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Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

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Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#461

Post by oblio »

jcgrillo wrote: post #453
Ancapistani wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Sure! Google began investing heavily in AI (LLMs, actually) to catch up to the other frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad r…

> frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad revenue) > If Google does nothing, they lose. Is any of that actually true though? In retrospect, had google done nothing their search product would still work. Currently it's pretty profoundly broken, at least from a functional standpoint--no idea how that impacts revenue if at all. To me it see…

Users still googled before. Now they just move to chatbots. Regular people don't really notice the search degradation as much and enshittification helps Google, as revenues kept going up. Chatbots are an existential threat since they will add ads and that's where Google's ad revenue dies.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#462

Post by porridgeraisin »

jcgrillo wrote: post #454
kergonath wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI. I don’t really see this. Lots of people like freebies, but the value aspect is less clear. AFAIK, none of these chatbots are profitable. You would not see nearly as many users if they had to actually pay for the thing.

In the article Pichai is quoted saying: > "It doesn't matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools." Bullshit. Citation very much needed. It's a shame--a shameful stain on the profession--that journalists don't respond critically to such absurd nonsense and ask the o…

From what I hear, many doctors pass X-ray and MRI scans to Chatgpt for a ...second opinion :-)

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#463

Post by [deleted] »

jaredklewis wrote: post #435
akoboldfrying wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birth rates correlate negatively with education of women. I read somewhere that this is one of the most robust findings in all of social science (and when I asked Gemini just now whether there was such a correlation, it said the same).

There’s a (positive or negative) correlation between birth rates and dozens of factors, because over the period birth rates have been falling, the world has changed dramatically. Issue is we don’t know what is causal. education also correlates with all kinds of other factors like income, type of work, marital status, and political views, meaning birth rates are also likely correlated with all of these factors.

[deleted]

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#464

Post by jcgrillo »

aurareturn wrote: post #38
nabla9 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has no technical moat (others can do what they do), generate content, all have the same data. OpenAI does not expect to be cash-flow positive until 2029. When no new capital comes in, it can't continue. OpenAI can's survive any kind of price competition.

They consistently have the best or second best models. They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users. Investors are lining up to give them money. When they IPO, they'll easily be worth over $1 trillion. There's price competition right now. They're still surviving. If there is price competition, they're the most likely to survive.

> They consistently have the best or second best models.

This is the problem with your original argument. It assumes that having a "good model" (e.g. one that performs well on some benchmarks) has somehow to do with something in the real world. It doesn't. If you can show that it does, your thesis might have at least a glimmer of credibility.

The idea that a chatbot will somehow displace an operating system is the kind of absurdity that follows from making this error.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#465

Post by jcgrillo »

oblio wrote: post #461
jcgrillo wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad revenue) > If Google does nothing, they lose. Is any of that actually true though? In retrospect, had google done nothing their search product would still work. Currently it's pretty profoundly broken, at least from a functional standpoint--no idea how that impacts revenue if at all. To me it see…

Users still googled before. Now they just move to chatbots. Regular people don't really notice the search degradation as much and enshittification helps Google, as revenues kept going up. Chatbots are an existential threat since they will add ads and that's where Google's ad revenue dies.

Did any users actually move to chatbots? By which I don't mean the 0.001% of tech nerds who buy chatgpt subscriptions, but in aggregate did a meaningful number of google searchers defect to chatgpt or other llm services? I really doubt that. Data would be interesting but there's a credibility problem...

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#466

Post by donperignon »

Google cannot ignore LLMs, I don’t remember last time I used Google to search instead of using ChatGPT.maybe a combination of factors, one being Google destroying their own search engine in order to milk advertisers money, the other the LLMs being so good at synthesizing information. Anyways either they improve or surf the AI wave, otherwise they are doomed

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#467

Post by big-and-small »

jcgrillo wrote: post #453
Ancapistani wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Sure! Google began investing heavily in AI (LLMs, actually) to catch up to the other frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad r…

> frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad revenue) > If Google does nothing, they lose. Is any of that actually true though? In retrospect, had google done nothing their search product would still work. Currently it's pretty profoundly broken, at least from a functional standpoint--no idea how that impacts revenue if at all. To me it see…

Even before recent "AI improvements" for us tech nerds Google search was broken ad invaded something. But for average Joe up until recently it's was still okay because it served purpose of whatever normal people use search for: find some rumors about their favorite celebs, find some car parts information or just "buy X".

Problem for Google is that for a good chunk of normal non-techy people LLM chats looks like talking to genius super intelligence and they was not burned by it yet. So they trust it.

And now good chunk of non-tech people now go and ask ChatGPT instead of using google search. And they do it simply because it's less enshittified than Google search.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#468

Post by big-and-small »

jcgrillo wrote: post #465
oblio wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users still googled before. Now they just move to chatbots. Regular people don't really notice the search degradation as much and enshittification helps Google, as revenues kept going up. Chatbots are an existential threat since they will add ads and that's where Google's ad revenue dies.

Did any users actually move to chatbots? By which I don't mean the 0.001% of tech nerds who buy chatgpt subscriptions, but in aggregate did a meaningful number of google searchers defect to chatgpt or other llm services? I really doubt that. Data would be interesting but there's a credibility problem...

Yes. People do use them and they trust them, unfortunately.

Tech nerds know what ChatGPT is, they know llm limits somewhat and they know it's hallucinating. Normal people do not - for them is a magical all knowing oracle.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#469

Post by cm2187 »

OptionOfT wrote: post #114

Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either. And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat... > McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work…

The economy has never worked like that. When you increase productivity, you create wealth and you enable other industries to appear. We have gone through numbers of those cycles. The industrialisation of agriculture, then machines in manufacturing, then introduction of computers (think of all the secretarial jobs, computers - as in engineers making calculations, accountants that have disappeared), then outsourcing of the industry to China. But somehow unemployment is low in most western countries. So what makes you think this time it will be different?

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#470

Post by kamaal »

watwut wrote: post #422
kamaal wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's the point, men are refusing to suffer. There is little incentive to walking in a contract, where you are working all the time, no appreciation, love, gratitude or even a thank you. All the time being made to feel like you are not measuring up. And they'd rather be with somebody else apart from you. That done, you also come back from work and do all the chores you would if you remained single. And if a few…

Except that it is men who complain constantly about wanting to marry and have kids while women are much more content being single and have friends. You dont have to pay alimony of the wife worked thw whole time. That complain is funny in the comtext of men demanding to return back to time where alimony arrangement was necessary protection. Even in marriage, it is more of women who initiate divorce are report higher h…

Its in the nature of men to work and provide. That's how men seek fulfilment in life.

But if you dial up the pain in the process men will bail. This shouldn't be surprising.

Perhaps the most primal biological set up of all, the very basis of evolution is response to stimulus.

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