[mshake2]

Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care. ChatGPT isn't so hot right now because boring PR articles were written about its abilities. It's hot because you can try it and see for yourself. Basic showmanship.

[GreedClarifies]

Not just showmanship, utility. ChatGPT has utility since “the common person” actually has access.

Deepmind loves doing research and getting accolades from a fawning press while never allowing commoners to access their dear technology for fear that the rabble could somehow misuse it.

Google, you lost your way.

[alfor]

Exactly, they are too afraid of reputation risks.

They sit on their golden goose and don’t want anything to happen to it.

When people understand how much they know about each one of us (with AI) they will be regulated.

[la64710]

This is absolutely correct

[victor106]

Exactly this.

Makes us wonder where Google would be if Larry and Sergie didn’t open it up to the public and we just kept hearing through the press that “there is this amazing search engine that works better than every other search engine”.

After the past decade of every damn startup “guru” advising to “just ship it”, Google just couldn’t follow that advice.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter how good chatgpt or Google’s AI is, all that matters is who shipped it first and how they incorporating feedback in to the model.

[khmii]

I just looked it up and it sounds like there is no point in a person wanting to play chess against AlphaZero right now because other engines have surpassed it. I don't know that much about chess though.

Here is for AlphaFold. I mean what you are going to do with this? It looks cool but I don't have the background to even contemplate doing anything with this information: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/L8XZM1

What is most interesting to me is the sociology of people completely writing off the monstrosity of resources and brain power that is Google. Speaking as if they are stubbornly committed to some outdated technology as opposed to the organization that published Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding.

[rawoke083600]

True ! Does anyone know if Blizzard got access or usage from AlphaStar afterwards?

For example to improve the current a.i/bot in the game ?

[timgo]

It's open source.

https://github.com/deepmind/alphastar

Same with AlphaFold.

Now people here complain that they don't sell APIs to proprietary models like OpenAI. They are a research lab after all.

[narrator]

They don't provide the trained model do they? That would take millions of dollars of GPU time to train. This safely keeps it out of the hands of the rabble.

[timgo]

Yes, but that wouldn't stop Blizzard if they wanted to use it.

But what would anyone do with a bot that beats almost all human players in Starcraft? Its was mainly a demo to show how far they can take their reinforcement learning algorithms after AlphaGo.

AlphaFold has much greater utility and its trained model parameters can be downloaded.

[Jensson]

OpenAI five is gone as well, up until ChatGPT there were no difference how they operated these things.

[jrvarela56]

Google gives me Xerox PARC vibes wrt AI. Got to the insights first, way ahead of everyone else, but OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research).

[max51]

With AI, most failed products aren't just "late" at the game, they often never release anything at all. Most of the wild claims made by AI companies could be strait up lies and we would never know because no one other than the devs has laid eyes on it directly.

[belter]

OpenAI and Microsoft will be hit by a big bus called GDPR.

"Unveiling the Crucial 5 GDPR Obstacles of ChatGPT That Can’t Be Ignored" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709482

[dkislyuk]

The LLM / foundation model industry will happily stay in the United States and ignore the stifling regulation of the EU if necessary. There is so much market share to capture domestically at the moment.

[missingdays]

Don't threaten the EU with good time

[croes]

In the US it will get sued for copyright violation and similar.

[mensetmanusman]

New laws would have to outlaw fair use, that will likely not happen as the only country that ignores such laws will win, especially now that the cat is out of the bag.

[ben_w]

They can redefine fair use without removing it entirely. Thing like that happen all the time.

Will it be effective? Dunno, but LLMs aren't as easy to duplicate or execute as films are to pirate or watch, and yet copyright law still gets enforced somewhat.

[belter]

What some call stifling regulation others call regulating monopolies.

[rawoke083600]

Lol you can have Crypto in E.U but not fancy new A.I, same how you can have A.I in USA but not Crypto :)

[__MatrixMan__]

One day, we'll have crypto where "mining" is helping train the AI. It'll be allowed nowhere.

[mountainriver]

Been thinking this for awhile, there are a couple projects in this space

[wand3r]

I have no idea how OpenAI would look at this, and of course there are similar obstacles here re:copilot vs. gpl, but couldn't they just shut off European access.

I think AI would be so important that Europe couldnt afford to not have AI. Wonder how this would resolve.

[GreedClarifies]

My guess is that the petty little bureaucratic tyrants in the EU would much rather deprive their subjects of new products than give up any sliver of their power.

One could hope that this would cause a rebellion, but recent history suggests that the populace will go along with anything their lords decree.

[olivermuty]

Short reply: lol

Longer reply: I love the EU so much. One of the few institutions taking big tech to task. I can roam cell operators at no extra cost, ensure that companies cant data mine me without my express permission and other wonderful tech oriented regulation.

It is extremely narrow minded to believe that throwing all principle out the window is the only way to «not stifle innovation».

«The lords decree», where does one even begin. The biggest fight against bigtech involving amongst others the cloud act that lets the us govt spy on anyone in complete secrecy is literally spearheaded by a common man [0].

This entire post is either satire, and if so I ate it hook line and sinker… or it is some kind of privacy exploitation stockholm syndrome.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems

[411111111111111]

> Longer reply: I love the EU so much.

As a EU citizen: You really shouldn't.

They do occasionally pass decent legislature, but i fear GreedClarifies is likely correct that it's probably more about them wanting the power big tech is currently centralizing for themselves.

For examples check the recent news from Belgium as they've uncovered recent corruption issues in the European Parliament. There is even an organization funded by the EU which is unapologetically treating political refugees as prisoners (putting them behind bars with literal cameras in their "living" space.

There was a pretty good report on German state media about that topic, should have English subtitles though if you can't understand it https://youtu.be/tJMLNMlJkPw

I am glad they're currently pushing back against big tech though, as FAANG is already speedrunning our society into a total dumbsterfire, but love to that organization is just misplaced. (Or should we call it MAMAA now? Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet Amazon)

[WanderPanda]

You mix up privacy wrt to the state (which has the monopoly on violence) vs private organisations. Two very different cans of worms. The EU is determined to fight the latter while embracing the former (as its incentives would suggest)

[pjkundert]

You don’t fight “big tech” by giving “big brother” all your liberty…

[jessekv]

I've got a lot of complaints about the EU, but this one makes no sense.

[techpression]

Well power is toxic that way unfortunately, I’m happy we’re having a bribery scandal right now (even if it’s being ignored by much of the media) and that things like Chat Control is being brought up (https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/).

EU will do a lot in the name of its subjects, but in the end it comes down to power and money. Anyone thinking it won’t end up as a totalitarian forced unification of the member states are sorely mistaken, or viewing it within the context of a minuscule time frame.

[belter]

-> petty little bureaucratic tyrants...One could hope that this would cause a rebellion

Is the rebellion funded by Google and Microsoft? Because that is a conspiracy theory with some legs...

[_yid9]

The great thing about the current-gen LLMs — anybody will be able to run one on the next gen of hardware. We’re within one order of magnitude of the capacity right now on retail hardware.

The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived.

GDPR, LLM “guard rails”, … — only the plebs will be affected by those.

[nateburke]

> The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived.

I agree. Use cases such as LLMs-as-backend-of-my-web-stack will move a lot of compute back to the edge of the network, eventually.

[TigeriusKirk]

I believe you could run GPT-2 at home now.

Remember when OpenAI claimed that was too much power to allow open access to?

[pjkundert]

Benevolent overlords patting the filthy masses on the head.

[tester756]

if it wasn't problem for Google, then why would for ChatGPT?

[fsh]

It isn't. No court has ever interpreted the GDPR in the bizarre way suggested in the linked article.

[MadSudaca]

Who knows. Maybe it's GDPR whose getting hit by a bus.

[wyager]

At some point, US companies will get fed up with constantly being harassed by the EU and just give up on the relatively small (as in money, not population) European market entirely. The hostility is simply not worth it.

For a sense of scale - the EU has 0 (zero) of the 14 largest companies by market cap. Out of the next 25, only a handful are in the EU.

[ESMirro]

It’s just like reading the fan fiction on Macrumours. Any day Apple are going to leave the EU over the Digital Markets Act, any day now!

[tester756]

Go ahead and bet your money on that

If your prediction happens, then EU based startups/companies that'll fill the void will booom.

[ianbutler]

I like Europe, but a climate for entrepreneurship is not something you have.

[tester756]

That's irrelevant imo.

If FAANG announced leaving EU, then somebody's stock would go up hard, at least on the beginning.

[rowanajmarshall]

The world's third largest tech sector is in a European country (the UK), and the two country's bigger than it are literally continent-scale superstates with around 10x the GDP.

[astrange]

The EU is set up to regulate already giant companies, which means it's not possible to create new ones because they can't afford the regulatory risk. (Mostly because the regulations are intended to troll American companies, not to do anything useful.)

And there isn't sufficient venture capital to build up new ones either. Maybe they can all adopt Yandex and VK.

[tester756]

>Mostly because the regulations are intended to troll American companies

Which one?

[wyager]

Why do you think that there are 0 (zero) EU tech companies that have "boomed"?

[belter]

And not a single one of them would be missed or affect European quality of life if they would be gone. How would Europe survive without Facebook...Microsoft spyware and Google advertisements?

[fsckboy]

> OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research)

what happens in cases like this is a slightly different dynamic what it seems on the surface. Apple, coming of huge success with the Apple ][ using the anemic but cheap 6502 8 bit to build a low-end (compared to Xerox) mass market (compared to Xerox) product, was well positioned to capitalize/productize the next generation of more capable 16/32 bit chips without changing their business model or distribution channel. It's right place right time, plus "easier to improve from the bottom, than downgrade from the top".

This idea was identified in a famous McKinsey study of the British motorcycle industry's loss of market share to low cost Japanese competition in the 1960's and 70's. The post WWII Japanese market developed to serve people who needed transportation but could not afford the leading British brands, not to mention autos. Once Japan had a successful motorcycle industry it was natural for them to export inexpensive bikes to Southeast Asia and South Asia. The British companies (Triumph, BSA, Norton) did not make much profit on the cheap bikes, they made their profit on the powerful luxury models, so they abandoned competing in the cheap sectors.

But then another force comes into play: if you manufacture a large number of something (there is always more of the cheap things) you get all sorts of manufacturing advantages. If you figure out a way to use achieve sturdy construction with fewer nuts and bolts, you get to save those nickels over many many bikes which makes it worth your effort to be good at that. If 1 out of 100 of your bikes leaks oil, and you sell a million, you get a lot of complaints, and you fix it. (these are called "learning curve advantages", and they tend to be logarithmic, so by being 10x bigger, you get +something better)

But who especially wants to buy sturdy, reliable transport (everybody) and is willing to pay a premium for it (rich people in the form of high margins)? So being the largest (and by definition the best) manufacturer of a product leaves you perfectly positioned to be the best high margin luxury supplier.

Xerox was not asleep at the switch, they were just not a high volume low cost manufacturer with a presence in the consumer market, at the time when these learning curve manufacturing/marketing ideas had just been developed so they weren't used to thinking that way. Nor was it a case of the suits not listening to the engineers; the engineering ethos at Xerox was not "can we squeeze this on the smallest chip possible", it was "omg let's leverage Moore's law onto even bigger high end chips, compile into microcode!"

I know it's popular to hate on MBAs here, but this is an example of what they learn, and why VC's might like to see an MBA on the team, this is the kind of talk they want to see in the business plan rather than an impossible dream.

[jrvarela56]

Thanks for the analogy. It seems OpenAI is getting ahead in building mass-market products (ChatGPT, Microsoft Partnership) by using 'lesser' LLMs (vs Google's published results).

From what I've been reading/tinkering, this expertise is essential bc these models are very useful only if the UX paradigms accommodate for them. Getting their hands dirty with consumer-facing applications may keep them a step ahead of Google despite the research 'disadvantage'.

[LoveMortuus]

Yeah... So many people miss the: "Show don't tell" That's for visual medium, for software it would be more like: "Touch, don't show"

Especially with software, pretty much every programmer knows that sky is the limit, and that's why promises mean so little.

In a way it's a similar problem to pre-orders.

People need to try it to truly understand it and its value.

Eg.: That new MMORPG looks amazing, but what's the gameplay like, because at the end of the day gameplay > graphics, if there's nothing to do except just the visuals people will get bored.

And people usually forget the boring stuff.

[amf12]

> Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care.

This is the right response for Google's AI news, but not Deepmind.

Building products isn't Deepmind's purpose. They have essentially "demo'd" it by releasing the paper and simulation videos. They don't build any products. This research is absolutely irrelevant for most people right now, but hopefully will be used by other researchers to make progress.

It's like saying "Stanford should build products and do demos instead of just releasing papers".

[skybrian]

Hardly any scientific research has a demo for you to try. The job of researchers is to publish research and their primary audience is other researchers. We can read about it but they aren't marketers and they don't have a product to sell to you.

[impulser_]

This is DeepMind, not Google. DeepMind is an AI research lab. They aren't a company. They solely do research. They don't produce products.

[rudasn]

> They don't produce products.

That can be said about Google as well, and I think that's what parent meant to express.

[narrator]

I think the Deepmind guys are ahead technologically because of Google's vast talent pool and computing resources, but they are scared of what they are making. The CEO of Deepmind was considering that they should stop publishing research because bad people might use it. If it wasn't for the Open AI guys putting pressure on them, they'd just toy with this stuff forever and never release anything.

I wonder what Larry and Sergei think of all this. Has Sergei said anything lately? Larry has been on a remote island in Fiji for years now. It seems with all this exciting geeky AI stuff they should be passionate about the business, but as far as I can tell they aren't very engaged.

Edit: Here's a recent article. Apparently, Sergei is back working on things for the first time since 2019. Larry and Sergei also checked in on the AI strategy in December: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/google-co-found...

[Kiro]

This is exactly right. ChatGPT (and Copilot) didn't blow my mind because people told me about it. It blew my mind when I started messing around with it. Doesn't matter how good things sound in theory. All the things that made me a believer are things I haven't even told anyone. It's too "you need to try it for yourself" for me to even try explaining.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I’d absurd to see basic research criticized by its lack of showmanship, especially when looking at paywalled secondary reporting on it. Hype isn’t the goal. In fact, hype and showmanship are generally counterproductive with research. That’s why a paper with a title “Compound B associated with low concentration of stuff in mice” turns into “Science says coffee will kill you.” Lack of showmanship and circus is a good thing here.

[xiphias2]

The problem for them isn't coming up with ChatGPT competitor. It's keeping their ads revenue.

[anigbrowl]

Organizing the world's information and keeping it inaccessible