> Back then, Google spent heavily to index websites without a clear path to profitability [citation needed] Google's goal was always advertising just like every other search engine.
Google didn't have ads until 2000. They strongly resisted banner ads (which were the only format at the time) until they invented contextual text ads.
So, it took Google a whole year to display ads. That's really not the description of a company that is " without a clear path to profitability".
> There is no technical moat in this field This is getting so repetitive now that it is stated as a truism. Isn't it the same bet yahoo was betting on in 2000 that it would win because their product branding is better? And now, Yahoo's and Microsoft's search engine is worse than Google from 2 decades ago.
Google's search engine is worse than Google from 2 decades ago.
This rings true to my ears: > There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly…
Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.
Create value at a higher layer and depend on tight integration to generate revenue and stickiness at both layers. See: Windows + MS Office.
They don’t need to make a moat for AI, they need to make a moat for the OpenAI business, which they have a lot of flexibility to refactor and shape.
Network effects are a moat. A vertically integrated system that people depend on with non-portable integrations is a moat. Regulatory Capture is a moat.
What is the moat of the Google Search? To me the LLM is the first and the only disruptor so far of the Search.
Google’s moat is eroding (filling?), but over the years it shifted from best product/tech to best brand.
Correction: all they need to succeed is unimaginable sums of money and the ironclad right to assimilate every work ever created by humanity without compensation. Who could refuse such a modest request? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-...
So why do they pay to license so much content? And you can’t really be suggesting that public domain should exclude AI training?
Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.
One view is that it’s not first mover, but first arriver advantage. Whoever gets to AgI (the fabled city of gold or silver?, Ag pun intended) will achieve exponential gains from that point forward, and that serves as the moat in the limit. So you can think of it as buying a delayed moat, with an option price equivalent to the investment required until you get to that point in time. Either you believe in that view or…
What does AGI even mean in this case? If progress toward more capable and more cost-effective agents is incremental, I don't see a defensible moat. (You can maintain a moat given continued outpaced investment, but following remains more cost-effective)
Correction: all they need to succeed is unimaginable sums of money and the ironclad right to assimilate every work ever created by humanity without compensation. Who could refuse such a modest request? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-...
So why do they pay to license so much content? And you can’t really be suggesting that public domain should exclude AI training?
That's a good question, why do they choose to pay for certain content while also continuing to insist that all publicly available content should be fair game? It's an incoherent stance, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that those "licensing deals" are out-of-court legal settlements in a trenchcoat.
Gruber's shilling some here. Andreesen et al. started over from scratch when they created Netscape. They didn't use any of the NCSA code. It was a ground up re-write. SamA wants to take everything the non-profit built and use it directly in HIS for profit enterprise. Fuck him.
Who and what do you think Gruber is shilling for? I don't see Gruber saying anything that might tempt anyone to part from some of their money. He seems to be doing the diametrical opposite of shilling.
The "Silicon Valley can do no bad" crowd. He's making it sound like Altman's just following a well trod path here when they're clearly doing something novel and actually quite evil.
Gruber's shilling some here. Andreesen et al. started over from scratch when they created Netscape. They didn't use any of the NCSA code. It was a ground up re-write. SamA wants to take everything the non-profit built and use it directly in HIS for profit enterprise. Fuck him.
What do you suppose he is shilling, and for whom? I don't know who this Gruber guy is, but it's relieving to hear at least someone talk some sense about the ludicrous levels of investment being poured into something that most users go "heh that's neat" and would never consider paying for.
He's in the "My guys can do now bad" gang. Always has been. Read his blog, it's 90% defending Big Tech and their abuses. He's especially bad about Apple, but all his angles are suspect.