[HN Gopher] Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles
        
       Author : Amorymeltzer
       Score  : 181 points
       Date   : 2023-05-15 10:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
        
       | wslh wrote:
       | Courious question: how difficult and expensive is to train these
       | models? Being the technology open source and assuming that we can
       | collaborate on the training phase and have big open training
       | sets, what will be the competitive advantage of companies such
       | Google beyond the brand?
        
         | spacebanana7 wrote:
         | Training foundation models is very expensive. Easily a few
         | million per model with no guarantee of success.
        
           | wslh wrote:
           | Again, we can assume a distribute training if that is
           | feasible.
        
             | spacebanana7 wrote:
             | Unfortunately, I don't think distributed training is
             | feasible.
             | 
             | My understanding is that these models are trained using
             | some form of gradient descent. This requires knowledge of
             | the model's prior state and current training error to
             | adjust parameter values.
             | 
             | With distributed training it's difficult, to point of
             | impossible, to communicate the state of the model across
             | large distances because these models are so large.
             | 
             | Take my comment with a grain of salt because I'm not an
             | expert in this area. I'd very much enjoy being wrong about
             | this because distributed training would unlock so much
             | potential.
        
         | HDThoreaun wrote:
         | > what will be the competitive advantage of companies such
         | Google beyond the brand?
         | 
         | The advantage is that their AI will be integrated into products
         | that already have billions of users. Android users will get
         | used to the default google assistant model so theyre more
         | likely to use it in other instances as well and so on.
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | Google scanned 25 million books. That has to help them at least
         | a little.
        
           | wslh wrote:
           | But it is possible to crawl Internet in a distributed way.
           | Also Wikipedia is a treasure.
        
             | criddell wrote:
             | That's all true, but everybody has access to that. None of
             | that is scarce so the value is basically 0.
             | 
             | You asked for advantages that Google has and the text of 25
             | million books is one thing. A lot of the text is going to
             | be scarce and so it's something of value Google has and
             | others do not.
             | 
             | Google also has built a massive GIS database from driving
             | their cars around the world. Apple has a smaller database
             | and there are some third parties (like ESRI) that will sell
             | you access to their database. If you want to ask an AI
             | something about your neighborhood, Google has more data
             | than anybody on that front.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | lelanthran wrote:
         | > Courious question: how difficult and expensive is to train
         | these models? Being the technology open source and assuming
         | that we can collaborate on the training phase and have big open
         | training sets, what will be the competitive advantage of
         | companies such Google beyond the brand?
         | 
         | Zero to none?
         | 
         | I mean, it's much much _much_ easier for collaborators to
         | produce better (or even competitive) map data than training
         | LLMs, and yet the open alternatives to google maps are hardly
         | ever used, have spotty data for some locations and have made no
         | compelling feature for user 's to adopt.
        
       | classified wrote:
       | The author seems shocked by the demonstration of the difference
       | between marketing and reality at Google.
        
       | s1k3s wrote:
       | Speaking of "AI Battles", the conversation I'd like to see more
       | is about how these 2 giants are crushing entire industries in
       | their search for higher stock prices. Far more interesting than
       | Bard vs. ChatGPT imo.
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | It just means that lots of these new so-called AI startups using
       | wrappers around AI APIs don't have a moat to go with since these
       | new announcements by Google has effectively destroyed them for
       | free or close to free.
       | 
       | It is only going to accelerate and AI research will increasingly
       | be more closed. There is now no difference between OpenAI.com or
       | Google DeepMind.
       | 
       | Either way it will have to take more than LLMs like 'ChatGPT' to
       | even come close to dethroning Google. [0] There is more to 'AI'
       | than the LLM chatbot hype.
       | 
       | [0] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-
       | gro...
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | Google's problem is that if it wanted to not break its current
       | business model it would need a chatbot that answers whatever the
       | highest bidder desires.
       | 
       | The fast pace of 'internet time' means Amazon, AOL, Facebook and
       | Google can follow the trajectory of Ford, AMC, Chrysler, and GM
       | in a fraction of the time. Amazon was a leader in e-commerce
       | once, now they count on someone who subscribed to Prime for the
       | last 15 years to subscribe for the next 15 years. Google search
       | used to be good, but now it is corrupt. Search for a 'used Honda
       | Fit' and the first search result is an ad from the one car dealer
       | that owns all the new car dealerships in town for new cars and
       | even though they presumably have used cars in their lot, they'll
       | try to sell you the same CR-V they'd try to sell you in person.
       | I'd accept any kind of ad from someone who is selling what i am
       | buying but Google aids and abets numerous acts of brand
       | destruction every day.
       | 
       | They know how to walk the line of running a corrupt ads engine
       | and not get anybody arrested but it is an unsolved problem in
       | A.I. ethics to get away with running a corrupt chatbot --- and
       | that is why Google is in so much trouble.
        
         | SilverBirch wrote:
         | To be honest... it actually would be entirely unsurprising and
         | perfectly workable for Google to sell off the top AI answers.
         | Something along the lines of
         | 
         | Your query: "Google, show me the best place to eat in
         | manhattan"
         | 
         | "Bard's partners at Manhattan steakhouse are known for their
         | delicious chargrilled steaks. Other options include..."
         | 
         | Sure, Google won't do that today, but they didn't do ads at the
         | top of search for a while... until they did.
        
           | PaulHoule wrote:
           | Google promised never to blend the ads with the content back
           | in the "don't be evil" days. Their first ad product was
           | simple text ads that went on the side of the search results
           | that maybe left some dollars on the table but actually kept
           | the table open by looking squeaky clean legitimate.
           | 
           | Google has a massive valuation because whenever Wall Street
           | demands "M0R M0NEY!" they can just increase the ad load. The
           | thing is they and their investors depend on every penny of ad
           | revenue they get and any innovation that reduces it, even
           | just a little bit, is an absolute disaster for them. That's
           | why it is a 'disruptive' technology to Google.... It eats
           | their lunch _right now_ and the possibility they might be
           | able increase their ad load someday doesn't make up for
           | losing it. I mean, shareholders can hit the SELL button and
           | run in as much time as it takes me to write this sentence.
        
         | twelve40 wrote:
         | > Amazon was a leader in e-commerce once
         | 
         | did i miss something and they are no longer half a trillion
         | revenue top ecommerce company in the world? who did they get
         | replaced by?
        
           | tartuffe78 wrote:
           | Yeah, it's the only place I know of where I can order from
           | 1,000s of products and have them delivered the next day...
        
             | PaulHoule wrote:
             | You can find 1000 products listed on their web site but 999
             | of the listings are bogus, fraud, or both.
             | 
             | Items you can buy off the shelf at Target for $40 are for
             | sale for $70 at AMZN.
             | 
             | Some people get one day delivery, but other people (me) get
             | five day delivery with Prime, particularly ZIP codes that
             | _have an Amazon distribution facility in them_. (Everyone I
             | know who gets 1 day delivery has a Cheesecake Factory in
             | their town... But for Christ 's sake I order things _from
             | Japan_ on Ebay and get them before I get things from the
             | AMZN warehouse in the next state.) I guess they think I
             | want to watch _Rings of Power_ so bad I 'll subscribe to
             | Prime anyway but you know... I don't.
             | 
             | My understanding is that the online store consistently
             | loses money, they are a going concern only because of AWS.
             | But guess what, I've already moved enough spend from AWS to
             | Azure that subjecting me to 5 day delivery cost them much
             | more than it saved.
             | 
             | As for replacements, see every other retailer that sees
             | fulfillment as a way to make a positive impression.
             | Adorama, Best Buy, and Target just to name a few. It's true
             | that many of those have bizzare limited product line ideas
             | (e.g. Best Buy sells Sony camera bodies but has no real
             | selection of lenses but they think I'm stupid enough to buy
             | a Samsung washing machine which is not a good choice unless
             | you want to buy another washing machine in a few weeks) but
             | the product listings are basically honest outside AMZN.
             | 
             | Long term see Temu and other asian retailers. When I look
             | at arXiv I see a large literature in "sequential
             | reccomendation" almost entirely by Chinese and Indian
             | authors. Looks like a "missile gap" for e-commerce and
             | social commerce if you ask me.
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | Google hasn't cared even slightly about how it has developed a
       | reputation for cancelling projects, leading to developer mistrust
       | of any new Google initiative.
       | 
       | It's going to bite them when they need developers to embrace
       | their ai ecosystem.
       | 
       | Their CEO should have been fired years ago.
        
         | fakedang wrote:
         | Honestly, is it Pichai's fault for canceling the projects? Or
         | is it Schmidt's fault for starting them, and for creating that
         | short termism culture in the first place.
         | 
         | It could be the case that Pichai is Immelt while Schmidt is the
         | Google Jack Welch.
        
       | PedroBatista wrote:
       | The Google AI strategy is to use their weight and flood the
       | market with everything AI so any competitor is either very niche
       | and/or more expensive than "free".
       | 
       | Typical big co move.
       | 
       | Also the amount of tweets that suddenly popped up on Twitter with
       | the same template of "ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard has
       | launched here 10 tips on how to..". It was clearly a Google
       | marketing push ( scummy as always, but Google have done way worse
       | in the past ).
       | 
       | This leads me to believe that Bard is at best OK and has no "AI
       | advantage" over other competitors and it's basically who has the
       | bigger ranch and deeper pockets until everything is dead around
       | them.
        
         | andai wrote:
         | Bard's advantage is integration with Google's "moat" which is
         | the best search engine in the world.
         | 
         | In all my tests so far, this integration fails. The Bing AI
         | worked every time. (Can't believe I just wrote those words, but
         | here we are...)
        
         | j33zusjuice wrote:
         | Bard is terrible, by comparison. ChatGPT feels like spontaneous
         | answers. Google Bard will literally copy top search result
         | answers to questions, and doesn't answer them relevantly. It's
         | a bad extension of search.
        
         | mupuff1234 wrote:
         | > has no "AI advantage" over other competitors
         | 
         | Couldn't that be said about Google's advantage in search, and
         | yet here we are?
        
         | martythemaniak wrote:
         | > It was clearly a Google marketing push ( scummy as always,
         | but Google have done way worse in the past ).
         | 
         | I don't think you understand engagement farming. The only
         | objective these hustlers have is to gain more followers, and
         | they will say anything about anything as long as it leads to
         | them standing out in your TL and thus increasing their chance
         | of a follow (and of course, eventually monetization)
         | 
         | Last year they were opining about Web3. In December they were
         | the ones screaming "Google is Finished", then that became
         | generic so now there's a new angle. In 2 months it'll change
         | again. Their words are completely meaningless and bare little
         | relation to reality. The most important thing is to establish
         | the poster as some kind of authority figure who always knows
         | what's going on, so please follow them.
        
         | sillysaurusx wrote:
         | Dude, or ma'am, _thank you_ for mentioning these obviously-
         | sponsored tweets.
         | 
         | How do they guarantee hundreds or thousands of likes?
         | Presumably the only reason the algorithm keeps showing them to
         | me is that they're popular. Otherwise they'd be labeled
         | "sponsored".
         | 
         | The points are always so bad, too. I asked Bard to summarize
         | one of my repos, and it hallucinated that it was an http server
         | written in Go. My repo didn't have a single .go file.
         | "Internet-connected AI" is just mistaken.
        
           | trasz4 wrote:
           | Twitter doesn't mark bot accounts as sponsored.
           | 
           | As to how - many ways, some of them really creative. One that
           | I remember was an account that's reposting stuff that I
           | genuinely liked, some left-wing activist content, and only
           | now and then they would push something different, like a
           | message about how this one time brand X turned out to be crap
           | during a manifa.
        
             | pclmulqdq wrote:
             | Most of the hype bots aren't labeled as bots. They are run
             | covertly, and replaced when they get burned.
        
           | throwwwaway69 wrote:
           | They carefully flood their tweets with likes from bot farms
           | and once there's a lot of inorganic activity it leads to a
           | ton of visibility and therefore further organic activity
        
           | jeroenvlek wrote:
           | Had a similar experience. Asked Bard to generate a Firefox
           | plugin and it responded that it was a text-based assistant
           | and couldn't comply [1] whereas ChatGPT just did it. It
           | didn't work, but it still generated it.
           | 
           | [1] https://twitter.com/jeroenvlek/status/1657195209686683648
        
             | trasz4 wrote:
             | >It didn't work, but it still generated it.
             | 
             | So neither could generate the plugin, it's just that one of
             | them lied about it.
        
               | jeroenvlek wrote:
               | No, I suspect it's more the case that ChatGPT could
               | generate it anno 2021, but can't anymore due changes in
               | Chromium (I switched to Edge ultimately) and the Gmail
               | API and Google Cloud Credentials workflow that I tried to
               | add to it later.
               | 
               | It was interesting to see that ChatGPT annotated its code
               | with pitfalls to avoid, that it actually didn't avoid in
               | the code.
        
               | trasz4 wrote:
               | >No, I suspect it's more the case that ChatGPT could
               | generate it anno 2021
               | 
               | Why? I mean, why does it sound more plausible to you that
               | it ever could, when we have countless examples of models
               | lying (or rather hallucinating)?
        
               | jeroenvlek wrote:
               | Because it was trained on old documentation, but I see
               | your point. My original point was also not necessarily
               | that ChatGPT was correct, but that ChatGPT at least gave
               | something to work with, whereas Bard simlly refused.
        
               | disgruntledphd2 wrote:
               | Just like a real human;)
        
               | badrequest wrote:
               | The company I work for is building a browser extension
               | that involves ChatGPT, and we can unfortunately confirm
               | that it is, in fact, not capable of writing browser
               | extension code.
        
         | processing wrote:
         | _exploding head emoji_
         | 
         | C&P "Google just updated its free competitor, Bard."
         | 
         | C&P "ChatGPT has now a big problem"
         | 
         | C&P "Here are 7 incredible things Bard can do (that ChatGPT
         | cannot)"
         | 
         | C&P "ChatGPT is in trouble"
         | 
         |  _exploding head emoji_
        
           | nonfamous wrote:
           | Also so telling that every Bard comparison is to ChatGPT,
           | when the correct comparison would be with Bing.
        
         | wfhBrian wrote:
         | > ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard has launched here 10 tips
         | on how to..
         | 
         | As if the spammy AI threads couldn't get worse, they managed to
         | do it.
        
         | skilled wrote:
         | I noticed the same. "ChatGPT is old news, here are 10 ADVANCED
         | prompts for Bard".
         | 
         | The advanced prompt in question = "create a table from these 3
         | numbers"
        
           | MattRix wrote:
           | The vast majority of tweets about ChatGPT are the same
           | garbage. I think it's mostly due to Twitter giving too much
           | weight to tweets and likes from "verified" users.
           | 
           | I wouldn't be surprised that if you looked at the details on
           | those tweets, it's the same few thousand dudes creating them
           | and liking them and retweeting them.
        
             | cloudking wrote:
             | The worst part is the tweets themselves are probably
             | generated
        
         | pphysch wrote:
         | > Also the amount of tweets that suddenly popped up on Twitter
         | with the same template of "ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard
         | has launched here 10 tips on how to..". It was clearly a Google
         | marketing push ( scummy as always, but Google have done way
         | worse in the past ).
         | 
         | There's clearly a Big Tech turf war going on over AI. All sides
         | are slinging poop/propaganda. I've seen more hysterical and
         | uninteresting anti-Google FUD than ever on this here Orange
         | Site over the YTD. Special mention of the "world is literally
         | ending because Google requested .zip TLD from ICANN" or pre-IO
         | anti-hype "Google CEO earns as much as other highly-paid CEOs".
         | 
         | Superfluous spam that I wish would be filtered, but often times
         | it's produced specifically to get upvoted on HN, which is a
         | dilemma for moderation.
        
         | Ttaha1390 wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | renewiltord wrote:
         | Lol, I posted "Google is BACK! MusicLM rules!" and no one paid
         | me for that. I just think MusicLM is cool!
         | 
         | Funny to think that somewhere out there I'm loaded into
         | someone's consciousness as a pawn in the marketing machinery of
         | The Alphabet.
        
         | blululu wrote:
         | This seems like attributing intent where there is none.
         | 
         | AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them they
         | just shill whatever the latest thing is.
         | 
         | Google has no central AI strategy because the company has weak
         | leadership and is largely directionless.
         | 
         | The distributed actions of a lot of people does not amount to
         | any concerted plan.
        
           | bigcat12345678 wrote:
           | > Google has no central AI strategy because the company has
           | weak leadership and is largely directionless.
           | 
           | Evidence please?
        
           | loudmax wrote:
           | Absolutely this. Google could develop an AI that's superior
           | to GPT-4. They may have already. Under their current
           | leadership, it wouldn't make a difference anyway as they
           | wouldn't know what to do with it. Google is on a fast track
           | to becoming Xerox.
        
             | anonylizard wrote:
             | Its called Gemini. Google's own mega-multimodal model.
             | Google merged google brain and deepmind to start developing
             | Gemini. All the talent left at Google to go all in on this.
             | 
             | The other AI products at google were just polishing up
             | their old stuff to hastily release. Gemini is their real
             | attempt at catching up to GPT-4.
        
               | ineedasername wrote:
               | So far I have found Bard to be significantly worse at
               | some basic tasks. A simple request to give me the text of
               | the opening scene of King Lear met with a badly comical
               | rewrite in modern prose that got basic things wrong (all
               | the daughters professed their love for their father a and
               | received equal shares of land & dowry) I point out the
               | inaccuracy and reinforced my request for the exact
               | verbatim text. And then proceeded to give-- still-- a
               | rewritten version albeit slightly closer to the true
               | text. Bing and ChatGPT both complied on the first try.
               | 
               | On the other hand, bard performed much better at a more
               | complex task: I provided fake data spanning six years and
               | a few rows of different categories. I left the sixth year
               | blank. Without prompting it, reformatted the from comma
               | do you limited into a nice table. It also gave a brief
               | summarization and analysis of the trends. When I asked
               | follow-up questions he gave detailed responses that were
               | moderately insightful for anyone that would be familiar
               | with the data domain given a few minutes to review the
               | data set. Finally, I asked it to give a projection of
               | what the values would be for the final column, which I
               | had left blank. It did so, with an explanation of the
               | trend it observed, as well as a description of the linear
               | regression model. It used it and apologized for not being
               | able to give more complex modeling due to the Small data
               | set.
               | 
               | GPT-4 provided answers and analysis that were comparable
               | in quality, but required additional rounds of prompting
               | and clarification.
        
               | aix1 wrote:
               | Just to disentangle this a bit, GP's post was about
               | Gemini and you're responding about Bard. The two are
               | different things. Gemini hasn't been trained yet; it's
               | the next-gen thing that's currently being worked on
               | (Pichai mentioned it at I/O).
               | 
               | It obviously remains to be seen how good Gemini will be.
               | I just wanted to clear up the apparent confusion.
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | zarkenfrood wrote:
           | Google are taking the time to make sure that there is not
           | much that comes back. With being the incumbent leader comes
           | the greater risks of regulatory problems an reputational
           | damage. OpenAI get something wrong is annoying Google do it
           | and it damages the business much more significantly. They
           | will attract regulator scrutiny far harder than other
           | operators will.
        
             | klibertp wrote:
             | I guess that's also the reason why OpenAI is MS's in 49%
             | and not 51%. Seems like a tried and true strategy.
        
           | trasz4 wrote:
           | >AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono.
           | 
           | Why do you assume not being explicitly paid by Google means
           | not being part of Google's marketing strategy?
           | 
           | Google's whole business model is getting people to do work
           | for free ("produce content") by making them believe they are
           | doing something else.
        
             | sillysaurusx wrote:
             | I think they're getting paid. The tweets are all similar,
             | down to the wording of the intro. It's unlike any organic
             | AI trend on Twitter that I've seen, and it reeks of "we
             | want you to mention these three things:" prompting from a
             | Google-sponsored PR firm.
             | 
             | I would've believed the first three were coincidence, but
             | by the time I got to tweet number 4 I was already re-
             | reading Submarine. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
        
               | brigadier132 wrote:
               | > The tweets are all similar, down to the wording of the
               | intro
               | 
               | This is what happens when they are all using the same ab
               | testing and title generation tech.
        
               | trasz4 wrote:
               | But I'm not saying they are not getting paid - I'm saying
               | they are not getting paid by Google. They might be making
               | money on sponsored links, or being part of some content
               | farm. Barnacles aren't aware of how they are working for
               | their whale.
        
               | sillysaurusx wrote:
               | How can you be sure? I agree that's a possibility, but
               | you seem certain. It seems more unlikely they're not
               | getting paid.
        
               | trasz4 wrote:
               | Because when something is possible and the incentives are
               | there, then it's either already happening, or will
               | eventually happen.
        
           | asdfman123 wrote:
           | Covert public opinion campaigns are incredibly common,
           | especially on Twitter.
           | 
           | Google has billions of dollars it doesn't know what to do
           | with: they can certainly part with a tiny fraction of it and
           | pay some PR firm to save face after the ChatGPT thing.
           | 
           | What often happens is a few paid employees get the ball
           | rolling and everyone else starts doing the hyping for free.
        
           | fakedang wrote:
           | > AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them
           | they just shill whatever the latest thing is.
           | 
           | I thought this was the case, until I saw how identical all of
           | the messages were, including the order of the bullet points.
           | It was clearly some form of paid marketing - or fake
           | accounts, except they all had blue ticks (not that that means
           | much these days).
        
             | sangnoir wrote:
             | > I thought this was the case, until I saw how identical
             | all of the messages were, including the order of the bullet
             | points.
             | 
             | This has always been the case for all corporate _fanbois_
             | on Twitter. As an ancient example: there was a time when
             | Steve Jobs proclaimed that 3.5 " screens were the perfect
             | size, and 5.5"/6" phones were too big(!!). This was
             | followed by suspiciously similar talking points
             | recirculating in the "iPhone Twitter" echo-chamber[0]:
             | including the same doctored image[1] that compared thumb-
             | coverage of a 3.5' iPhone vs the Galaxy Note (IIRC). I
             | don't think Apple was directly paying people to say those
             | things: they simply confirmed their biases and they felt
             | compelled to share the "truth".
             | 
             | 0. Trended on Twitter, and even appeared on blogs written
             | by Apple superfans like Marco Arment and Gruber
             | 
             | 1. The phones were not to scale and the image was
             | inaccurate in a way that was unfavorable towards the non-
             | iPhone phablet.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | tiniuclx wrote:
       | > AI is zero marginal generation of information (well, nearly
       | zero, relative to humans). As I wrote last year generative models
       | unbundle idea creation from idea substantiation, which can then
       | be duplicated and distributed at zero marginal cost.
       | 
       | I find this quote a little bit hard to believe. Are the current
       | models genuinely capable of innovation? I've been productive in
       | using image generation for my album covers, but I haven't found a
       | similar use for Large Language Models yet.
        
       | chimen wrote:
       | On a side note, we're experiencing the death of SEO I believe
       | since content can't be trusted any more and knowledge, expertise
       | and competence is available to everyone that can ask the proper
       | questions.
        
       | retskrad wrote:
       | Google's brand is only bested by Apple in the minds of consumers.
       | They will never go away. It doesn't matter if ChatGPT or anything
       | else comes along - 95% of the billions of daily Google users will
       | wait for Google's version. I am honestly surprised that the
       | Alphabet market cap hasn't reached $2T yet.
        
         | m0llusk wrote:
         | Never is a really long time.
        
         | silvestrov wrote:
         | > They will never go away.
         | 
         | History would say otherwise.
         | 
         | Look at how quickly Nokia went south.
         | 
         | Look at how quickly Google took over from the AltaVista search
         | engine.
        
           | denismenace wrote:
           | The Nokia example makes much more sense in this case since it
           | was an established company.
           | 
           | On the other hand AltaVista was on the early days of the
           | internet where everything was much more turbulent.
        
           | fendy3002 wrote:
           | Don't think that with GCP and play store it'll be as easy to
           | replace Google though
        
             | TexanFeller wrote:
             | Compared to AWS, no one uses GCP. Compared to IOS App
             | Store, Play Store doesn't sell any paid apps and
             | subscriptions, only adware.
        
               | kernal wrote:
               | Google Play 2021 revenue was 48 Billion and 42 Billion in
               | 2022. I suggest you google in the future. Also, I have an
               | iPhone and it's filled with just as much adware, crapware
               | and ridiculous subscription apps.
        
             | spiralpolitik wrote:
             | You don't have to replace them. You just need to reduce the
             | income from search based ads by enough to cause them to
             | implode.
             | 
             | Hard to fund loss leaders like Android with say 20% less
             | revenue.
        
               | jsnell wrote:
               | None of us know what the direct profitability of Android
               | is. Given the revenue from Play Store, it at the very
               | least is not obvious that it's a loss-leader.
               | 
               | But one thing that _is_ obvious is that having 20% less
               | revenue would not mean Google was unable to work on
               | Android. We know that, because they were able to already
               | fund Android in the distant past of 2021, when their
               | revenue was 20% lower than now. (In fact, they were able
               | to afford Android in 2010, with 90% lower revenue.)
        
         | pyrale wrote:
         | Really? To me, Google's image is much closer to that of
         | Microsoft : You may hear of them in a few innovative projects,
         | but most of what you know and use from them is boring office
         | stuff, or personal stuff that you take for granted and don't
         | think twice about. Having an Android or using Chrome isn't a
         | personal statement like having an iphone or a macbook is.
         | 
         | And in terms of ethics, the perception of them being a force
         | for good eroded a lot. When thinking about the typical googler,
         | people around here will sooner think about an exec trying to
         | skip some tax than about a techie doing innovative stuff,
         | because that's what their media coverage is about these days in
         | Europe.
         | 
         | I'll give you that Microsoft is very unlikely to go away
         | either, unless the US govt finally remembers they have
         | antitrust laws.
        
           | alphabetting wrote:
           | Youtube and Google are the top two highest favorability
           | brands among gen Z
           | 
           | https://archive.is/8Ippr
        
             | trasz4 wrote:
             | >Others in Gen Z's top 10 include M&M's, Walmart, Target,
             | Doritos, KitKat, and Oreo.
             | 
             | Makes one wonder if it's actually representative of the
             | whole gen Z, or just some specific western subset.
        
               | Thrymr wrote:
               | It is based on a survey in the US, as stated in the
               | article.
        
               | hummer_embark wrote:
               | Are age coherts like "gen z" relevant outside of a single
               | country? I don't know if generations would line up world
               | wide. Perhaps "baby boomers" would line up Europe wide
               | becuase WWII ended at the same time for all of the
               | continent.
        
               | trasz4 wrote:
               | Sure - there definitely are Zoomers in UK, but I doubt
               | many of them would ever recognize Target or Walmart
               | brands.
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | You're a techie (and/or business tech person).
           | 
           | Go ask 10 non-tech people what they think of Google.
        
             | pyrale wrote:
             | Likely the same as they think about fb, microsoft, netflix,
             | amazon-tech, uber, etc: employees are probably handsomely
             | paid, and taxes probably aren't.
             | 
             | Actually as a factoid, I recently changed jobs, and got
             | handed an iphone for work. People noticed it and commented
             | on it, whereas a pixel would probably have not raised much
             | attention.
        
             | kernal wrote:
             | You mean the same people that use it as a verb? Which is
             | the highest compliment you could give a product and is so
             | rare that companies can only dream about it.
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | throwuxiytayq wrote:
         | Waiting for a Google product to start working well (or to start
         | respecting you as a user) isn't a strategy that gets you very
         | far these days.
        
         | 1980phipsi wrote:
         | Google does annoy the shit out of me when using it behind a
         | VPN. Constantly asking me to do Captchas. Never have that
         | problem with bing or duckduckgo.
        
         | siva7 wrote:
         | Yeah, that's what Microsoft (Windows era), Xerox, Kodak, IBM
         | (PC era) and so on also thought back then about their own
         | "monopoly" and brand ;)
        
         | munchler wrote:
         | ChatGPT is the fastest growing application in history. It had
         | 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch.
         | No one is "waiting" for Google's version.
        
         | samwillis wrote:
         | > I am honestly surprised that the Alphabet market cap hasn't
         | reached $2T yet.
         | 
         | Because online advertising, particularly search ads, are
         | working less well for advertisers and regulators are pushing
         | for more changes. The vast majority of Google revenue comes
         | from an industry that is facing massive risks.
         | 
         | On top of that I don't think it's clear that "AI" in search
         | will help Google sell advertising or increase revenue. It's
         | also likely to bring them under even more scrutiny from
         | regulators.
         | 
         | In many ways AI is harder to sell ads against, Google is payed
         | when people leave the page via a click on an ad. That doesn't
         | happen when Google is summarising the content. Microsoft/Bing
         | have found a brilliant way to attack Google, build a product
         | that they have to copy that (potentially) decimates ad revenue.
        
           | pyrale wrote:
           | > Microsoft/Bing have found a brilliant way to attack Google,
           | build a product that they have to copy that (potentially)
           | decimates ad revenue.
           | 
           | Didn't 0-click search as a trend for google search predate
           | bing's changes?
        
           | trasz4 wrote:
           | >Google is payed when people leave the page via a click on an
           | ad
           | 
           | Not really. The click rate is iirc usually around 5%; I'm not
           | convinced this is much higher than the "noise floor"
           | generated by a human equivalent of drunk racoons. So in
           | practice Google is being paid for displays.
        
         | v4dok wrote:
         | Google is an advertising business. Can you sell more ads with
         | AI? I would say no. And even if you can, having an automated
         | smart assistant being able to "cut" through the BS is certainly
         | not as good for Google as clicking a bunch of sites trying to
         | battle SEO.
         | 
         | However the judge is still out in regards to how much can AI
         | allow Google to squeeze the profit margins of businesses by
         | offering even better conversion rates. Personally, I don't
         | think it will make a big difference, the AI will not make you
         | buy more. I suspect Google makes more money by having multiple
         | companies fight for the same customer than actually making a
         | conversion.
         | 
         | IMO best case scenario for Google is to keep their search
         | market. Table stakes is keeping search relevant at all.
        
           | tscherno wrote:
           | Can't they massively improve their ad-targeting by analyzing
           | conversations with the AI?
        
             | SiempreViernes wrote:
             | People are already freaked out plenty by the idea that
             | googles products spies on you to sell ads. To start doing
             | it outright will definitely kill uptake of any AI service
             | they provide.
        
               | fendy3002 wrote:
               | I wonder, does the general populace really freak out of
               | it, since everyone I've known don't really do
        
               | trasz4 wrote:
               | >People are already freaked out plenty by the idea that
               | googles products spies on you to sell ads.
               | 
               | The inverse is true - people continue using Google
               | products despite being aware that they are spying on
               | them. Doing it outright won't make them suddenly start
               | caring.
        
             | asdfman123 wrote:
             | Tech companies have been running all your data through AI
             | for years now to show you targeted ads.
             | 
             | It's what the whole house of cards is built on.
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | > Google is an advertising business. Can you sell more ads
           | with AI? I would say no.
           | 
           | Oh, you optimist!
           | 
           | It's ALWAYS about incentives. Aka money.
           | 
           | Companies will use AI to squeeze garbage (aka ads) in every
           | nook and cranny of the observable universe now. Think of all
           | the thankless tasks that required a human to do them until
           | now.
           | 
           | Guess what? Now that AI can do them 100000x faster and
           | probably 2-5x better.
           | 
           | Our lives are about to be flooded by a stream of -pardon my
           | French-, adshit.
        
             | v4dok wrote:
             | I don't see how my life could me MORE cluttered with adshit
             | than now. Literally everything is an ad space. And I have
             | to navigate into a lot of it to actually find something
             | useful.
        
             | nemothekid wrote:
             | This post is a culmination of a trend I'm been seeing where
             | LLMs are made synonymous with AGI. AFAIK you can't use an
             | LLM to drive a car.
             | 
             | In the context of this thread, I don't think Google could
             | sell more ads with an LLM which is why they sat on this
             | technology. It disrupts their current business, while being
             | more expensive and harder to monetize (charging a
             | subscription to consumer is worse than a monopolized ad
             | business charging hundreds of millions to corporations).
        
           | mtrovo wrote:
           | Wouldn't this help google on second order effects tho? I
           | guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to less
           | incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made searching
           | in Google so awful in the past years.
           | 
           | Also for queries asking for product recommendation, where ad
           | price is quite high, they could still plug ads into an LLM
           | and have it write a summary back to you similar to what
           | magazines do with sponsored content.
        
             | trasz4 wrote:
             | >I guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to
             | less incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made
             | searching in Google so awful in the past years.
             | 
             | Main part of Google's business is selling infrastructure
             | for that SEO junk, AdWords et al. Sure, you meant the
             | _other_ SEO junk, but from AI point of view both would be
             | noise to be separated from actual content.
        
           | asdfman123 wrote:
           | > Can you sell more ads with AI
           | 
           | Companies like Google and Meta have been relying on AI to
           | display ads for years now. It's been central to their
           | strategy.
           | 
           | ChatGPT was just a shiny toy. A very cool, shiny toy, but a
           | toy nonetheless.
        
             | siva7 wrote:
             | I wouldn't call something a toy that has shown the most
             | impressive growth rate for a commercial product since the
             | invention of the internet.
        
               | asdfman123 wrote:
               | To be more than a toy it needs to be profitable and have
               | a moat.
               | 
               | OpenAI just implemented something (well) that was
               | developed in other places.
               | 
               | LLMs are indeed very cool and maybe even revolutionary,
               | but their main accomplishment was beating big tech to the
               | punch.
        
               | mprovost wrote:
               | Kodak invented the digital camera. Being first doesn't
               | mean much. New competitors don't have anything inside the
               | moat (their existing business) to protect and can move
               | faster.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | v4dok wrote:
               | They didn't beat them because they are faster. They beat
               | them because it was something big tech did not want to
               | happen. The space you have for ads is severely limited
               | and the fact that no moat exists means that you will need
               | alternative ways to fund it (or skyrocket the ad costs).
               | 
               | I suspect that those who don't care about privacy or
               | can't afford to pay, will be swarmed with AI-seo results
               | from an ad-supported model, but people will FINALLLY have
               | the choice to pay and avoid this ad-fest. And who knows,
               | maybe when open-source catches up, it will even be
               | affordable enough that ad-tech will shrink considerably.
        
               | asdfman123 wrote:
               | > They beat them because it was something big tech did
               | not want to happen
               | 
               | Yep. Google didn't want a chatbot telling kids how to
               | cook meth, so they weren't in a hurry to release.
               | Meanwhile, releasing a chatbot is one of the few cards a
               | much smaller company like OpenAI can play.
        
               | v4dok wrote:
               | I dont know if you are sarcastic, but the solution to
               | kids cooking meth is not hiding the recipe. Hiding
               | knowledge is a sign of a problematic society, not "God's
               | work"
        
               | asdfman123 wrote:
               | This is mostly unrelated to the chatbot conversation, but
               | hiding sensitive things from children is basic parenting
               | as practiced in all cultures everywhere. The only
               | difference is not everyone agrees on what's sensitive
               | content.
        
           | iKevinShah wrote:
           | Can you sell more ads with AI?
           | 
           | 100% Yes. We can (because people are going to ask how to do X
           | in postgres and AI can reply how to do that in postgres with
           | a side-note that this Sponsored product does it out of the
           | box). however, can you sell more ads (by tagging them as
           | "ads" or "Sponsored") - That is where the gray area shows up
           | (IMO).
           | 
           | Obviously, this is still evolving but I guess something along
           | that lines could be done, if one is too serious to monetize
           | it. In my personal opinion, I think right now companies are
           | focussed around capturing market than monetization.
        
             | HDThoreaun wrote:
             | Any chatbot that has ads integrated into the responses will
             | face an uphill battle against competing products that
             | simply have banner style ads.
        
             | v4dok wrote:
             | I don't think so. Google had Lambda for quite some time
             | internally. If it was a slum dunk on selling more ads, it
             | would have been out way before chatgpt.
             | 
             | Google has maximized their ad revenue with their current
             | model. You don't have the same ad real estate in your
             | example and that is a problem. Now they get money for
             | impressions on a whole page, and clicks from people trying
             | to find the right fit among the seo. I believe that google
             | wants information filtering but not too much as it needs
             | current estate for ads.
        
           | pawelmurias wrote:
           | To me building the automated smart assistant seems like
           | insanely lucrative place to put in ads. When you order the
           | assistant to solve a problem or buy some product google can
           | show you something even better or a things that solve the
           | issue.
        
           | deltree7 wrote:
           | [dead]
        
         | EduardoBautista wrote:
         | Some of Google's success comes from being "free". It's not
         | necessarily because consumers believe Google has the best
         | services/products.
         | 
         | It's hard for a software company to compete against the largest
         | ad network ever created.
        
         | chpatrick wrote:
         | That's what we thought about Google Plus.
         | 
         | What's the last time Google launched a product that everyone
         | really uses?
        
           | endisneigh wrote:
           | when's the last time any company has launched a product
           | everyone really uses? for the sake of conversation let's say
           | 2 billion+ for everyone.
        
             | raincole wrote:
             | In 2021 there were "only" one billion iPhone users[1]. By
             | the time, Apple was the most valuable company in the world,
             | and it still is today. So I'll say 2B is a very arbitrary
             | and unrealistic number.
             | 
             | [1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/27/there-
             | are-1b-ipho...
        
               | endisneigh wrote:
               | the parent said "everyone". there are about 5 billion
               | people over 20. 2 billion is quite conservative.
               | 
               | as for your link. iphones are popular, but it's
               | definitely not true that "everyone" has an iphone, which
               | is my point. android has almost 4 billion active users,
               | for comparison.
        
             | disgruntledphd2 wrote:
             | TikTok is probably closest, but I don't think they've hit
             | 2bn yet.
        
             | chpatrick wrote:
             | I think 2 billion is an arbitrary number but I'm thinking
             | of Search, Maps, Gmail, Google Docs. All of those are
             | ancient.
        
             | iTokio wrote:
             | ChatGPT
        
               | oittaa wrote:
               | Not even close to 2B users. Google have probably 10
               | different products with more than 2B monthly users.
        
               | raincole wrote:
               | It's very hard to believe. Besides search, Android,
               | Chrome and Gmail are in 2B~4B range. Are there really
               | another _6_ products that are ubiquitous as these 3?
               | Google Docs definitely doesn 't have 2B monthly users.
               | Some built-in Android apps might be installed on >2B
               | phones, but it doesn't mean they have that many active
               | users.
        
               | avrionov wrote:
               | Google Search, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Play Store,
               | and YouTube
               | 
               | Also Google Maps, Google Photos and Google Drive have
               | more than 1B users.
        
               | rpdillon wrote:
               | The article mentions they have six products with 2
               | billion users.
        
             | gniv wrote:
             | Instagram? (launched 12 years ago)
        
             | braymundo wrote:
             | TikTok is the closest I can think of.
        
         | xbmcuser wrote:
         | Its because unlike Microsoft and Apple. Google has no real
         | presence in China which keeps it out of one of the world's
         | largest and fast growing economies
        
       | nixcraft wrote:
       | I am curious if there will be a requirement in the future,
       | possibly enforced by the EU or US law, for content such as books,
       | videos, music, PDF files, news articles, or blog posts to be
       | labeled as produced by either a human author or AI. I'm talking
       | about ethical disclosure. While it is uncertain, it is important
       | to be transparent about the content's origins. As we know, AI is
       | here to stay, and it is likely that governments will be the
       | biggest investors (or spenders) in AI technology for military
       | purposes.
       | 
       | Despite Bing having a head start, it's unlikely that Google will
       | lose to AI battle to Bing and others. Google's strong brand image
       | and popular properties, such as Gmail, YouTube, Search, Chrome,
       | and Android, used by billions of users daily, give them a
       | significant advantage. It's doubtful that Bing will take over the
       | search market anytime soon. But, who knows? Ha!
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | ipsum2 wrote:
         | It's not clear where to draw the line on what is AI or not, and
         | I suspect most content will be at least partially generated by
         | AI. Is spell-checking AI? grammar-checking? Rewriting sentences
         | for clarity? Summarization?
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | Or, following editing suggestions your text editor/word
           | processor gives you? Or, on the artistic side, automatic
           | cutout/background removal? Content-aware fill?
        
         | MildlySerious wrote:
         | I believe that would just be fighting losing battles on a front
         | that doesn't matter.
         | 
         | Content mills existed long before AI. Clickbait existed long
         | before AI. Fake news and misinformation existed long before AI.
         | 
         | AI will empower things like that, but it isn't at the core of
         | the problem.
         | 
         | As a user, I care that content is truthful, useful, and/or
         | entertaining. I care that it isn't presented in a misleading
         | way, and I care that it doesn't cause harm (hate,
         | misinformation, etc.) - What I don't care about is who or what
         | created it.
         | 
         | I think a bigger step in the right direction for society would
         | be to empower certain groups like journalists in ways that they
         | don't have to compete with all the crap out there.
        
           | xyproto wrote:
           | I think clear visions, good taste, thorough fact-checking,
           | clever prompt engineering and proper AI-result curation will
           | all become more important in the years ahead.
        
         | nachteilig wrote:
         | Maybe the publishing company can train an AI on GRR Martin's
         | work and we'll get the final books from an AI ghostwrite,
         | labeled or not
        
           | fakedang wrote:
           | Considering season 8 was apparently Martin's idea to test the
           | waters, I think the AI will do a much better job than him.
        
         | ljlolel wrote:
         | It could backfire like the Made in China labels and all that
         | did is advertise China as a manufacturing hub and leader and
         | project it's totality and power
        
         | merek wrote:
         | IMO this sounds infeasible, since AI human generated content
         | exists on continuum. At one end is content 100% written by a
         | human, at the other end is 100% AI written content. How do we
         | label everything in between? For example, AI written content
         | that was tweaked by a human? Or human written content with some
         | sentences written by AI?
         | 
         | Furthermore, it seems unenforceable. As AI becomes more
         | sophisticated (if this isn't the case already), it will be
         | virtually impossible to prove mislabelling.
        
           | Tyr42 wrote:
           | Does using a smart spell check count? The new grammer checks
           | might be AI powered.
           | 
           | Where is the line?
        
             | judge2020 wrote:
             | For reference, Gmail and docs 100% use generative ai[0]:
             | "As language understanding models use billions of common
             | phrases and sentences to automatically learn about the
             | world, they can also reflect human cognitive biases"
             | 
             | 0: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9116836?hl=en&co=
             | GENI...
        
           | igetspam wrote:
           | This.
           | 
           | I have written a number of documents recently that are AI
           | assisted but definitely my own work. I use the LLM to help me
           | cross reference topics, clean up some of the language,
           | improve the flow and prepare for the potential follow-up
           | discussions but the arguments and recommendations are still
           | mine. Is this AI or not?
           | 
           | Side note: I just prepared a recommendation for an org change
           | and had the AI argue against it, as well as provide
           | responses. Some were good and some were weak but it was
           | extremely useful and quite fun.
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | Yesterday I sent out an invite for a family event we're
             | organizing.
             | 
             | This time, I figured I'll use GPT-4 to help me write the
             | perfect text. I described the details of the event, my
             | relationship to the invitee (inb4: without any kind of PII,
             | of course), the style, tone and context of the desired
             | text, and asked GPT-4 to generate suggestions. I went back
             | and forth with it, asking it to generate more variants of a
             | specific suggestions, then taught it a simple markup for
             | editing and asked to iterate on specific words and
             | sentences, until I was somewhat satisfied with the result.
             | 
             | Then I asked my wife for her idea, and she quickly wrote a
             | little text of her own. Only afterwards, I showed her the
             | best (to me) of GPT-4 texts. We then mixed the sentences
             | from both together, creating a final work that's 50% OG,
             | perfectly clean text written by my wife, and 50% the output
             | of GPT-4 (with me guiding it).
             | 
             | Is that text a work of AI? Or of a human? Or both? Is it
             | even 50% AI and 50% human, given that the AI part were
             | created from my input, and then edited by my telling GPT-4
             | what to change, and then finally approved by me using my
             | own judgement?
             | 
             | Does a random website sharing invitation templates on-line
             | have a copyright case, if a couple sentences from our text
             | matched something of theirs? What if it wasn't the AI part
             | that matched?
        
         | samwillis wrote:
         | Just as with labelling for Vegan and Vegitarian food, "Fair
         | Trade" or Organic, there is going to be similar movements in
         | the creative arts for "AI Free" content.
         | 
         | So no, I don't believe there will be regulation on labelling
         | "AI" derived content, but there will be a drive to label and
         | certify "organic content".
        
           | zirgs wrote:
           | Cool, then I will know what to avoid.
           | 
           | People who boast that their company is <insert identity here>
           | owned do that, because their product can't compete otherwise.
        
         | Waterluvian wrote:
         | An interesting thought. Though it's not a binary property. I'm
         | also not sure how many people care how the sausage is made. I
         | don't.
        
       | supriyo-biswas wrote:
       | The example of the new EU regulation in the article is a great
       | example of how regulation typically only serves to enable
       | regulatory capture, thereby playing into the same goals of
       | creating a monopoly or duopoly that governments otherwise say
       | they're opposed to.
        
         | nocoiner wrote:
         | Regulation "typically only" serves the interests of incumbents?
         | Surely that's an overstatement, no? Personally I tend to think
         | that the inability to move fast and break things is a good
         | thing when it comes to, say, air travel or food safety.
        
         | Seeemi wrote:
         | Ah yes the USB regulation which did nothing for the consumers.
         | 
         | And the safety regulations which made our products less toxic
         | and less shoking
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | Plus the 40 hour workweek, 2 day weekends, healthcare (not in
           | the US, outlier among developed countries), pensions, equal
           | rights acts, ...
           | 
           | Or in the EU, roaming charges removal, flight reimbursement
           | regulations, etc.
           | 
           | Heck, speaking of flying, the entire airline industry is
           | regulated up the wazoo and a few years ago we had a full year
           | of metal coffins flying through the skies at 10 000m going
           | 950 kmph without any fatalities.
        
         | pavlov wrote:
         | This is a popular talking point but it feels ahistorical to me.
         | Was Ralph Nader really working for General Motors all along
         | when he called for more regulation?
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | > Was Ralph Nader really working for General Motors all along
           | when he called for more regulation?
           | 
           | You don't get it! Only big companies can make safe cars
           | cheaply, so it was all a big ploy against small car
           | manufacturers.
           | 
           | I'm being sarcastic in case someone missed it :-)
        
       | dahwolf wrote:
       | Google is going to be just fine. The most important slide in the
       | article is that Google has 6(!) 2B+ user products. Even if
       | slightly behind in capability, they have superior reach. They'll
       | deeply integrate AI into every part of that stack and this way
       | put it into people's hands. They also have the data,
       | infrastructure, people and capital to make it work.
       | 
       | Microsoft has little consumer push (no mobile presence) hence
       | they will likely dominate in the business market. Integrating it
       | into Office, private training on company data, etc.
       | 
       | Apple is the big mystery. Supposedly the big consumer-facing
       | competitor to Google but very little is known about what's coming
       | from them. Honestly, I'm quite convinced they're in panic mode as
       | well, they just hide it better.
        
       | spiralpolitik wrote:
       | Google right now are Netscape in 1997. They see AI in the rear
       | view mirror. They think it's going to eat their primary revenue
       | stream. The question is are they going to keep staring in the
       | rear view mirror and go over the cliff or can they reinvent
       | themselves?
       | 
       | Given that Google still gets the vast majority of its revenue
       | from search its hard to see that this doesn't cause then a huge
       | amount of pain. I suspect they've made the mistake of not
       | starting to cannibalize their revenue stream and now it might be
       | too late.
       | 
       | It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
        
       | anonyfox wrote:
       | I think the main battle for google will be that corpus poisoning
       | might be the new SEO - wait for it!
        
         | pphysch wrote:
         | What differentiates second-degree corpus poisoning from first-
         | degree advertising?
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | If the eu makes those laws then it will exclude itself from all
       | ai development, push ai to other countries, and lead to an ai
       | brain drain.
       | 
       | I do think all government should require AI to disclose all the
       | material ingested.
        
         | flagrant_taco wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
       | Sai_ wrote:
       | I read through the full article and the cognitive leaps the
       | author makes are too big for me to follow.
       | 
       | It's like listening to a mad scientist connect totally unrelated
       | (seemingly) events.
       | 
       | E.g., I don't at all understand the linkage between current
       | events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants
       | denoms.
       | 
       | Maybe I'm just too dumb to follow this much brilliance.
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | Use ChatGPT to make sense of it. In future idiocracy we all
         | will
        
           | mikhasev wrote:
           | Sad but true.
        
         | trasz4 wrote:
         | >It's like listening to a mad scientist connect totally
         | unrelated (seemingly) events.
         | 
         | Why a mad scientist and not a mad junkie? Or just some clueless
         | language model, artificial or not? I think we tend to make this
         | assumption that things that seem complicated _are_ complicated,
         | and not just random bs, and that assumption no longer holds.
         | 
         | >E.g., I don't at all understand the linkage between current
         | events and the schism between the Catholic Church and
         | Protestants denoms.
         | 
         | Hadn't read it, but let me guess, is it about how Gutenberg
         | changed the society's interconnection fabric, and it triggered
         | Thirty Year's War, and the same fabric remodeling thing is
         | happening right now? :)
        
           | Sai_ wrote:
           | > Hadn't read it, but let me guess, is it about how Gutenberg
           | changed the society's interconnection fabric, and it
           | triggered Thirty Year's War, and the same fabric remodeling
           | thing is happening right now? :)
           | 
           | Yes, there is some reference to the evolution of the
           | principle of national sovereignty which came from the
           | disruption of the Catholic Church and how that ties to Europe
           | trying to regulate AI advances coming out of America.
           | 
           | Like you said, he could just as well be an organic LLM.
        
             | trasz4 wrote:
             | >Europe trying to regulate AI advances coming out of
             | America.
             | 
             | That's just an attempt to prevent technical colonisation.
             | An analogy would be Japan and China trying to fence off
             | missionaries. Protestantism was about something different:
             | decentralisation. And in that regard there's no difference
             | between Google and their competitors - it's all strictly
             | centralised; nothing Protestant about it.
             | 
             | Having properly Open Source models would be protestant. And
             | EU regulations should help it happen by reducing the
             | incentives for centralised ones.
        
         | ftxbro wrote:
         | > E.g., I don't at all understand the linkage between current
         | events and the schism between the Catholic Church and
         | Protestants denoms.
         | 
         | His point is that LLMs are a disruptive technology at the level
         | of the printing press. The power structure most famously
         | disrupted by the printing press was that of the Catholic
         | Church.
         | 
         | EDIT: Yeah this isn't what he's saying. His analogy is more
         | like the major LLM companies like OpenAI or Google are like the
         | Catholic Church which is being disrupted by European
         | regulations which are like the protestants. Or the opposite. He
         | literally says both ways as possibilities. And in this analogy
         | the open models (the refinements of the 'leaked' LLaMa models
         | which can fit on a single GPU) are like the wacky persecuted
         | fringe sects which were exiled to the United States and which
         | he thinks shouldn't be called as either Catholic or Protestant.
         | At the end he says "This is, admittedly, a rather speculative
         | and far-reaching Article" which I have to agree.
        
           | Sai_ wrote:
           | That's what I thought too but I went and reread that part.
           | He's saying something else.
           | 
           | The American companies like Google/OpenAI (trying to export
           | AI globally) are on one side, opposing them are Europeans
           | (who want AI to be controlled, licensed, and regulated).
           | Together, these two regimes are the Catholic Church and
           | mainstream Protestantism of AI.
           | 
           | Opposing both these sides are open source AI models. He calls
           | this group radical reformers like the Amish.
           | 
           | Yeah, don't ask. This much brilliance in way above my pay
           | grade.
        
             | ftxbro wrote:
             | He says "This is where history is interesting to consider,
             | particularly the invention that I have long held is most
             | analogous to the Internet: the printing press." Maybe his
             | main metaphor for disruption is the printing press and he
             | already used it for talking about the internet. Now there
             | is a new disruptive thing, so he has to make his metaphor
             | more complicated if he doesn't want to look like he's
             | repeating himself.
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | laserlight wrote:
         | > I read through the full article and the cognitive leaps the
         | author makes are too big for me to follow.
         | 
         | Very typical of the author. Except few valuable ideas presented
         | years ago, I haven't read or heard anything worthwhile. Mostly
         | unsubstantiated speculation and "I've seen the big picture"
         | type of ramblings.
        
           | Sai_ wrote:
           | Yeah, back in the day, I remember being impressed by one such
           | insightful article shared on HN but the others were almost
           | always "wtf is he saying?"
        
           | trimbo wrote:
           | Many of his recent articles are structured around quoting
           | himself from prior articles.
        
       | mFixman wrote:
       | From my experiences with Google integrated AI, I'm skeptical that
       | Google can win any battle with it.
       | 
       | ChatGPT and other modern AI tools are useful specifically because
       | they do what I want when I want to do it. Compare this to Gmail's
       | smart compose: by the time the AI makes a suggestion I'm already
       | half-way through typing that text, so its prediction is
       | completely useless even if it's correct.
       | 
       | (Also, I really enjoy the random historical rambling at the end
       | of some Stratechery articles).
        
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