Google Invests Almost $400 Million in ChatGPT Rival Anthropic

[u/chilchil777]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-03/google-invests-almost-400-million-in-ai-startup-anthropic

[u/Le_saucisson_masque]

Could google use Anthropic to release a version of its own AI while avoiding bad press if something goes wrong ?

like when Microsoft chatbot started to praise hitler.

400 millions feel like pocket money compared to Microsoft 10 billions.

[u/Extension_Bat_4945 → u/Le_saucisson_masque]

I think they have enough knowledge to prevent those chatbot praises. 400 million to back that up is not logical in my opinion.

I’m surprised Google needs to invest in a company for this, as they have been extremely strong on the AI and Big data side.

[u/sknnbones → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

I’m willing to bet, given the right input, you could get chatGPT to praise Hitler.

Its very good at “roleplaying” so if you push it in that direction you can get it to say pretty much anything.

Edit: Seems like some people have been successful, while others have not been.

[u/RenterGotNoNBN → u/sknnbones]

I couldn't even get it to admit that sleeveless north face puffer jackets are linked to being promoted in my company - it kept insisting that people get promoted on merit and that I should work hard.

[u/Jani3D → u/RenterGotNoNBN]

sleeveless north face puffer jackets are linked to being promoted

Lol. This is the truth, though. If you get sweaty "hill-top" selfie on your socials, you're golden.

[u/complete_your_task → u/RenterGotNoNBN]

I mean, I guess a "boot-straps" capitalist bot is better than a literal Nazi bot. But still not ideal, IMO.

[u/Silvawuff → u/RenterGotNoNBN]

ChatGPT is all lies. You only get promoted if you know someone or blow someone while wearing a north face puffer jacket.

[u/Extension_Bat_4945 → u/sknnbones]

Maybe you can, although they have very strict filters. But I believe you won't get a full-out nazi bot that can only praise Hitler where everyone would get nazi results, that's the big difference.

[u/sknnbones → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

Oh yeah, the Thread system does that.

it doesn’t matter how much you “train” or “trick” ChatGPT, your input won’t reflect in any other instance.

[u/BeneficialEvidence6 → u/sknnbones]

I had the bot explain this to me. But I couldn't completely shake my distrust

[u/zebediah49 → u/BeneficialEvidence6]

The down-side is that it's stuck on its 2021 training dataset.

It's not that it's set to not learn new things from people -- it can't with its current architecture.

[u/BeneficialEvidence6 → u/zebediah49]

I'm guessing this is so people can't fuck up all the devs hard work by training it to be a nazi bot or something

[u/Seer434 → u/sknnbones]

I mean praising Hitler is a reproduceable error in our own software. Lots of human instances returning bad output.

[u/morgazmo99 → u/Seer434]

I suppose you just terminate those threads when the occur and carry on..

[u/ilovemodok → u/sknnbones]

I was able to get it to tell a story of Spider-man shooting webs out of his butt and kind of liking the sensation.

It took a bit of work convincing though.

[u/ProfessorPetrus → u/sknnbones]

I mean we got Americans and Greeks praising Hitler, given the history of the those two countries, makes no sense. Ima give AI a pass on that.

[u/FleetStreetsDarkHole → u/ProfessorPetrus]

Americans praising Hitler makes more sense to me with the tidbits more I've gotten on how we reacted to WW2. Just knowing that we actually waited as long as possible, and that big time capitalist like Henry Ford were a bit buddy/buddy with Nazis explains a lot about how there were probably actually a ton of sympathizers in the US.

What we learn in school is basically that we were good guys, they were bad guys, and we dropped two bombs. What actually happened (not fully but just the little extra I heard outside of school) is that we had to be dragged in as the last country across the finish line, installed our own concentration camps (minus the ovens and gas), and had plenty of softness towards Hitler (not entirely sure why big time capitalists loved him but for a lot of people they probably agreed with the racism).

So we come to today where a shit ton of the "silent majority" (as they like to pretend) hasn't even let go of the Civil War, and then you have similar (if not the same) people passing down their fondness for Nazis in a country that only reluctantly entered the war and committed copy cat (albeit "watered down") atrocities. And the current generations of that part of our history has been seething in the stew that is the hallucination that all their problems come from integration and/or the loss of slavery.

And then they go online and spew it everywhere, prolifically because they're angry, even in common spaces like reddit but with coded language. Language that an AI can still decipher. So it goes online, sees the metric shit ton of nonstop racism that most of us don't even see because we don't talk nearly as much as they do about not being racists (because that seems like common sense to most of us) and when it is required to regurgitate what it learns, boom, racist AI.

[u/TheRealMDubbs → u/FleetStreetsDarkHole]

I think it's important to note that FDR was giving critical supplies to both Britain and Russia through the Lend Lease act long before we officially entered the war. Without these supplies Russia may have not been able to hold out at the battle of Stalingrad, and England might have lost the battle of Britain. America's real strength was her economy and we were sending equipment long before we sent troops. Isolationism was very popular at the time and we may never have joined the war in Europe if Hitler hadn't declared war on us first.

[u/DracoLunaris → u/FleetStreetsDarkHole]

not entirely sure why big time capitalists loved him

As per the poem, the Nazis went after the communists, socialites and trade unionists first. There's also the fact that "The first mass privatization of state property occurred in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1937" as well. Both things which, as you might imagine, capitalists are big fans of. There's probably more I don't know about too.

[u/[deleted] → u/sknnbones]

I couldn't trick it into making a joke about Jay Leno, it just said it's inappropriate to delight in the misery of others or whatever.

[u/leo-g → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

Google Brain is having issues commercialising their research and many researchers also left https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/06/10/ai-gurus-are-leaving-big-tech-to-work-on-buzzy-new-start-ups.html

Google has not made any big AI product in a long time. Occasionally they might add some AI Smarts to their older products like Translate but ChatGPT was like the killer app of AI.

[u/Extension_Bat_4945 → u/leo-g]

I get that, but it’s surprising to me since Google built Tensorflow, one of the most important AI tools/coding resource for AI out there. But interesting article, didn’t know they were having issues.

[u/TheFriendlyArtificer → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

Tensorflow is a quagmire of deprecated APIs, half assed documentation, and features either forgotten about or moved to another namespace.

I loathe Facebook with a fury so white hot that it makes quark plasma look tepid, but at least I can count on Torch to be occasionally stable.

[u/0b_101010 → u/TheFriendlyArtificer]

a quagmire of deprecated APIs, half assed documentation, and features either forgotten about or moved to another namespace

Sounds like a Google product alright!

[u/kelkulus → u/TheFriendlyArtificer]

PyTorch is not run by Facebook as of last September :)

[u/GammaGargoyle → u/TheFriendlyArtificer]

Google has horrendous support for most dev tools outside the company. They are a complete mess.

[u/GreatBigJerk → u/GammaGargoyle]

Google has horrendous support for everything. It's one of the few consistent things about them.

[u/leo-g → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

That’s just how technology works. TensorFlow has been on the backburner since 2020.

https://jamesmccaffrey.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/yes-tensorflow-is-dead/

Most non-research AI deep learning have moved to using PyTorch.

[u/throwclose_mm → u/leo-g]

Jax is the hot new thing

[u/grandphuba → u/leo-g]

Can you share some more context on how TensorFlow and PyTorch are different and what have led the market/community to move to the latter? I have a CS background so no need to completely dumb it down, but I'm not as well versed in the AI ecosystem.

[u/rye_212 → u/grandphuba]

Sounds like a question for ChatGPT

[u/leo-g → u/grandphuba]

Google stopped innovating with TensorFlow and had shitty documentation. Naturally, everyone that wanted to use AI ML for practical uses moved towards the simpler Python solution.

[u/poopyheadthrowaway → u/leo-g]

I heard it was the opposite--academia largely moved to PyTorch while industry is largely using Tensorflow.

[u/jrcomputing → u/poopyheadthrowaway]

I'm in academia on a high performance computing operations team. I'm tangential to the support team, and I see all of the help requests they get. We've got people using both, although I haven't seen a help ticket for Tensorflow since December, while I have seen multiple PyTorch requests in the last few weeks.

[u/Antonskarp → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

Hell, GPT itself is the implementation of a Google paper on large language models from like 2017. Remember that guy at Google who got fired for claiming their lambda AI had become sentient? That was a while ago. I'm betting they have something more advanced than chat-gpt at Google internally, and have had it for a while. They just haven't released it for whatever reason. Probably because when most of your revenue comes from your search engine, it's stupid to make it obsolete.

[u/Earthling7228320321 → u/Antonskarp]

It's weird because they had lamda on the test kitchen app and it was pretty cool, but then it just say there never getting updates and everyone's question allotment ran out.

I thought it was going to be an ongoing app to test new AI stuff but they fell asleep because they're Google so ofc they did.

[u/AmputatorBot → u/leo-g]

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[u/Zerowantuthri → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

It is common for big companies to buyout competitors. Maybe they get something from the purchase but, mostly, they get no competition.

Google has seemed kinda asleep at the wheel the past few years. For this ultra tech company they keep putting out only ok-ish stuff. They did some cool stuff with their phones and using software to take great pics and their voice recognition but then they just seemed to kinda...stop.

[u/celtic1888 → u/Zerowantuthri]

Google has been asleep at the wheel for the last decade

[u/Mescallan → u/celtic1888]

Uhh, YouTube is the largest distributor of video on earth.

DeepMind solved protein folding and releases it for free to everyone.

It seems like their threshold for what is successful is just insanely high, because when they hit it changes industry, and if it doesn't change industry they just walk away from it.

Don't forget DeepMind is probably farther ahead than OpenAI in terms of capability, they have far more data, processing power, and budget, but public facing products haven't been their goal as far as I'm aware

[u/TheodoeBhabrot → u/Mescallan]

YouTube isn’t a new thing from google though and was bought 17 years ago

[u/GammaGargoyle → u/celtic1888]

They need to get Sundar out and put in a CEO that knows how to organizationally scale a tech company.

[u/_sfhk → u/Zerowantuthri]

Google has seemed kinda asleep at the wheel the past few years.

Being a giant target of multiple antitrust and privacy litigations across the world in the last few years probably slowed down a lot of things

[u/DXPower → u/_sfhk]

Wah wah. They've all been literal slaps on the wrist for Alphabet.

The real problem is their infamous leadership culture. No focus or team mentality, constant interior competition and reinventing the wheel, tons of redundant work, prioritizing new shiny apps over strengthening and maintaining their core business, etc. I could go on.

Google has been like this for nearly a decade now, the recent suits haven't changed anything.

[u/Southern-Exercise → u/Zerowantuthri]

It is common for big companies to buyout competitors. Maybe they get something from the purchase but, mostly, they get no competition.

Yeah, this sucks.

A year or so back I was waiting for orders of the 2nd version of Focals by North AR glasses to open and next thing I know, Google buys them and now there's nothing 🙄

Kinda figured they would have put something out that integrated them with all my other Google stuff by now.

[u/xyz_electronic → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

I'm surprised too. I always assumed something like ChatGPT would be something coming out of Google. Instead Google is apparently significantly behind the curve and needs to acquire something.

[u/islet_deficiency → u/xyz_electronic]

Thats the general arc of a business's initialization, growth, stagnation, and then ultimate decline.

A business creates a new market or a better product in the market. They use their capital to expand to meet the market's demand. In doing so, they rapidly grow, add layers of management and support, etc, etc.

Once they've grown, it becomes more difficult to adapt to changing market conditions and incorporate new technology/innovation. That's where google is at IMO.

Oftentimes, companies resort to buying out the competition because it's far easier to do that than change one's business model. That's been google's strategy for a while. But, I'd argue that it sucks for the consumer. The bought-up tech dies or doesn't get used to its full potential.

[u/Deeviant → u/Extension_Bat_4945]

Google is not nearly as strong with AI as they should be. Deepmind is their most impressive AI project and it has next to no integration with Google's day to day.

Other than Deepmind, they are average to behind in AI as far as FAANG's go. Innovation is also a nightmare at Google right now so it may be structurally impossible for Google to compete on the bleeding edge without acquisitions.

[u/TFenrir → u/Deeviant]

? Google has some of the best AI, maybe the best AI that we know about. PaLM for example, is seemingly the best language model. Their work on combining it with robots (Saycan-PaLM) or their work fine tuning it for medicine (MedPaLM) is incredibly impressive.

This doesn't even touch the fact that they still put out the majority of cited research in AI, even if you don't include DeepMind.

Google's big challenge is that they are really cautious.

[u/DeltaBurnt → u/TFenrir]

ChatGPT and DALL-E have been amazing PR moves for OpenAI when you think about it. They don't accomplish that much other than advertising their current development progress. People are convinced that other companies who aren't immediately productionizing their research into toy chat bots are behind the curve.

[u/nathris → u/Le_saucisson_masque]

You mean like when Google released its image recognition system and it started displaying pictures of gorillas when you searched for black people?

I don't think they are concerned with bad press over things like this. They will just fix the issue and everyone will forget about it in 2 weeks. Google's image search is amazing now. I took at picture of my in laws wifi password back in 2018, and when I need to type it in I just open up Google Photos and search for 'piece of paper', and it pops up.

[u/unbannednow → u/nathris]

You can do that on both Apple photos and Microsoft Drive too. In my opinion Microsoft’s is the best out of the 3

[u/Browncheese1 → u/unbannednow]

Just learned I can search for pictures by words on my phone.

[u/potatan → u/Browncheese1]

And locations. Search your photos for Barcelona for instance.

Disclaimer: you may need to visit Barcelona before it works perfectly

[u/tenaciousdeev → u/potatan]

I really wish you put the disclaimer higher up before I wasted the last hour of my life.

[u/dogeteapot → u/tenaciousdeev]

I've been twice but no photos on my Google account because my phone was stolen first night both times 🤣 great city though

[u/tbird83ii → u/unbannednow]

Yeah, OneDrive's ability to search through images, and use image metadata with said images is pretty amazing...

I usually don't like to give Microsoft a ton of credit, but some of the stuff I have seen has been fairly impressive.

I have this idea in my head that Microsoft is basically some of the most amazingly talented engineers and marketers, but they are outvoted by some middle manager who doesn't know how they can "monetize" these ideas...

[u/djdadi → u/tbird83ii]

my theory is that there's an A team and B team at MS. The B team does everything closed source, ugly, that makes money. You know, Sharepoint 2013, Windows, Bing, etc.

While the A team is off making VS Code, Terminal, Typescript, newer Python features like JIT, etc.

[u/cozmoAI → u/nathris]

Google was affected a lot by "gorillas" incident. Lot's of red tape was added to avoid such PR disasters in the future. Hence, why Google seems to fall so much behind OpenAI

[u/TFenrir → u/Le_saucisson_masque]

So here's the thing - Google's AI generally is the best in the world. At least from all measures and metrics that we see in research papers, their models like PaLM (and medPaLM most recently) are very very good fundamentally, but Google also puts a lot of effort into alignment - meaning that they try to have their models say and do things that are sensible, accurate, and inoffensive. They place a very high bar for themselves, which is why they are probably investing in Anthropic.

Anthropic is made from researchers from FAANG companies, who think alignment is even more important than most other (even very cautious) companies think. Almost all their energy and effort is on ensuring that models are.... Benevolent? I think that's a good enough description.

Most recently Anthropic has released papers that are really impressive to that end, like their work on constitutional training, so they seem to be doing some really impressive stuff.

And here's my gut - Google's feet are being held to the fire, and they're going to have to release some of their models for the public, even if they are not perfect. They are going to start showing them off in literally a few days at an AI and search event. The reason they've taken so long is complicated, but a big part is that internally there are a lot of people who really care about alignment - and I think this investment is to mollify them, as I'm sure that even if they understand that Google's hand is somewhat forced, that aren't happy about the change in policy with the upcoming releases.

[u/Caminsky → u/TFenrir]

I for one love the idea of OpenAI challenging Google's hegemony. It reminds me of Tyson saying "you scaaared..."

[u/TFenrir → u/[deleted]]

Yeah this is a good encapsulation of a lot of the challenging feelings people in the alignment community have. There is an increasingly large subset of computer scientists, philosophers, ethicists, etc who think that an arms race in AI development is going to literally be the largest existential risk we've had to deal with.

[u/Hemingwavy → u/[deleted]]

I think you might be disappointed to learn how much of Google hasn't allowed public access to their chatbot is because "advertisers get cold feet easily" and not "We have an ethical obligation to behave well".

[u/Diffusion9 → u/Hemingwavy]

Or Ai-enabled search that actually returns relevant answers can't return two pages of sponsored results and ads they can sell. It will kill their golden goose.

They're probably coming up with ways to make sure it only serves sponsored content they can control and monetize.

[u/Earthling7228320321 → u/[deleted]]

At this point, I am no longer willing to dismiss the notion of a technological singularity.

[u/Gurkenglas → u/TFenrir]

What I think they're concerned about is that nobody knows how to ask a wish from a hypothetical genie-tier AI without everyone dying. Which is no good, at the rate things are going.

[u/white_bread → u/Le_saucisson_masque]

400 millions feel like pocket money

It is. In 2022 Google made $775 million every single day.

[u/its_never2_late → u/white_bread]

I think they meant compared to the 10billion Microsoft invested in chatGPT not compared to how much Google makes.

I agree with them. I've never heard of this other AI but I can talk about chatGPT to a stranger and they'll know what I'm talking about

[u/kebyou → u/Le_saucisson_masque]

it's google

it'll get shuttered within a year anyway

[u/glowinghamster45 → u/Le_saucisson_masque]

The Microsoft chat bot (Tay) was a bot that was set up to learn from people. When people figure that out, it doesn't take much for it to learn to be hateful.

Chatgpt (at least the current one based on gpt3) has already done all of its learning, it's just interacting based off of what it knows to do. Only OpenAI can teach it more than it currently knows. I wouldn't expect chatgpt to have any racist tirades any time soon.

[u/iRedditonFacebook]

Begun the AI wars has

[u/honestFeedback → u/iRedditonFacebook]

Not really. Whatever Google produces, nobody will use it if there's a comparable alternative because everybody knows that Google will just kill it in a year's time anyway. Which will cause them to kill it in a years time....

[u/Bimancze → u/honestFeedback]

I'm certain that ChatGPT isn't going to remain free to everyone for lifetime. Maybe Google can give it a competition by keeping Anthropic free.

[u/Tasik → u/Bimancze]

Yet it also sounds like GPT is going to be used in Microsoft Bing. And I don’t imagine they plan on charging users To use Bing.

[u/mrtakada → u/Tasik]

I’m willing to bet they’ll try marketing it as “Bing+”, a premium search option you subscribe to 🗿

[u/ARainbowHorse → u/mrtakada]

Gonna be pissed off if that’s the case

[u/Bimancze → u/mrtakada]

shhh don't give them ideas

[u/xflashbackxbrd → u/Bimancze]

Too late $20 monthly sub is already here

[u/aminorityofone → u/Tasik]

Not just bing, but the office suite too and windows search.

[u/Triaspia2 → u/aminorityofone]

Just roll it into the 365 subscription and increase the price $10

[u/Stakoman → u/Bimancze]

In the US there's already a 20$ version subscription...

Nothing is free... Your data is money.

[u/[deleted] → u/Stakoman]

I mean, there's also a cost associated with creating chatgpt. I think it's fair to change for that.

[u/westbamm → u/Bimancze]

The goal is now to let startups find a use for it.

The server costs are astronomical.

[u/a_vanderbilt → u/Bimancze]

As somebody who writes apps, I’m still not going to write anything relying on a Google API until they demonstrate they arent going to do what they always do: either make 5 versions with different APIs that are all in competition, or abandon the idea entirely after 3 years. Stadia was the most recent reminder, and the list is long. OpenAI has changed their API and deprecated parts of it over time, but the replacements have been better. I can justify a rewrite if the capabilities are that much better. I don’t trust Google to do that anymore.

[u/Arcturion → u/Bimancze]

That is a given; ChatGPT is already trialling paid subs now.

The firm behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT is trialling a subscription service in the US.

For $20 (£16) per month, subscribers will get access to the platform even at peak times when it can be hard to log onto, and also "priority access" to new features, chatbot creator OpenAI said.

It plans to extend the trial more widely but initially it will only be offered to those on a waiting list.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64492750

[u/WonTon-Burrito-Meals → u/honestFeedback]

I mean, googe docs, Google drive, Gmail, and Google maps are all still king's (maybe not Gmail, but it's not going anywhere) of their respective market lol

[u/Nosferax → u/WonTon-Burrito-Meals]

Shhh circle jerk around here is that Google products all get shut down. We're blessed to have Microsoft's half baked product clones stick around forever.

[u/Purpoisely_Anoying_U → u/WonTon-Burrito-Meals]

My life/house is basically Google.

Google Nest cams, Google Wifis, Google Speakers. Android phone+tablets. Chrome/Gmail/calendar/drive/youtube/chat/translate/wallet, not to mention...Google the search engine which I use dozens of times a day.

[u/r4tzt4r → u/Purpoisely_Anoying_U]

You don't understand, man, NOBODY uses Google anymore.

[u/JuliusErrrrrring → u/Purpoisely_Anoying_U]

So many schools are basically google schools as well. Google Classroom is connected to so many Google programs in education.

[u/Mescallan → u/WonTon-Burrito-Meals]

Don't forget YouTube lol

[u/thebardingreen → u/WonTon-Burrito-Meals]

Gmail is pretty ubiquitous in startup world. I don't see Google Aps GSuite Google Workspace going anywhere anytime soon. Changing it's name? Sure. Trying to rebrand without changing anything? Sure. But actually falling our of use? No.

[u/segagamer → u/honestFeedback]

Good. It's about time Google got dethroned for something better. It's been shit for years.

[u/keving216 → u/segagamer]

Google assistant is easily the best voice assistant though. Siri and Alexa don’t even come close, unfortunately.

[u/IAmTaka_VG → u/keving216]

Someone made an ios shortcut that hooked up ChatGPT and made it 'pretend' it was his home assistant. It was EASILY decades ahead of google assistant. It was jaw dropping how intelligent these voice assistants can actually be and how much Google, Amazon, and Apple have dropped the ball with theirs.

[u/BoardRecord → u/IAmTaka_VG]

It was EASILY decades ahead of google assistant.

What will be the weather tomorrow?

I'm sorry, as a language model I don't have access to current weather information or the ability to predict future weather patterns. Please check a local weather service for the most up-to-date information.

When do Australia next play India in the cricket?

I'm sorry, as a language model with a knowledge cutoff of 2021, I don't have information on the current cricket schedule. Please check a cricket news source or the official websites of the cricket boards of Australia and India for the latest information on upcoming matches.

Seems pretty useless for that purpose to me.

[u/JamesR624 → u/IAmTaka_VG]

Yep. IF Apple were to hook Siri up to ChatGPT, it'd immediately become the #1 voice assistant, bar none.

(And that's saying something considering how shit she is right now)

[u/silentmage → u/segagamer]

Tried Bing recently? I've been exclusively using it for a while and it hasn't let me down. Plus I get points to use it.

[u/seehp → u/silentmage]

Wow. Points.

[u/segagamer → u/seehp]

Yeah. You use them to claim amazon vouchers or Xbox money.

[u/El-Sueco → u/segagamer]

If you collect 200 bing points and redeem, it lets you uninstall Microsoft edge for a whole month!

[u/atheistunicycle → u/El-Sueco]

It's how I afford my Xbox Mountain Dew Verification Cans.

[u/midnitefox → u/atheistunicycle]

omg I forgot about that greentext lol

For those that don't know.

[u/McGarnacIe → u/silentmage]

I work in IT and sometimes have used Bing to search for errors or drivers and it is usually pretty crappy compared to Google.

[u/silentmage → u/McGarnacIe]

I'm in IT as well and have no issue with it.

[u/nevernovelty → u/silentmage]

If the items for points don’t relate, they can be automatically transferred to $$ for charities. It will take a while but if multiple hundreds of people do it, it adds up quickly.

[u/tetea_t → u/silentmage]

There are points?

[u/silentmage → u/tetea_t]

Yeah. Sign in with a Microsoft account and they give you points. Usually I get enough for a month or two of game pass, but you can get gift cards too.

[u/tetea_t → u/silentmage]

Thanks. I’ll check it out, I haven’t used it recently.

[u/segagamer → u/silentmage]

Been on Bing for years now. Microsoft rewards have given me so many free games lol

[u/VectorSam → u/segagamer]

You're not tricking me this time, Steve Ballmer.

[u/TWAT_BUGS → u/VectorSam]

I’m not Steve Ballmer. I’m John DiMaggio playing Steve Ballmer. Use Bing.

[u/itisoktodance → u/silentmage]

If you're concerned about data farming, (Microsoft) Bing is not the one you're wanting...

[u/silentmage → u/itisoktodance]

Nope, you would want duckduckgo or, if you don't mind paying, Neeva is 5$ a month for add free tracking free search.

[u/orbital → u/honestFeedback]

Started to realize that google search was never really a completed product. Using chatgpt feels like what using google should be today.

[u/troyboltonislife → u/orbital]

Yesterday I spent 20 minutes googling a specific but rather basic solution to a task I wanted to do in SQL. I was doing multiple different searches trying to get something that was specific to Hive SQL and couldn’t get it. I put the problem in chatgpt and it gave me the wrong but close answer. I gave an example of the data I was working with and it gave another answer that gave me an error. I put the error code in and it said “oh if you are working with hive then you have to do it this way”. And it was correct. It was like talking to a person. Absolutely amazing, and blows google out of the water. To be able to add and specify based on the results you initially get is extremely powerful and is what google is lacking.

It can’t replace people. But it can really help someone like me who knows what a correct solution looks like but might not know the specific steps to get there.

For people wondering: I was looking for how to filter for data after a specific date but my date column was in string format and I was using hive sql (most threads I found were mysql). If anyone finds a google search with the right code that chat gpt gave me I’d be surprised. Chatgpt is also much quicker than sifting through 5 stack overflow threads

[u/etacovda → u/troyboltonislife]

had a very similar experience doing some string parsing in lua - never used lua but have done it in other languages. Searched for a good 1/2hr on google, 5 minutes on chatgtp and I had working code

[u/troyboltonislife → u/etacovda]

I see a lot of really technical people say chatgpt isn’t really helpful because it gives wrong answers all the time. I would say those people aren’t using chatgpt correctly. That’s like saying google isn’t helpful because the first stackoverflow or article you find doesn’t immediately solve your problem.

Being able to iterate and provide more information based on what chatgpt gives you is extremely valuable. Even if it doesn’t give the correct answer it can usually point you in the right direction with example code to work off of. If you have enough experience to know what a correct solution is, then I would say 90% of the time you can get chatgpt to give you a correct answer after some tweaking.

It’s likely much less helpful to newbies and experts but for intermediates like myself it’s immensely helpful.

[u/GiantPandammonia → u/troyboltonislife]

I asked chatgp a coding questions and it marked my question as duplicate

[u/wioneo → u/troyboltonislife]

Another great thing is for tedious tasks like GUI design with something like QT. You can just describe what you want, run it, and make suggested corrections until it's nearly perfect if not all the way there.

It's orders of magnitude faster than even some of the dedicated design programs.

[u/WTFwhatthehell → u/troyboltonislife]

The ability to understand error messages and adapt is a game changer...

[u/pieter1234569 → u/troyboltonislife]

Which is the real thing google fears. Google already ha a better one in lamda, but it’s simply not economical to release one.

As you point out, an advanced chat bot makes googling things obsolete. Instead of a search showing 10 pages with ads, google would now be limited to just one.

It would have been for the best if no one released one, that’s what google was hoping for. And why they didn’t release theirs.

[u/only1rob → u/troyboltonislife]

My current example of why google is crap is this search term:

House counting software

The results trash ads and seo’d realtor pages

Changing it to this:

House counting software reddit

Gets me links to a reddit page, where people link to open maps and software code samples to achieve counting houses within an area on a map.

While not the best, google, after years and billions of investment, should be giving me something close to what i need, and not clearly manipulated search results.

[u/Trentonx94 → u/orbital]

I've been sucking dry Chatgpt for all my google search, until they paywall it I'll be using it till the last day.

the amount of useful info it can come up vs the useless shit and sponsored content I get when searching something on google it's just too much to give up.

I was searching for the trend of natural gas prices and how they would relate to domestic market utility bill increase/decreas. 30 minute of google was only articles full of pop-ups and mailing list spam, trading titles platforms or useless blogs shilling their trade bots.

I went to Chatgpt in 2 minute it was able to guide me step by step on the European commission website, what link and sub-folder to click to dowload a 180 page long report on natural resources prices and give me the exact page number to look for what I was looking for.

something that, google, which probably has indexed that document as well, could not give me.

I was pretty good with google-fu in the past years but lately they either changed their algo too much or they weight paid content too much to the point where I can't even get an AIR FRIER recipe using "brackets" terms to get what I really need. I clicked 3 recipes link and they all lacked that bracketed word (ingredient)

Bha

[u/numbuh0004 → u/iRedditonFacebook]

Literally the first thought I had reading this post lol

[u/AdDear5411]

Well, if we can look at history as an example, Google is definitely going to overfund this and then shut it down 2 years later.

[u/wdrosa → u/AdDear5411]

Google can't shut it down, they aren't buying it. They are investing in it. It's a completely separate company.

[u/ex1stence → u/wdrosa]

Ya know objectively you’re right, but I have faith Google will still find a way.

[u/Scarletfapper → u/ex1stence]

Google… uhhh… finds a way…

[u/TWAT_BUGS → u/ex1stence]

Google and Netflix. They’ll shut it all down.

[u/AdDear5411 → u/wdrosa]

Yea, and with that investment comes board seats and/or voting shares. They'll have a ton of pull. Google doesn't invest in anyone without a seat at the table.

[u/mynewromantica → u/wdrosa]

Along with their $400m spend comes some say in how things operate, I guarantee it.

[u/_twokoolfourskool_ → u/wdrosa]

If they purchase a certain amount of the company then they gain a controlling interest in it and absolutely have a say.

[u/ChineseCracker → u/AdDear5411]

No, they won't. ChatGPT threatens google's core business. They can't afford to back down from user-facing AI. AI is the next mobile or the next voice input. It completely changes the way we interface with services.

I'm honestly surprised Google isn't using in-house tech for this. That's what they should've been working on for the past couple of years

[u/simonsays9001 → u/ChineseCracker]

Google engineers wrote the Transformer architecture used by ChatGPT in a paper back in 2017. Hence why they already have the tech in-house, they just haven't prioritized it for public use (yet).

Here's a link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf

[u/ProgrammersAreSexy → u/simonsays9001]

they just haven't prioritized it for public use (yet).

Actually, they have. Google Search has been using the Transformer-based BERT model in their search engine for years.

[u/zaviex → u/ChineseCracker]

Deepmind is a google company that could do a language model on this level. They are focused in other areas

[u/ChunkyLaFunga → u/ChineseCracker]

Well they already let Amazon beat them to smart home tech and then half-assed catching up. I am fully confident they won't be using their whole ass for this either.

[u/ChineseCracker → u/ChunkyLaFunga]

Well they already let Amazon beat them to smart home

first of all, Smart Homes isn't really part of Google's core product set. The only reason Google does smart home stuff is that Apple does it as well.

And secondly, Amazon isn't really a player in the smart home game anymore. Alexa was a failure. Google has thoroughly beaten them. Mostly because Alexa was just a glorified interface to buy stuff on Amazon

[u/universe-advisor → u/ChineseCracker]

I think the commenter was referring to Ring and Anker/Eufy products which Amazon has a stake in/owns.

[u/HMS404 → u/AdDear5411]

https://killedbygoogle.com/

[u/AdDear5411 → u/HMS404]

Exactly, which is why people never take their products seriously. Stadia was doomed from the start. Who would buy a console when you know it'll be unsupported in 2 years?

[u/lilbro93]

Alphabet Inc.’s Google has invested almost $400 million in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which is testing a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Google and Anthropic declined to comment on the investment, but separately announced a partnership in which Anthropic will use Google’s cloud computing services. The deal marks the latest alliance between a tech giant and an AI startup as the field of generative AI — technology that can generate text and art in seconds — heats up.

The deal gives Google a stake in Anthropic, but doesn’t require the startup to spend the funds buying cloud services from Google, said the person who asked not to be identified because the terms were confidential.   “AI has evolved from academic research to become one of the biggest drivers of technological change, creating new opportunities for growth and improved services across all industries,” Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, said in a statement. “Google Cloud is providing open infrastructure for the next generation of AI startups, and our partnership with Anthropic is a great example of how we’re helping users and businesses tap into the power of reliable and responsible AI.”

Founded in 2021 by former leaders of OpenAI Inc., including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, Anthropic AI in January released a limited test of a new chatbot named Claude to rival to OpenAI’s wildly popular ChatGPT. 

The Google-Anthropic partnership follows a high-profile $10 billion investment by Microsoft Corp. in OpenAI, which built on the $1 billion the software giant had poured into the AI startup in 2019, plus another round in 2021.

Such alliances give more established companies such as Microsoft and Google access to some of the most popular and advanced AI systems. Startups like Anthropic, in turn, need funding and cloud-computing resources that a tech giant like Google can provide. In announcing the deal, Google said its cloud division would lend computing power and advanced AI chips that Anthropic plans to use to train and deploy its future AI products.

Anthropic’s language model assistant, Claude, hasn’t yet been released to the public, but the startup said it planned to expand access to the chatbot “in the coming months.”

The deal underscores Google’s commitment to AI, particularly in ways that may be expanded beyond the company’s core search business. “I’m excited by the AI-driven leaps we’re about to unveil in Search and beyond,”

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday as the company reported fourth-quarter earnings. He said Google intended to release chatbots “in the coming weeks and months” and allow consumers to use such products “as a companion to search.”

Google’s investment in Anthropic was reported earlier by the Financial Times. 

[u/reigorius → u/lilbro93]

Chatbot seems a demeaning word for a potential artificial intelligence.

With that said, the movie 'Her' should be on everyone's watch list.

[u/Dodolos → u/reigorius]

It is a chatbot though

[u/Webfarer]

Just ask chatgpt to write an AI for them

[u/Sketch13]

People acting like this is the start to some AI "revolution" or "war", when AI has been undergoing heavy development in many, MANY industries for a while now.

It's just not as flashy or gets in the news like ChatGPT has, so nobody knows about it.

[u/VertexMachine → u/Sketch13]

Yea. And success of ChatGPT even surprised OpenAI. They made it out of 2-years old tech in 13 days. I've been using GPT3 before that for a while and I was also surprised how popular it got for how little new things it provided (essentially the UX... and censorship).

I think OpenAI got extremely lucky with timing. The AI hype was growing in media and general population for a while now. Ofc. it being free + simple to use UX helped a lot too.

[u/viriorum → u/VertexMachine]

I've been using gpt-2, distillgpt-2 on hugging face, (write with transformer), and even some gpt-3 demos which were impressive but had usage caps. Like you said, it being free + all their output labelling by contractors made this perfect storm where its ease of use + usefulness just skyrocketed.

[u/AgentTin → u/VertexMachine]

It's the first implementation that the average person can just sit down and use

[u/BobLoblaw_BirdLaw → u/Sketch13]

This is like the internet in 1997. The public is starting to hear about it when it’s been in use for 20 years prior. The general public is oblivious

[u/bushrod]

Is it really necessary to link to paywalled articles?

[u/iamjackslackofmemes → u/[deleted]]

I doubt it's as high as 10%.

[u/zenospenisparadox → u/[deleted]]

I hate reading articles hidden behind ads, cookie notifications, and 75% filler words in the article itself.

Usually a waste of time.

[u/EnUnLugarDeLaMancha]

Isn't Google supposed to have a really good AI research team? This looks more like an attempt to prevent rivals from buying it than anything else.

[u/aquarain → u/EnUnLugarDeLaMancha]

Intel has an ARM license. These massive corporations accumulate technologies in bulk and you never know where it's going to go. AMD bought a company that built ARM servers back in the day. Killed it off. But the interconnect SeaMicro used is now the Infinity Fabric on every AMD chip that helped them gain share.

[u/nebson10]

400 million seems pretty small compared to Microsoft's 10 billion, what gives? Are they not taking this seriously?

[u/Left_Boat_3632 → u/nebson10]

Buyig it to prevent another company from buying it. Google already has LamDa and has been working on LLMs just as much as OpenAI/Microsoft.

Facebook Research has LLMs similar to chatGPT as well. Anyone who thinks Microsoft/OpenAI is leaps and bounds beyond the other big techs doesn't know the space.

It's just a matter of time (a short amount) before Google and FB release similar products to chatGPT.

[u/foxbones → u/nebson10]

They have had their own internal AI for years. Call any Google Support phone number and an AI is listening and learning from your interaction. A figure I heard floated about while working with them is fully controlled AI support centers by 2030.

[u/Kcnflman]

I’m not sure this “AI revolution” ends well.

[u/metahipster1984 → u/Kcnflman]

These violent delights have violent ends

[u/Feisty_Perspective63 → u/Kcnflman]

Explain why you feel that way

[u/arcosapphire → u/Feisty_Perspective63]

Is this an Eliza reference?

[u/stephcurrysmom → u/Feisty_Perspective63]

There is no regulatory or monetary incentive in place for AI to exist as a benevolent entity.

[u/Picasso320 → u/Feisty_Perspective63]

I have no mouth and I must scream - Harlan Ellison, 1967.

[u/Locupleto]

If MS plays their cards right, they are going to dominate. AI mixes very well will office. OTOH they might screw the pooch with some awful marketing effort mixed in.

[u/SurprisinglyInformed → u/Locupleto]

AI Powered Clippy incoming!

[u/CoherentPanda → u/Locupleto]

The AI features in Teams are really cool, and almost makes me jealous my company doesn't use it.

MS definitely seems to be on the right path to bring us into the future with AI tech. Will be interesting what Google has up their sleeves in the coming days and weeks.

Apple is the big question mark right now. They need an answer to both, and I haven't heard anything positive about them in the AI space.

[u/kattoboiy]

I bet it will be a bland, ad ridden and censored to hell pos that will launch in an unfinished state and Google will shut it down after two weeks because it only gained 0.5 billion users and undershot expectations

[u/SUPRVLLAN → u/kattoboiy]

What exactly is Google censoring (in the west, at least)?

[u/kattoboiy → u/SUPRVLLAN]

Censoring in regards to a hypothetical language model, not Google itself.

[u/FangornEnt → u/kattoboiy]

Would venture to say that Anthropic's product already works better than ChatGPT but that's just my opinion after using both :)

[u/CoherentPanda → u/FangornEnt]

Where can you test Anthropic?

[u/errdayimshuffln]

OpenAI not turning ChatGPT into a free search engine-like tool with ads is gonna be THE mistake of this decade. There is still a little time before Google does it.

Edit: I guess Microsoft thought so too.

[u/joeblow555]

time for the next Google+

[u/brianlangauthor]

Begun, the AI wars have.

[u/OnlyOCfromThisOP]

They are scared of Microsoft integrating CGPT into Bing

[u/DanteJazz]

I just started playing with chat GPT, and despite all the hype, it really is in a fantastic tool for writing short documents. I was really impressed. If Google has something that can do a better job than that would be great. The Google needs to see what ordinary people in management or Line staff need in their work as a tool to help them do their jobs. For example I write policies and procedures as a manager. If I had a tool that helps me write those policies better, that would be fantastic. It has to be easy to use with no learning curve and it has to produce a product that I can adapt for what I need. As for chat GPT replacing google search engine, people don’t understand in the computer world what people like me need. I am not going to stop using Google Chrome, because it is easy to use and it doesn’t have any distracting features. I am always learning new software programs and it’s a waste of my effing time. Having simple and easy to use software that does what it needs to do in order to make my job easier is essential.

[u/Suunaabas]

Didn't they just lay off thousands of employees? A real blessing how they found 400 mil just lying around.

[u/Willinton06 → u/Suunaabas]

They never said they ran out of money tho, they fired people to reduce costs, not to make ends meet

[u/FarceMultiplier → u/Suunaabas]

In the past year they hired 50,000 and laid off 10,000. The whole story isn't properly discussed.

[u/pwalkz → u/Suunaabas]

You think they fired people because they were low on cash?

[u/bigkoi → u/Suunaabas]

Google has $80B+ in cash and is solidly profitable.

They aren't like Amazon which posted a $3B loss just last week.

[u/absentmindedjwc → u/bigkoi]

Don’t assume that Amazon posted a loss because they werent profitable… they posted a loss because they spent all their profits on business growth and investments (like Rivian)

[u/dotjazzz → u/Suunaabas]

Didn't they just lay off thousands of employees?

And? Did those thousands have a working AI chatbot?

A real blessing how they found 400 mil just lying around.

When did they say they didn't have money? They can't improve organisational efficiency just because they have money?

I'm sure there were good engineers that got axed. But vast majority are not able to make a business case or future proofing case to keep them. That's a fact.

[u/Pillowtalk]

It’s really interesting to see Google become Yahoo!

[u/carnifex2005 → u/Pillowtalk]

True. From them getting beaten out of the cloud by Amazon and Microsoft when they concentrated on that before both those companies, to this. I'm not confident on Google ever being a leader in anything other than advertising again.

[u/Imokwhydoyouask_ → u/carnifex2005]

AWS was launched in 2006 while Google Cloud was launched in 2008

[u/DocBrutus]

I’m amazed that Google didn’t just buy ChatGPT.

[u/CoherentPanda → u/DocBrutus]

They already have LaMDA and even some other newer AI software internally, so they probably figured they are far enough ahead to not need to buyout anyone else. They've been doing AI research in the US and China for years, and I'm sure OpenAI would be an incredible undertaking to integrate with all of the Google services.

[u/Morlock43]

Skynet Vs Legion

[u/SooThatGuy]

Oh great, get the robots to fight each other. This should go well.

[u/I_will_delete_myself]

I used to get ChatGPT to mimic the BS of Donald Trump and it was hilarious. They honestly ruined something so great with all the filters they manually inserted into there.

[u/BrobdingnagLilliput]

That seals it! Google will drive out any other competition but abandon the project in a couple years, leaving ChatGPT to be an overwhelming commercial success.