alt Hacker News> sundar made the call to bury proto LLM tech
Then where did nano banana and friends come from? Did Google reverse course? Or were you referring to something else being buried?
Replies
tsunamifury • today at 5:50 AM
Neema was running a fully fledged Turing passing chatbot in 2019. It was suppressed. Then written about in open source and openAI copied it. Then Google was forced to compete.
This is all well known history.
This was long before. Google had conversational LLMs before ChatGPT (though they weren’t as good in my recollection), and they declined to productize. There was a sense at the time that you couldn’t productize anything with truly open ended content generation because you couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t say something problematic.
See Facebook’s Galactica project for an example of what Google was afraid would happen: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-lar...