<story><title>OpenAI tech gives Microsoft&apos;s Bing a boost in search battle with Google</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-tech-gives-microsofts-bing-boost-search-battle-with-google-2023-03-22/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danans</author><text>&amp;gt; Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I&amp;#x27;m sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of &amp;quot;big company that lost its way&lt;p&gt;Former Googler, opinions are my own.  They haven&amp;#x27;t lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of responses (hallucinations and all).  Bard is an intentionally toned down version of  LamDa.&lt;p&gt;The reason they didn&amp;#x27;t release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search.  Bing&amp;#x2F;ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the &amp;quot;There&amp;#x27;s no such thing as bad publicity&amp;quot; logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it&amp;#x27;s not a long term product strategy.&lt;p&gt;So the real institutional problem at Google isn&amp;#x27;t lack of technological innovation, it&amp;#x27;s the inability to take major product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>While I agree with a bunch of other comments that are interested to see what happens in the long term, to me, all of this points to some &lt;i&gt;profound&lt;/i&gt; organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I&amp;#x27;ve seen from current&amp;#x2F;ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I&amp;#x27;ve had with some of these folks.&lt;p&gt;If a decade ago you told me Microsoft would leapfrog Google in the AI race (obviously albeit through OpenAI, but I think that separate org structure was key in the first place), I would have thought you were insane. Google &lt;i&gt;invented&lt;/i&gt; the transformer architecture just 6 years ago. I recently compared ChatGPT (on the free, 3.5 version mind you, not even the 4 version) with Bard, and it wasn&amp;#x27;t even close - ChatGPT was the &amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; to Bard&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;AltaVista&amp;quot; circa 2000 or so.&lt;p&gt;Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I&amp;#x27;m sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of &amp;quot;big company that lost its way&amp;quot;. I can&amp;#x27;t express enough how much admiration and amazement I had for Google that started to tarnish about 10 years ago (I think it was when the whole first page became ads for any remotely commercial search, whenever that started). I honestly hope they are able to course correct (heck, Microsoft had their decade+ of &amp;quot;the Ballmer years&amp;quot; before they turned around).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nopinsight</author><text>GPT-4 got much better results on many benchmarks than PaLM, Google&amp;#x27;s largest published model [1]. PaLM itself is probably quite a bit better than LamDa in several tasks, according to a chart and a couple of tables here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2204.02311&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2204.02311&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s unclear that Google currently has an internal LLM as good as GPT-4. If they do, they are keeping quiet about it, which seems quite unlikely given the repercussion.&lt;p&gt;[1] GPT-4&amp;#x27;s benchmark results vs PaLM: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;openai.com&amp;#x2F;research&amp;#x2F;gpt-4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;openai.com&amp;#x2F;research&amp;#x2F;gpt-4&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>OpenAI tech gives Microsoft&apos;s Bing a boost in search battle with Google</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-tech-gives-microsofts-bing-boost-search-battle-with-google-2023-03-22/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danans</author><text>&amp;gt; Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I&amp;#x27;m sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of &amp;quot;big company that lost its way&lt;p&gt;Former Googler, opinions are my own.  They haven&amp;#x27;t lost their way technologically - as you mentioned they invented the Transformer - and internally Google has long had language models that rival ChatGPT in sheer size and coherence of responses (hallucinations and all).  Bard is an intentionally toned down version of  LamDa.&lt;p&gt;The reason they didn&amp;#x27;t release their LLM earlier was likely due to the serious brand risk associated with making it part of Google search.  Bing&amp;#x2F;ChatGPT had no such brand risk, and released their LLMs using the &amp;quot;There&amp;#x27;s no such thing as bad publicity&amp;quot; logic. That works great as a wrecking ball, but it&amp;#x27;s not a long term product strategy.&lt;p&gt;So the real institutional problem at Google isn&amp;#x27;t lack of technological innovation, it&amp;#x27;s the inability to take major product risks, especially in anything adjacent to Search.</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>While I agree with a bunch of other comments that are interested to see what happens in the long term, to me, all of this points to some &lt;i&gt;profound&lt;/i&gt; organizational and cultural problems at Google. I base that statement on things I see as an external observer, from posts I&amp;#x27;ve seen from current&amp;#x2F;ex-Googlers here on HN, and from some (albeit brief) conversations I&amp;#x27;ve had with some of these folks.&lt;p&gt;If a decade ago you told me Microsoft would leapfrog Google in the AI race (obviously albeit through OpenAI, but I think that separate org structure was key in the first place), I would have thought you were insane. Google &lt;i&gt;invented&lt;/i&gt; the transformer architecture just 6 years ago. I recently compared ChatGPT (on the free, 3.5 version mind you, not even the 4 version) with Bard, and it wasn&amp;#x27;t even close - ChatGPT was the &amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; to Bard&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;AltaVista&amp;quot; circa 2000 or so.&lt;p&gt;Would be curious to hear from some Googlers on their thoughts. I&amp;#x27;m sure, internally, a lot of it must feel like piling on from the outside, but in all honestly it really feels to me like a classic case of &amp;quot;big company that lost its way&amp;quot;. I can&amp;#x27;t express enough how much admiration and amazement I had for Google that started to tarnish about 10 years ago (I think it was when the whole first page became ads for any remotely commercial search, whenever that started). I honestly hope they are able to course correct (heck, Microsoft had their decade+ of &amp;quot;the Ballmer years&amp;quot; before they turned around).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jatins</author><text>Microsoft has been really smart in this regard because they are invested in OpenAI but OpenAI does not have to suffer from any Big tech organizational nonsense the way Google&amp;#x27;s AI probably has to</text></comment>