Microsoft has dominated BIG TECH headlines over the last few months, thanks largely to a drumbeat of headlines involving their partner OpenAI and its world-shaping ChatGPT.

So awe-striking is Microsoft's hand right now, it has made rival companies' advancements, like Apple's recently announced and insanely powerful M2 MacBook Pros, look pedestrian in comparison.

But now Google has entered the chat.

And by "entered the chat", we mean that CEO Sundar Pichai - Pich-AI? - released a distressingly long 15,000-word(!) treatise on its own endeavors in AI, signaling a counter attack... maybe... at some point in the future... when and if it is responsible to do so... 💤

We read this thing so you don't have to... with the help of ChatGPT.

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https://preview.redd.it/bosc4qx5s6fa1.jpg?width=781&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=5220fb6160696057cf2479a90b3cda717785cba0

Here's what Google is working on, in plain English:

• Google is, of course, trying to solve complex problems to create AI that helps understand, categorize, and generate text, images, audio, and video
• They are making progress but don't appear to be ready to release any one product similar to ChatGPT, however specific use cases will be spoon fed into existing applications, like Gmail, YouTube, and the Pixel phone
• They are working on Chain of Thought prompting, which breaks down requests into individual steps, and on models fine-tuned for specific use cases, like translation and medical contexts
• They want to create a single model that can work in many different use cases, regardless of context-- this is the hardest part
• But the most overwhelming takeaway is their insistence on "Responsible AI"--  releasing AI in a way that is not harmful to the world so we're not flooded with biased machines and fake images and video

There's a saying that if you can't describe what your business or product does in a few sentences, it's probably a failure. There's a whiff of that here. 15,000 complex words to basically say "hey, we're not there yet"... all while ChatGPT is accessible and useful to humans with even a moderate IQ.

Google will release a series of blog posts updating their progress... signaling that no major products or features on the level with ChatGPT are expected to be available for widespread use this year.

Not a great look.

Worse is that the New York Times reports today that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were brought in for Google's "code red" moment last month.

They met with the executive team to discuss AI and adding chatbot features to search, a topic they rarely weigh in on these days.

A slide presentation obtained by The Times outlines a less-than-stellar AI product road map-- as summarized BY CHATGPT!

• They plan to offer software developers and other companies a list of A.I. programs, including image-creation technology to bolster revenue for their Cloud division
• MakerSuite will be offered as a tool to help other businesses create their own A.I. prototypes in internet browsers with two Pro versions
• In May, they plan to announce Colab + Android Studio, a tool to make it easier to build apps for Android smartphones that will generate, complete, and fix code
• Another code generation and completion tool, called PaLM-Coder 2, is also in the works
• Google will demonstrate a version of its search engine with its ChatGPT competitor LaMBDA this year, but it's unclear whether it will actually be released to the public this year
• Google lags behind OpenAI's self-reported metrics when it comes to identifying content that is hateful, toxic, sexual or violent
• OpenAI bested Google tools in each category and Google tools fell short of human accuracy in assessing content

Meanwhile, today Google laid off 12,000 employees. 6% of its workforce.

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Disclaimer: This is a cross-post, see here the OG. All credits to them for this DD.