alt Hacker NewsI was just thinking earlier today how in an alternate universe, probably not too far removed from our own, Google has a monopoly on transformers and we are all stuck with a single GPT-3.5 level model, and Google has a GPT-4o model behind the scenes that it is terrified to release (but using heavily internally).
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brador • yesterday at 9:28 PM
Now think about how often the patent system has stifled and stalled and delayed advancement for decades per innovation at a time.
Where would we be if patents never existed?
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nsxwolf • yesterday at 9:23 PM
It would have been nice for me to be able to work a few more years and be able to retire
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This was basically almost real.
Before ChatGPT was even released, Google had an internal-only chat tuned LLM. It went "viral" because some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus. This is partially why Google was so ill equipped to even start competing - they had fresh wounds of a crazy media circus.
My pet theory though is that this news is what inspired OpenAI to chat-tune GPT-3, which was a pretty cool text generator model, but not a chat model. So it may have been a necessary step to get chat-llms out of Mountain View and into the real world.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-c...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fi...