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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

#621

Post by matthewdgreen »

famouswaffles wrote: post #526
matthewdgreen wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.

And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.

It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.

(PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#622

Post by ltadeut »

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?

> The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products.

agree with you on this.

you already see that playing out with Meta and a LOT of companies in China.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#623

Post by indigodaddy »

"They're also small, which makes them perfect for edge applications and phone integration."

- you can't locally install or onprem Gemini right, so why does small make it better for edge applications, essentially because small means light and fast, so it will respond quicker and with less latency? Requests are still going out over the network to Google though right?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#624

Post by mianos »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #479
nostrebored wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think AWS decided to sell? Both companies had a significant interest in making infrastructure easy to create and scale.

AWS had a cleaner host-guest abstraction (the VM) that makes it easier to reason about security, and likely had a much bigger gap between their own usage peaks and troughs.

Yep. Google offered app engine which was good for fairly stateless simple apps in an old limited version of python, like a photo gallery or email client. For anything else is waa dismal. Amazon offered VMs. Useful stuff for a lot more platforms.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#625

Post by neilv »

cgh wrote: post #468
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…

Perhaps ironically, I know a guy who uses ChatGPT to write ad copy. The snake eats its own tail.

Is this someone someone working as a writer, who is just phoning it in (LLM-ing it in)?

Or is this someone who needs writing but can't do it themselves, and if they didn't have the LLM, they would pay a low-end human writer?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#626

Post by bagacrap »

indigodaddy wrote: post #623

"They're also small, which makes them perfect for edge applications and phone integration." - you can't locally install or onprem Gemini right, so why does small make it better for edge applications, essentially because small means light and fast, so it will respond quicker and with less latency? Requests are still going out over the network to Google though right?

Wrong, Android and Chrome infer locally

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#627

Post by h2zizzle »

sva_ wrote: post #610

It is sort of funny to me how the sentiment about whoever seems to be leading in ML changes so frequently (in particular here on HN.) A couple months ago it felt like people were sure that Google completely fucked it up for themselves (especially due to the fact that they invented the transformer but didn't productize it themselves at first.) For a short while, Claude was the best thing since sliced cheese, then Deep…

You could also be seeing waves of various astroturf campaigns.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#628

Post by abaymado »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #599
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?

There are two perspectives on this. What you said is definitely a good one if you're a business planning to add AI to whatever you're selling. But personally, as a user, I want the opposite to happen - I want AI to be the product that takes all the current products and turns them into tools it can use.

I agree, I want a more intelligent voice assistant similar to Siri as a product, and all my apps to be add-ons the voice assistant could integrate with.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#629

Post by thfuran »

LightBug1 wrote: post #591
ranyume wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the reader. The AI won't tell the reader what to think in an authoritative voice. This is better than the AI trying to decide what is true and what isn't. However, the AI should be able to search the web and present it's findings without refusals. Obviously, always presenting the sources. And the AI should never use an authoritative tone and it should be transparent about the steps it took to gather the informati…

Yes, Musk's contention of an AI trying to tell the truth, no matter what, is straight up horse manure. Should be done for false advertising (per usual)

Elon Musk had been an endless stream of false advertising for years.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#630

Post by Izikiel43 »

istjohn wrote: post #419
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…

> 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…

> micro-targeted ads to people at the moment they are seeking a solution to a problem

Personal/anecdotal experience, but I've bought more stuff out of instagram ads than google ads ever.

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