[smallnix]

> It’s kind of crazy that they have been slow to create real products and competitive large scale models from their research.

I always thought they deliberately tried to contain the genie in the bottle as long as they could

[mullingitover]

Their unreleased LaMDA[1] famously caused one of their own engineers to have a public crashout in 2022, before ChatGPT dropped. Pre-ChatGPT they also showed it off in their research blog[2] and showed it doing very ChatGPT-like things and they alluded to 'risks,' but those were primarily around it using naughty language or spreading misinformation.

I think they were worried that releasing a product like ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it might mess up their money printing operation over in advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer children: little did they know they could run an operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it wouldn't make above-the-fold news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims

[2] https://research.google/blog/lamda-towards-safe-grounded-and...

[tempest_]

The front runner is not always the winner. If they were able to keep pace with openai while letting them take all the hits and miss steps, it could pay off.

Time will tell if LLM training becomes a race to the bottom or the release of the "open source" ones proves to be a spoiler. From the outside looking while ChatGPT has brand recognition for the average person who could not tell the difference between any two LLMs google offering Gemini in android phones could perhaps supplant them.

[bhadass]

I swear the Tay incident caused tech companies to be unnecessarily risk averse with chatbots for years.

[xtracto]

Attention is all you need was written by Googlers IIRC.