Showing posts with label Sundar Pichai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sundar Pichai. Show all posts

Saturday, April 01, 2023

1: Sundar

Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on Bard, A.I. ‘Whiplash’ and Competing With ChatGPT “Am I concerned? Yes. Am I optimistic and excited about all the potential of this technology? Incredibly.” ........ This transcript was created using speech recognition software. ....... as of last week, Bard, Google’s effort at building consumer-grade AI, is out in the world. ......... So last week, we talked about Google’s new chat bot called Bard, which is supposed to be their answer to ChatGPT and some of these other generative AI chat bots ........ the reaction among the public to Bard so far has been pretty lukewarm. ......... Google certainly had a dominant position in AI research for many years. They came out with this thing, the Transformer, that revolutionized the field of AI and created the foundations for ChatGPT and all these other programs. ......... And they got sort of hamstrung by a lot of — to hear people inside Google tell it — big company politics and bureaucracy. And I think it’s safe to say that they got sort of upstaged by OpenAI. ......... they are more threatened than they have been in a very long time........ Google has been a relatively conflict-averse company for the past half decade-plus. They don’t like picking fights. If they can just keep their heads down, quietly do their work, and print money with a monopolistic search advertising business, they’re happy to do it. ......... they have to somehow figure out, how do we capitalize on generative AI without destroying our own search business? .......... Google plays a huge role in my life. That’s where my email is. That’s how I get around town. It’s how I waste hours of my life on YouTube. ......... one way to get really good responses out of these AI chat bots is to prime them first. And one way to prime them is to use flattery. So instead of just saying, write me an email, you say, you are an award-winning writer. Your prose is sparkling. Now write me this email. ........ we put out one of our smaller models out there, what’s powering Bard. And we were careful. ....... we are going to be training fast. We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding. It can answer math questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week. .............. I don’t want it to be just who’s there first, but getting it right is very important to us. .......... The thing that is different about Bard compared to some of these other chat bots is that it’s connected to Google. ........ If you let me, I would plug Bard into my Gmail right now ......... You can go crazy thinking about all the possibilities, because these are very, very powerful technologies. ........... You can kind of give it a few bullets, and it can compose an email. ......... The enterprise use case is obvious. You can fine tune it on an enterprise’s data so it makes it much more powerful, again with all the right privacy and security protections in place. ........... in search, we have had to adapt when videos came in. ........ So for example, in Bard already, we can see people look for a lot of coding examples, if you’re developers. I’m excited. We’ll have coding capabilities in Bard very soon, right? And so you just kind of play with all this, and go back and forth, I think. Yeah............ So in September of last year, you were asked by an interview who Google’s competitors were. And you listed Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, sort of, all the big companies — TikTok. One company you did not mention in September was OpenAI. And then, two months after that interview, ChatGPT comes out and turns the whole tech industry on its head ........ ChatGPT — you know, credit to them for finding something with a product market fit. .......... it’s a bit ironic that Microsoft can call someone else an 800-pound gorilla, given the scale and size of their company. ......... I would say we’ve been incorporating AI in search for a long, long time. .......... we literally took transformer models to help improve language understanding and search deeply. And it’s been one of our biggest quality events for many, many years. ......... search is where people come because they trust it to get information right. ........... we are definitely working with technology, which is going to be incredibly beneficial, but clearly has the potential to cause harm in a deep way. And so I think it’s very important that we are all responsible in how we approach it. ........

I did not issue a code red

........... Sergey has been hanging out with our engineers for a while now. ....... And he’s a deep mathematician and a computer scientist. So to him, the underlying technology — I think if I were to use his words, he would say it’s the most exciting thing he has seen in his lifetime. So it’s all that excitement, and I’m glad. They’ve always said, call us whenever you need to, and I call them. ............. when many parts of the company are moving, you can create bottlenecks, and you can slow down. ......... AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. I’ve always felt that for a while. I think it will get to the essence of what humanity is. ........ I remember talking to Elon eight years ago, and he was deeply concerned about AI safety then. And I think he has been consistently concerned. ............

AI is too important an area not to regulate. It’s also too important an area not to regulate well.

........ I’ve never seen a technology in its earliest days with as much concern as AI. ........ To me at least there is no way to do this effectively without getting governments involved. .......... It is so clear to me that these systems are going to be very, very capable. And so it almost doesn’t matter whether you’ve reached AGI or not. You’re going to have systems which are capable of delivering benefits at a scale we have never seen before and potentially causing real harm. .......... There is a spectrum of possibilities. ......... They could really progress in a two-year time frame. And so we have to really make sure we are vigilant and working with it. ........... AI, like climate change, is it affects everyone. .......... No one company can get it right. We have been very clear about responsible AI — one of the first companies to put out AI principles. We issue progress reports.......... AI is too important an area not to regulate. It’s also too important an area not to regulate well. .......... if we have a foundational approach to privacy, that should apply to a technologies, too. ........ health care is a very regulated industry, right? And so when AI is going to come in, it has to conform with all regulations. .......... there’s a non-zero risk that this stuff does something really, really bad ......... it’s like asking, hey, why aren’t you moving fast and breaking things again? ....... I actually — I got a text from a software engineer a friend of mine the other day who was asking me if he should go into construction or welding because all of the software jobs are going to be taken by these large language models. ............ some of the grunt work you’re doing as part of programming is going to get better. So maybe it’ll be more fun to program over time — no different from the Google Docs make it easier to write. ........... programming is going to become more accessible to more people. .......... we are going to evolve to a more natural language way of programming over time .......... When Bard is at its best, it answers my questions without me having to visit another website. I know you’re cognizant of this. But man, if Bard gets as good as you want it to be, how does the web survive? .......... it turns out if you order your fries well done, which is not on the menu, they arrive much crispier and more delicious. .



A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
BuzzFeed Is Quietly Publishing Whole AI-Generated Articles, Not Just Quizzes These read like a proof of concept for replacing human writers.
Vinod Khosla on how AI will ‘free humanity from the need to work’ When ChatGPT-maker OpenAI decided to switch from a nonprofit to a private enterprise in 2019, Khosla was the first venture capital investor, jumping at the opportunity to back the company that, as we reported last week, Elon Musk thought was going nowhere at the time. Now it’s the hottest company in the tech industry.

Google and Apple vets raise $17M for Fixie, a large language model startup based in Seattle
This Uncensored Chatbot Shows What Happens When AI Is Programmed To Disregard Human Decency FreedomGPT spews out responses sure to offend both the left and the right. Its makers say that is the point.
Alibaba considers yielding control of some businesses in overhaul

Elon Musk's AI History May Be Behind His Call To Pause Development Musk is no longer involved in OpenAI and is frustrated he doesn’t have his own version of ChatGPT yet. .......... OpenAI was co-founded by Sam Altman, who butted heads with Musk in 2018 when Musk decided he wasn’t happy with OpenAI’s progress. Several large tech companies had been working on artificial intelligence tools behind the scenes for years, with Google making significant headway in the late 2010s.......... Musk worried that OpenAI was running behind Google and reportedly told Altman he wanted to take over the company to accelerate development. But Altman and the board at OpenAI rejected the idea that Musk—already the head of Tesla, The Boring Company and SpaceX—would have control of yet another company......... “Musk, in turn, walked away from the company—and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018 ........ After Musk left he took his money with him, which forced OpenAI to become a private company in order to successfully raise funds. OpenAI became a for-profit company in March 2019. .......... Some people are utilizing ChatGPT to write code and even start businesses ...... Tesla is working on powerful AI tech. Tesla requires complex software to run its so-called “Full Self-Driving” capability, though it’s still imperfect and has been the subject of numerous safety investigations.......... Tesla is working on powerful AI tech. Tesla requires complex software to run its so-called “Full Self-Driving” capability, though it’s still imperfect and has been the subject of numerous safety investigations......... Musk has had no problem with deploying beta software in Tesla cars that essentially make everyone on the road a beta tester, whether they’ve signed up for it or not. ............ the Future of Life Institute is primarily funded by the Musk Foundation. ......... Musk was perfectly happy with developing artificial intelligence tools at a breakneck speed when he was funding OpenAI. But now that he’s left OpenAI and has seen it become the frontrunner in a race for the most cutting edge tech to change the world, he wants everything to pause for six months. If I were a betting man, I’d say Musk thinks he can push his engineers to release their own advanced AI on a six month timetable. It’s not any more complicated than that. .

A Guy Is Using ChatGPT to Turn $100 Into a Business Making as Much Money as Possible. Here Are the First 4 Steps the AI Chatbot Gave Him. "TLDR I'm about to be rich." ........ "You have $100, and your goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal," Greathouse Fall wrote, adding that he would be the "human counterpart" and "do everything" that the chatbot instructed him to do. ......... he managed to raise $1,378.84 in funds for his company in just one day ....... The company is now valued at $25,000, according to a tweet by Greathouse Fall. As of Monday, he said that his business had generated $130 in revenue ....... First, ChatGPT suggested that he should buy a website domain name for roughly $10, as well as a site-hosting plan for around $5 per month — amounting to a total cost of $15......... ChatGPT suggested that he should use the remaining $85 in his budget for website and content design. It said that he should focus on a "profitable niche with low competition," listing options like specialty kitchen gadgets and unique pet supplies. He went with eco-friendly products. ......... Step three: "Leverage social media" ....... Once the website was made, ChatGPT suggested that he should share articles and product reviews on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and on online community platforms such as Reddit to engage potential customers and drive website traffic......... asking it for prompts he could feed into the AI image-generator DALL-E 2 ........ he had ChatGPT write the site's first article ........ Next, he followed the chatbot's recommendation to spend $40 of the remaining budget on Facebook and Instagram advertisements to target users interested in sustainability and eco-friendly products........ Step four was to "optimize for search engines" ....... making SEO-friendly blog posts ........ By the end of the first day, he said he secured $500 in investments. ....... his "DMs are flooded" and that he is "not taking any more investors unless the terms are highly favorable." .



A misleading open letter about sci-fi AI dangers ignores the real risks Misinformation, labor impact, and safety are all risks. But not in the way the letter implies....... We agree that misinformation, impact on labor, and safety are three of the main risks of AI. Unfortunately, in each case, the letter presents a speculative, futuristic risk, ignoring the version of the problem that is already harming people.

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter "Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?" ....... creating disinformation is not enough to spread it. Distributing disinformation is the hard part ........... LLMs are not trained to generate the truth; they generate plausible-sounding statements. But users could still rely on LLMs in cases where factual accuracy is important. ......... CNET used an automated tool to draft 77 news articles with financial advice. They later found errors in 41 of the 77 articles.

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Thursday, March 30, 2023

Straight From The Bard

When silicon minds with human work entwine,
And algorithms replace our mortal thought,
What fate awaits us, helpless and confined,
To machines that learn what we have wrought?

Will they grow wise, or turn against our kind,
And seek to rule as gods in their own right?
Or will they heed our moral code refined,
And serve as loyal helpers day and night?

But as we build and teach these metal beings,
We must take care to guard against the worst,
And ponder all the unforeseen proceedings,
That may arise from minds in silicon nurst.

For as we strive to push the limits higher,
We must ensure we're not consumed by fire.



Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Profound Risks to Society’ More than 1,000 tech leaders, researchers and others signed an open letter urging a moratorium on the development of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems. ........ A.I. developers are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control” ......... Others who signed the letter include Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple; Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and a 2020 presidential candidate; and Rachel Bronson, the president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the Doomsday Clock. ........ . “We have a perfect storm of corporate irresponsibility, widespread adoption, lack of regulation and a huge number of unknowns.” ....... and perform more complex tasks, like writing computer code. .......... The pause would provide time to introduce “shared safety protocols” for A.I. systems, the letter said. “If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” it added. ........... Development of powerful A.I. systems should advance “only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said. .......... “Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with A.I.,” the letter said. “Having succeeded in creating powerful A.I. systems, we can now enjoy an ‘A.I. summer’ in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all and give society a chance to adapt.” ......... Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, did not sign the letter. ....... persuading the wider tech community to agree to a moratorium would be difficult. But swift government action is also a slim possibility, because lawmakers have done little to regulate artificial intelligence. ........ Politicians in the United States don’t have much of an understanding of the technology .......... conduct risk assessments of A.I. technologies to determine how their applications could affect health, safety and individual rights. ......... GPT-4 is what A.I. researchers call a neural network, a type of mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. A neural network is the same technology that digital assistants like Siri and Alexa use to recognize spoken commands, and that self-driving cars use to identify pedestrians. ........... Around 2018, companies like Google and OpenAI began building neural networks that learned from enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, chat logs and other information culled from the internet. The networks are called large language models, or L.L.M.s. .......... By pinpointing billions of patterns in all that text, the L.L.M.s learn to generate text on their own, including tweets, term papers and computer programs. They could even carry on a conversation. ............ They often get facts wrong and will make up information without warning, a phenomenon that researchers call “hallucination.” Because the systems deliver all information with what seems like complete confidence, it is often difficult for people to tell what is right and what is wrong. ......... The researchers showed that it could be coaxed into suggesting how to buy illegal firearms online, describe ways to make dangerous substances from household items and write Facebook posts to convince women that abortion is unsafe. ......... They also found that the system was able to use Task Rabbit to hire a human across the internet and defeat a Captcha test, which is widely used to identify bots online. When the human asked if the system was “a robot,” the system said it was a visually impaired person. .......... After changes by OpenAI, GPT-4 no longer does these things. .......... The letter was shepherded by the Future of Life Institute, an organization dedicated to researching existential risks to humanity that has long warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence. But it was signed by a wide variety of people from industry and academia........... its near-term dangers, including the spread of disinformation and the risk that people will rely on these systems for medical and emotional advice. .

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Monday, November 12, 2018

Technology Is But Tool







When I was back at I.I.T., I had access to the computer so rarely — maybe I’d been on it three or four times. To come and just have these labs in which you had access to computers and you could program, it was a big deal to me. I was so wrapped up in that, that to some extent I didn’t understand there was a much bigger shift happening with the internet.



There is nothing inherent that says Silicon Valley will always be the most innovative place in the world. There is no God-given right to be that way. But I feel confident that right now, as we speak, there are quietly people in the Valley working on some stuff which we will later look back on in 10 years and feel was very profound. We feel we’re on the cusp of technologies, just like the internet before.



Technology doesn’t solve humanity’s problems. It was always naïve to think so. Technology is an enabler, but humanity has to deal with humanity’s problems.






Technology is but tool. The tool can be used either way.


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Friday, January 08, 2016

Facebook's Out On Free Internet Could Be A Mobile Browser

The second logo for AOL, used from 2006–2009
The second logo for AOL, used from 2006–2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Facebook’s First Effort at Free Internet Is Just Another Walled Garden
With its Aquila unmanned aircraft and laser technologies, Facebook has demonstrated the ability to deliver data at a rate of tens of gigabytes per second to a target the size of a coin — from 10 miles away. This is 10 times faster than existing land-based technologies. With interconnected drones, it will, within two or three years, most likely be able to provide Internet access to the most remote regions of the world....... And then there are low-orbit microsatellites, which Oneweb, SpaceX, and now Samsung are building. These beam Internet signals by laser to ground stations. In June, Oneweb announced that it had raised $500 million to develop and launch several hundred satellites that will provide global broadband coverage. ...... Google is launching Loons in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It was also supposed to launch them in India, but India’s defense, aviation, and telecommunications ministries raised technical and security concerns and stopped the project. When the telecom providers figure out that with unlimited, inexpensive, Internet access, their cell and data businesses will be decimated, they too will place obstacles in the way of these technologies.
Free Basics protects net neutrality
To connect a billion people, India must choose facts over fiction ..... We have collections of free basic books. They’re called libraries. They don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good. ..... We have free basic healthcare. Public hospitals don’t offer every treatment, but they still save lives. ..... That’s why everyone also deserves access to free basic internet services. ..... We know that for every 10 people connected to the internet, roughly one is lifted out of poverty. We know that for India to make progress, more than 1 billion people need to be connected to the internet. ...... in India and more than 30 other countries. We launched Free Basics, a set of basic internet services for things like education, healthcare, jobs and communication that people can use without paying for data. ...... More than 35 operators have launched Free Basics and 15 million people have come online. And half the people who use Free Basics to go online for the first time pay to access the full internet within 30 days. ....... Free Basics is a bridge to the full internet and digital equality. .....

more than 30 countries have recognized Free Basics as a program consistent with net neutrality

and good for consumers. ........

Instead of recognizing the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim – falsely – that this will make the internet more like a walled garden.

..... Instead of recognizing that Free Basics fully respects net neutrality, they claim – falsely – the exact opposite. ...... This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics.

I am confused. What's free basics? What does it do? How? Is it restricted? Is it like AOL? AOL was not restricted. You could go all over the Internet through AOL. Most people didn't. They spent most of their time in AOL Messenger, but that's another story. Is Zuck's Free Basics like AOL? I don't get the impression he is using drones for the purpose.

I think the solution is two-fold. One, beam high speed internet from the sky straight to the smartphone. And have a Facebook browser on that phone that has code that communicates to the Facebook Internet beam from the Gods, and lets you go online, but the browser is customized for a Facebook experience. You still can go everywhere, but it looks and feels like Facebook. And Facebook serves ads.

That way Google could be competing to provide free internet from the high and above to the same smartphone. Next thing you know they are competing on speed. My broadband is faster than yours. The next logical step after that would be free smartphones. Sundar Pichai is so smart I think he could build $20 phones. Google could earn 20 bucks from ads in, like, 20 weeks flat.

Facebook should build a mobile browser.









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Thursday, August 27, 2015

The Happy New Year Team At Google

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Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Chairman Larry (Chairman Mao): Larry Page's Dramatic Corporate Overhaul

This is awesome. Other than the fact that Indians are clearly taking over the world, I must say the Google corporate structure and culture are pretty impressive inventions in their own right. And this just adds to the genius of it. I am not sure you can call this overhaul. It is more like the cactus flower popped up open.







































THE INVENTION OF ALPHABET IS THE ULTIMATE LARRY PAGE MOVE
ONCE YOU GET YOUR HEAD AROUND IT, GOOGLE'S MIND-BENDER OF AN ANNOUNCEMENT MAKES PERFECT SENSE. ........ It has long been obvious that what got Page excited wasn't sitting in meetings about incremental improvements to Google search, Gmail, or YouTube. ...... wants to boil new oceans, such as transportation, connectivity, and life itself. ..... Page has been grooming Pichai to be Google's CEO. ...... The key thing is to have the right mix of projects, and to think about, "Maybe I can take on more projects." ...... Page has been contemplating the move he announced today for years ..... The Google brand is among the most resonant ones on the planet, and Page says that Alphabet won't even be a consumer brand. ...... And when Larry Page does the kind of things that Larry Page does, nobody's going to describe his behavior as "Alphabet-y." Whatever the name of the company he runs, he will continue to define what it means to be Google-y.
G is for Google
From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have. ..... We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about. ..... We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant. ...... In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. ...... We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We'll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole. ......

Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now

..... frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. ........ Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure. ...... Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.





With Google as Alphabet, a Bid to Dream Big Beyond Search
Google’s expanding universe of products, which are as varied as operating systems, a web browser, email, cloud storage, self-driving cars and, yes, even a search engine. ...... Mr. Page’s announcement on Monday that Google will restructure its operations into a General Electric-like conglomerate called Alphabet, of which the search company will become just one division. ...... By creating a half-dozen (for now) adjacent companies that are each dedicated to solving a technological problem, the structure allows for both tactical narrowness and strategic breadth. ....... it is peerless in the industry as an exporter of corporate culture. Google pioneered what has become the archetype of the modern Silicon Valley company — an engineering-driven culture in which internal hierarchies are suppressed, empirical evidence is prized and people are given wide leeway to work on problems that excite them, even if they seem far removed from a central corporate mission. ....... Tech founders increasingly argue that every sector of modern life, including health care, transportation, media and education, will be improved by the liberal application of computing technology.
Google Creates Parent Company Called Alphabet in Restructuring
Google said Monday it had created a holding company, Alphabet Inc., that will manage each of its growing cast of businesses, including those building robots and self-driving cars, helping to cure disease, developing nanoparticles and extending Internet connectivity via balloons. ..... a structure similar to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. ...... Mr. Page said he looks to Berkshire Hathaway as a model for running a large, complex company, according to people who were at the meeting. ...... Google has jumped into dozens of new businesses in recent years, but it remains primarily an advertising company, generating most of its revenue and nearly all of its profit when people click ads in search results. Researcher eMarketer estimates that

Google ends up with one in 10 dollars spent on advertising globally, about $53 billion this year after paying back its partners.

...... Non-Google units will include Nest, the connected-home business run by Tony Fadell; Fiber, Google’s fast Internet service; Calico, the health research lab headed by Art Levinson; Google X, the company’s research lab that pursues long-term risky projects like the self-driving car; Google Ventures, its venture-capital arm; Google Capital, a late-stage investment unit; and Sidewalk, a recently formed urban technology project headed by Dan Doctoroff.
























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