Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

931–940 of 960 posts

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#931

Post by array_key_first »

rprend wrote: post #915
array_key_first wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People could trivially switch their search engine to Bing or Yahoo, but they don't. Well those are obviously worse products. > If ads are so overpriced, how big is your short position on google? I hate hearing this stupid, stupid line. Most companies are run by neanderthals with more money than brains. Companies burn money on advertising because why not? Making your product better is hard and takes time, advertisin…

Do you think consumer brands lose money when they pay Google to do advertising? Do you think digital ads have a negative ROI for the brands that buy them? If so, why do they keep buying more? Wouldn’t they lose to more efficient companies? I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is. Just the other day i googled “bluetooth speaker” and bought the first result (an ad). One hour of that can n…

> Do you think consumer brands lose money when they pay Google to do advertising?

For many brands, yes, and they don't know it.

> I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is.

The more you advertise, the less valuable each ad space becomes. Consumers have a lot of money they have to dole out. Giving them more ads won't increase that pot of money - it will make your cut smaller and smaller as it's split across more brands.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#932

Post by rprend »

array_key_first wrote: post #931
rprend wrote: post #915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think consumer brands lose money when they pay Google to do advertising? Do you think digital ads have a negative ROI for the brands that buy them? If so, why do they keep buying more? Wouldn’t they lose to more efficient companies? I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is. Just the other day i googled “bluetooth speaker” and bought the first result (an ad). One hour of that can n…

> Do you think consumer brands lose money when they pay Google to do advertising? For many brands, yes, and they don't know it. > I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is. The more you advertise, the less valuable each ad space becomes. Consumers have a lot of money they have to dole out. Giving them more ads won't increase that pot of money - it will make your cut smaller and smaller as…

Which brands lose money on ads? Why are they still in business?

> consumers have a lot of money that they dole out. More ads wont increase the cut of money

Consumer spending is not a fixed pie chart or a zero sum game. US consumer spending has grown from $14 to $19 trillion since 2020. $5 trillion in new pie!!

Your model of ads is: “I, a consumer, have decided to buy a bluetooth speaker, and the ads push and pull me towards particular brands”. But that’s not how ads work! Ads don’t just compete for fixed spending, they induce NEW spending. An ad can give a customer the idea of buying, and grow the market.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#933

Post by littlestymaar »

array_key_first wrote: post #930
littlestymaar wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Google built an empire on advertising money alone, and Facebook became one of the biggest company in the world on that business as well. I think your are the one vastly underestimate advertising.

Yes, and if you take all that money, it's not even 1/10 enough. Consumers can spend what they can spend. Not even 1 quadrillion dollars in advertising can change that. There is a hard, hard cap to the value of advertisement because of that. It's just how the thing works.

Please tell me how being the third and 7th biggest companies in the world is “not even 1/10 enough” …

“Enough” for what exactly?

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#934

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #933
array_key_first wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and if you take all that money, it's not even 1/10 enough. Consumers can spend what they can spend. Not even 1 quadrillion dollars in advertising can change that. There is a hard, hard cap to the value of advertisement because of that. It's just how the thing works.

Please tell me how being the third and 7th biggest companies in the world is “not even 1/10 enough” … “Enough” for what exactly?

It's not enough to pay for the size of the rollout the AI companies are doing. The difference between Google and OpenAI is that Google's add revenue comes at basically 0 cost. Google serves multiple adds for every search, and actually completing the search costs a tiny fractions of a cent (the majority of which is the cost to figure out what add to display). OpenAI is in a totally different boat. They get a similar number of adds per search, but each query will cost them far more than a simple web search. A paragraph or a single image costs OpenAI over 1c to generate, so you can't even cover the marginal costs on ads alone (google adds cost ~.1c per view).

Furthermore, OpenAI has to make up for a ton of debt they are taking on. They've already lost $9B, and are planning on losing another $75B in the next 2 years. As such, they have a ton of digging to do to get themselves out of the massive hole they're digging.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#935

Post by fovc »

jdoliner wrote: post #274

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 m…

Łukasz Kaiser basically confirmed it in a podcast:

https://youtu.be/3K-R4yVjJfU?si=JdVyYOlxUbEcvEEo&t=2624

> Q: Are the releases aligned with pre-training efforts?

> A: There used to be a time not that long ago, maybe half a year, distant past, where the models would align with RL runs or pretraining runs ... now the naming is by capability. GPT5 is a capable model; 5.1 is a more capable model

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#936

Post by johncolanduoni »

immibis wrote: post #921
johncolanduoni wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m circumspect that anyone knows how it’ll play out. I think there’s strong evidence a correction is coming, but some talking head is predicting it’s going to be this week every week, and have been for a while. Nobody has convinced me it’s likely to look like the Great Depression yet. I also think the circular dealing fears in particular are overstated. Debt financing that looks like this is common in semicon, and I…

Anything that can't continue forever must eventually stop, but the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent. I don't think there's a problem saying that there will be a crash but it's impossible to know when. The longer a bubble grows, though, the worse it gets when it pops. According to Fed stats, we might still be postponing most of the crash that was going to happen in 2008.

If the AI boosters are right about what the technology will be capable of in 5 years, at least some of the big player’s investments will be literally the most profitable investments that ever happened. This is a potential mispricing, not a system inherently incapable of paying off long term like the subprime mortgages were. I don’t think another step-change like we saw with GPT2/3 is likely in the mid-term future, but I don't think anyone has shown it’s virtually impossible.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#937

Post by kranke155 »

deaux wrote: post #826
kranke155 wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then the usage is already so useful in Free mode that I didn’t even notice it. “Thinking ” has a meaningful cap. But I have not felt the need to pay for more. I pay for Claude.

That must've changed very recently then, even just a month ago I'd have Gemini (2.5 Pro) run into a daily limit after just 3-4 messages as a free user.

I bought on Black Friday, so pretty sure I got extended Gemini usage for 1.99

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#938

Post by immibis »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #936
immibis wrote: post #921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that can't continue forever must eventually stop, but the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent. I don't think there's a problem saying that there will be a crash but it's impossible to know when. The longer a bubble grows, though, the worse it gets when it pops. According to Fed stats, we might still be postponing most of the crash that was going to happen in 2008.

If the AI boosters are right about what the technology will be capable of in 5 years, at least some of the big player’s investments will be literally the most profitable investments that ever happened. This is a potential mispricing, not a system inherently incapable of paying off long term like the subprime mortgages were. I don’t think another step-change like we saw with GPT2/3 is likely in the mid-term future, bu…

That's betting, basically, that there will be an oligarchy (multiple dictatorship) and the oligarchs (dictators) will be whoever owns OpenAI shares.

If AI turns the world into a dictatorship, what gives anyone the idea they'll just agree to share that dictatorship with their shareholders? They could just ignore company law - they're dictators!

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#939

Post by array_key_first »

rprend wrote: post #932
array_key_first wrote: post #931

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think consumer brands lose money when they pay Google to do advertising? For many brands, yes, and they don't know it. > I think you underestimate how valuable being the top slot on google is. The more you advertise, the less valuable each ad space becomes. Consumers have a lot of money they have to dole out. Giving them more ads won't increase that pot of money - it will make your cut smaller and smaller as…

Which brands lose money on ads? Why are they still in business? > consumers have a lot of money that they dole out. More ads wont increase the cut of money Consumer spending is not a fixed pie chart or a zero sum game. US consumer spending has grown from $14 to $19 trillion since 2020. $5 trillion in new pie!! Your model of ads is: “I, a consumer, have decided to buy a bluetooth speaker, and the ads push and pull me…

> US consumer spending has grown from $14 to $19 trillion since 2020. $5 trillion in new pie!!

All that's telling you is the economy is not doing nearly as well as some of our metrics would have you believe.

Real wages are about the same as before, probably lower. Consumers are buying the same amount of stuff - no value has been created. Rather, the dollar has been devalued, much more than we're willing to let on.

There's real value, like actual physical goods, service and labor, and fake value. Fake value tries to proxy real value, but historically it's often way off.

Money is fake value. Stocks are even more fake value. It doesn't matter if your stock price is through the roof if you're not selling a product people want, for example. The product is the value, the stock price is people trying to approximate the value and future value.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#940

Post by fragmede »

rurp wrote: post #892
fragmede wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My first hand experience tells ChatGPT and even ClaudeCode are no where near the expertise they are touted to be Not doubting you, but where specifically have the latest models fallen short for you?

I'm unsure how someone could use LLMs regularly and not encounter significant mistakes. I use them a lot less than some devs and still run into basic errors pretty often, to the point that I rarely bother using them for niche or complicated problems even though they are pretty helpful in other cases. Just in the past few days I've had Claude trip all over itself on multiple basic tasks. One case was asking how to do…

Care to share a chat link?
Post reply on HN