Many of Google's products were second, or later, to market. Google does not care.

Isn't it generally very hard to be first to market? And even if you are it's more likely that someone coming in later will take your lunch.

Apple wasn't the first one to try to make a successful smartphone, but they had resources, know-how, and tried at a better time with fewer unknowns around.

Or were just willing to adapt when others didn’t. Blackberry mocked the touchscreen for years until finally coming around and their initial implementation was awful.

Blackberry Torch??

That's okay if they can leapfrog.

Google Maps wasn't the first map product. We all used mapquest way before. But Google Maps was technologically advanced. Ajax made maps usable for the first time.

Gmail wasn't the first webmail. Hotmail had millions of customers already. But Google gave people unlimited space to store old email, whereas email in the old days filled up your inboxes and needed to be deleted.

Question is if they can and will leapfrog.

Google Plus was a sign of desperation and utterly failed. The dozens and dozens of different Messengers (sorry I don't even know what the latest one they're pushing is, RCS?) all failed.

As an organization we will see in the coming months and years if Google can still overtake others when coming in from behind or not.

>But Google gave people unlimited space to store old email

This isn't correct. Gmail launched with 1GB per user, which was way higher than other services, and they did keep doubling the storage space year-after-year, but it was never unlimited until Google Apps offered unlimited storage for businesses and schools.

That is true. You're technically correct.

In 2004 1GB of email was effectively unlimited though. Keep in mind hotmail offered 2MB and only increased that 125x when Gmail launched.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/hotmail-to-o...

That assumes that training on the output of another language model somehow gives you the ability to improve your model and to catch up somehow

Well, it does, that's how we got Alpaca from LLaMA.

It does. In general this is known as teacher-student training or knowledge distillation. It works better if you have access to the activations of the model but you can work with just outputs as well.

Does it work even if you don't control the inputs?

Ascribing actual human emotion to a giant corporation like a google is probably not a good idea. Their motivations aren't going be heavily dictated by feelings of shame at being late out of the gate.

Google’s been second banana to openai for a few years now, right?

The funny part is that deepmind's tech (and some of Google Brain's research) seems to be as good as openAI's or better, but Google's unwillingness/inability to productionize these systems is keeping them back. It seems like the issue is only with the management, and I'll be looking forward to reading about Google's version of Fumbling the Future[0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Com...

I think Amazon was first in the (free) banana business

you joke, but first producy they changed on whole foods were the bananas.

before: organic (south america) and regular (central ou SEA) for 69, 59.

then: both chikita's brand with regular and organic stickers (clearly the same produce, always from SEA) for 49 and 39 cents.

thats was days after the announcement

Did you inadvertently reverse to regular/organic order, or was organic cheaper after?