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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”

#661

Post by intended »

kweingar wrote: post #659
safety1st wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…

> In Google's case they are still really focused on search whereas LLMs arguably move the focus to answers. I would love to see what proportion of searches are questions that would benefit from natural language answers. The huge majority of my searches would not be improved by LLMs and in fact would probably be made worse. “Thai food near me”, “IRS phone number”, “golang cmp documentation”

Frankly, it’s more about the number of ads and low relevance.

Old google was simply faster to use.

GPT for search is google without ads

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

#662

Post by whywhywhywhy »

reissbaker wrote: post #368
tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

GPT-4 is so much better for complex tasks that I wouldn't use anything else. Trying to get 3.5 to do anything complicated is like pulling teeth, and using something worse than 3.5... Oof. TBH this feels like cope from Google; Bard is embarrassingly bad and they expected to be able to compete with OpenAI. In my experience, despite their graph in the article that puts them ahead of Vicuna-13B, they're actually behind..…

>Similarly, StableDiffusion's image quality progress has in my experience stalled out, whereas Midjourney continues to dramatically improve every couple months, and easily beats SD. Open source isn't a magic bullet for quality.

MJ only does one style, and you can emulate that just fine in SD if thats what you want.

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

#663

Post by wing-_-nuts »

dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

There are two things that make a good LLM. The amount of data available for training, and the amount of compute available. Google's bard sucks in comparison to Open AI, and even compared to Bing. It's pretty clear that GPT4 has some secret sauce that's giving them a competitive edge.

I also don't think that Open Source LLMs are that big of a threat, for exactly this reason. They will always be behind on the amount of data and compute available to the 'big players'. Sure, AI will increasingly be incorporated into various software products, but those products will be calling out to big tech apis with the best model. There will be some demand for private LLMs trained on company data, but they will only be useful in narrow specialties.

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

#664

Post by generalizations »

Animats wrote: post #298
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.

Honestly, it kinda fits my perception of Google, which is that they don't really have good business sense for creating new products - they invent first, find applications after. This 'leak' feels like it has that same kind of perspective.

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

#665

Post by aero-deck »

computerex wrote: post #513
aero-deck wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. What you have in mind is already how the masses interact AI. There is little value-add for making machine translation, auto-correct and video recommendations better. I can think of a myriad of use-cases for AI that involve custom-tuning foundation models to user-specific environments. Think of an app that can detect bad dog behavior, or an app that gives you pointers on your golf swing. The moat for AI is g…

Fine tuning isn't a thing for foundational models though, it's all about in context learning.

that means there's no money in making foundation models - the economics are broken.

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

#666

Post by InCityDreams »

dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

>They'll also find a way to integrate this in a way where you don't have to directly pay for the capability, as it's paid in other ways: ads.

I fear you are correct.

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

#667

Post by DannyBee »

reissbaker wrote: post #593
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

I think Satya Nadella put it pretty well in an interview: ad revenue, especially from search, is incremental to Microsoft; to Google, it's everything. So while Microsoft is willing to have worse margins on search ads in order to win marketshare from Google, Google has to defend all of their margins — or else they become significantly less profitable in their core business. LLMs cost a lot more than traditional search…

"OpenAI gets paid by MS"

Actually, MS gets paid by OpenAI at 70% of profits until they make back their investment (according to articles on the terms)

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

#668

Post by HarpyMan03 »

How do I know this conversation thread isn't generated by AI? also let's stop calling it intelligence. Its software that has been programmed. Don't forget that guys and gals. One flick of a switch and it's gone. Actually it would be cool if software went extinct instead of species of irreplaceable animals..

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

#669

Post by HarpyMan393393 »

How do I know this conversation thread isn't generated by AI? also let's stop calling it intelligence. Its software that has been programmed. Don't forget that guys and gals. One flick of a switch and it's gone. Actually it would be cool if software went extinct instead of species of irreplaceable animals..
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