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Google is winning on every AI front

(www.thealgorithmicbridge.com)
993 points vinhnx | 16 comments | 12 Apr 25 03:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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codelord ◴[12 Apr 25 06:51 UTC] No.43661966[source]▶
As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but 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. The whole time that I was at OpenAI until now GOOG has been the only individual stock that I've been holding. Despite the threat to their search business I think they'll bounce back because they have a lot of cards to play. OpenAI is an annoyance for Google, because they are willing to burn money to get users. Google can't as easily burn money, since they already have billions of users, but also they are a public company and have to answer to investors. But I doubt if OpenAI investors would sign up to give more money to be burned in a year. Google just needs to ease off on the red tape and make their innovations available to users as fast as they can. (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)
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imiric ◴[12 Apr 25 08:24 UTC] No.43662490[source]▶
> 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.

I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already.

The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

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1. jononor ◴[12 Apr 25 09:01 UTC] No.43662666[source]▶
I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".
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2. imiric ◴[12 Apr 25 11:24 UTC] No.43663454[source]▶
Hey, we could save them all the busywork, and just wire all our money to corporations...

But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.

3. JKCalhoun ◴[12 Apr 25 12:32 UTC] No.43663831[source]▶
I have yet to understand this obsession with agents.

Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce?

Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role.

As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!

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4. tilne ◴[12 Apr 25 13:13 UTC] No.43664087[source]▶
> Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce?

This is what I see motivating non-technical people to learn about agents. There’s lots of jobs that are essentially reading/memorizing complicated instructions and entering data accordingly.

5. dinfinity ◴[12 Apr 25 13:54 UTC] No.43664386[source]▶
> I have yet to understand this obsession with agents.

1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs.

2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in various heads to prototypes/MVPs is causing/will cause somewhat of a Cambrian explosion of such things.

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6. samtp ◴[12 Apr 25 15:44 UTC] No.43665366{3}[source]▶
A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas, filled with hallucinations, unable to ever get past the first step. Sounds lovely.
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7. popcorncowboy ◴[12 Apr 25 16:20 UTC] No.43665731[source]▶
If you reframe agents as (effectively) slave labor, the economic incentives driving this stampede become trivial to understand.
8. fragmede ◴[12 Apr 25 19:15 UTC] No.43667152[source]▶
> Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people?

Should I take this job or that one? Which college should I go to? Should I date this person or that one? Life has some really hard decisions you have to make, and that's just life. There are no wrong answers, but figuring out what to do and ruminating over it is comes to everyone at some point in their lives. You can ask ChatGPT to ask you the right questions you need asked in order to figure out what you really want to do. I don't know how to put a price on that, but that's worth way more than $20/month.

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9. fragmede ◴[12 Apr 25 19:16 UTC] No.43667169{4}[source]▶
They were already not getting past the first step before AI came along. If AI helps them get to step two, and then three and four, that seems like a good thing, no?
10. janalsncm ◴[12 Apr 25 19:28 UTC] No.43667273{3}[source]▶
Right, but before a product can do all of those things well it will have to do one of those things well. And by “well” I mean reliably superhuman, not usually but sometimes embarrassingly poorly.

People used to (and still do) pay fortune tellers to make decisions for them. Doesn’t mean they’re good ones.

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11. fragmede ◴[12 Apr 25 19:35 UTC] No.43667317{4}[source]▶
fwiw I used it the other day to help me figure out where I stand on a particular issue, so it seems like it's already there.
12. jart ◴[12 Apr 25 20:13 UTC] No.43667585{4}[source]▶
Only a small percent of people will actually produce ideas that other people are interested in. For most people, AI tools for building things will enable them to construct their own personalized worlds. Imagine watching movies, except the movies can be generated for you on the fly. Sure, no one except you might care about a Matrix Moulin Rouge crossover. But you'll be able to have it just like that.
13. dinfinity ◴[12 Apr 25 22:14 UTC] No.43668324{4}[source]▶
> A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas,

Well yeah, that's how evolution works: it's an exploration of the search space and only the good stuff survives.

> filled with hallucinations,

The end products can be fully AI-free. In fact, I would expect most ideas that have been floating around to have nothing to do with AI. To be fair, that may change with it being the new hip thing. Even then, there are plenty of implementations that use AI where hallucinations are no problem at all (or even a feature), or where the issues with hallucinations are sufficiently mitigated.

> unable to ever get past the first step.

How so? There are already a bunch of functional things that were in Show HN that were produced with AI assistance. Again, most of the implemented ideas will suck, but some will be awesome and might change the world.

14. sumedh ◴[12 Apr 25 23:33 UTC] No.43668778[source]▶
> Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people?

Take insurance, for example — do you actually enjoy shopping for it?

What if you could just share a few basic details, and an AI agent did all the research for you, then came back with the top 3 insurance plans that fit your needs, complete with the pros and cons?

Why wouldn’t that be a better way to choose?

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15. fn-mote ◴[13 Apr 25 01:25 UTC] No.43669269{3}[source]▶
There are already web sites that do this for products like insurance (example: [1]).

What I need is something to troll through the garbage Amazon listings and offer me the product that actually has the specs that I searched for and is offered by a seller with more than 50 total sales. Maybe an AI agent can do that for me?

[1]: https://www.policygenius.com/

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16. sumedh ◴[13 Apr 25 04:37 UTC] No.43670132{4}[source]▶
> There are already web sites that do this for products like insurance

You didnt get the point, instead of going to such website for solving the insurance problem, going to 10 other websites for solving 10 other problems, just let one AI agent do it for you.