Google announces 2024 season of docs

[Posted February 8, 2024 by daroc]

On February 2, Google announced this year's "Season of Docs", a program complementing its Summer of Code program by providing funding to open source projects to hire technical writers to improve their documentation. Interested projects have until April 2 to apply.

Google Season of Docs provides direct grants to open source projects to improve their documentation and gives professional technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in open source. Together we raise awareness of open source, of docs, and of technical writing.

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Posted Feb 9, 2024 7:01 UTC (Fri) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (4 responses)

Oh, great, it seems they need some human material to seed their next round of LLMs.

Probably still recovering from the shock that Microsoft undercut them with their clever marketing gag. Poor thing, it has no moat.

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Posted Feb 9, 2024 9:53 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

This is not a new program. It's been around for several years.

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Posted Feb 9, 2024 10:14 UTC (Fri) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (2 responses)

> Probably still recovering from the shock that Microsoft undercut them with their clever marketing gag. Poor thing, it has no moat.

Apologies, I must be severely out of the loop. What marketing gag and what's this thing about moats?

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Posted Feb 9, 2024 11:03 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

Sounds like an oblique reference to the leaked blog post from an anonymous Google researcher at https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and... which argued that open source Large Language Models will outcompete Google and OpenAI (ChatGPT) - those companies have no "moat" in the Warren Buffett sense of a persistent competitive advantage. (It's not really about open source though, it's mostly talking about open-source-ish communities tinkering with Meta's LLM in violation of its license agreement). And I guess the "marketing gag" was Microsoft integrating ChatGPT with all their products, including Bing, which led to Google prematurely releasing their own inferior LLM chatbot. And I think it has no relevance to the Summer of Docs, it's just general snark about Google.

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Posted Feb 10, 2024 8:09 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

One hundred points on the "moat". Although my guess would be that the anonymus Google researcher was referring to Shoshana Zuboff (who doesn't explicitly credit Buffett, but may well have picked up that term from him).

As to the "gag". Everyone and their dog knew since a while that "running recognizers in reverse" produced something akin to (crippled) human output. The most colourful example "in the wild" was perhaps Google's (oh?) DeepDream [1], ca 2015. So everyone and their dog (at least those with enough dogs -- uh -- resources) has been working on chatty things. But they all were wary of that thing misbehaving at a large scale, Microsoft is still wiping off egg from their face from that (was it 2020?) Sydney episode on Twitter.

So what they did is to fund OpenAI to the tune of $1B, to give them the resources they needed to build credible guardrails [2] (and you need *a lot* of human resources for that), pushed them over the edge and watched (the egg would, so they hoped, be on someone else's face, and the model theirs). Soon they dumped another $12B on top of that.

The press was ravish and everyone was talking about "AI". *That* was the gag. They sold everyone a LLM as "AI".

Facebook threw a temper tantrum and "open sourced" the model they've been working on after that.

I must admit that I felt a bit vindicated when I read [2], [3]. That had been my hunch all along.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream
[2] Ask the thing about legal or medical advice to know what I mean
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/09/cha...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/technology/ai-chatgpt-...