I 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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vineyardmike 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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...

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brador 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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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sarchertech 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Who knows? If we’d never moved on from trade secrets to patents, we might be a hundred years behind.

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cma 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair, Google has a patent on the transformer architecture. Their page rank patent monopoly probably helped fund the R&D.

	▲	dboreham 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They also had a patent on map/reduce.

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nsxwolf 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It would have been nice for me to be able to work a few more years and be able to retire

	▲	dimitrios1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		will your retirement be enjoyable if everyone else around you is struggling?