The person here claims that Google has an amazing GPT-4 killer ready to launch, and that they are just waiting to integrate with ads partners or something.
If you want to believe that Google is intentionally holding it back and, as a diversion, releasing a very buggy software to the public, then why not, but it doesn't make sense at all.
Even in terms of costs, they could force a limit of X messages and then push to upgrade to a paid subscription.
In terms of reputation or safety they have DeepMind as a separate entity.
This is like claiming that Tesla has a revolutionary car, but that Tesla is intentionally not releasing it, and instead waiting that someone else does.
As a fictitious and parallel example: it's not because Xerox invented the mouse that it is a great company for innovation or that they wouldn't get eaten by others.
(site-note: some claims Xerox didn't even invent the mouse).
Regarding transformers:
The transformers guys ("Attention Is All You Need") don't appear to work for Google for a long-time, and the comments from the team are not so glorious from what I see (if I remember well, the Character.AI is very harsh on Google all the time claiming it was not good for innovation).
They may be missing the RLHF part for example or other part of the magic, and between 2017 and 2023 is an insanely long period where many impactful new things have been discovered.
Doing the 90% is easy now with LLMs, but each % of improvement is very difficult.
> If you want to believe that Google is intentionally holding it back and, as a diversion, releasing a very buggy software to the public, then why not, but it doesn't make sense at all.
One reason would be capacity. They've increased their server production at least 4x since the announcement of Bard, and that's recent enough that I feel like any decom and deployment, even if it's 1:1 to existing data centers, hasn't been completed.
This maps to your last point somewhat, since anticipation is hard. Google has learned not to fully open the all the taps since they can't commit to a consistent product. Assistant and Home technologies were heavily encumbered by patent defense, security awareness, and privacy controls, so much so that the product capabilities they advertised during the Pixel 3 launch were permanently rolled back. They're not promoting or promising anything about Bard, if you notice, because people may not appreciate every new feature, but they never forget when you take things away.
Capacity issue may be alleviated by limiting the numbers of users who have access, and then progressively scaling it up, rather than releasing an inferior product (assuming the superior product really exists).
That being said, for all the other points I agree with you.
Google is often a target of any legal claim, so perhaps this makes them more risk-averse too.
Also, it's a meme that when you buy a Google gadget, the customers are its QA team, but it's accurate that they do find ways to sell us products containing their pet technologies so they can gather data and sell them to their real customers - defense, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.
Bard is no different. We'll all be performing the RLHF, and they'll sell off the improvements.
If we passed a law that made it illegal to work for free, companies like Google would be falling over themselves to institute UBI to avoid paying out to their userbases.
