Google is winning on every AI front

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.)

> 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.

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".

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!