Feb - Bard Launched with LaMDA -- Immediately replaced by Palm 2 backend within a month.
May - Launched Palm2 with 4 different sizes, 2 of which were unusable (poor Gecko) and 1 of which was unavailable (unicorn being invite-only/ask your google rep), which replaced Palm-540. Will be replaced by Gemini Ultra apparently next year as "Bard Advanced"
Launched Duet AI for both Workspace and Cloud, still compares unfavorably to GH Copilot.
SGE basically caught up to ChatGPT web search with Bing
June - Imagen released, results were ok, and immediately superseded by DallE3 within 3 months.
November - Youtube releases AI Music generation, but only as part of their Music AI Incubator.
Gemini launches with the infamous blue duck video.
Gemini Ultra will likely be gatekept just like Palm2-Unicorn despite performance only matching GPT4/Turbo (and despite delaying their official launch by a quarter).
Bard is a really stupid name. I get the origin of the name, and it's a short word, and in some sense it's a nice vibe with implications of a mystical poet or whatever. But it's a word that most people don't use.
As many have commented, ChatGPT is a pretty bad name too -- people get the order of the letters wrong all the time -- but at least it starts with "Chat", which explains what you're supposed to do with it.
A lot of this stuff was actually cool...but OpenAI got there first.
By the time LaMDA came out, we already had ChatGPT. Palm2 was a serious ChatGPT competitor, but by that point, we had GPT4. Imagen was trained in mid 2022 (!) and could do text and everything, but they locked it away until SD and Midjourney had claimed the market. When it finally came out, nobody found it interesting. And now we have Gemini, which appears to be equal or slightly worse than GPT4, which itself was trained in mid 2022.
Google with some of the best people in the world. Unlimited resources in almost every way, manages to fall further behind and further into irrelevance in AI.
A bunch of closed models no one can run. A mediocre bard that is way behind everyone else. Pretty pathetic. Is anyone home at Google?
Google's AI budget is higher than the total funding for AI at all US universities combined. It's just mind boggling how they can drop the ball so badly.
What a change in fortunes. Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.
Well, Google has a bunch of people who tell themselves they’re the best in the world. I’ve known perfectly reasonable humans start working there and by the time the left they felt they were smarter. By that I mean, in general, smarter than others. You can’t be smarter, you can be smart, but smarter isn’t a state of being. But they definitely feel they are, and assume you know that too. When discussing work I had done with one they insisted I must have based it off of a Google paper, which they weren’t sure if there was one on it, but surely I didn’t do it myself. That level.
One when confronted with the actual remit of their new job at a new company said “wow you hired an atom bomb to open a tin can.” They failed to achieve anything in two years and was fired.
Gemini Pro, with arguably comparable quality to GPT4, competes with GPT4 with its superior pricing and speed.
If you actually use Gemini Pro, you will find that it gives nearly instantaneous full responses, which makes me use it more than even GPT4 Turbo for a lot of quick questions. And certainly more than Bing AI with GPT4, which is so slow and awkward to use and which I gave up on.
It's something that doesn't get discussed: speed and pricing, with near top quality. That's maybe how Google is planning to win for now.
Google probably has at least 5x the management bloat as the competitors and it's killing them. Too many cooks in the kitchen vying to be the next AI thought leader. They're acting like IBM to be honest.
It's nice to see this. Hopefully small upstarts will make breakthroughs in different areas. Better than an AI monopoly.
This last decade, Google hasn't really made much of relevance outside AI either. The company is just milking its existing ad flows and not much else, it seems.
Google doesn’t really have much of a track record in real breakthroughs, does it?
It was built on its founders’ initial application of an eigenvector centrality algorithm to web search. The main innovation there was the application, not the algorithm - it was innovation more than invention.
Since then, perhaps the most technically impressive thing I’m aware of that Google has actually productized is their language translation system. But again, that was primarily innovation that built on existing technology and access to a lot of data, hardware, and distribution capability.
> Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.
Wasn’t that mainly because of money and the collection of smart people you mention, bought by that money? Which is not the same thing as a record of achievement.
I admit I could be wrong, I’m open to being corrected.
Every other lab is likely working very hard just so they can leave Google behind and build the next actually usable Search Engine & Portal (Browser / App Store).
I’m really hoping a new player displaces Alphabet and Meta (the ad giants).
Similar to how 1903 wasn't groundbreaking because Orville and Wilbur Wright merely upped their income potential from bicycle mechanics by building on work done on gasoline engines and lightweight construction techniques perfected in previous years
htrp|2 years ago
Feb - Bard Launched with LaMDA -- Immediately replaced by Palm 2 backend within a month.
May - Launched Palm2 with 4 different sizes, 2 of which were unusable (poor Gecko) and 1 of which was unavailable (unicorn being invite-only/ask your google rep), which replaced Palm-540. Will be replaced by Gemini Ultra apparently next year as "Bard Advanced"
Launched Duet AI for both Workspace and Cloud, still compares unfavorably to GH Copilot.
SGE basically caught up to ChatGPT web search with Bing
June - Imagen released, results were ok, and immediately superseded by DallE3 within 3 months.
November - Youtube releases AI Music generation, but only as part of their Music AI Incubator.
Gemini launches with the infamous blue duck video.
Gemini Ultra will likely be gatekept just like Palm2-Unicorn despite performance only matching GPT4/Turbo (and despite delaying their official launch by a quarter).
rogerclark|2 years ago
As many have commented, ChatGPT is a pretty bad name too -- people get the order of the letters wrong all the time -- but at least it starts with "Chat", which explains what you're supposed to do with it.
COAGULOPATH|2 years ago
By the time LaMDA came out, we already had ChatGPT. Palm2 was a serious ChatGPT competitor, but by that point, we had GPT4. Imagen was trained in mid 2022 (!) and could do text and everything, but they locked it away until SD and Midjourney had claimed the market. When it finally came out, nobody found it interesting. And now we have Gemini, which appears to be equal or slightly worse than GPT4, which itself was trained in mid 2022.
They just don't ship things fast enough.
cubefox|2 years ago
https://deepmind.google/technologies/imagen-2/
light_hue_1|2 years ago
A bunch of closed models no one can run. A mediocre bard that is way behind everyone else. Pretty pathetic. Is anyone home at Google?
Google's AI budget is higher than the total funding for AI at all US universities combined. It's just mind boggling how they can drop the ball so badly.
What a change in fortunes. Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.
fnordpiglet|2 years ago
One when confronted with the actual remit of their new job at a new company said “wow you hired an atom bomb to open a tin can.” They failed to achieve anything in two years and was fired.
l8_to_catch_up|2 years ago
If you actually use Gemini Pro, you will find that it gives nearly instantaneous full responses, which makes me use it more than even GPT4 Turbo for a lot of quick questions. And certainly more than Bing AI with GPT4, which is so slow and awkward to use and which I gave up on.
It's something that doesn't get discussed: speed and pricing, with near top quality. That's maybe how Google is planning to win for now.
candiddevmike|2 years ago
solardev|2 years ago
This last decade, Google hasn't really made much of relevance outside AI either. The company is just milking its existing ad flows and not much else, it seems.
antonvs|2 years ago
It was built on its founders’ initial application of an eigenvector centrality algorithm to web search. The main innovation there was the application, not the algorithm - it was innovation more than invention.
Since then, perhaps the most technically impressive thing I’m aware of that Google has actually productized is their language translation system. But again, that was primarily innovation that built on existing technology and access to a lot of data, hardware, and distribution capability.
> Just a few years ago it was the place to be and our PhD students were dying to work there.
Wasn’t that mainly because of money and the collection of smart people you mention, bought by that money? Which is not the same thing as a record of achievement.
I admit I could be wrong, I’m open to being corrected.
m3kw9|2 years ago
nojvek|2 years ago
I’m really hoping a new player displaces Alphabet and Meta (the ad giants).
atleastoptimal|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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px43|2 years ago
worldsayshi|2 years ago
falcor84|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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PedroBatista|2 years ago
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labrador|2 years ago