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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

So in general and from the uninformed outside it seems like OpenAI (120 employees?) is outperforming Alphabet (187k employees). Is there any truth to that notion?

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It’s apples and oranges imo. Google owns Wayze which is hitting the streets in SF this year with autonomous taxis. That’s huge if it goes well. There are of course other non-public models Google has developed like Imagen (diffusion model) and LaMDA (Google engineer convinced it was sentient). So I wouldn’t discount Google at all.

In terms of granting direct access to machine learning models, OpenAI has Google beat. But that’s not Google’s business model. And it remains to be seen if it’s a viable business model at all.

Google has models that are at parity with or outperform OpenAIs models at most tasks, they just don’t bring them to market quickly or build their brand around them as strongly as OpenAI does.

See Imagen for example - https://imagen.research.google/

If Google is to be believed, this outperforms Dall-E - and I’ve heard from people that use it that in general, it does perform better than Dall-E.

Doesn't do them any good to do nothing with it.

I don't get Google's brand or leadership anymore. They're staring disruption to their core revenue stream in the face and acting like the "everything is fine" dog.

Meanwhile Microsoft is playing dimensional chess across multiple industries and key developing areas of research.

It's very possible they are doing something with them, just not the sort of thing OpenAI is doing. Google could have a model just as capable as Whisper running in their Google Cloud or Assistant transcription service - but they might have upgraded from their previous model without any announcement or blog post.

Are you saying they should have more bombast in their product announcements?

It’s quite simple, actually. State of the art research gets attention and attracts top tier researchers. As long as they’re working for Google they’re not working for Bing. The research is sometimes useful but even if it’s not it is red meat for their researchers.

However although the models of today are interesting, they’re not consistent enough for many business applications. It’s not good enough to generate realistic cartoon characters most of the time but sometimes they randomly have 4 arms. Or you have a language model that can say interesting things but can’t be relied upon for basic facts. Maybe some day we will be there but not today.

> If Google is to be believed, this outperforms Dall-E - and I’ve heard from people that use it that in general, it does perform better than Dall-E.

Google actually surpassed its own model[0], first with Parti[1], which unlike DALL-E could even correctly insert text in the image, then with Imagen Video[2], which does as the name implies.

[0]: https://paperswithcode.com/sota/text-to-image-generation-on-...

[1]: https://parti.research.google/

[2]: https://imagen.research.google/video/

Google makes more money than OpenAI, so I wouldn't say that.

Also, OpenAI is basically a subsidiary of Microsoft at this point.

keep in mind that Google also works on other products than AI (e.g. Android), and that the best model is not necessarily the best for the business. E.g. it might be too costly to operate certain models as Googles scale, and so they would need to pick a compromise between quality of results, runtime cost and scalability.

Outperforming in what sense? AI model capabilities?

It could well be that 187K employees is a disadvantage, not just economically, but because every project has too many cooks in the kitchen so to say, and it has too much politics.

A tiny fraction of that 187k employees is working on AI. Total employee count is a silly metric.

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