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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

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Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#521

Post by brap »

throwup238 wrote: post #494
brap wrote: post #265

I think the key is that Google is the gateway to the internet for the entire world. Think about it. Whatever you’re trying to do online, either Search, Chrome or Android are in the critical path of like 90%+ of people if not more. Once AI is deeply baked into these products, which are more like the “operating system” of the internet, the race is basically over. Not to mention that Google is already sitting on the lar…

That becomes really clear when using Gemini Deep Research vs OpenAI. I tried running the same research questions in both and Google regularly reads 10x as many sources as OpenAI and does it faster.

I actually meant it in terms of having insane reach to end users, but yes, it most likely helps with finding/processing information

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#522

Post by p0w3n3d »

ZeroTalent wrote: post #179
p0w3n3d wrote: post #161

I recently had to check some legal thing - I gave the pdf with law to both - chatgpt and Gemini, and I was able to convince the Gemini that my interpretation is right, but chatgpt was constantly opposing me. Later I checked and found out that my interpretation was wrong, so I'd say that chatgpt was better and moreover it spared me some problems with "Polish IRS"

"Polish IRS" — I never heard that term before. Do you mean the gov revenue service of Poland or something else?

Urząd Skarbowy. An office that takes care about income tax (among others)

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#523

Post by alienthrowaway »

mike_hearn wrote: post #294
thunderbird120 wrote: post #10

This article doesn't mention TPUs anywhere. I don't think it's obvious for people outside of google's ecosystem just how extraordinarily good the JAX + TPU ecosystem is. Google several structural advantages over other major players, but the largest one is that they roll their own compute solution which is actually very mature and competitive. TPUs are extremely good at both training and inference[1] especially at sca…

TPUs aren't necessarily a pro. They go back 15 years and don't seem to have yielded any kind of durable advantage. Developing them is expensive but their architecture was often over-fit to yesterday's algorithms which is why they've been through so many redesigns. Their competitors have routinely moved much faster using CUDA. Once the space settles down, the balance might tip towards specialized accelerators but NVID…

> Developing them is expensive

So are the electric and cooling costs at Google's scale. Improving perf-per-watt efficiency can pay for itself. The fact that they keep iterating on it suggests it's not a negative-return exercise.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#524

Post by mike_hearn »

phillypham wrote: post #410
dgacmu wrote: 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.

I was wrong, ironically because Google's AI overview says it's 15 years if you search. The article it's quoting from appears to be counting the creation of TensorFlow as an "origin".

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#525

Post by eximius »

dcow wrote: post #367
netcan wrote: 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…

I don’t think “AI” as a market is “winner-takes-anything”. Seriously. AI is not a product, it’s a tool for building other products. The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products. Does OpenAI really make sense as a chatbot company?

Is Amazon a product or a place to sell other products? Does that make Amazon not a winner?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#526

Post by famouswaffles »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #517
famouswaffles wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last Month, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (very close to this one, likely passes it this month) were the only sites with more visits than chatgpt. Couple that with the 400M+ weekly active users (according to open ai in February) and i seriously doubt that. https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070 https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...

Weekly active users is a pretty strange metric. Essential tools and even social networking apps report DAUs, and they do that because essential things get used daily. How many times did you use Google in the past day? How many times did you visit (insert some social media site you prefer) in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.

Mostly only social media/messaging sites report daily active users regularly. Everything else usually reports monthly active users at best.

>in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.

No, something I use on a weekly basis (which is not necessarily just once a week) is pretty important to me and spinning it otherwise is bizarre.

Google is the frontend to the web for the vast majority of internet users so yeah it gets a lot of daily use. Social media sites are social media sites and are in a league of their own. I don't think i need to explain why they would get a disproportionate amount of daily users.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#527

Post by anon84873628 »

brookst wrote: post #452
istjohn wrote: post #419

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…

I don’t think it works. Search is the perfect place for ads for exactly the reasons you state: people have high intent. But a majority of chatbot usage is not searching for the solution to a problem. And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product. Search is all about infor…

The intent will be obvious from the prompt and context. The AI will behave differently when called from a Doc about the yearly sales strategy vs consumer search app.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#528

Post by mike_hearn »

ndriscoll wrote: post #310
mike_hearn wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason why having an LLM be sly or misleading would be more profitable. Too many people try to make advertising a moral issue when it's not, and it sounds like you're falling into that trap. An ideal answer for a query like "Where can I take my wife for a date this weekend?" would be something like, > Here are some events I found ... . Based on our prior conversations, sounds like the third might be the be…

Wouldn't fewer searches indicate better answers? A search engine is productivity software. Productivity software is worse when it requires more user interaction. Also you don't need ads to answer what to do, just knowledge of the events. Even a poor ranking algorithm is better than "how much someone paid for me to say this" as the ranking. That is possibly the very worst possible ranking.

Google knows how to avoid mistakes like not bucketing by session. Holdback users just did fewer unique search sessions overall, because whilst for most people Google was a great way to book vacations, hotel stays, to find games to buy and so on, for holdback users it was limited to informational research only. That's an important use case but probably over-represented amongst HN users, some kinds of people use search engines primarily to buy things.

How much a click is worth to a business is a very good ranking signal, albeit not the only one. Google ranks by bid but also quality score and many other factors. If users click your ad, then return to the results page and click something else, that hurts the advertiser's quality score and the amount of money needed to continue ranking goes up so such ads are pushed out of the results or only show up when there's less competition.

The reason auction bids work well as a ranking signal is that it rewards accurate targeting. The ad click is worth more to companies that are only showing ads to people who are likely to buy something. Spamming irrelevant ads is very bad for users. You can try to attack that problem indirectly by having some convoluted process to decide if an ad is relevant to a query, but the ground truth is "did the click lead to a purchase?" and the best way to assess that is to just let advertisers bid against each other in an auction. It also interacts well with general supply management - if users are being annoyed by too many irrelevant ads, you can just restrict slot supply and due to the auction the least relevant ads are automatically pushed out by market economics.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#529

Post by pressbuttons »

brookst wrote: post #452
istjohn wrote: post #419

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…

I don’t think it works. Search is the perfect place for ads for exactly the reasons you state: people have high intent. But a majority of chatbot usage is not searching for the solution to a problem. And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product. Search is all about infor…

It doesn't have to be high intent all the time though. Chrome itself is "free" and isn't the actual technical thing serving me ads (the individual websites / ad platforms do that regardless of which browser I'm using), but it keeps me in the Google ecosystem and indirectly supports both data gathering (better ad targeting, profitable) and those actual ad services (sometimes subtly, sometimes in heavy-handed ways like via ad blocker restrictions). Similar arguments to be made with most of the free services like Calendar, Photos, Drive, etc - they drive some subscriptions (just like chatbots), but they're mostly supporting the ads indirectly.

Many of my Google searches aren't high intent, or any purchase intent at all ("how to spell ___" an embarrassing number of times), but it's profitable for Google as a whole to keep those pieces working for me so that the ads do their thing the rest of the time. There's no reason chatbots can't/won't eventually follow similar models. Whether that's enough to be profitable remains to be seen.

> Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment.

Same outcome, different intermediate steps. I'm usually searching for information so that I can do something, build something, acquire something, achieve something. Sell me a product for the right price that accomplishes my end goal, and I'm a satisfied customer. How many ads for app builders / coding tools have you seen today? :)

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#530

Post by dcow »

eximius wrote: post #525
dcow wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think “AI” as a market is “winner-takes-anything”. Seriously. AI is not a product, it’s a tool for building other products. The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products. Does OpenAI really make sense as a chatbot company?

Is Amazon a product or a place to sell other products? Does that make Amazon not a winner?

If there were 2 other Amazons all with similar products and the same ease of shipping would you care where you purchased? Amazon is simply the best UX for online ordering. If anything else matched it I’d shop platform agnostic.
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