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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, according to OpenAI they started ChatGPT as a demo/experiment and were taken by surprise when it went viral.

It may well be that they also didn't have a product culture as an organization, but were willing to experiment or let small teams do so.

It's still a lesson, but maybe a different one.

With organizational scale it becomes harder and harder to launch experiments under the brand. Red tape increases, outside scrutiny increases. Retaining the ability to do that is difficult.

Google does experiment a fair bit (including in AI, e.g. NotebookLLM and its podcast feature are I think a standout example of trying to see what sticks) but they also tend to try to hide their experiments in developer portals nowadays, which makes it difficult to get a signal from a general consumer audience.

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If I can take a slight tangent. This is what I will remember OpenAI for. Not the Closed vs Open debate. They caused the democratization of access to AI models. Prior to ChatGPT, I would hear about these great models Deep Mind and Google were developing. They'd always stay closed behind the walls of Google.

OpenAI forced Google to release and as a result, we have all of the AI tooling, integrations, and models. Meta's leaning into the stolen Llama code took this further and sparked the Open Source LLM revolution (in addition to the myriad contributors and researchers who built on that).

If we had left it to Google, I suspect they'd release tooling (as they did with TensorFlow) but not an LLM that might compete with their core product..

According to Karen Hao's Empire of AI, this is only half accurate. And I trust what Karen Hao says a lot more.

OpenAI mistakenly thought Anthropic was about to launch a chatbot, and ChatGPT was a scrappy, rushed-out-the-door product made from an intermediate version of GPT-4, meant to one-up them. Of course, they were surprised at how popular it became.

Do you mean an intermediate version of GPT-3? That's more the timeline I'm thinking.

Google is definitely good at experimenting (and yeah NotebookLLM is really cool), which is a product of the bottom-up culture. The lack of a consistent story with regard to AI products however is a testament to the lack of product vision from the top.

NotebookLM came out of Google Labs though, and in collaboration with outside stakeholders. I'm not sure I would call it a success of "bottom-up" culture, but a well realized idea from a dedicated incubator. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the company is so empowered or product oriented.

-> With organizational scale it becomes harder and harder to launch experiments under the brand

I feel like Google tried to solve for this with their `withgoogle.com` domain and it just ends up being confusing or worse still, frustrating when you see something awesome and then nothing ever comes of it.

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