Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's True Moonshot

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#111

Post by nextworddev »

acdha wrote: post #106
nextworddev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AwS is just a reseller of 3p LLMs at this point (via Bedrock). If you don’t believe me try their 1p LLM (Titan)

That may be true but consider that AWS was “just” a reseller of Intel servers a decade and a half ago (remember people saying S3 was too expensive and hard to use with tons of competition, too?). Integration matters and if they do a good job of making it easy to build into applications I’d easily believe that the path for a lot of businesses will involve a partner they already have extensive relationships and experie…

S3 was actual innovation that AWS led the market in. Apples to oranges comparison.

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#112

Post by datadrivenangel »

anileated wrote: post #57
poulsbohemian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Apple can play since they control OS and hardware, but at the moment they appear pretty far behind in the AI aspect. I disagree strongly with this, and it has everything to do with how we conceptualize AI. I get in my car and plug in my iPhone. CarPlay immediately causes the Maps app to pop up and route me to my next meeting. I can say "hey siri, set a reminder to call Mr. Jones at 3:00" and she will gladly comply.…

The impressive ML is ML that’s part of daily life. Even as I tap on this iPhone’s keyboard, button regions (tappable, not visible) slightly change in size depending on what it predicts the next letter would be. No one calls this “AI” yet it’s the same tech, and arguably more beneficial for the society as a whole than “AI” as a dedicated commercial service purpose-built to launder copyrighted creative works for profit…

And yet the iPhone keyboard has gotten worse than it was a few years ago. I used an iPhone 8 years ago, and when I got an SE last year the keyboard was too smart, and so I disabled all the AI features.

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#113

Post by keenmaster »

fumar wrote: post #13

The lengthy post boils down to this quote " Google could build the AI to win it all" but it is not guaranteed. I appreciate the context as someone who hasn't kept a close eye on Google's AI efforts, but Ben doesn't cover why Google has a right to win outside of search data. Interestingly, there is no mention of AWS and Amazon's wider efforts to create AI tools. There is hype around chat bots but what is the likelihoo…

Intelligence makes almost everything better, so maybe salt is a better analogy than chocolate (especially once the hallucination rate of LLMs becomes more acceptable).

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#114

Post by anileated »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #112
anileated wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impressive ML is ML that’s part of daily life. Even as I tap on this iPhone’s keyboard, button regions (tappable, not visible) slightly change in size depending on what it predicts the next letter would be. No one calls this “AI” yet it’s the same tech, and arguably more beneficial for the society as a whole than “AI” as a dedicated commercial service purpose-built to launder copyrighted creative works for profit…

And yet the iPhone keyboard has gotten worse than it was a few years ago. I used an iPhone 8 years ago, and when I got an SE last year the keyboard was too smart, and so I disabled all the AI features.

Adjusting invisible tappable key regions, swipe typing, etc., these are based on ML even if you disable predictive typing and other settings though.

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#115

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

flappyeagle wrote: post #51
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #21

The one part of this thesis that I pretty strongly disagree with is the idea that people would prefer to have long, meandering voice conversations with an AI, compared to text. Just look at anyone under the age of 25 (35 maybe?) They can easily have long, meandering conversations with actual humans using voice, yet I see them go for text 9 times out of ten. As someone on the backside of middle age, I often find it pr…

Young people text because it’s considered bad etiquette to call unannounced. No such issue with robots.

That's definitely not the only reason. Again, I've known folks to have long, drawn out, back-and-forth conversations over text, certainly not just a "Hey, can I call you?" text intro, which is what I do.

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#116

Post by solardev »

hoseja wrote: post #60

Is the phrase "OK Google" very hard to pronounce for anyone else? Specifically the G after the Kay.

You can say "Hey Google" instead, like "Hey Google, what have you guys been doing this whole last decade?", to which it'll answer, "Okay, playing guy music from last decade on kitchen speaker".

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#117

Post by nojvek »

> After all, if a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its advertisers for user attention. Google Assistant has the exact same problem: where do the ads go?

This is Google / Alphabet's biggest problem. Unlike Microsoft that has Enterprise, Gaming, Cloud and multiple other 10B+ businesses that don't rely on ads, Google has only cloud.

And Google Cloud is a distant third where they actively sabotage their own success by not caring about customers. 90% of Google revenue comes from ads. From Search, youtube, Adsense e.t.c

If they build an AI that gives exactly what the user wants without ads, Google's stakeholders would fire the CEO the next day.

My perception is that Google is in AI race to be relevant and capture the talent, but they don't want to actively put AI anywhere near their products that would eat into their ad revenue.

Google Brain/Deepmind produces great research, they have the most number of published papers, by a big margin, but Google is not the place if you want to work on productionizing AI.

Top AI Researchers probably make the most money being at the big tech labs - DeepMind / Open AI / Meta FAIR. I've heard comp being into the 10s of millions per year.

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#118

Post by lelanthran »

rdsubhas wrote: post #86

Big companies drag themselves down – not because they can't innovate – but because they can't go "all in" into innovations which compete against their real cash cow. An AI assistant fundamentally hits at Google's gut: Search ad revenue. Yeah, Google can make dozens of AI demos. Are they truly ready to put Gemini as the default interaction model, pitting it against their search? Can they give super accurate answers to…

> An AI assistant fundamentally hits at Google's gut: Search ad revenue.

I understand this argument, having made it multiple times in the past - any development at google that threatens the cash cow will, ultimately, go nowhere. Why, after all, would they spend money developing something that reduces their income.

After a little bit of thinking about it, I offer an alternate future for google+AI: the AI improves their ad relevancy to such a degree that it makes google search more valuable, not less.

With all the data they have on each individual using their search, it is not inconceivable that that data + an inferior model beats out a superior model that has less context.

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#119

Post by ithkuil »

fatherzine wrote: post #91
bambax wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone remember Google Video? It was a horrible experience. The upload process was a pain, and I think some approval was needed at some point, or you had to be sponsored by someone already on the service. Then Google bought Youtube. In the AI space it's unclear what/who they could buy -- OpenAI being obviously out of reach -- but it's possible they could find a good match.

mistral

I just tried their API mistral-medium model for some coding prompts that failed miserably on anything other than gpt-4 and it handled them well. Just anecdotal, didn't so any proper benchmarking.

IIUC their open Mixtral 8x7 maps to the mistral-small model (which while impressive is still behind gpt-4).

I guess they want to keep their best model behind the API for now.

Anyway, I second that Mistral does stand a good chance to compete with openai

Re: Google's True Moonshot

#120

Post by acdha »

nextworddev wrote: post #111
acdha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true but consider that AWS was “just” a reseller of Intel servers a decade and a half ago (remember people saying S3 was too expensive and hard to use with tons of competition, too?). Integration matters and if they do a good job of making it easy to build into applications I’d easily believe that the path for a lot of businesses will involve a partner they already have extensive relationships and experie…

S3 was actual innovation that AWS led the market in. Apples to oranges comparison.

EC2 was innovation, but many people didn’t see it. S3 was more distinctly new although still not the first object store or even object store over HTTP as a service, but if you were there a LOT of people did not share that perception and said it cost too much, would never scale, or required too much software to be modified. I’m not saying that to diminish the importance of S3 but simply that we often wildly overstate the importance of being first to ship an idea versus easy to work with, low-drama for operations, etc.
Post reply on HN