm in Japan
|
| Aidan N. Gomez: CEO & Co-founder of Cohere, a company focused
| on Natural Language Processing (NLP)
|
| Lukasz Kaiser: The search for Lukasz Kaiser's current
| affiliation did not yield relevant results. Further research
| may be required to find his current affiliation.
|
| It's also noted that many of the co-authors have left Google to
| start their own ventures or joined other organizations since
| the publication of the paper."
| vitus wrote:
| > Lukasz Kaiser: The search for Lukasz Kaiser's current
| affiliation did not yield relevant results. Further research
| may be required to find his current affiliation.
|
| The Lukasz Kaiser who's been at OpenAI since 2021?
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser
|
| I know it's popular on HN to give Google crap about having
| bad search results these days and to use ChatGPT instead, but
| this was literally the first Google search result for me.
|
| IMO it's especially embarrassing that Bing (owned by
| Microsoft) was unable to find Lukasz Kaiser via LinkedIn
| (also owned by Microsoft).
|
| That said: native Bing Search gets it right:
| Lukasz Kaiser | LinkedIn Connections: 500+
| Followers: 5.3K Works For: OpenAI
|
| (obligatory disclaimer that Google pays me money in exchange
| for work that has nothing to do with AI/ML, so let that
| inform how you read my post)
| vitus wrote:
| Also: Parmar and Vaswani were cofounders of Adept in Nov
| 2021, but have since left to found a different startup
| around Nov 2022 per Niki's LinkedIn denoting a "Stealth"
| startup [0] (and supported by a news article [1]).
|
| I guess my point is that it's really hard to tell which
| pieces of information are correct vs outdated vs outright
| hallucinated, without doing the legwork yourself.
|
| [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikiparmar
|
| [1] https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/two-co-
| founders-of-...
| zer0c00ler wrote:
| Maybe it only does a certain amount of sub queries? Like a
| DOS protection?
|
| To be fair. It says research yourself and provided data for
| most of the others saving the user enormous amount of time.
|
| The genie is out of the bag.
| anonylizard wrote:
| OpenAI is $80 billion now, you want to buy it outright,
| that's probably $100 billion. Google does not have that cash,
| probably only Apple does, and OpenAI would not agree to any
| 'equity' based purchase.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Google reportedly has $118 billion cash on hand. But makes
| no sense to blow it on one company. And no way that
| Microsoft could let it happen.
| riku_iki wrote:
| the more interesting number is $20B in net income in last
| Q, so $80B is their annual profit.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Microsoft also owns a large percentage of it and would
| almost certainly prevent any sale
| frabcus wrote:
| It's also not for sale - OpenAI is still owned by its non
| profit, and Microsoft only has effectively debt equity
| (capped profit).
| bsder wrote:
| > Early last year or so I've read that people were lamenting
| on how Google at the time was struggling to monetize Deepmind
| products
|
| The problem was that all of the ML/AI products would _de_
| monetize Google's flagship moneymaker.
|
| Everybody is trying to use ML/AI to undo all the damage the
| Google monopoly on search has done to the web ecosystem.
| Microsoft is fine with this for now because Google has the
| dominant position.
|
| It is pretty clear, however, that this is not a sustainable
| situation. At some point, people are somehow going to want to
| turn ML/AI into cash extraction from end users. How to do
| that isn't obvious.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I always assumed Google bought Waze to prevent Facebook from
| buying it.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Imagine a version of ChatGPT that has tight integration with
| Google Search, Google Scholar, Google Patent, Google Books,
| Google Deepmind, etc.
|
| Google wants Google Bard to become that and use all the
| Google's services.
| jsemrau wrote:
| I guess the main driver here is gaining control / influence ?
| garblegarble wrote:
| I can't understand the mindset of any AI researchers who stay at
| Google at this point.
|
| You're there (presumably) because you want to make an impact. You
| gave them a massive lead with a novel approach... and Google
| failed to capitalise on that so spectacularly that they're now
| investing billions _into their competitor_ who 's miles ahead of
| Google, using Google's approach, all to try and head off another
| competitor who's miles ahead of everybody _also using Google 's
| approach_
|
| I hope that (counter to stories) they pay the researchers very
| well, because the best result I can see is Google shutting down
| what they can publish to try and stop this happening again.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Most researchers aren't there to make a commercial product.
| They're there to publish well-cited research papers, talk at
| top conferences, and have access to far more compute than
| anyone else can offer to have the biggest chance at state-of-
| the-art results.
|
| In terms of FLOPS, Google is rumoured to be by far the biggest,
| since they have _lots_ of their own silicon, while most other
| people are limited by what NVidia can make or smallish amounts
| of custom silicon.
|
| If Google can't turn that into a commercial product, the
| researchers don't really care.
| garblegarble wrote:
| >Most researchers aren't there to make a commercial product.
| They're there to publish well-cited research papers, talk at
| top conferences, and have access to far more compute than
| anyone else can offer.
|
| I think that's core to what I'm getting at - I don't see how
| Google continues to let them publish core research at this
| point given how much of a lead they've given their
| competitors (especially combined with their own inability to
| execute)
| leereeves wrote:
| If Google didn't let them publish, the researchers would
| leave for sure.
| aix1 wrote:
| > I don't see how Google continues to let them publish core
| research at this point
|
| From what I hear from Google DeepMind researchers, the
| current policies are making it very difficult to publish
| NLP research. The barrier to disclosing research advances
| to the wider community appears much higher than it used to
| be.
| visarga wrote:
| > and have access to far more compute than anyone else can
| offer to have the biggest chance at state of the art results
|
| What models do they have to show after 15 years of AI
| research? AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and that's about it. Search is
| mediocre, translation the same, not even their OCR APIs are
| very good.
|
| On pure research they invented the transformer in 2017
| (Vaswani) and word embeddings in 2012 (Mikolov). But
| Microsoft invented residual connections (Kaiming He 2015)
| which underline transformers and modern CNNs. CNNs and LSTMs
| were invented longe before, by Yann LeCun (1989) and Jurgen
| Schmidhuber (1997).
|
| And yes, OpenAI also invented something of their own - the
| Adam optimiser (Kingma 2015), that trains 99% of the models
| today.
|
| Hinton invented Dropout (2014) and backpropagation (1986).
| londons_explore wrote:
| They're good at research.
|
| They're bad at turning the research into a product.
|
| Specifically, most AI based products need to be trained on
| user data, and Google is too scared to make any real use of
| much user data in AI models for fear of getting sued into
| oblivion if, for example, gmail can be tricked into writing
| something in an email which reveals some other gmail users
| private data.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >They're good at research. They're bad at turning the
| research into a product.
|
| Tbh, Google Lens is one of the best computer vision
| products in the market. Generally speaking, it's hard to
| crate a product around something that is completely new.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| OpenAI didn't even exist when Adam was invented! The
| contact email on the paper is from 2017.
|
| OpenAI has made 1 major contribution - the auto regressive
| decoder. You could argue also their productisation of RL
| for LLMs has been highly influential even though they
| strictly didn't invent it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Plus all the things they haven't yet published... there
| must be something, because nobody has yet come close to
| the performance of GPT-4 8 months later, despite many
| people trying.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| The likely architecture of GPT-4 was invented at Google -
| MoE. OpenAI poached the team who developed it.
|
| OpenAI is ahead on the RL data side. To me that's the
| likely biggest advantage they have in GPT-4.
| visarga wrote:
| I believe they are using much more synthetic data than
| others. That's the secret sauce besides their larger
| training set and model. Synthetic data makes the model
| more consistent.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| For all of the novel interest in the tech and service
| side, I can't understand why so many overlook the value
| of the datasets. I've been promoting them as potential
| products to license, similar to textbook publishing, and
| a bit reminiscent of how Google used its search
| appliances. Automating methods of creation will be an
| immensely valuable service.
|
| I've already introduced methods of instruct formatting
| within our org, because as the architectures change, what
| we learn from performing the work to organize and account
| for our internal knowledge will continuously pay off.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Nobody has tried to come close to the performance of 4
| and failed.
|
| Palm-2 was never intended to match 4 (Gemini is). Llama 2
| was never intended to match 4 either. Same with Claude 2.
| Nobody has matched GPT-4's training compute and failed to
| reach it.
| visarga wrote:
| True, the paper is dated Jan 2015 and company was founded
| in Dec. But if you read the paper it is signed:
|
| > Diederik P. Kingma* University of Amsterdam, OpenAI
| dpkingma@openai.com
| blovescoffee wrote:
| What? CLIP? Whisper? Dota 2 RL was big at the time, they
| made notable contributions to deep rl
| logicchains wrote:
| >On pure research they invented the transformer in 2017
| (Vaswani)
|
| Transformers were invented in the early 90s:
| https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/fast-weight-
| programmer-1991... Google were just the first with the
| compute to scale them up.
| blovescoffee wrote:
| fwiw Schmidhuber is famous for claiming to have come up
| with virtually every architecture that's now
| useful/important.
| blovescoffee wrote:
| Google researchers publish leading/important research
| monthly. They publish impressive work in vision, nlp, and
| RL. Have you tried reading papers or following research out
| of google?
| tester756 wrote:
| >translation the same
|
| What? between what languages?
| visarga wrote:
| > I can't understand the mindset
|
| I can. None of this tech will maintain Google as the chokepoint
| of internet and make billions for them. You can download and
| run a LLaMA or Mistral but can't download a Google. On-topic
| information has been commoditised.
|
| Even OpenAI is in a bad spot. They owned the whole LLM mountain
| in 2020, now they only own the peaks. Almost the whole mountain
| has been conquered by open models. Their area of supremacy is
| shrinking by the day.
|
| The two factors at play here are 1. ability to run LLMs locally
| and 2. ability to improve local LLMs with data exfiltrated from
| SOTA LLMs.
|
| I foresee an era of increased privacy as a consequence of this.
| We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk and
| override Google, Twitter and FB. Bad news for ad providers,
| they got to move into some other profitable line of business
| now. Nobody got time to read garbage and ads.
| lobochrome wrote:
| Powerful vision! Thank you.
| dustingetz wrote:
| is there a strongly written essay or paper arguing this
| viewpoint?
| visarga wrote:
| the original: "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"
| https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-
| ne...
| esperent wrote:
| > We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk
| and override Google, Twitter and FB
|
| I cannot wait for the day where I can create a list of
| blocked terms "Musk, Trump, American politics, ..." and have
| an intelligent LLM filter so that it doesn't matter what site
| I visit, whether The Verge, or The Guardian, or Reddit, all
| articles or posts related to these terms will be gone.
|
| I think this has a chance to have a far higher effect than
| just ad tech. It's going to effect all media publishers. But
| I also expect them, led by Google and Facebook, to fight this
| tooth and nail with every dirty trick they can.
| xalava wrote:
| You may achieve this by only visiting websites or pages
| with tailored feeds.
|
| The problem is that it requires a bit of self discipline.
| Google and Meta are probably safe then...
| esperent wrote:
| What websites are you talking about?
|
| I do use a feed reader already but it's not good for
| discovering new things. The problem is when I venture out
| to discover what's going on in the world I'm deluged with
| Musk spam. A couple of years ago it was Trump spam.
| kubrickslair wrote:
| We started work on an open-source LLM-powered media filter
| at OpenLocus (https://github.com/openlocus), aiming for an
| alpha release by late 2023.
|
| In the more medium term we are collaborating on improving
| information overload, filter bubbles & misinformation with
| labs at AllenAI, CMU, UPenn & Utah.
|
| Contributions and feedback are welcome! Feel free to hit me
| up for an early access - email in the profile.
| eganist wrote:
| Explains why Google tried (or is trying) so hard to push
| WEI though. If they can't programmatically evade
| adblockers, might as well programmatically prevent them.
| devxpy wrote:
| I've just the thing for you my friend
| https://github.com/devxpy/anti-chatgpt
| esperent wrote:
| That looks great, have you tested it?
| esperent wrote:
| Oh you're the author, in that case I guess you have!
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| As a suggestion, personally I'd rather the offending
| items just be removed entirely rather than showing
| "redacted".
| kubrickslair wrote:
| This is a good start, devxpy! What other features are you
| planning to build over it? Hit me up if you want to
| collaborate.
| MontgomeryPy wrote:
| Great start. Please develop a plugin I can secretly add
| to my Mother's browser to dial down the outrage she reads
| on the fly! She'll notice 'redacted' ;)
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is very interesting desire to me.. Wont you end up
| with a weird, contrived context for everything else you
| _do_ read though? Like you would be reading an article
| about the UN and it would say: "and then, _some country_
| put forward a new resolution. " Wouldn't that, like, kinda
| drive you crazy?
|
| Like I know the state of journalism is less than stellar,
| but patching it after the fact for each reader seems like
| the wrong direction. The implicit conception of "the news"
| in this desire reifies it into a weird kind of commodity
| for your personal entertainment/edification; which is
| precisely the conception operating today which makes it so
| bad!
|
| Like, maybe, if you have psychological considerations where
| certain triggers are very damaging, I can kinda understand
| this. But if that is really the case, then just why read
| the news anyway? Of course you gotta read some sometimes,
| but in general you can read other things. There is a
| lifetime and a half of fiction and nonfiction to read, no
| GPU required!
| theduder99 wrote:
| patching it after the fact is definitely needed. same way
| I use a plugin to filter out curse words because when it
| comes to your brain, garbage in = garbage out. patching
| "news" stories after the fact will never be perfect
| though because half the problem with "journalism" is
| omission of facts, not just biased half-truths or
| opinions.
| esperent wrote:
| I don't want to remove all mentions. If I'm reading an
| article about something else and it happens to mention
| something on my list, that's fine. I just want to remove
| all the top level articles and posts about these things.
|
| It's not about being triggered by anything or trying to
| hide from anything. I also don't need (or even want) 100%
| efficacy. It's about cleaning up noise. For example, at
| this point I'm fully aware that Musk has turned Twitter
| into even more of a cesspool. I don't need any more
| information about that. And yet I get it, all the latest
| "juicy Musk gossip" any time I go near any tech sites.
| And it's just noise to me at this point.
|
| Same with American politics. I'm not from the US so I'd
| be happy with a short monthly synopsis on what's
| happening there. But on the English speaking web,
| American politics is _everywhere_. It 's exhausting. I
| want to filter it, reclaim the attention it steals from
| me while still being engaged with online society to a
| degree that I choose. And I believe that reclaiming this
| attention, energy, and time would allow me to engage more
| with subjects I do care about.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I see, that totally makes sense, but in that case it
| doesn't seem like you need a fancy AI for this, or at
| least it feels way overkill for what you actually want
| here.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Right now GPT4 is useful/powerful and probably anything else
| sucks. That may change but the mountain has real value at the
| top only. At least for chat used for either human assist or
| decision making or code generation. Categorisation, yeah you
| can use lesser LLMs.
| npsomaratna wrote:
| Not necessarily true anymore. As a counterexample, consider
| CodeLlama 33b, which is quite good (and which has replaced
| GPT-4 for my coding assistant needs).
|
| OpenAI's models are likely to remain the best, but I see
| open models catching up and becoming "good enough." Why pay
| for GPT-4 when I can run a model locally for free? (Barring
| the initial capital cost of a GPU; and not even this if
| you're, say, using a Macbook)
| revoxx3 wrote:
| What's CodeLlama 33b? I couldn't find anything regarding
| it online
| jsemrau wrote:
| I guess its a typo
|
| https://huggingface.co/codellama/CodeLlama-34b-hf
| bingemaker wrote:
| Off by 1B error
| jsemrau wrote:
| ^-^
| JTon wrote:
| Not 100% sure but I believe Llama [1] is a LLM created by
| meta. Code Llama is probably one tailored as a coding
| assistant
|
| [1] https://ai.meta.com/llama/
| npsomaratna wrote:
| Whoops, sorry. 34b :)
| hansvm wrote:
| CodeLlama spit out some of the wildest garbage when I
| tested it, even against GPT-3.5. Which tasks have you
| found it to perform well?
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Like yes, as long as GPT-4 remains the most useful (and now
| they have multi-modality in Plus so they've just extended
| their lead) nobody will adopt anything else.
|
| So grandparent's argument makes even less sense as search
| should also be fungible but it isn't when Google still
| provides the best search product and has since it started.
| If OpenAI can maintain that lead and continue to ship
| improvements that continue to push their peak higher, most
| people will not pay for anything less even when that price
| is free.
| HKH2 wrote:
| The GP didn't say who the value was meant to be for.
| There is definitely a lot of value for users, regardless
| of which model.
|
| I would like LLaMa to be more local, responsive and
| private rather than more intelligent; it is good enough
| in that regard.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| No way, for creative writing zephyr (based on mistral) is
| my favourite. Also no stupid limits like chatgpt
|
| For assistance, chatgpt is the best but llama is more than
| adequate.
|
| For code generation they all suck, chatgpt 4 before they
| nerfed it was good.
|
| I use codellama phind locally
| HKH2 wrote:
| I don't work in tech and I use LLaMa. It is great for
| giving me ideas, writing overviews which I use to make sure
| I have most of my bases covered (and helping me see which
| of my ideas are more original), getting more examples,
| along with other creative tasks.
|
| Could I get my employer to pay for it if all free options
| disappeared? Probably, but I don't have to while they
| exist.
| kubrickslair wrote:
| > We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk
| and override Google, Twitter and FB ... Nobody got time to
| read garbage and ads.
|
| Exactly, there is a paradox that is getting more extreme by
| the day - that social media (and the broader web) is a
| wellspring of knowledge, yet also a vortex of addiction,
| filter bubbles & lost productivity. I want one without the
| other.
|
| This pushed me to start building open source at OpenLocus,
| contributions & feedback are welcome - details in other
| comment.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Isn't Microsoft deeply integrating those peaks into Windows
| and Office? That's one hell of a moat.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Microsoft is also integrating ChatGPT into Bing.
| qiine wrote:
| "I foresee an era of increased privacy as a consequence of
| this. We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs"
|
| I am contemplating feeding Firefox extensions code to AI to
| detect possible malicious behaviors quickly.
| staunton wrote:
| Does anyone know vision models that detect ads? I wasn't able
| to find any, which is kind of surprising... That sounds like
| an armsrace that would exist.
| petemir wrote:
| There are some sparse examples
|
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.08.210
|
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1811.04115
|
| https://doi.org/10.3390/s20164587
| zo1 wrote:
| It won't work as long as you have HTTPS preventing any
| large scale interception and analysis of traffic. This is
| why Google was so quick to promote and switch to HTTPS. I
| bet you my left nut right now there is some random ex
| Googler with an NDA and interesting story to tell about
| this topic.
|
| It pretty much means you have to detect the ad locally. And
| by then you've already lost and transferred it down at
| least.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I tried something not dissimilar, but without AI models:
| having webpages rendered in a real browser, but "headless".
| But there was really no way for the webpage to detect it
| was "headless": I'd render in a real browser, in an actual
| X session, under Xephyr. And I wouldn't be showing that
| Xephyr X server (so I wouldn't see what that real browser
| was rendering).
|
| I'd then put gray rectangles on what where ads and only
| show visually that, with the grey rectangles, after having
| covered the ads with gray rectangles.
|
| I just did it as some quick proof-of-concept: there are
| plenty different ways to do this but I liked that one. It's
| not dissimilar to services that renders a webpage on _x_
| different devices, without you needing to open that webpage
| on all these devices.
|
| But the issue is that while it's relatively easy to get rid
| of ads, it's near impossible to get rid of submarine
| articles/blogs and it's getting harder and harder by the
| day to get rid of all the pointless webpages generated by
| ChatGPT or other LLMs that are flooding the web.
|
| Meanwhile sticking to the sites I know (Wikipedia / HN /
| used car sales websites / a few forums I frequent etc.) and
| running a DNS locally that blocks hundreds of thousands of
| domains (and entire countries) is quite effective (I run
| _unbound_ , which I like a lot for it's got many features
| and can block domains/subdomains using wildcards).
|
| I'm pretty sure detecting and covering ads before
| displaying a webpage can be done but I'd say the bigger
| problem is submarines and overall terribly poor quality LLM
| generated webpages.
|
| So basically: is it even worth it to detect ads while the
| web has now got a much bigger problem than ads?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Absolutely its still worth blocking ads. They abuse my
| compute rendering client side. Off with their heads.
| Presumably you could use ai to sniff out putative ai
| content in text and flag or block that too.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| But how can we possibly be this optimistic though? Like, time
| and time again there are these little glimmers of fantasy
| that some technology alone can alleviate the heinous/annoying
| parts of a mature capitalism, and every time the technology
| has ended up, after all is said and done, on the other side
| (so to speak).
|
| Like, go back and read old mailing lists. See how everyone
| was so assured that computers themselves, then cryptography,
| then the modern internet, would create radical changes in the
| way the economy works, and enable avenues for greater self-
| determination and happiness. They all seem so naive in
| retrospect, knowing what we know and how it all played out.
|
| I love that so many people are these days inspired by the llm
| tech to imagine a better world with them, and its important
| in itself to inspired like this. But precedence does not
| favor putting all your hopes in solely the technology itself
| for a better world. Hope I am wrong though!
| visarga wrote:
| It will undoubtedly be a turbulent time. All the skills and
| knowledge expressed in text or images is compressed into
| models. And these models offer back all they know to each
| of us according to our needs. Learning from everyone
| indiscriminately, serving everyone specifically, open
| sourcing skills and knowledge to a much deeper degree than
| open source had on software.
|
| This will have social implications, it will speed up the
| learning process of any new technology. For example by
| upgrading Copilot, Github can upgrade coding practices
| everywhere (where it's used) to new coding standards
| instead of taking years, that's how fast it can go.
|
| On another line of thinking, an image-language-action model
| can be used to control robots, and robot hardware is
| getting accessible. There is a chance for inventing self
| reliance automation for people, a possible solution to job
| loss.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I agree heartily with you. OpenAI may be the best, but the
| open models are getting good.
|
| A weak analogy: as you might take a hybrid cloud/local
| compute strategy, I think it makes sense to be very flexible
| and use LLMs from different sources for diversity and not
| getting locked in. I mostly use OpenAI, but I am constantly
| experimenting with options. Local options are most exciting
| to me right now.
|
| I usually use APIs, but OpenAI's app that supports multi
| modal input images and voice conversation is impressive and
| points to a future mode of human computer interactions.
|
| Exciting times!
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| It is also a testament to what happens when you open up
| powerful technology instead of hoarding
| lobochrome wrote:
| Google AI : Xerox PARC AI : GUI
| schleck8 wrote:
| Yeah, Bard is still the worst major LLM product
| raverbashing wrote:
| Maybe Google doesn't see how it can turn AI into a low traction
| product that will only be used for renaming and turning some
| cosmetic improvements to justify someone's promotion
|
| Google truly has grown complacent and whoever has a good idea
| feel like they can't develop it there. But if you have an idea
| on how Google can lose money and reputation by retiring another
| product they're all ears
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Classic moment of business people not understanding how some of
| these technical things work.
| jeswin wrote:
| > You gave them a massive lead with a novel approach...
|
| From everything I've read/watched, the original researchers
| didn't know at that point their work was going to be so
| impactful. In hindsight, yeah. But otherwise no.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > I can't understand the mindset of any AI researchers who stay
| at Google at this point.
|
| Have you heard of money?
|
| But seriously, Google have talent because they pay insane
| salaries like all the other big tech companies
| hcks wrote:
| Google doesn't pay very well, actually
| jorlow wrote:
| They definitely pay a large number of people a large
| amount, but they're happy to pay less when they can.
| riku_iki wrote:
| they pay average market salaries to large number of
| mediocre people.
| Frost1x wrote:
| >I can't understand the mindset of any AI researchers who stay
| at Google at this point. >You're there (presumably) because you
| want to make an impact.
|
| I can't speak to AI researchers specifically but I can speak to
| research more generally. Ideally you want to focus on somewhere
| you can make and impact, pursue the general line of research
| you find interesting/promising, AND have stability to at least
| live (or ideally enough pay to not care).
|
| I've known enough highly talented researchers who almost always
| have to sacrifice the "making a difference" and "pursuing their
| pathway" to large degree just to survive. Ultimately what
| people are paying for to be researched is what matters, be it
| some business R&D division's head, federal agency biased
| directions, of whatever philanthropic connections some
| organizations are able to extract decide you should be doing.
| It's not just medicore researchers, it's what one might
| consider "world class" top of their field researchers. Everyone
| at some point makes sacrifices to pay the bills but there's
| this neverending gaslighting that occurs about what researchers
| _want_ to do and what areas they choose to impact or some
| nonsense like that. That happens in _very few_ idealized cases.
| E.g., tenured professorship at highly endowed institutions
| where they 've already invested enough time doing the stuff
| they don't want to game the system to get to a point they can
| finally pursue their own paths and so on.
|
| If you want to focus on an impact and perform research you need
| to be able to self-fund that and hope the area you work isn't
| capital intensive (AI specifically DNN, LLM, and highly
| data/compute intensive approaches is for the most part pretty
| capital intensive, hence one reason big tech pursued them to
| reduce competition--you can pursue paths theoretically but
| ultimately unless you find approaches that aren't as capital
| intensive it'll be awhile before you can experimentally test
| and iterate approaches).
|
| Researchers just hope to get remotely close to the area they
| want to work in but by in large have to chase the money and
| lines of research behind it if they hope to remain a
| researcher. Maybe Google is different but I doubt it. This
| happens in other industries as well with people in R&D near the
| tops of their field working at market leaders still caving.
|
| If by some miracle you happen to be near the top of your field
| and happen to guess or have some natural deep insight to the
| path forward where you're fortunate enough to make a huge
| breakthrough, you can often just spin it out yourself or take
| on some investment risk. Why work for Google if you have the
| practical path to say AGI in your hands? Try and do it on your
| own or find someone who doesn't own all your IP at the end of
| it. You work at big corp because there's ideally some stability
| balance with some semi-interesting research paths to you,
| probably not exactly what you want but as close as you can get.
| bartwr wrote:
| I have a simple answer for you - researchers measure impact
| differently. If they measured it primarily by shipping
| products, they would work as engineers, not research
| scientists. As a researcher you realize impact by _researching_
| and publishing (internally or externally) and are ok with the
| idea that it 's up to others to pick it up and turn into cool
| products.
|
| Hopefully they work at the same company, but if they don't -
| it's not your problem to solve, but VPs and above.
|
| But yes, it can be frustrating if you're junior and take your
| work personally and attribute its success to its (and even
| worse, your own) value. After a few years of career, you learn
| to look at it from a distance.
|
| Google publishes amazing stuff, people are paid great salaries,
| they have a ton of fun doing it, work life balance is way
| better than at startups - what's not to like?
| user8872642489 wrote:
| That's why all the researches from the Attention is all you
| need paper not longer work at Google. /s
|
| Food for thought: https://www.aichat.blog/google-exodus-
| where-are-the-authors-...
|
| Each of the co-authors who spoke to the FT said they wanted
| to discover what the toolbox they had created was capable of.
| "The years after the transformer were some of the most
| fertile years in research. It became apparent . . . the
| models would get smarter with more feedback," Vaswani says.
| "It was too compelling not to pursue this." [2]
|
| [2] - https://www.ft.com/content/37bb01af-
| ee46-4483-982f-ef3921436...
| bartwr wrote:
| This quote says nothing about _product_ , but about
| continuing _research_.
|
| Most researchers don't care about products. Many don't even
| care about any practicality (just the scientific pursuit).
| How do I know? Well, I happen to work as Research
| Scientist. I worked at Google 5y. :) For the majority of my
| colleagues, "having to" support their work after it was
| published was a nuisance and they wanted to work on new
| cool stuff instead.
| hnfong wrote:
| I am, unironically, not sure whether your description is
| reflective of being a Research Scientist, or just being a
| Google engineer in general...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > people are paid great salaries, they have a ton of fun
| doing it, work life balance is way better than at startups
|
| Compared to AI startups, neither of these is true.
| kleene_op wrote:
| Those who can't do.. pay.
| rawrawrawrr wrote:
| $6 billion dollars raised in 2 months for their series C is
| blowing my mind. What does Anthropic have that OpenAI or other
| LLM startups don't? What other companies have raised that much in
| a single round?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Gotta be the talent. Started by ex-OpenAI and probably
| attracted some AI geniuses who buy in to their safety approach
| too.
| mptest wrote:
| joking, but maybe they have achieved agi (internally) ;)
| Varloom wrote:
| It's absolutely good, have you tried their Claude 2 AI?
| polymorph1sm wrote:
| It's not as good as GPT-4, the only feature I used often was
| their PDF QA. The rest ChatGPT plus ( GPT-4 ) still miles
| ahead
| lambdaba wrote:
| I regularly compare queries with both GPT-4 and Claude 2
| and I find I prefer Claude's answers most often. The 100k
| token context is a major plus too.
|
| Claude is more creative and that comes with a higher rate
| of hallucinations. I hope I'm not misremembering but GPT-4
| was also initially more prone to hallucinations but also
| more capable in some ways.
| nmfisher wrote:
| They managed to build something equally good (if not better)
| than GPT4, without losing 50% of their cap table to Microsoft.
| That alone is worth a lot.
|
| The investments are absurdly large but if you believe LLMs will
| be fundamentally transformative then I can understand the
| logic.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Claude 2 is good and better than 3.5 but nothing close to 4
| in general.
| artdigital wrote:
| I'm now almost always using Claude over GPT4 in my day to
| day and rarely have moments where I'm not happy with the
| output and fallback to ChatGPT
|
| The big context window is so nice, I can dump in huge files
| or conversation exports and it can handle them without
| problems
| xiaohk wrote:
| How do you guys access Claude?
| staticman2 wrote:
| Claude is available without API on Poe and with API on
| Amazon Bedrock.
| jackson1372 wrote:
| claude.ai
| RecycledEle wrote:
| http://Claude.AI
|
| Am I the same only one who uses the web interface?
|
| I keep thing simple (KISS) because I teach for a living,
| and only things my student can pick up in a class are
| useful to me.
| nmfisher wrote:
| I'm not saying your experience is wrong, but for my use
| case (code, mainly), I've found Claude to be far more
| reliable (not to mention faster) than GPT4.
| bmikaili wrote:
| The larger context window might be nice, but it's nowhere
| close to GPT4's reasoning ability. GPT4 is still the best
| for coding.
| staticman2 wrote:
| In my experience Claude 2 is better than GPT 4 in many non
| programming tasks.
| taspeotis wrote:
| > What does Anthropic have that OpenAI or other LLM startups
| don't
|
| I dunno I kind of get the perception Microsoft's locked up
| OpenAI's funding so Google couldn't throw money at them even if
| they wanted to?
| warthog wrote:
| Yeah I believe so as well. They are probably going after the
| second best thing that is out there that has a chance of
| overtaking GPT 4
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I also rather like Claude's capability of using XML tags as
| scrap-pads of sorts to see the inner workings of the AI. Makes
| for better prompt design.
|
| https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/give-claude-room-to-t...
|
| You can see how the AI arrived at the response.
| leodriesch wrote:
| This is just a prompting hack you can use with any LLM, not
| exclusive to Claude. But I do like the fact that they include
| these tricks in their documentation.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| > What does Anthropic have that OpenAI or other LLM startups
| don't?
|
| The big context window is pretty magical for some use cases.
| There are lots of things RAG with limited context can't do.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| The "big context window" talk reminds me of high wattage
| speakers in the 80s. Yes, it's loud. "Does it sound good?",
| is the question.
|
| Having a large context window is pointless unless the model
| is able to attend to attention on the document submitted. As
| RAG is basically search, this helps set attention regardless
| of the model's context window size.
|
| Stuffing random thing into a prompt doesn't improve things,
| so RAG is _always_ required, even if it 's just loading the
| history of the conversation into the window.
| cypress66 wrote:
| RAG is not always required. If you can fit a whole
| document/story/etc in the context length, it often performs
| better, especially for complex questions (not just basic
| retrieval).
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Exactly. RAG is great if you need certain paragraphs to
| answer specific questions but there are limits.
|
| Assuming a new unheard of play called "Romeo and Juliet "
| RAG can answer "Who is Rosaline?".
|
| But a large context window can answer "How does
| Shakespeare use foreshadowing to build tension and
| anticipation throughout the play?" "How are gender roles
| and societal expectations depicted in the play" or "What
| does the play suggest about the power of love to overcome
| adversity?".
|
| In other words, RAG doesn't help you answer questions
| that pertain to the whole document and aren't keyword
| driven retrieval queries. It's a pretty big limitation if
| you aren't just looking for a specific fact.
|
| RAG limits you to answers where the information can be
| contained in your chunk size.
| kromem wrote:
| It's such a small playing field with too few players.
|
| I have a slide in a presentation on the topic that's an
| inverted pyramid, as pretty much the entire LLM field rests on
| only a few companies, who aren't necessarily even doing
| everything correctly.
|
| The fact that they even have a seat at such a small table with
| so much in the pot already and much more forecasted means they
| command a large buy in regardless of their tech. They don't
| ever need to be in the lead, they just need to maintain their
| seat at the table and they'll still have money being thrown
| their way.
|
| The threat of missing the next wave or letting a competitor
| gain exclusive access is too high at this point.
|
| Of course, FOMO driving investments is also the very well known
| pattern of a bubble, and we may have a bit of a generative AI
| bubble among the top firms where large sums of money are going
| to go down the drain on investing into overvalued promises
| because the cost of missing a promise that will actually come
| to fruition is considered too high.
|
| Ironically the real payoff is probably in focusing on
| integration layers at this point, particularly given the gains
| in performance over the past year in research by developing
| improved interfacing with SotA models.
|
| LLMs at a foundational pretrained layer are in a race towards
| parity. Having access to model A isn't going to be much more
| interesting than having access to model B. But if you have a
| plug and play intermediate product that can hook into either
| model A or B and deliver improved results to direct access to
| either - that's where the money is going to be for cloud
| providers in the next 18 months.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Massive context length
| Racing0461 wrote:
| Competition.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| They don't have much confidence. Microsoft invested 10b into
| OpenAI. That investment seems to be paying off well.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Can't risk losing the AI war entirely. Much better to be
| embarrassed to the tune of $2B than to have no profits from
| future AI success.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| I'd love to see the statistics on the daily number of Google
| searches since OpenAI (ChatGPT in particular) came to the fore
| this year.
|
| Anecdotally, I now use ChatGPT for at least 25-50% of the queries
| that I previously would have had no other channel for other than
| a search engine.
|
| If I was in charge of Alphabet I'd be starting to worry. This
| move makes them look a bit desperate.
| dalbasal wrote:
| The types of queries where gpt is useful (or I hope will soon
| be useful) to me are those where google themselves have
| "destroyed the internet.^"
|
| If you want to basic information about a physical exercise, a
| recipe, a travel destination or such... All the content in
| Google seems to be content farmed. Written by people who don't
| know, quickly, by copying similar articles. It's just a buggy,
| manual version of the proverbial gpt anyway. At this point, I
| may as well just go direct.
|
| If I want to know about doing weighted crunches instead of sit
| ups, Google results already represent all the downsides of
| using gpt. The got UI is nicer. You can also narrow in on your
| questions, push back and generally get the same level of
| content in a better package.
|
| Maybe the old chestnut of "computerized recipe book" will
| finally be solved.
|
| ^Ra Ra!
| riku_iki wrote:
| > All the content in Google seems to be content farmed
|
| you are just forgetting to add word "reddit" at the end of
| your query..
| edgyquant wrote:
| That doesn't help and is just as astroturfed at this point.
| Companies caught on to this years ago
| riku_iki wrote:
| that's very far from my experience, mods and voting
| community do great job in ranking good posts and
| comments. Maybe you can give example of your query which
| you are not satisfied with results?
| astura wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddi
| t-i...
| dalbasal wrote:
| Idk... Maybe... But Reddit seems to hold info pretty
| poorly. A lot of the subs/posts and incredibly dumb.
|
| The good information is there, often, but finding it is hit
| and miss. Until relatively recently, unofficially archived
| gives web forums were still available. Reddit search is a
| downgrade, imo.
|
| In any case gpt can do reddit pretty well.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > In any case gpt can do reddit pretty well.
|
| I am not sure I trust gpt, hallucinations are still very
| common.
| DilutedMetrics wrote:
| Also growth in Bing searches with Bing Chat (backed by
| ChatGPT). I even switched my mobile browser from Brave to Edge
| to use the integration.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Casual users don't care about ChatGPT or any other smart chat
| app because they are used to Google Search or classical search
| bar type web search for decades now.
|
| If chat apps take over, I think they will first taker over
| desktop computers because on mobile it is easier to type a few
| keywords in the web search bar and get 5 or 6 relevant web
| results than it is to chat with a chat bot for like 5 minutes.
|
| Informational quires are most likely to be more useful in chat
| apps than in the classical web search but navigational and
| transactional quires are here to stay on Google or whatever
| search engine comes about.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I was going to say that mobile can just chat on the mic to
| the gbt but then I remembered speech to text is an apparently
| hard problem that no one has made progress on in 15 years
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Actually, OpenAI just made the progress you're asking for.
| Try the voice conversation mode in ChatGPT app (if you can,
| it's still a beta testing version IIRC). This one is to the
| likes of Google Assistant as GPT-4 is to GPT-2. Huge
| quality jump - not only it doesn't suck (like e.g. Google
| Assistant does), it _works_ , and absurdly well at that.
| ~1% error rate for me in English, which isn't even my first
| language, on the go, in rain, next to noisy street...
| methyl wrote:
| There is no difference whatsoever, you can look up some
| Similarweb stats on this.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Google reportedly has $118 billion cash on hand. I think they
| would have happily invested more than $2 billion in an OpenAI
| competitor if they thought more money than that would matter.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I don't see how that could even register. We use OpenAI at home
| (both me and my wife) but _everything_ ChatGPT spouts must,
| invariably, be verified.
|
| It's not even "trust but verify" but "Oh yup, I didn't thought
| of that. However it may be a lie because ChatGPT is a
| pathological liar, and as I cannot possibly trust a lying tool,
| I'll now verify" (I know, I know, there's a discussion
| regarding nomenclature: "lying" / "hallucinating" or whatever.
| But anyone who's actually using ChatGPT knows what I mean).
|
| Basically the output of ChatGPT, for me, goes directly into
| Google / Wikipedia / etc.
|
| The one case where I can use the output of ChatGPT directly is
| when I translate from, say, english to french or vice-versa and
| I know both languages well enough to be able to tell if the
| translation is okay or not.
|
| Those believing they can use the output of ChatGPT without
| verifying it are basically these lawyers who referenced
| hallucinated cases to a judge.
|
| As another person as commented: it didn't even make a dent in
| Google's search requests and that is no surprise.
| constantly wrote:
| I don't use chatgpt or LLMs for anything factual at all given
| the workflow you've described of asking a question and then
| needing to separately search all results. But they are very
| useful for framing documents, summarizing things, etc.
| pradn wrote:
| ChatGPT remixes info from beyond the first page of Google
| search. That's the value. If you ask it for a list of nice
| nature spaces in Tokyo, like I just did, it returns 12 spots
| that all seem appealing. Already, that's more information
| density than a Google Search. But now I have to go look up if
| these actually exist (this isn't the sort of mistake it
| usually makes though), where it is, the hours, admission
| prices etc. So that's going to be a few Google searches for
| this question. Of course, I'll have to actually go to the
| sites for these gardens, if they exist, because you can't
| quite trust Google Maps's accuracy either - hours and opening
| days can be off, especially around the holidays, when I'd
| like to go to Tokyo. One ChatGPT query -> several Google
| searches.
|
| If for this text output, ChatGPT also linked me directly to
| the gardens' sites, scraped the info from the live site, and
| summarized this - that would actually save a ton of time.
| Google could have a leg up bc it has a knowledge graph, but
| so does Microsoft. This requires a lot more than training an
| LLM - this requires it to be an actual product, not a tech
| demo like it is. A chat with an agent that occasionally lies
| is a terrible UI.
|
| I think there's great scope for UI innovation here. But such
| an experience might be pretty expensive in terms of compute -
| lots of LLM queries and extra lookup systems. Someone who
| does this hard integration work and is willing to spend a lot
| of resources per query will deliver a delightful, time-saving
| user experience, and can probably charge for it. And that may
| be a great value-prop for local AI - you can give it tons of
| resources to solve your particular problem. As I see it, mass
| market LLMs that are provided for free will never do this
| extra work for you. ChatGPT might be in a good position bc it
| already has a ton of paying customers that it can continue to
| draw a wall around. Their early Nov announcement might be
| something along these lines.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Doesn't ChatGPT's Browse with Bing option do that? It's
| definitely provided me with inline links to its browsed
| sources.
| oezi wrote:
| If you want more factual answers why not use Bing with
| ChatGPT?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I still have no clue how so many people in this thread are
| relying on it for code just based on the code output I get
| from it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| ChatGPT is like Google in the early days. Some people just
| never learned how to use a search engine. Other people very
| quickly did.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| They're using 4. The quality difference is huge for coding.
| Nearly a different product.
| jug wrote:
| I find GPT-4 pretty amazing at coding myself. I have learnt
| basic R language + a particular package within it, enough
| to solve an emergency issue that barred us from launching a
| product for a coding competition within 24 hours of only
| having heard of the language before, just barely meeting
| our deadline. The team was amazed and I could never have
| done it without GPT-4.
|
| Otherwise I'm regularly coding with it as an assistant
| while it's not always 100% correct, it's often decimating
| the time especially when I can request things like a
| website skeleton layout and it just seamlessly doing it all
| using CSS flow layouts and whatnot. I ask it to implement a
| Javascript library for a chat-style interface with bubbles
| and just bam it's there, even adapted for existing code.
|
| I'll still have to debug and I _will_ still find issues
| occasionally but the win is still often enormous for me.
|
| ChatGPT 3.5 though. That's mostly just a toy, yes.
| svara wrote:
| It starts with the power users. GPT4 has certainly had a big
| impact on my Google searches.
|
| For example, all my tech support searches are now GPT4. Those
| are painful on Google. There's no need to verify with a
| Google search, since you can just try out what GPT4 says.
|
| Concrete example: I use it all the time to help me with
| Excel. What it suggests is nearly always correct. It has
| turned me into an Excel power user within a few weeks.
|
| You need to develop a sense for what it's likely to be
| correct on, but once you do it's insanely useful. Simple rule
| of thumb: if you think you'd find a direct response to your
| question by wading through pages of ad infested Google
| results, it'll definitely work great on GPT4.
|
| The way I recall it, it took multiple years for Google to go
| from a secret power user thing to displacing Yahoo and
| Altavista for the broad user base. And that was at a time
| where being online in itself was sort of an early adopter
| thing.
|
| Anyway, I guess my point is, I would be worried if I was
| Google, and ignore this tech at your own risk...
| kubrickslair wrote:
| I use it with Browse with Bing and it works quite well for
| keeping up with research on a diverse set of topics - CS, AI,
| economics, neuroscience etc. The citations help you verify
| quickly.
|
| And this is besides the other stuff that search ones can't do
| directly but it does quite well. It has definitely cut web
| searches for me.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I don't know, I make plenty of queries that don't need
| verification. I would say the majority.
|
| Write a polite email to X saying Y -> doesn't need
| verification.
|
| Rewrite this in formal English for a grant application ->
| doesn't need verification.
|
| How to tar gz a folder in Linux? -> doesn't need
| verification. When I get the answer, I will probably think
| "oh, sure, it was czvf". And even if I didn't know what the
| arguments were, I would know enough to know that a tar
| command isn't going to delete my files or anything like that,
| so I would just try and see if it worked.
|
| Write Python code to show a box plot with such and such data
| -> doesn't need verification, I'm too lazy to write the code
| myself (or look into how seaborn worked) but once I see the
| code, I can quickly understand it and check that it does what
| it should. Or actually run it and see if it worked.
|
| Brainstorming (give me a bunch of titles for a paper about
| X/some ideas about how I could do Y) -> doesn't need
| verification, I can see the ideas and decide which I like and
| which I don't.
|
| I get that if you're a journalist, a lawyer or something like
| that, probably the majority of your ChatGPT queries will need
| verification, but that's definitely not my experience...
| probably because I don't often ask ChatGPT for things that I
| don't know, most of my use is either for things that I could
| do myself but require a time investment and I'd rather
| ChatGPT does them in a few seconds, or for brainstorming.
| Neither of those require a Google search at all.
| sadtoot wrote:
| the supermajority of humanity doesn't know what chatGPT is
| useful for, so google's total amount of searches are almost
| certainly the same. you could only detect the difference for,
| say, searches that would return stackoverflow results
| kaoD wrote:
| ...which I suspect has a large overlap with ad blocker users
| and, even those that don't, probably are not as sensitive to
| online ads as average Joe.
| snickmy wrote:
| I'm struggling in finding the source, but I read some in depth
| analysis that reports that bing only got 0.53% market share
| since the launch of chatGPT integration. Apparently they are
| cannibalising small players but not google.
| soniman wrote:
| FTX Anthropic worth a lot now or has it been diluted ?
| crypt1d wrote:
| Worth a lot. It probably would have been enough to plug the
| hole from stealing customer funds, if he managed to stay afloat
| for a few more months. Ah, the irony.
| k4rli wrote:
| What happened to their shares? Just sold to cover claims?
| crypt1d wrote:
| from what I know, they still have their stake, but they
| will eventually sell it
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| Hope ftx bankruptcy CEO can make it whole for the customers.
| 80% of my nw is stuck there
| edgyquant wrote:
| Why is 80% of your net worth in FTX
| Varloom wrote:
| That means all the work they did on their own AI has failed. So
| they are buying someone else's AI.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Or it means they have more money than they know what to do with
| so they're throwing it at any de-risking they can find
| Bishonen88 wrote:
| Funny, seeing that Amazon seems to be dipping their toes in the
| same water.
|
| https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/9/amazon-and-anthropic-an...
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| It's about as close as one can get to an acquisition, no?
| mrkramer wrote:
| Didn't Amazon invest in Google in the Google's early days? Now
| Google is returning the favor by saying: "Look FTC and DOJ, we
| are not a monopolist, web users prefer Amazon over Google when
| they search for products to buy."
| foxhop wrote:
| I'm using LLMs at my day job and claude v2 getting close to
| gpt-4's intelligence. It does use a different prompting style and
| has a huge 100,000 context window so it expects multishot
| prompting to train the LLM just-in-time.
| lambdaba wrote:
| I've recently subscribed too. The huge context window is a
| game-changer and I can't wait for API access. Unfortunately it
| hallucinates a lot. It's amazing for extracting information out
| of large documents, altough doing so made me realize how
| limited current models are in terms of detecting "subtleties"
| that would be obvious to a human.
| foxhop wrote:
| I have API access using AWS Bedrock which is hosted claude
| v2. boto3 has a client to trigger the completions but I've
| been practicing using just the playground in AWS console.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Thanks, I've requested access, how long did it take for
| you?
|
| Update: access already granted!
| lambdaba wrote:
| BTW what do you mean by "different prompting style"?
| foxhop wrote:
| https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt
| foxhop wrote:
| Human: I have a message and I need to categorize it into the
| right bucket. Can you help? General Inquiry
| Feedback & Suggestions Technical Issues
| Billing & Payments Appointments & Scheduling
| Others
|
| return only JSON like {"category": "Technical Issues"}
|
| Assistant: Sure using just JSON!
|
| Human: The app freezes every time I launch it.
|
| Assistant: {"category": "Technical Issues"}
|
| Human: I think your platform could use a night mode feature.
|
| Assistant: {"category": "Feedback & Suggestions"}
|
| Human: How do I reschedule my consultation?
|
| Assistant: {"category": "Appointments & Scheduling"}
|
| Human: I don't like the new open layout.
|
| Assistant: {"category": "Feedback & Suggestions"}
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I'm confused. Ok, Bard isn't cutting edge but it's pretty damned
| good for every day stuff ... and I actually detest Google ... but
| I've been using it because I'm sick of Edge on my PC and I think
| the UI is just 'friendlier' and quicker.
|
| N=1
| nacs wrote:
| Sorry but Bard is terrible and Google knows it.
|
| They've already announced a replacement / better model coming
| but considering how long Google has been doing the AI thing,
| it's amazing they dropped the ball this badly.
|
| This investment is Claude sounds like their backup plan.
| fastball wrote:
| Google literally invented the Transformer architecture, so
| yes, an impressive dropping of the ball.
| wenc wrote:
| If you've used the competition (ChatGPT, Claude, even
| Perplexity free version), you will find that Bard is not good
| in terms of quality of answers. (I'm forced to use Bard at
| work. The UI is responsive I'll give you that, but the answers
| are often more wrong than ChatGPT and Claude)
| staticman2 wrote:
| Bard is so stupid that I tried the take a picture feature,
| asked a question about a picture, then when I asked a followup
| question about the picture it said "Sorry I can't look at
| pictures."
|
| I do expect it to get much smarter by the end of next year.
| qwertox wrote:
| Can't wait for the day where it makes sense to export all my
| ChatGPT history and import it into Google's competition product
| in order for them to customize my experience.
|
| At this point Google is offering nothing which comes close to
| ChatGPT, Bard is a laughing stock compared to it. But I don't
| doubt that Google will catch up and then offer a better
| experience.
|
| The only thing OpenAI has from me is that (valuable) chat history
| (and the monthly subscription money), so I wouldn't have any
| problems with moving away from them once they are no longer in
| the unique position they're currently in. This is different with
| Google, which has several orders of magnitude more data about me
| and which they also do manage for me.
|
| I'm concerned that it's only a matter of time until OpenAi gets
| hacked and some of the user account's data gets leaked.
| ep_jhu wrote:
| There's already been hacks with 100k user account data leaked:
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-100-000-...
|
| OpenAI says it was an issue with the user devices not their
| service, though.
| k4rli wrote:
| What's the actual big gain of having history? I have it enabled
| as well and I sometimes jump back into old chats but it's
| mostly not so useful.
| kmlx wrote:
| the big gain is for long running queries. i had to refactor a
| big codebase and i went back to the same conversation
| numerous times over the course of a month. of course it would
| sometimes lose context, but having it all in the same place
| made things very easy for me.
| Taranis wrote:
| Amazon recently annouced their investment in Anthropic as well.
| Two, of the largest ad providers on the planet. Invest in the
| competition so you can have "input" into various aspects of the
| company, all the while profitting on any sucess.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I generally agree with this sentiment, but Anthropic has agency
| and have deemed it acceptable to grant these companies some
| control.
| ttul wrote:
| There may be some interest in having access to Google's
| machine learning hardware as well. What we don't know
| publicly is the extent of any deals these companies have to
| share technology and infrastructure. Google is one of the
| only hyperscalers to have succeeded in building its own ML
| hardware. That's a key asset.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| Amzoogle. Coining it here for the benefit of our future
| Amzooverlords.
| javajosh wrote:
| "Googazon" has a better ring to it, IMHO.
| mmmm2 wrote:
| Seems to capture the scale and ridiculousness as well.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Amagongle?
| wseqyrku wrote:
| Ok, Amzoogoogazongle
| malfist wrote:
| One of amazon's leadership principles is "Think Big" why
| stop at amazon and google? I propose Amzoogoogazonglezure.
|
| Don't ask me how to pronounce it.
| javajosh wrote:
| Or perhaps AmazonGoogleKleinerPerkinsKlaxoGoldmanSachs GmbH
| hughesjj wrote:
| "alphazon"
|
| "Amabet"
| neom wrote:
| Wonder if Anthropic could end up making FTX shareholders whole
| given SBF invested quite bit into them a while ago.
| olalonde wrote:
| That and the crypto bull market. Imagine being SBF and knowing
| you could have avoided decades in jail if only you hadn't filed
| for bankruptcy.
| valyagolev wrote:
| this happened to him several times, and each time he ended up
| betting it all again. if anthropic would make him whole, he'd
| bet it all on more bullshit crypto
| da-bacon wrote:
| If you rob a bank and then win the lottery, you still robbed
| the bank.
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah, but also, if the hole is $0 vs $8 billion, you
| probably get _less_ jail time.
| fastball wrote:
| Don't be too sure, that's not how it played out for
| Martin Shkreli.
| loeg wrote:
| We can never know the outcome of the counterfactual
| scenario for Shkreli.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| Totally agree but it is a strange situation. Everyone will
| probably be made whole now
| phatfish wrote:
| Feels like the best situation. Those who had their
| cash/investment misappropriated get it back, and someone
| who clearly should not have been in a position to have
| that much responsibility and power has been removed.
| troymc wrote:
| True, so the bank robber should be tried for bank robbery.
|
| The question here is whether the bank can get back some or
| all of the stolen money, i.e. can FTX customers get back
| the money & cryptocurrency they gave to FTX for safe
| keeping, maybe as shares in Anthropic?
| peter422 wrote:
| FYI if your creditors are demanding their money back and you
| don't have it... you really don't have many other options.
|
| The fact that 1 or 2 years later the people will get their
| money back doesn't mean there was any hope of surviving this
| a year ago.
| teej wrote:
| Yep, that's already a given.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Does anyone know what clauses OpenAI workers work under in terms
| of competition trying to pick them up and win them over?
|
| I still don't see any competition to what openai has done and so
| I expect some heavy rivalry coming up
| xyst wrote:
| I wonder what the burn rate is for these AI companies. $2b is a
| shit ton of money but I can easily see it quickly draining with a
| large team of devs, data scientists, SREs, and misc costs such as
| specialty hardware and cloud costs.
| skizm wrote:
| There was an article a while ago about how it costs OpenAI
| around $700,000 _per day_ to operate. Could be north of $1M /
| day now.
| fastball wrote:
| That's still only $365M per year - $2B would last you 5+
| years.
| lukevp wrote:
| Even at $1M/day, the 3 billion from Amazon and Google would
| last 3000 days, which is ~8.2 years. Nothing to sneeze at!
| And that's assuming they make no money themselves, which
| would extend the runway. A billion is a lot of money. I
| always accidentally think of it as 100 million instead of a
| thousand million for some reason.
| kubrickslair wrote:
| They are also have a $1B+ annual run rate [1].
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-track-generate-
| mor...
| typon wrote:
| Even though 1M/day sounds like a lot, $10B (their funding
| from Microsoft) would last them 27 years at this rate.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Right now, it's mostly hardware costs.
| latchkey wrote:
| Source? I'm guessing salaries aren't cheap either.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Google and their also-ran AI. Pichai is the lame duck CEO, Brin
| and Page are the lame duck founders. Hassabis is a lego nerd.
|
| Company hasn't done shit but shutter products and piss people
| off, and the search engine is working about as good as AltaVista
| circa 1999.
|
| Google employees downvoting me
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I don't get how Pichai isn't in the crosshairs right now, he
| must be good at bullshitting the board and shareholders,
| because things have very clearly been going downhill under his
| leadership.
| mechanicker wrote:
| Could it be more to prevent monopoly by their competitor Amazon
| becoming the biggest investor?
|
| OpenAI gave Microsoft a competitive edge and this could just be a
| hedge to prevent Amazon from getting even further ahead.
| ta988 wrote:
| They have no choice their internal models are just ridiculously
| bad compared to OpenAI. The behemoth is so fat it can't move
| anymore, this doesn't sound good for the company as a whole and
| the only thing that keep them afloat is that they are paying to
| be the default on devices.
| grammers wrote:
| Google paid $26 billion in 2021 to become the default search
| engine on browsers and phones - $2B is peanuts to them.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Anthropic will be interesting company if founders lost voting
| power in the board, with FTX, Amazon and Google representatives
| arguing to each other on key decisions protecting their
| interests.
| jasondclinton wrote:
| We announced our board structure here:
| https://www.anthropic.com/index/the-long-term-benefit-trust
|
| Quoting:
|
| """The Trust is an independent body of five financially
| disinterested members with an authority to select and remove a
| portion of our Board that will grow over time (ultimately, a
| majority of our Board). Paired with our Public Benefit
| Corporation status, the LTBT helps to align our corporate
| governance with our mission of developing and maintaining
| advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."""
| riku_iki wrote:
| > to select and remove a portion of our Board
|
| and how large is that portion?
| caddemon wrote:
| Who is the FTX representative at this point?
| nextworddev wrote:
| If anything this is a signal that there's hiccups with Gemini GA
| or performance
| outside1234 wrote:
| So the internal effort to build a competitive AI product are
| going well?
| Jackson__ wrote:
| Huh, this together with their "Gemini" AI product still not being
| released does not paint a good picture of progress at the Google
| DeepMind Team.
| donor20 wrote:
| Are they the ones doing Bard? I've got a ChatGPT subscription
| but interested in trying googles product but it says my
| workspace hadn't enabled bard yet
| gzer0 wrote:
| You should be able to use Bard with a non-workspace account.
| Any personal gmail/google account should be able to go
| directly to https://bard.google.com and agree to the terms
| and enroll.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| I feel like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park rn
| taf2 wrote:
| I hope anthropic improves their api with this money. Having usage
| information from OpenAI is very nice. Their ai is really good
| just need to improve their features to support commercial usage
| gzer0 wrote:
| In my experience, claude.ai outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT in
| several key areas. Notably, claude.ai excels in long-tail
| document reading and recall, demonstrating superior comprehension
| and information retrieval. Additionally, claude.ai offers
| enhanced contextual understanding, allowing it to provide more
| relevant and precise responses.
|
| However, while Claude.ai certainly showcases its strengths in
| specific areas, it doesn't quite measure up to OpenAI's ChatGPT
| in terms of adaptability and precision. ChatGPT stands out for
| its capability to understand intricate queries and produce
| nuanced, tailored responses.
|
| Both platforms have distinct strengths; I firmly believe they'll
| evolve to dominate different niches in the AI ecosystem.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience. Soon after claude 2 came out,
| i pasted in a long document that started with the document's
| title and it couldn't answer a "what is the title?" question.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _In my experience, claude.ai outperforms OpenAI 's ChatGPT in
| several key areas._
|
| ChatGPT on GPT-3.5? I can buy this. GPT-4? No fucking way. If
| Claude got anywhere close, this would be front page news in
| every tech and tech-adjacent outlet.
|
| This has to be said again and again: "ChatGPT" is meaningless
| without specifying whether you mean GPT-3.5 or GPT-4;
| statements about "ChatGPT" (or LLMs in general) capability
| limits are invalid unless tested on GPT-4.
| gzer0 wrote:
| I have been using GPT since the inception of GPT-2.
|
| You're correct, I should have specified. I rarely if ever use
| GPT-3.5. I have 7 paid / premium accounts, and I primarily
| use GPT-4.
| tadfisher wrote:
| OpenAI does this disservice to themselves by paywalling GPT-4
| and not 3.5, under the umbrella of "ChatGPT".
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| > ChatGPT on GPT-3.5? I can buy this. GPT-4? No fucking way.
| If Claude got anywhere close, this would be front page news
| in every tech and tech-adjacent outlet.
|
| Have you compared both? For my use case of generating &
| modifying simple code & Q&A based off of docs claude is in a
| similar range to GPT-4 & you can pay as you go instead of 20
| bucks a month.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| GPT-4 is "pay as you go" too if you use it via API. I
| haven't compared the prices though - for my use cases,
| which are mostly ad-hoc and manual, the cost doesn't add up
| to anything particularly noticeable.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Even though Claude sounds French, it seems it is not directly
| accessible from European countries? I'd love to give it a spin.
| xmglgpeldmg wrote:
| Is there any significance in Google proper making the investment
| rather than another arm of Alphabet?
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