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Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI
The search giant should’ve been first to the chatbot revolution. It wasn’t. So it punched back with late nights, layoffs—and lowering some guardrails.
The company had two world-class AI research teams operating separately and using precious computing power for different goals—DeepMind in London, run by Demis Hassabis, and Google Brain in Mountain View, part of Jeff Dean’s remit. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had recently praised NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews on an earnings call, saying he “used the living daylights out of it.” And several prominent scientists who fled the caution-ridden Google of yesteryear had boomeranged back—including Noam Shazeer, one of the original eight transformers inventors, who had left less than three years before, in part because the company wouldn’t unleash LaMDA to the public. That’s a classic strategy for Google, of course, one that long ago spread to the rest of Silicon Valley: Give us your data, your time, and your attention, check the box on our terms of service that releases us from liability, and we won’t charge you a dime for this cool tool we built.
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