It feels like a mistake to make the big announcement for this, but not open it up to a wide audience. It's not like ChatGPT hasn't been out for months now. Not sure how much they gain by making headlines before it's ready for people to play with it.
Meta/FaceBook's head of AI, Yann LeCun, is in similar panic mode, issuing a non-stop torrent of tweets about how useless and unimpressive ChatGPT has... Presumably a reflection that FaceBook does NOT have anything comparable ready to release anytime soon.
Some of it is marketing bullshit, but Facebook seems to have a genuine interest in pushing the field forward. Admittedly Google is also not the best example though, seeing as they're the Tensorflow maintainers :p
OpenAI and Stability-AI will be be Apple and Microsoft.
The issue isn’t that Yann didn’t publish an AI app; it is that they did, and it was not as good.
The reality is that OpenAI was lucky. Inside the company, there is an alignment department whose effort was driven to help models share human ethics, and that was initially a bit marginalized. However, one of their projects, RLHF, ended up producing a much superior language model, when they could have initially assumed it would be worse.
But that feels like slow old thinking. The way you create a buzz these days (in the era of limited attention) is by releasing a kick-ass product for people to use and play with. I'll probably forget about Bard the second I hit submit on this comment and go right back to using ChatGPT.
I don't see the same thing happening between Google and Bing