151–160 of 1001 posts
Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
You can do basic research without being monopolistic.
Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.
You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good ROI.
Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.
By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.
Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.
Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI. Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on you…
Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money. There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly.
Source, figure 2 in: [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/
None of the proposed remedies benefit consumers.
We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits. By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rath…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to Google when presented with other options or defaults.
> There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS. 1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do basic research without being monopolistic.
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national government…
Though both companies created novel & useful inventions, the biggest shifts in those industries during those monopoly eras were from outside those organisations by competitive startups. As an example, IBM should have produced Microsoft, but they didn't. They missed out on a multi-trillion dollar value creation opportunity as a result.
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face... Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI. If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed,…
It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:
* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.
* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.
Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do basic research without being monopolistic.
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national government…
I have been close enough to billionaires and how they spend their money to not be fully impressed by such arguments.
And certainly the robber barons of the 2000s spend far less on the public good than when tax rates were higher and they used to fund universities, libraries, hospitals and the like.
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face... Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI. If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed,…