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Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

semianalysis.com

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Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#681

Post by greedo »

bsaul wrote: post #602
safety1st wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…

in 1995 people understood very well what internet was going to become. The technology just wasn't there yet, but every kid and parents remember very well the sound of that modem and the phone lines beeing busy. That memo would have been prescient if made 5 years before.

You're conflating the Internet with the walled gardens that were dominant at the time; AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy etc.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#682

Post by lerchmo »

narrator wrote: post #396
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

I think the problem with AI being everywhere and ubiquitous is that AI is the first technology in a very long time that requires non-trivial compute power. That compute power costs money. This is why you only get a limited number of messages every few hours from GPT4. It simply costs too much to be a ubiquitous technology. For example, the biggest LLama model only runs on an A100 that costs about $15,000 on ebay. The…

caching + simpler models for classification / triage should reduce the load on the big model.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#683

Post by aabajian »

ripper1138 wrote: post #611
aabajian wrote: post #234

I don't know if I agree with the article. I recall when Google IPO'ed, nobody outside of Google really knew how much traffic they had and how much money they were making. Microsoft was caught off-guard. Compare this to ChatGPT: My friends, parents, grandparents, and coworkers (in the hospital) use ChatGPT. None of these people know how to adapt an open source model to their own use. I bet ChatGPT is vastly ahead in t…

Your grandparents use ChatGPT? For what?

Recipes!

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#685

Post by dekhn »

zztop44 wrote: post #565
titzer wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. I...kinda don't want this? UIs have already changed in so many different fits, starts, waves, and cycles. I used to have skills. But I have no skills now. Nothing works like it used to. Yeah they were tricky to use but I cannot imagine that a murky AI interface is going to be any easier to use, and certainly impossible to master. Even if it is easier t…

I once volunteered with a older woman. She’d been a computer programmer in the 70s, using punch cards and, later, Pascal. Then she had kids and stopped working for a while and the technology moved on without her. Now she’s like any other old person, doesn’t know how to use a computer and gets flustered when eg: trying to switch from the browser back to Word. Her kids and grandkids clown on her for being hopeless with…

I worked with somebody who developed MULTICS but struggled constantly to do even the most basic tasks on a Mac even after using Macs for a decade. It was painful to watch them slowly move a mouse across the screen to the apple, take about ten seconds to click it, and then get confused about how to see system info.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#686

Post by dekhn »

DannyBee wrote: post #667
reissbaker wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Satya Nadella put it pretty well in an interview: ad revenue, especially from search, is incremental to Microsoft; to Google, it's everything. So while Microsoft is willing to have worse margins on search ads in order to win marketshare from Google, Google has to defend all of their margins — or else they become significantly less profitable in their core business. LLMs cost a lot more than traditional search…

"OpenAI gets paid by MS" Actually, MS gets paid by OpenAI at 70% of profits until they make back their investment (according to articles on the terms)

Note that MS cost-offsets much OpenAI infrastructure including their top-5 TOP500 class supercomputer (similar to a full TPUv4 pod)

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#687

Post by rounakdatta »

kmmlng wrote: post #653
safety1st wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…

I feel like search still has its place. New information is being generated all the time. I want to be able to access it without having to retrain my LLM. It's also easier to validate that my search results are real. With LLMs, you never know if the answers are hallucinated or real. Where LLMs really shine is in understanding what I actually want. Where search still gives me many irrelevant answers, LLMs just get my q…

Phind shines here.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#688

Post by titzer »

zztop44 wrote: post #565
titzer wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. I...kinda don't want this? UIs have already changed in so many different fits, starts, waves, and cycles. I used to have skills. But I have no skills now. Nothing works like it used to. Yeah they were tricky to use but I cannot imagine that a murky AI interface is going to be any easier to use, and certainly impossible to master. Even if it is easier t…

I once volunteered with a older woman. She’d been a computer programmer in the 70s, using punch cards and, later, Pascal. Then she had kids and stopped working for a while and the technology moved on without her. Now she’s like any other old person, doesn’t know how to use a computer and gets flustered when eg: trying to switch from the browser back to Word. Her kids and grandkids clown on her for being hopeless with…

Indeed. I like the fact that my stove has only the knobs and buttons on it (other than a 7-segment LED display). I am master of my stove because I am pretty sure I have explored the complete state space of it by now.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#689

Post by codethief »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #663
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

There are two things that make a good LLM. The amount of data available for training, and the amount of compute available. Google's bard sucks in comparison to Open AI, and even compared to Bing. It's pretty clear that GPT4 has some secret sauce that's giving them a competitive edge. I also don't think that Open Source LLMs are that big of a threat, for exactly this reason. They will always be behind on the amount of…

Did you read the article? It refutes almost every claim you're making and, I must say, rather convincingly so.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#690

Post by midnitewarrior »

kmmlng wrote: post #653
safety1st wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…

I feel like search still has its place. New information is being generated all the time. I want to be able to access it without having to retrain my LLM. It's also easier to validate that my search results are real. With LLMs, you never know if the answers are hallucinated or real. Where LLMs really shine is in understanding what I actually want. Where search still gives me many irrelevant answers, LLMs just get my q…

Bing Chat searches then summarizes for you. It gets all the latest information, reads the top results and gives you a summary of what you are looking for. It's here today. Also, Bing Chat makes search by humans irrelevant for many things.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." ― Buckminster Fuller

Google needs to move fast.

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