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Google is winning on every AI front

(www.thealgorithmicbridge.com)
993 points vinhnx | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.162s | source | bottom
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codelord ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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1. commandersaki ◴[] No.43664525[source]
Google were pioneers to cloud computing

How so? Amazon were the first with S3 and EC2 including API driven control.

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2. foobarian ◴[] No.43664662[source]
Maybe for public services, but Google did the "cattle not pets" thing with custom Frankensteined beige boxes starting really early on
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3. phreeza ◴[] No.43664731[source]
AWS was the first to sell it, but Google had something that could be called cloud computing (Borg) before that.
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4. nostrebored ◴[] No.43665306[source]
What do you think AWS decided to sell? Both companies had a significant interest in making infrastructure easy to create and scale.
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5. commandersaki ◴[] No.43665467[source]
Modern cloud computing is more than just having a scalable infrastructure of servers, it was a paradigm shift to having elastic demand, utility style pricing, being completely API driven, etc. Amazon were not only the first to market but pioneers in this space. Nothing came close at that time.
6. pclmulqdq ◴[] No.43665723{3}[source]
AWS had a cleaner host-guest abstraction (the VM) that makes it easier to reason about security, and likely had a much bigger gap between their own usage peaks and troughs.
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7. mianos ◴[] No.43668184{4}[source]
Yep. Google offered app engine which was good for fairly stateless simple apps in an old limited version of python, like a photo gallery or email client. For anything else is waa dismal. Amazon offered VMs. Useful stuff for a lot more platforms.