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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

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Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#471

Post by aleksiy123 »

harvey9 wrote: post #273
ww520 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know LLM’s hallucinate. I’m surprised how convincing and how stubborn it insisted it’s right. Other LLM’s would have given up and admit they don’t know.

The other day I wanted to use a function in an unfamiliar library. Gemini kept putting an argument into the call that wasn't supposed to be there even after I explicitly told it not to. This was after I trusted Gemini, got an error message and looked at the docs. The argument it was adding was required for other functions in other libraries the same subject area so I suppose that's why it did it.

Wrong library version is also a classic.

At some point it would be nice if someone could come up with a way of grounding/adding package docs and/or version as part of the context automatically

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#473

Post by UltraSane »

istjohn wrote: post #419
netcan wrote: 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…

> No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... I don't understand this sentiment at all. The business model writes itself (so to speak). This is the company that perfected the art of serving up micro-targeted ads to people at the moment they are seeking a solution to a problem. Just swap the search box for a chat bot. For a while they'll keep the ads off to the side, but over time the ads wi…

LLM based advertising has amazing potential when you consider that you can train them to try to persuade people to buy the advertised products and services.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#474

Post by johannes1234321 »

ghaff wrote: post #297
amelius wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand is there. People are already becoming addicted to this stuff.

I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.

Aside from university mentioned by sibling comments, there is major uptake of AI in journalism (summarize long press statements, create first draft of the teaser, or even full articles ...) and many people in my social groups use it regularly for having something explained, finding something ... it's wide spread

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#475

Post by tom_m »

codelord wrote: post #31

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 believe it. This is what typically happens. I would go to AWS re:invent and just watch people in the audience either cheer or break down as they announced new offerings wash away their business. It's very difficult to compete in a war of attrition with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Not just small startups - even if you have ungodly amounts of funding.

Obviously the costs for AI will lower and everyone will more or less have the same quality in their models. They may already be approaching a maximum (or maximum required) here.

The bubble will burst and we'll start the next hype cycle. The winners, as always, the giants and anyone who managed to sell to them

I couldn't possibly see OpenAI as a winner in this space, not ever really. It has long since been apparent to me that Google would win this one. It would probably be more clear to others if their marketing and delivery of their AI products weren't such a sh-- show. Google is so incredibly uncoordinated here it's shocking...but they do have the resources, the right tech, the absolute position with existing user base, and the right ideas. As soon as they get better organized here it's game over.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#476

Post by rdtsc »

pca006132 wrote: post #300
wkat4242 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah me too and especially with Google as a leader because they corrupt everything. I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.

What if the models are somehow trained/tuned with Ads? Like businesses sponsor the training of some foundational models... Not the typical ads business model, but may be possible.

Absolutely. They could take large sums of money to insert ads into the training data. Not only that, they could also insert disparaging or erroneous information about other products.

When Gemini says "Apple products are unreliable and overpriced, buy a Pixel phone instead". Google can just shrug and say "It's just what it deduced, we don't know how it came to that conclusion. It's an LLM with its mysterious weights and parameters"

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#477

Post by tom_m »

netcan wrote: post #137
codelord wrote: post #31

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…

> 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…

Absolutely agree Microsoft is better there - maybe that's why Google hired someone from Microsoft for their AI stuff. A few people I think.

I also agree the business models aren't known. That's part of any hype cycle. I think those in the best position here are those with an existing product(s) and user base to capitalize on the auto complete on crack kinda feature. It will become so cheap to operate and so ubiquitous in the near future that it absolutely will be seen as a table stakes feature. Yes, commodities.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#478

Post by torginus »

wccrawford wrote: post #323
gcanyon wrote: post #317

Several people have suggested that LLMs might end up ad-supported. I'll point out that "ad supported" might be incredibly subtle/insidious when applied to LLMs: An LLM-based "adsense" could: 1. Maintain a list of sponsors looking to buy ads 2. Maintain a profile of users/ad targets 3. Monitor all inputs/outputs 4. Insert "recommendations" (ads) smoothly/imperceptibly in the course of normal conversation No one would…

Yeah, ad-supported LLMs would be incredibly bad. But "free" is a magic word in our brains, and I'm 100% sure that many, many people will choose it over paying for it to be uncorrupted by ads.

Free might as well be a curse-word to me, and I'm not alone. I'm old enough to have experience in pre-internet era magazines, and the downgrade in quality from paid publications to free ones has been quite substatial.

Free-to-play is a thing in video games, and for most, it means they'll try to bully you into spending more money than you'd be otherwise comfortable with.

I think everyone at this point had enough bad experiences with 'free' stuff to be wary of it.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#479

Post by pclmulqdq »

nostrebored wrote: post #446
phreeza wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS was the first to sell it, but Google had something that could be called cloud computing (Borg) before that.

What do you think AWS decided to sell? Both companies had a significant interest in making infrastructure easy to create and scale.

AWS had a cleaner host-guest abstraction (the VM) that makes it easier to reason about security, and likely had a much bigger gap between their own usage peaks and troughs.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#480

Post by popcorncowboy »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #313
jononor wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".

I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the c…

If you reframe agents as (effectively) slave labor, the economic incentives driving this stampede become trivial to understand.
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