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brap

I’m curious to hear why Google isn’t going to win in this AI arms race.

The way I see it, Google:

* is effectively the gateway to the internet, owning the most popular website in the world, mobile OS, and browser

* has infinite LIVE data, both unstructured and structured (knowledge graph)

* has infinite compute resources

* employs the world’s best AI scientists and invests heavily in AI

* has decade(s) of experience in AI products

* has one of the most popular suit of apps already in people’s hands (gmail, calendar, maps, docs, YT, drive, wallet, photos etc etc)

* is a popular cloud provider (which is another vector, ie platformizing AI)

* has infinite money

* is probably the most well positioned company to actually monetize AI

Honestly I don’t see why HN seems to think it’s over for Google. Outside of tech, most people have never heard of ChatGPT or Bing. Everyone on the planet knows Google.

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That may all be the case but then why has Google been failing to innovate and also maintain anything the past few years?

The past fews years we’ve seen Google products die and deteriorate. Search has gotten worse, they’ve killed dozens of products and services (even ones that they promised would be around for the long haul). GPhotos is no longer free (after putting most competitors out of business).

Google lack any institutional commitment and consistency to succeed at much these days. One only need to look at their recent past to see why everyone is skeptical. Maybe they will pull a rabbit from their hat but I’m not holding my breath.

That is all not to mention the pending real antitrust issues they are facing.

Search is so very bad. I tried to figure out what the largest MicroSD card was and was served ads and real results to buy fake 2tb cards from Amazon. Several searches were useless packed with ads and SEO spam. Only Reddit could tell me that the largest currently available card is 1tb.

It left me pretty shocked at how bad it’s gotten.

I looked up "largest available microsd" and the first item was a pop up box that said the largest available one is 1TB. I put the same query into bing and the result as the same.

That's not to say that happen to you didn't happen. Information on the internet evolves rapidly and far from static. One problem is that people game Google with SEO. We end up with an arms race of people gaming signaling for information and Google search having to find different signals for information. The high noise to signal ratio is a very hard problem to solve.

That’s entertaining, because I just tried your query. I got this from the Google curated info, all of which is wrong:

(Summarizing) People also ask

What’s the largest MicroSD card you can get? 256gb (wrong)

Will there be a 2tb card? Yes (press release of company I’ve never heard of that I’m pretty sure is not legit.)

What the largest card you can get? 512gb with 1 and 2 on the horizon. (Out of date and also wrong, no legit company has announced a 2tb)

Who makes a 2tb card? (List of companies that are scammers and make fake cards.)

Do 1tb cards work? All 1tb cards are fake (wrong or out of date)

I'm still salty about Google Reader, but they've innovated (Bard is the subject in the Op and a pretty big AI innovation) and maintained (Gmail, Docs, Chrome, Golang, Android) a bunch of stuff.

> but they've innovated (Bard is the subject in the Op and a pretty big AI innovation)

Bard has yet to be released or evaluated and they are already using marketing speak to let people know it won't be as good as ChatGPT.

>and maintained (Gmail, Docs, Chrome, Golang, Android)

I wouldn't call any of those maintained... stagnated at best with degradation around the edges all around. For each one of those there are 10 projects Google has killed or let wither on the vine over the past 5 years.

>GPhotos is no longer free (after putting most competitors out of business).

Maybe the putting most competitors out of business has something to do with GPhotos not being free? I think it does.

I would definitely agree - it is anti competitive behavior all around and will only make their antitrust woes worse in the coming years.

I also don't understand why everyone is sure that "search is over" because you can ask AI to teach you, for example, first semester calculus.

That's great and all but that's not where the money is. Where is the money? It's in queries like "greek food near me", "best earbuds 2023", "replace sparkplug Honda motorcycle." Simple, monetizable questions that are extremely context dependent and constantly changing.

For that you'll continue to need search.

But imagine Google takes that query, does the search, then feeds the search results into an LLM and gets it to synthesize all that information.

Basically, what if Google's little info boxes weren't garbage? That alone would be a huge step, without even getting into potentially more sophisticated ways to use an LLM.

I do agree that Google search AI will most likely win against Bing search AI due to brand recognition and resources.

But I also think that Microsoft will be a huge winner for enterprise software. They are already integrating GPT into Teams, and no doubt they plan to integrate it into pretty much everything they can think of.

I hope we will see a lot of independent startups making innovative AI products as well. This space has incredible potential, and there could be many winners.

To add some noise, and my own opinion which had literally no weight.

I think Google's ties to ads is the evil which creates the infinite money and computer and ai scientists etc.. however it's an extreamly negative part of their product suite for the end consumers.

If ads eat the rest of the business faster than they can deliver killer features which make them too good to leave then I think google will be doomed.

If their ads remain in check with their ability to provide great product expiernces then it will likely survive.

I'm optimistic that Google will do well.

Ozymandias. There have been large and powerful corporations (with supposedly """infinite""" resources) like the East India Company that eventually transformed into no more than dust and rubble.

I think the same is going to happen with Google (in due time, maybe 100 years), mainly because its product management is completely out of focus due to mismanagement and lack of a proper incentive structure.

This is an interesting take that I also share to an extent, however there is a catch, it depends on Google's ability to sustain an offshoot product, which as time has shown despite endless amounts of money and talent, they're unable to do.

I also think Google is well resourced/positioned. Though, I am wondering: what does winning the AI arms race mean? The AI needs to be in some useful products/services?

Perhaps it creates specialization for the "internet gateways", where the dominant companies for each major type of internet gateway entrench themselves further?

- Meta (FB) as the social door, with more useful AI for socializing?

- Microsoft is the document app door, with more useful AI for creating documents?

- ...

One possibility is that they get sued by 1000's of companies for "stealing their knowledge". Bogged down in the courts forever a la MS antitrust. Even though all the other LLM services will be indexing the same data, Google will be the ones that bear the brunt of the lawsuits because they are a rich target. Kind of like the Yelp lawsuit but on steroids.

Couldn’t you write something similar about IBM and early personal computers?

Because they are to scared to release a public version of their AI

You could make a similar argument about companies with "infinite" resources that reached the highest peaks of technology at the moment and nowadays are mostly irrelevant: IBM, Xerox, Nokia, Blackberry, Yahoo... Maybe the question is, why do you think Google is different from these companies?

... and yet a good chunk of their revenues is driven by ads. On the other hand Microsoft can deploy ChatGPT tech in all their enterprise products.

Google does have the means and knowledge, but they are not as good at monetizing them. See also the cloud space and Google Cloud vs Azure.

My mom has heard of ChatGPT... she's a boomer retiree that (used to) share those Facebook posts that "make you rich by reposting".

Also, when was the last time Google actually delivered a successful product? Yeah, it's been a while.

This is going to be interesting for sure.

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