Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sort of confused -- so Google has had this amazing, breakthrough chat tech but just didn't feel like making it available?

I asked ChatGPT and it had this to say:

> is google's LaMDA available to the public? how does it compare to chatGPT in quality?

> Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is not currently available to the public. However, it has been used in a number of Google's products, such as Google Assistant and Google Meet's "smart compose" feature. It is not clear how it compares in quality to ChatGPT, as the models have different training data and architectures, and are used for different purposes. However, LaMDA is specifically designed for dialogue generation, while GPT-3 is a more general-purpose language model.

Assuming ChatGPT isn't lying to me, if that's the best Google could do with the tech, at the very best they suffer from an absolutely devestating lack of ambition and creativity in their application of the tech. (Or perhaps they're just moving very slow.)

Anyway, hopefully all this does motivate Google to do some impressive things.

Or perhaps it's the innovator's dilemma. Why would they voluntarily cannibalise their ad business by offering a chat interface that means users don't have to visit websites?

in the other article here the deepmind guy mentioned they might release the bot once it's able to cite its sources which makes total sense

I don't think it's any specific scenario like that they're afraid of.

It's more that the changes this technology will lead to are extremely hard to predict, and Alphabet (and Alphabets many powerful friends) have far more to lose than to gain.

As I understand, a couple of the lead Google scientists from LaMDA went on to form character.ai which, for me, checks all the boxes that an LLM should. I haven't really seen many people try to compare it with ChatGPT, and I've never used the latter, but from using the former quite a bit I think it's very comparable to what people have done with ChatGPT.

I tried talking to the "Ask me anything" bot suggested on the main page, comparing it to ChatGPT. It's pretty good, but definitely not as good as ChatGPT. ChatGPT is usually so flawless it passes some sort of phase-transition threshold where it just feels completely natural.

(I'm not sure if a different bot would've been better. It seems like the sites have slightly different purposes.)

You may be right about that, but I don't think any of the bots on the main page are particuarly good examples; to really get an idea of what capabilities it has I'd recommend creating a bot, playing around a bit with the example dialogue section you can feed into it, and then having a few rounds of conversation where you aggressively probe topics and vote on several possible replies before accepting one.

I still need to check out ChatGPT I guess, if something new hasn't blown them all away by the time I get to it.

Not sure if you got downvoted for naively believing ChatGPT, but it warns you that it has been trained on data up to year 2021 - so the answer would be outdated, even if it was correct.

They say it's not ready for prime time, probably because it's way too easy to make it say wrong or offensive things that would damage their reputation, and because they haven't figured out how to monetize it. I also think they got comfy with their money printer and were slow to respond to the competition, just like YouTube was with TikTok.

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