No, it was a perfectly fine question IMHO. it is a broken incentive - it is expected that you design complex systems regardless whether they are useful or not. Try to interview for the role you have to fill, nor for a role you a dreaming you would love to have whenever you're Google2.
If the interview wants you to think about stuff that never happens in your role, I think it is a sign that in your role, you're expected to solve the problems like in the interview.
In context, this bit is about how to deal with the fact that our intuitions on what's worth it vs not worth it in terms of the time it takes to build are likely out-of-date with these new tools:
> For now I think the best we can do is to second guess ourselves: any time our instinct says "don't build that, it's not worth the time" fire off a prompt anyway, in an asynchronous agent session where the worst that can happen is you check ten minutes later and find that it wasn't worth the tokens.
This shouldn't lead to huge maintenance burden because most of the time you'll throw away the result. It's a learning exercise.
Their unreleased LaMDA[1] famously caused one of their own engineers to have a public crashout in 2022, before ChatGPT dropped. Pre-ChatGPT they also showed it off in their research blog[2] and showed it doing very ChatGPT-like things and they alluded to 'risks,' but those were primarily around it using naughty language or spreading misinformation.
I think they were worried that releasing a product like ChatGPT only had downside risks for them, because it might mess up their money printing operation over in advertising by doing slurs and swears. Those sweet summer children: little did they know they could run an operation with a seig-heiling CEO who uses LLMs to manufacture and distribute CSAM worldwide, and it wouldn't make above-the-fold news.
The front runner is not always the winner. If they were able to keep pace with openai while letting them take all the hits and miss steps, it could pay off.
Time will tell if LLM training becomes a race to the bottom or the release of the "open source" ones proves to be a spoiler. From the outside looking while ChatGPT has brand recognition for the average person who could not tell the difference between any two LLMs google offering Gemini in android phones could perhaps supplant them.
Indeed, none of the current AI boom would’ve happened without Google Brain and their failure to execute on their huge early lead. It’s basically a Xerox Parc do-over with ads instead of printers.
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