Simon Willison’s Weblog

But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.

— Casey Newton # 15th May 2024, 10:23 pm

One consideration is that such a deep ML system could well be developed outside of Google-- at Microsoft, Baidu, Yandex, Amazon, Apple, or even a startup. My impression is that the Translate team experienced this. Deep ML reset the translation game; past advantages were sort of wiped out. Fortunately, Google’s huge investment in deep ML largely paid off, and we excelled in this new game. Nevertheless, our new ML-based translator was still beaten on benchmarks by a small startup. The risk that Google could similarly be beaten in relevance by another company is highlighted by a startling conclusion from BERT: huge amounts of user feedback can be largely replaced by unsupervised learning from raw text. That could have heavy implications for Google.

— Eric Lehman, internal Google email in 2018 # 11th February 2024, 10:59 pm

The largest model in the PaLM 2 family, PaLM 2-L, is significantly smaller than the largest PaLM model but uses more training compute. Our evaluation results show that PaLM 2 models significantly outperform PaLM on a variety of tasks, including natural language generation, translation, and reasoning. These results suggest that model scaling is not the only way to improve performance. Instead, performance can be unlocked by meticulous data selection and efficient architecture/objectives. Moreover, a smaller but higher quality model significantly improves inference efficiency, reduces serving cost, and enables the model’s downstream application for more applications and users.

— PaLM 2 Technical Report (PDF) # 10th May 2023, 6:43 pm

If you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.

— James Vincent # 23rd March 2023, 12:10 am

Here are some absurdly expensive things you can do on a trip to Tokyo: Buy a golden toilet. There is a toilet in Tokyo that is made of gold and costs around 10 million yen. If you are looking for a truly absurd experience, you can buy this toilet and use it for your next bowel movement. [...]

— Google Bard # 21st March 2023, 6:27 pm