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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Google for 10 years in AI and invented suggestive language from wordnet/bag of words.

As much as what you are saying sounds right I was there when sundar made the call to bury proto LLM tech because he felt the world would be damaged for it.

And I don’t even like the guy.

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> sundar made the call to bury proto LLM tech

Then where did nano banana and friends come from? Did Google reverse course? Or were you referring to something else being buried?

Neema was running a fully fledged Turing passing chatbot in 2019. It was suppressed. Then written about in open source and openAI copied it. Then Google was forced to compete.

This is all well known history.

This was long before. Google had conversational LLMs before ChatGPT (though they weren’t as good in my recollection), and they declined to productize. There was a sense at the time that you couldn’t productize anything with truly open ended content generation because you couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t say something problematic.

See Facebook’s Galactica project for an example of what Google was afraid would happen: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-lar...

I'm having a hard time believing this, or at least understanding the decision (not on your part). Why wouldn't they just continue R&D on it rather than drop it entirely?

Many products we use every day start out unsafe and dangerous during the early stages. Why would this be any different?

And why allow the paper to be published?

You’re applying logic to what was actually a series of major oversights.

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