861–870 of 960 posts
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I suspect some of the downvoters hate the idea of ads, which is understandable. But a lot of HN users use gmail, which has the same model. And there are plenty of paid email providers which seem far less popular (I use one). Ads didn't end up being a problem for most people provided they were kept independent of the content itself.
1. Gmail is free 2. I’ve never seen ads on the Gmail webapp (It sure does data collection)
The real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here. Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time. Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.
Especially if we're approaching a plateau, in a couple years there could be a dozen equally capable systems. It'll be interesting to see what the differentiators turn out to be.
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This assumes your model is static and never needs to be improved or updated. Inference is cheap because the final model, despite its size, is ridiculously less resource intensive to use than it is to produce. ChatGPT in its latest form isn't bad by any means, but it is falling behind. And that requires significant overhead, both to train and to iterate on model architecture. It is often a variable cost as well.
As long as revenue rises faster than training costs and inference remains profitable I dont think this is an issue. Eventually theyll be able to profitably amortize training across all the users.
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>They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow. I've had that uneasy feeling for a while now. Just look at Jensen and Nvidia -- they're trying to get their hooks into every major critical sector as they're able to (Nokia last month, Synopsys just recently). When chickens come home to roost, my guess is that they'll pull out the "we're too big to fail, so bailout pls" card. Crazy times. I…
Nvidia is the ultimate beneficiary of the money invested (due to expensive GPUs). If Nvidia loses these good customers, it will have less revenue. So it prefers to slowly buy it's customers with this money...
Antitrust regulators must be sleeping at the wheels.
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Google in 1999 was already far superior to Yahoo and other competitors. I don't think OpenAI is in a similar position there. It seems debatable as to whether they're even the best, let alone a massive leap ahead of everyone else the way Google was.
Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember. Yahoo was always more a directory of websites. AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either. I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Googl…
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That's a bit revisionist. Network effects were obvious when Google acquired Youtube. Google Video had the edge technically, but it didn't matter because Youtube had the users/content and Google saw that very clearly in their user growth before they made their offer.
I'm not sure about it having the edge, I thought Google video had a worse interface between them at the time. But that point feels eerily relevant anyway: a lot of normal people I see don't care if Claude/Gemini/etc are better models technically, they're comfortable with ChatGPT already. A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.
A lot of "normal people" are learning fast about ChatGPT alternatives now. Gemini in particular is getting a lot of mainstream buzz. Things like this [1] with 14k likes are happening everyday on social. Marc Benioff's love for Gemini broke through into the mainstream also.
[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1995900344224907500 [2] https://x.com/Benioff/status/1992726929204760661
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Are you saying that Google, Meta, Amazon, etc... can't do software? It's the bread and butter of these companies. The CUDA moat is important to hold off the likes of AMD, but hardware like TPUs for internal use or other big software makers is not a big hurdle. Of course Huang will lean on the software being key because he sees the hardware competition catching up.
Essentially, yes, they haven’t done deep software. Netflix probably comes closest amongst FAANG. Google, Meta, Amazon do “shallow and broad” software. They are quite fast at capturing new markets swiftly, they frequently repackage OpenSource core and add the large amount of business logic to make it work, but essentially follow the market cycles - they hire and layoff on a few year cycle, and the people who work ther…
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If we stop for a while and really consider the value of AI tools, then comparing them on price doesn't make much sense. Any of these tools give hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars of value per month to the user. With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality.
> With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality Take a look at the comments in the thread and tell me whether there is a consensus on which AI has the best "quality". Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT are all stochastic machines; they'll give me a different output at different times for the very same query, with differences in quality each time within themselves, let alone other products. I did my own ch…
I'm not saying there's any certain answer to which AI has the best quality. That answer depends on the user. For you, Gemini seems to fit the bill very well.
> Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month.
That's not a logical comparison, since those things aren't related in any way. Your utility bill being cheap doesn't make everything else expensive. Some things are just great value, that doesn't mean everything else is not worth it. In that case, you should compare every other purchase and expense with that utility bill, and logically not spend money on anything else.
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But the first example sigmoid10 gave of a company that can't do software was Microsoft .
Yeah I'm not convinced Microsoft can do software anymore. I think they're a shambling mess of a zombie software company with enough market entropy to keep going for a long time.