[HN Gopher] What Neeva's quiet exit tells us about the future of...
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What Neeva's quiet exit tells us about the future of AI startups
Author : bobvanluijt
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-05-26 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.supervised.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.supervised.news)
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I believe that Google Memo answered this entire line of
| questioning very well:
|
| https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
|
| "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does *"
|
| The problem with building AI products is that as long as you
| don't know why or how it works, your competition can just imitate
| the surface-visible results and it's as good as your product
| because they also have no clue about why or how it works, just
| like you.
| legendofbrando wrote:
| The fact that anyone at Google wrote this memo tells you more
| about Google than it does about AI (or anything).
|
| What's the moat for Apple (after all, they're all phones and
| computers)?
|
| What's the moat for Microsoft (after all Google and insert
| thousands of other competitors offer docs, sheets, etc)?
|
| What's the moat for Facebook (after all, it's just a social
| network)?
|
| What's the moat for Google search (it's just another search
| box)?
|
| The moat isn't the product, it's the business. Every one of
| these companies built a business that served customers well
| (people who want the best phone, company IT departments,
| advertisers, and advertisers again). The moat is a business so
| good at serving its customers that you can afford to offer a
| better/cheaper/faster product than others because you serve a
| well paying customer the best. Done well, your moat is then the
| momentum of being the default option.
| romeros wrote:
| moat is real. And it definitely is the product.
|
| Long time back when Google first came about.. I remember
| reflexively switching from the default Yahoo browser to
| Google. It felt painful even trying out Yahoo Search
| Engine... I was just a kid back then and even I wondered why
| I was doing this..
|
| Google search results were far superior.
|
| Same thing with Apple.. I never had a mac/iphone crash on me
| ever.. they just worked..
|
| For Facebook.. the killer feature was the wall.. that and the
| network effects..
| CPLX wrote:
| It's monopoly and anti-competitive business practices all the
| way down. That's Google's moat and has been for a decade.
|
| Under any sane regulatory regime they never would have been
| allowed to get to this point but that didn't happen.
|
| The only problem here is they aren't going to be able to
| replicate that for the next big tech shift.
| goatlover wrote:
| 100 million users for ChatGPT plus GPT4 with plugins seems like
| a pretty good starting moat.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Is it though? It would be a moat for social media or
| something with network externalities, but Chatbot's don't
| have the strong network externalities that come when the
| business involves many-to-many user-user interaction
| patterns, or even 1-1 interaction.
|
| Its a lead, but its not a barrier to competitors acquiring
| users even if they can offer better value for price outside
| of network size, nor is it a barrier to competitors
| development.
| 13years wrote:
| Indeed. I have termed this the coming "AI clone wars".
|
| "Anything you create can be created without investment cost
| while also being unique in design as well as delivering the
| same function or experience"
|
| From - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-
| things
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The droids are clones, delicious
| throwaway55905 wrote:
| We've got to stop calling this a "Google Memo." That's a false
| narrative. It's just a random doc written by one of 140000+
| employees.
|
| > Google has been contacted for comment but it is understood
| that the document is not an official company memo. [1]
|
| There are moats to products, but less so to pure language
| models trained on the same web-scale scraped data that many
| share.
|
| Not all data is readily available to language models, and
| integration can be difficult.
|
| A company that specializes in say AI for trash sorting likely
| still has a moat.
|
| Microsoft integrating AI into Windows still has a moat (for
| Windows).
|
| GPT-4 is ~200 Elo better than the next best semi-public
| Vicuna-13B in Chatbot Arena [2]. That is a non-zero moat -
| perhaps due to hosting larger models, training data, licensing,
| output postprocessing, etc.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/05/google-
| en...
|
| [2] https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-05-25-leaderboard/
| Jenk wrote:
| > We've got to stop calling this a "Google Memo." That's a
| false narrative. It's just a random doc written by one of
| 140000+ employees.
|
| So it's a.. memorandum?
| flokie wrote:
| yes but "{person name} memo" is not the same as "Google
| Memo" (published and endorsed by the company)
| kodah wrote:
| It is a memo written by a Googler on internal systems that
| makes it a Google memo. Companies almost never officially
| sponsor internal memos escaping without PR and legal having a
| crack at the content.
|
| What I'm really curious about is why you think this isn't a
| Google Memo, and why you think that's a false narrative.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > GPT-4 is ~200 Elo better than the next best semi-public
| Vicuna-13B in Chatbot Arena [2]. That is a non-zero moat
|
| Its a non-zero advantage.
|
| A moat is something that inhibits someone from closing an
| advantage.
|
| (Also, its odd that the biggest models, outside of the big
| vendor centralized ones, they are testing are 13B-14B when
| 30B-ish and 65B-ish versions exist.)
| hiddencost wrote:
| (250,000 employees. Just about half of staff is TVC)
| mediaman wrote:
| I believe there is better opportunity from focusing hard on
| specific niche industry verticals and developing AI assisted
| workflows that make their operations more efficient.
|
| Those will be good businesses, and founders will do well,
| though they may not be billion dollar businesses. Their moat
| will be industry comprehension and then their integration and
| embedding into business operations.
|
| That does leave a question as to the purpose of VC in AI
| though.
| rvz wrote:
| There really isn't a moat with these so called 'AI startups'
| especially those with VC money and are still unprofitable whilst
| pumping their valuation by overusing AI buzzwords pretending to
| challenge Google.
|
| Neeva was a solution in search of a problem and almost no one
| cared to pay to search for results worse than Google. Their
| situation was so expensive that it wasn't enough for Neeva to
| make any money to break even and cover their compute costs.
|
| This is the entire race to zero, where Stability, Apple, Meta are
| already at the finish line with other open source AI models or
| on-device inference with consumer hardware already available.
| OpenAI.com and other hosted AI services cannot compete against
| open source models or freely available models and that is why
| OpenAI.com needed to cry to regulators to introduce AI licensing
| rules that benefit them over actual open source or freely
| available AI models; i.e regulatory capture.
|
| I can see many of these lesser known 'AI startups' getting
| acquired or shutdown and the bigger companies in AI actually
| doing AI research still being around much longer. The big money
| in AI is unsurprisingly hardware and not the software. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581777
| nvrmnd wrote:
| Even if Neeva was free it still was compelling enough to unseat
| such a dominant incumbent. Especially since the search result
| quality is not obviously different to the consumer.
| cj wrote:
| Maybe I haven't drank enough coffee today, but what exactly is
| the takeaway here?
|
| Unless I'm missing something this article is basically saying a
| failed startup that couldn't find product market fit was acquired
| by a large company for its team and some of its tech.
|
| Maybe I skimmed the article too quick, but this exact movie is
| one that has been playing for decades.
|
| Edit: Side note, my personal opinion on AI is that companies with
| existing distribution and existing audiences will be the ones
| that succeed (e.g. Notion layering AI on top its widely used
| existing wiki platform). Succeeding by building pure tech with no
| pre-established audience will be very hard.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Shridhar was SVP of Google Ads for a very long time. Him
| quitting to start a Google competitor without ads was ...
| Optics.
|
| Tho Pragh somehow was in the process of eating him.
| woah wrote:
| I'm not sure but another type of business that may succeed is
| one that uses AI to provide a product or service directly to
| consumers through a radically more efficient business process.
| esafak wrote:
| Why? AI increases leverage, and makes it easier for entrants to
| provide value.
| two_in_one wrote:
| > Succeeding by building pure tech with no pre-established
| audience will be very hard
|
| But that's how "Open"AI and Hugging Face started, didn't they?
| So, it's possible. Not easy, and probably not single-handedly.
| I would say it's much harder then selling another game in app
| store.
| cj wrote:
| If Google announced a ChatGPT equivalent embedded in Google
| Docs, I think ChatGPT would lose a ton of users very quickly.
| The Microsoft partnership/investment is their saving grace.
|
| I think it's a bit early to declare either of them to be a
| long-term (commercial) success.
|
| Edit: See Google Duet:
| https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-
| announcements/duet...
| dvt wrote:
| Hugging Face is a niche business at best, and OpenAI is pure
| hype, no real substance. I know you'll find someone saying
| (maybe even in this thread) "I use ChatGPT daily to make my
| job 10x easier" but these anecdotes are dubious at best.
|
| Imo, the real winners here will be Nvidia and Apple, which
| provide software/hardware coupling for these AI features. And
| most of these are _features_ , not products. Midjourney is a
| rare example of a real product, but the quality of generative
| art if you _don 't_ include copyrighted art in the training
| set is pretty bad, so there's a lot of complications there.
| mianos wrote:
| OoenAI may be hype but if they got 100M people paying $20 a
| month for the occasional use of their premium models I
| would call that a valid business. It does not matter that
| vicuna or whatever are nearly as good if people are paying
| for their model and ecosystem.
| sv123 wrote:
| That's 100M monthly active users, not paying subscribers.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Somewhere down the line there will also be a very heavy crash
| when everyone becomes disillusioned with this hype-driven self-
| proclaimed "AI" revolution (if we can call it that..). Misleading
| the investors and regulators and manipulating the market. Silicon
| Valley being SV once again!
| diego wrote:
| tl;dr: nothing we didn't know. Since the beginning of times,
| startups with lots of funding have failed for a number of
| reasons. AI is no different in that regard.
| code51 wrote:
| Where we're going we don't need acquisitions.
| m0llusk wrote:
| If only there were something that might help us understand what
| we were getting into.
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(page generated 2023-05-26 23:00 UTC)