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Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

semianalysis.com

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Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#291

Post by digging »

visarga wrote: post #99
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #86

This is easily among the rare highest quality articles/comments I've read in the past weeks, perhaps months (on LLMs/AI since that's what I am particularly interested in). And this was for internal consumption before it was made public. Reinforces my recent impression that so much that's being made for public consumption now is shallow and it is hard to find the good stuff. And sadly, increasing so even on HN. As I w…

I've been saying the same things for weeks, right here and in the usual places. Basically - OpenAI will not be able to continue to commercialise chatGPT-3.5, they will have to move to GPT-4 because the open source alternatives will catch up. Their island of exclusivity is shrinking fast. In a few months nobody will want to pay for GPT-4 either when they can have private, cheap equivalents. So GPT-5 it is for OpenAI.…

> I'm wondering how many of the requests will be so complex as to require GPT-5

I am not sure the pessimism is warranted. True that few people have the need to upgrade from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 now, but if GPT-5 is another serious leap in capabilities, it might have an effect closer to the difference between old chatbots (useless, interesting) and ChatGPT (immediate economic impact, transforming some jobs). Or at any rate, we should expect such a leap to occur soon, even if it's not GPT-5.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#293

Post by lanza »

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

I mean... your argument is structurally the same as his. "I once saw X happen and thus X will happen again."

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#294

Post by kpw94 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

The higher up failed to see the difference in "users", as well as use cases.

In Wikipedia, the user is same as the content creator: the general public, with a subset of it contributing to the Wikipedia content.

In OpenStreetMaps, one category of users are also creators: general public needs a "map" product, and a subset of them like contributing to the content.

But there's another category of users: businesses, who keep their hours/contact/reviews updated. OpenStreetMap doesn't have a nice UX for them.

As for use cases: underlying map data sure, but one needs strong navigation features, "turn right after the Starbucks", up-to-date traffic data.

This all makes it so different from Wikipedia vs Encarta.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#295

Post by huijzer »

As many point out in this thread, there are very valid counter arguments against the ideas presented in this memo.

This "AI war" starts to look like Russian vs. American "leaks". Any time something leaks, you have basically no information because it could be true, it could be false, or it could be false with some truth sprinkled in.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#297

Post by kelsolaar »

valine wrote: post #282
CSMastermind wrote: post #192

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

Open source works well when the work is inherently cool and challenging enough to keep people engaged. Linux and Blender are two of the most successful open source projects, and the thing they have in common is that problems they solve are problems engineers enjoy working on. Mapping intersections is extremely boring in comparison. The sheer quantity of boring work needed to bring open street maps up to the quality o…

And arguably Blender is much more innovative and achieving faster progress than proprietary and commercial software such as Autodesk Maya.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#298

Post by Animats »

skybrian wrote: post #195

This gets attention due to being a leak, but it’s still just one Googler’s opinion and it has signs of being overstated for rhetorical effect. In particular, demos aren’t the same as products. Running a demo on one person’s phone is an important milestone, but if the device overheats and/or gets throttled then it’s not really something you’d want to run on your phone. It’s easy to claim that a problem is “solved” wit…

It comes across as something from an open source enthusiast outside Google. Note the complete lack of references to monetization. Also, there's no sense of how this fits with other Google products. Given a chat engine, what do you do with it? Integrate it with search? With Gmail? With Google Docs? LLMs by themselves are fun, but their use will be as components of larger systems.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#299

Post by Scubabear68 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

I stopped using Google Maps in my car with CarPlay, because the map would lag by about 5 seconds to reality, which is really bad at say 55 mph in a place where you’re not familiar.

Been using Apple Maps now for six months, and very happy with it. No lag, and very useful directions like “turn left at the second stop light from here”.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#300

Post by frabcus »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #178

The question I'd love to be able to ask the author is how, in fact, this is different from search. Google successfully built a moat around that, but one can argue, too, that it should not have been long-lived. True, there was the secrete page-rank sauce, but sooner or later everyone had that. Other corporations could crawl anything and index whatever at any cost (i.e. Bing), yet search, which is in some sense also a…

One example - they mine people's labour of searching beyond the first page of results - so when a small % of people really dig into results, they can infer which the good sites are deeper in (e.g. by when you settle on one).

Bing doesn't have enough traffic to do this as well, so is less good at finding quality new sites, reducing overall quality.

Source: Doing SEO, but about 8 years ago now, the ecosystem will have changed.

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