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Google is winning on every AI front

(www.thealgorithmicbridge.com)
993 points vinhnx | 29 comments | 12 Apr 25 03:58 UTC | HN request time: 2.923s | 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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netcan ◴[12 Apr 25 09:17 UTC] No.43662766[source]▶
> 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.

So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term.

Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.

Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses.

At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs.

The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.

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tonyedgecombe ◴[12 Apr 25 09:59 UTC] No.43662990[source]▶
>It's be a >$10bn business already.

But not profitable yet.

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1. amelius ◴[12 Apr 25 11:59 UTC] No.43663651[source]▶
The demand is there. People are already becoming addicted to this stuff.
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2. ghaff ◴[12 Apr 25 12:18 UTC] No.43663742[source]▶
I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.
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3. amelius ◴[12 Apr 25 12:52 UTC] No.43663936[source]▶
Well, they said it is a $10B industry. Not sure how they measure it, but it counts for something, I suppose.
4. kcatskcolbdi ◴[12 Apr 25 12:53 UTC] No.43663948[source]▶
I think you may be underestimating it.

At this point in college, LLMs are everywhere. It's completely dominating history/english/mass comm fields with respect to writing papers.

Anecdotally all of my working non-tech friends use chatgpt daily.

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5. ghaff ◴[12 Apr 25 13:22 UTC] No.43664153{3}[source]▶
It does anecdotally seem to be very common in education which presumably will carry over to professional workplaces over time. I see it a lot less in non-tech and even tech/adjacent adults today.
6. datavirtue ◴[12 Apr 25 13:51 UTC] No.43664368[source]▶
My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.
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7. rubyfan ◴[12 Apr 25 13:57 UTC] No.43664410[source]▶
Sadly it’s become common for many mediocre employees in corporate environments to defer to ChatGPT, receive erroneous output and accept it as truth.

There are now commonly corporate goon squads whose job is to drive AI adoption without care for actual impact to results. Usage of AI is the KR.

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8. mistrial9 ◴[12 Apr 25 14:39 UTC] No.43664764[source]▶
every ordinary college and university in the USA is filled with AI now AFAIK
9. johannes1234321 ◴[12 Apr 25 16:05 UTC] No.43665573[source]▶
Aside from university mentioned by sibling comments, there is major uptake of AI in journalism (summarize long press statements, create first draft of the teaser, or even full articles ...) and many people in my social groups use it regularly for having something explained, finding something ... it's wide spread
10. ezst ◴[12 Apr 25 16:36 UTC] No.43665904[source]▶
For many, this stuff is mostly about copilot being shoved down everyone's throats via ms office obnoxious ads and distractions, and I haven't yet heard of anyone liking it or perceiving it as an improvement. We are now years into this, so my bets are on the thing fading away slowly and becoming a taboo at Microsoft.
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11. og_kalu ◴[12 Apr 25 16:45 UTC] No.43665988[source]▶
Last Month, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (very close to this one, likely passes it this month) were the only sites with more visits than chatgpt. Couple that with the 400M+ weekly active users (according to open ai in February) and i seriously doubt that.

https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...

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12. matthewdgreen ◴[12 Apr 25 17:28 UTC] No.43666352{3}[source]▶
Weekly active users is a pretty strange metric. Essential tools and even social networking apps report DAUs, and they do that because essential things get used daily. How many times did you use Google in the past day? How many times did you visit (insert some social media site you prefer) in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
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13. og_kalu ◴[12 Apr 25 17:55 UTC] No.43666555{4}[source]▶
Mostly only social media/messaging sites report daily active users regularly. Everything else usually reports monthly active users at best.

>in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.

No, something I use on a weekly basis (which is not necessarily just once a week) is pretty important to me and spinning it otherwise is bizarre.

Google is the frontend to the web for the vast majority of internet users so yeah it gets a lot of daily use. Social media sites are social media sites and are in a league of their own. I don't think i need to explain why they would get a disproportionate amount of daily users.

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14. anon84873628 ◴[12 Apr 25 18:21 UTC] No.43666759[source]▶
Many recent HN articles about how middle managers are already becoming addicted and forcing it on their peons. One was about the game dev industry in particular.

In my work I see semi-technical people (like basic python ability) wiring together some workflows and doing fairly interesting analytical things that do solve real problems. They are things that could have been done with regular code already but weren't worth the engineering investment.

In the "real world" I see people generating crummy movies and textbooks now. There is a certain type of person it definitely appeals to.

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15. UncleEntity ◴[12 Apr 25 18:39 UTC] No.43666900{3}[source]▶
> My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd...

She is literally married into the HN crowd.

I think the real AI breakthrough is how to monetize the high usage users.

16. moshegramovsky ◴[12 Apr 25 19:56 UTC] No.43667468{3}[source]▶
My Dad is elderly and he enjoys writing. Uses Google Gemini a few times a week. I always warn him that it can hallucinate and he seems to get it.

It's changed his entire view of computing.

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17. ikiris ◴[12 Apr 25 20:23 UTC] No.43667648[source]▶
I think you're in fact wildly out of touch with the general populace and how much they use AI tools to make their work easier.
18. matthewdgreen ◴[12 Apr 25 21:43 UTC] No.43668149{5}[source]▶
I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.

And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.

It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.

(PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)

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19. og_kalu ◴[12 Apr 25 22:53 UTC] No.43668555{6}[source]▶
>I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.

OK? That's fine. I don't think I ever claimed you were a WAU

>And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty.

So you are not a weekly active user then. Maybe not even a monthly active one.

>Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service.

Maybe[1], but you didn't. And I doubt your wife needs a new logo every week so again not a weekly active user.

>ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators)but have no essential need for whatsoever.

You visit the same exact meme generator or finance site every week? If so, then that site is pretty important to you. If not, then again you're not a weekly active user to it.

If you visit a (but not the same) meme generator every week then clearly creating memes is important to you because I've never visited one in my life.

>And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.

There are well funded alternatives to Google Search too but how many use anything else? Rarely does any valuable niche have no competition.

>It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.

Yeah it is and so far, you've not actually said anything to indicate the contrary.

[1]ChatGPT had an image generation update recently that made it capable of doing things other services can't. Good chance you could not in fact do what you did (to the same satisfaction) elsewhere. But that's beside my point.

20. ylee ◴[13 Apr 25 02:00 UTC] No.43669433{4}[source]▶
My father says "I feel like I hired an able assistant" regarding LLMs.
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21. pyuser583 ◴[13 Apr 25 03:39 UTC] No.43669918{3}[source]▶
I don’t understand why this is happening. Why is everyone buying into this hype so strongly?

It’s a bit like how DEI was the big thing for a couple years, and now everyone is abandoning it.

Do corporate leaders just constantly chase hype?

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22. rubyfan ◴[13 Apr 25 04:10 UTC] No.43670017{4}[source]▶
Yes corporate leaders do chase hype and they also believe in magic.

I think companies implement DEI initiatives for different reasons than hype though. Many are now abandoning DEI ostensibly out of fear due to the change in U.S. regime.

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23. pyuser583 ◴[13 Apr 25 05:19 UTC] No.43670275{5}[source]▶
A case can be made for diversity, but the fact that all the big companies were adopting DEI at the same time made it hype.

I personally know an engineering manager who would scoff at MLK Day, but in 2020 starting screaming about how it wasn’t enough and we needed Juneteenth too.

AI isn’t hype at Nvidia, and DEI isn’t hype at Patagonia.

But tech industry-wide, they’re both hype.

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24. theshackleford ◴[13 Apr 25 06:10 UTC] No.43670474[source]▶
> I haven't yet heard of anyone liking it or perceiving it as an improvement.

Well I mean if you say it, then of course it MUST be true I’m sure.

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25. ezst ◴[13 Apr 25 07:18 UTC] No.43670754{3}[source]▶
As much as you may make fun of my anecdotal observation, your comment doesn't add anything of value, in particular to substantiate that "people [are] becoming addicted to LLMs". I stand behind my comment that the vast majority of non-tech worker are exposed to them via Copilot in MS Office, and if you want to come to its rescue and pretend it's not a disaster, by all means :-)
26. ezst ◴[13 Apr 25 07:25 UTC] No.43670795{3}[source]▶
I'm sure this is a thing,

what I'm not so sure about is how much that generalises beyond the HN/tech-workers bubble (I don't think "people" in OP's comment is as broad and numerous as they think it is).

27. ghaff ◴[13 Apr 25 11:48 UTC] No.43672079{5}[source]▶
I’m not sure companies are “abandoning DEI” so much as realizing that it’s often only a vocal minority that cares about DEI reports and scores and you don’t actually need a VP and diversity office to do some outreach and tally internal metrics.

The climate has changed. Some of that is economic at big tech companies. But it’s also a ramping down of a variety of things most employers probably didn’t support but kept their mouths shut about.

28. rubyfan ◴[14 Apr 25 15:04 UTC] No.43682110{6}[source]▶
I think many were rightly adopting DEI initiatives in an environment post me-too and post George Floyd. I don’t think it was driven by hype but more a reaction to the environment which heightened awareness of societal injustices. Awareness led to all sorts of things - conversation, compassion, attempts to do better in society and the workplace, and probably law suits. You can question how motivated corporations were to adopt DEI initiatives but I think it’d be wrong to say it was driven by hype.
29. moshegramovsky ◴[18 Apr 25 19:06 UTC] No.43730990{5}[source]▶
It's so great!

I keep reminding him that it can hallucinate...