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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

431–440 of 851 posts

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have loyalty, but one day there will be no one else to switch to. So, if you're a loyal user or not is a moot point.

History shows it's a self-defeating victory. If one provider were to "win" and stop innovating, they'll become ripe for disruption by the likes of Deepseek, and the second someone like that has a better model, I'll switch.

Nothing lasts forever, not even empires. This doesn't mean that tech monopoly is any better than any other monopoly. They're all detrimental to society.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#432
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are still FAR in the red. Technically have never turned a profit. Among other famous companies.

I'm not a finance person, but how is net income of $9.9B for FY 2024 not profit?

I assume they mean the profits in the past couple years are dwarfed by the losses that came before. Looking at the company's entire history, instead of a single FY.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#433
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…

>Just swap the search box for a chat bot.

Perhaps... but perhaps not. A chatbot instead of a search box may not be how the future looks. Also... a chatbot prompt may not (probably won't) translate from search query smoothly... in a Way That keep ad markets intact.

That "perfected art" of search advertising is highly optimized. You (probably) loose all of that in transition. Any new advertising products will be intrepid territory.

You could not have predicted in advance that search advertising would dwarf video (yourube) advertising as a segment.

Meanwhile... they need to keep their market share at 90%.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#434
Totally agree Gemini Pro 2.5 is currently ahead but it isn't by a gigantic amount.

It's also still uncertain whether Google can turn Gemini into a successful product that either consumers or businesses want to use. They are famously bad at translating their technological advantage into good products - for example the way they shoehorn AI chat into search just makes both worse (imo).

I think OpenAI has the consumers and that'll make it easier to get business. Once they start eating into Google's lunch with AI booked flights and hotels...

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> chatbots ... provided for free ... ads Just because the first LLM product people paid for was a chatbot does not mean that chat will be the dominant commercial use of AI. And if the dominant use is agents that replace knowledge workers, then they'll cost closer to $2000 per month than $20 or free, and an ad-based business model won't work.

True. This is my point too.

The actual business models and revenue sources are still unknown. Consumer subscriptions happens to be the first major model. Ads still aren't. Many other models could dwarf either of these.

It's very early to call the final score.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#437
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They go back about 11 years.

Depending how you count, parent comment is accurate. Hardware doesn't just appear. 4 years of planning and R&D for the first generation chip is probably right.

The first TPU (Seastar) was designed, tested, and deployed in 15 months: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04760

They started becoming available internally in mid 2015.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#438

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…

> 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

other significant revenue surfaces:

- providing LLM APIs to enterprises

- ChatBot Ads market: once people will switch from google search, there will be Ads $200B market at stake for a winner

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#439

Google is winning on every front except... marketing (Google has a chatbot?), trust (who knew the founding fathers were so diverse?), safety (where's the 2.5 Pro model card?), market share (fully one in ten internet users on the planet are weekly ChatGPT users), and, well, vibes (who's rooting for big G, exactly?). But I will admit, Gemini Pro 2.5 is a legit good model. So, hats off for that.

Didn't GCP manage to lose from this position of strength? I'm not sure even if they're the third biggest

They "lost from a position of strength" in that they had they had the most public-cloud like data centers and started thinking about selling that later than they should have. Bard/Gemini started later than chatgpt , but there's not really a moat for this LLM stuff, and Google started moving a lot earlier relative to GCP vs Amazon.

They've got the cash, the people, and the infrastructure to do things faster than the others going forward, which is a much bigger deal IMO than having millions more users right now. Most people still aren't using LLMs that often, switching is easy, and Google has the most obvious entry points with billion+ users with google.com, YouTube, gmail, chrome, android, etc.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#440

> I felt Demis Hassabis was trustworthy in a way Sam Altman couldn't be—a true scientist, not a businessman Not that I think Demis is or is not trustworthy, but I think it’s a bit foolish to believe it would be allowed to matter.

It's already made some difference to how the companies are behaving - Deepmind doing quite a lot of work on protein folding and now protein drug interactions, OpenAI under Altman tying to do the startup max the money raised and user count thing.
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