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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#111

Post by mistrial9 »

alexpotato wrote: post #101
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

Rory Sutherland has a great take on this which is (paraphrasing and my own interpretation): Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to higher quality products an…

classical MBA says that a firm can compete on price OR branding, unfair advantages (moat) notwithstanding. Competition in commodities is difficult but not impossible given a rational economic environment. Some would say that the modern expectation of returns on investment are irrational, and warp the economics around them too.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#112

Post by JumpCrisscross »

logicchains wrote: post #110
optymizer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and Google researchers, I could not disagree more. When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas? You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at X…

> is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook…

> company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research

OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3]. Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a tech giant than a start-up.)

The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies, spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence, that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of American private capital markets make a solid case against favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants. (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/openai-raises-6-6b-and-is-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_research_...

[3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-peek-behind-openai...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ai-deals-lift-us-ve...

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#113

Post by geor9e »

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetector.com/status/bing/

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#114

Post by whiplash451 »

geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain competitive?

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#115

Post by nickff »

optymizer wrote: post #85
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and Google researchers, I could not disagree more. When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas? You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at X…

Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished reading “Dealers of Lightning”, which is about PARC, and says that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC, they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in ‘regular’ Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on how you define the term).

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#116

Post by voisin »

geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

> I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.

I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#117

Post by nickff »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #103
cosmic_quanta wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion about monopolies? Their net effect may be wholly negative while having some interesting aspects

Not impossible, but mostly impossible. You can discuss the interesting aspects of large corporations, but you can't really discuss them in a vacuum. The top level post about "big kahuna" companies comes across as an unambiguous defense of monopolies, not an attempt at nuanced conversation.

Not a participant in your back-and-forth, but the top level comment seems to be much more nuanced than your posts. Perhaps you could:

>”Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#118

Post by richwater »

idle_zealot wrote: post #100
dtquad wrote: post #39

Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy. It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that. However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of…

There is no point in chasing a high GDP when it results in a materially worse world. The point of a society isn't to make the numbers go up. If a monopoly is super efficient at generating some nebulous concept of value by creating and operating the world's largest surveillance system and actively using it to sell influence over people's attention and habits then the only sensible thing to do is to dismantle it.

> results in a materially worse world.

Please explain how Google has created a materially worse world

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#119

Post by ergonaught »

voisin wrote: post #116
geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

> I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.

Google search results are garbage and are still superior to DDG.

I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#120

Post by Night_Thastus »

whiplash451 wrote: post #114
geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain competitive?

Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from everyone being searched. Every single business wants their results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that uphill battle 24/7.

I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.

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