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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#91
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more like same toll-tax/road-tax for vehicles of all sizes

How is it more like that? This is a proposed remedy for breaking the law. Driving on the road (tll or free) is not breaking the law. There is no 'like' about it at all.

I know what you mean but your statement

> Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding

can me mistaken for "not everyone who is speeding is fined", and that's clearly not what you meant or wrote. You are right its not more like tolls because it still doesn't capture the /exponential/ difference of whats being compared (any other company vs google). Its like a car vs a jet fighter

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#92
post #73
post #31

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

> Google is the reason for the current AI boom. OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer? If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.

The BERT model, which uses the transformer architecture, was deployed by Google for every English language Google search by the end of 2019.

This is about concurrent with OpenAI's release of GPT-2. But GPT-2 was not really a product.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#93
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades. Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently. Google's monopoly helped research along in the…

You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies. I would rather we don’t allow monopolies since they are so bad for society, regardless of some benefits. Government funded research and private investment are still a thing, that doesn’t try to break the whole capitalism thing.

> You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies.

I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#94
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have an illegal monopoly on AI data sets, though? This is attacking a random, unrelated Google branch. The company that brought us AirBnB and Doordash arguing for fair and open markets should say enough about how honest their intentions are.

I'm not talking about the merits of YC's brief, just the merits of the comment I'm replying to. "Why shouldn't we apply the proposed remedy for illegal behaviour on everyone" seems like a no-brainer to me.

I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same remedy to all AI companies. Sure, it would punish Google, but if companies would actually share their data set, the internet may not be so polluted with AI crawler bots I need to block on my servers.

Just as an example: in my country, all public transit information is shared publicly between operators, so anyone can effectively build a public transit navigation app. That includes the for-profit companies that actually run the trains. Had they kept their data silo'd up, like they were not that long ago, companies would need to make expensive deals or write elaborate scrapers to provide basic route navigation services. Thanks to regulation opening up the data for this system, everyone benefits, including the transit companies themselves, as their route planners now seemlessly integrate with routes offered by unrelated third parties.

By only hitting Google with regulations like those, I think we're building a situation where it's only a matter of time before a new Google appears and ruins the market again. Google has been financing Firefox and Safari for years now because they don't want to be the only browser, because being the only browser comes with all kinds of nasty antitrust regulations. If we selectively apply mitigations like these for competitive purposes (which I very much doubt are the real reason they're being suggested anyway), we'll just end up with some equivalent like "OpenAI sponsoring xAI and Claude so OpenAI doesn't control more than 80% of market share".

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#95
post #67

It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness. Google is being competitive. YC is being anti-competitive. Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves . Imagine spending years and billions building something a…

Google benefits at scale from infrastructure, systems and laws that create the opportunity to make such revenues. It is only natural they should not harm the host.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#96
post #73
post #31

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

> Google is the reason for the current AI boom. OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer? If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.

I usef BERT before chatgpt was a thing.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#97
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website to users using other browsers was a significant part of Chrome adoption success. And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with sever…

I don't know if you remember but it was just a few years ago that using search engines like bing was a shameful meme.

Nowadays using Google Search is, since they pivoted from from being a "search company" to "adtech company" which resulted in the degradation of Google Search quality.

"Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are better options than Bing.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#98
post #73
post #31

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

> Google is the reason for the current AI boom. OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer? If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.

They had AI assistants and machine vision aplenty. The current hype cycle seems to stem from the discovery that going big on these models was worth it.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#99
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC firms, not specifically YC, also tend to encourage monopolization when it comes to startups they are invested in. Have we not seen unicorns gobble up other smaller startups all the time?

You can compete with a unicorn. You can't compete with a trillion dollar company with a cash hoard larger than every unicorn.

Which is how AirBnB ruined tourist industries worldwide, caused rents to soar, people to get displaced from their cities of birth, and why they're touted as a "disruptor" in this very brief.

The end game for these unicorns is to become the cash hoard that they intended to compete with.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#100
Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI.

Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.

Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)

I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)

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