Live data from Hacker News

Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

221–230 of 851 posts

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google collects and stores grotesque amounts of data about the public https://takeout.google.com

And OpenAI doesn't/wouldn't if they had the chance?

OpenAI absolutely would, but OpenAI can't.

Google can spy on everything: via its OS, its browser, its Youtube, its search engine, its ad network, its blog network, its maps app, its translation service, its fonts service, its 8.8.8.8, its Office suite, its captcha, its analytics service, and on and on and on...

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product. Google's cash-cow product is relevant ads. You can display relevant ads in LLM output or natural language web-search. As long as people are interacting with a Google property, I really don't think it matters what that product is, as long as there are ad views. Also: > Web search is no longer a crown jew…

Kodak was well placed to profit from the rise of digital imaging - in the late 1970s and early 1980s Kodak labs pioneered colour image sensors, and was producing some of the highest resolution CCDs out there. Bryce Bayer worked for Kodak when he invented and patented the Bayer pattern filter used in essentially every colour image sensor to this day. But the problem was: Kodak had a big film business - with a lot of f…

This is a good anecdote and it reminds me of how Sony had cloud architecture/digital distribution, a music label, movie studio, mobile phones, music players, speakers, tvs, laptops, mobile apps... and totally missed out on building Spotify or Netflix.

I do think Google is a little different to Kodak however; their scale and influence is on another level. GSuite, Cloud, YouTube and Android are pretty huge diversifications from Search in my mind even if Search is still the money maker...

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#224
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term. Meanwhile... making mo…

> a >$10bn business 'Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."' ¹ Until something makes a profit it's a charity or predatory monopoly-in-waiting.² ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

> Until something makes a profit

The chip makers are making a bundle

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time for my next round of Evals then. I had a 40 PR coding streak last weekend with mostly o3-mini-pro, will test the latest 2.5 now.

PR = pull request? So every bit of garbage from the LLM, over and over, resulted in an individual pull request? Why not just do one when your branch is finally right?

Presumably because they were discrete changes (i.e. new features), and it didn't make sense to group them together.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#226
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term. Meanwhile... making mo…

>It's be a >$10bn business already. But not profitable yet.

Opera browser was not profitable for like 15 years and still became rather profitable eventually to make an attractive target to purchase by external investors. And even if not bough it would still made nice profit eventually for the original investors.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#227
post #107

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free an…

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than trad…

You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendations anyway, they want to control the way their ad appears and what ad copy is used.

There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons.

So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this.

Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#228
post #120

Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio? Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Goog…

> Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI … ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet

And Google is #1 and #2, with search and YouTube. Distribution is a huge part of the problem and they’ve got some great distribution options.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#229

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free an…

I don't know what you did there, but clearly being ex OpenAI isn't the intellectual or product flex it is: I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best at what it does and we keep trying Google and Claude and keep coming back. They got and as of now continue to get things right for the most part. If you still aren'ĥt seeing it maybe you should introspect what you're mi…

Don't think it's a flex, I think it's useful context for the rest of their comment.

> I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best

My smart friends use a mixture of models, including chatgpt, claude, gemini, grok. Maybe different people, it's ok, but I really don't think chatgpt is head and shoulders above the others.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PR = pull request? So every bit of garbage from the LLM, over and over, resulted in an individual pull request? Why not just do one when your branch is finally right?

Presumably because they were discrete changes (i.e. new features), and it didn't make sense to group them together.

Or it could be just microservices. One larger feature affecting 100 repositories.
Post reply on HN