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Comment by strangattractor | Hacker News Reader

Their real issue is can they defend their position? I would say not likely. Google has a web scraping infrastructure in place and invented the technology. Facebook also has the capability. M$ will likely try to buy them or partner long enough to develop the tech and be a competitor. This isn't the car industry where it literally takes industry leaders years to figure out that electric cars are really a thing.

I think Google is the likely winner since this will definitely enhance search and be a service to sell to large multinationals.

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What do you mean by, "M$ will likely try to buy them"?

My understanding is that Microsoft owns a 49% stake of OpenAI and gets 75% of their profits until Microsoft recoups their investment.

Are you saying you feel that OpenAI will not find a path to profitability and will sell their remaining stake to Microsoft?

I was unaware of that. Interesting - "Profits" is an interesting term. Movies never make "Profits" despite "Grossing" billions.

I was just extrapolating from observing M$ behavior for several decades. M$ to my knowledge has never been the sharing type. They will control it either by buying it outright and owning or they will develop their own version still owning and controlling. They will weave the functionality into their Office products. They would likely consider it suicide to depend on an outside party to supply a key tech for their cash cow.

They already have woven it into their office products. ChatGPT is licensed out through Office365 as a sort of "co-pilot for Office" at $30/mo. It's currently trialing with ~600 companies in their early access program.

price: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/07/18/furthering-our-a....

user count: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/05/0...

Probably as an acquihire? For MS, it makes hugely sense to buy an industry leading AI org at $100B, or even more than that. 75% of OpenAI's profit is very small compared to what they'll get by this hypothetical acquisition.

Tbh I don't think OpenAI would sell for 100bb unless they are seriously strapped for cash and can't fundraise any other way.

Given their current revenue projections I would be surprised if that happened

They spent $8 billion to buy Skype in 2011.

To be clear: I think Microsoft would gladly pay 100bb to acquire OpenAI (although I think that one would give the lawyers a headache given the weird corporate structure)

I don't think OpenAI would sell though

The top people at OpenAI are all ideologically motivated

I am with you. It is not hard to imagine that either 1) Google (et al) swoops in with a massively superior model and cost structure or 2) Facebook (et al) commoditizes this space with an open source model like Llama 2 that brings this down to essentially barely break-even infrastructure hosting.

In any case, it does look like Microsoft is going to eat the $10B.

I don't understand where Amazon is in this game. They are the biggest cloud provider. Azure is offering first class pretrained ml model hosting (content moderation, OCR, OpenAI, etc.).

Google has vector search SCANN library and hosted vector db offerings.

AWS is nowhere to be seen.

https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/

https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/titan/

I'd expect a bunch of announcements at re:invent in November as well. They often hold off on big stuff for re:invent.

Yeah, I guess. I feel like google and FB have been releasing interesting ML models every month now.

I’m skeptical Amazon can be like apple and drop everything at once. I find many of their announcements are lost in their own noise.

Does Amazon have enough GPUs?

They make their own, called Trainium and Inferentia

https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/trainium/

https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/

AWS offers optimized inference and custom infrastructure (https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/).

I don’t think Google is a good competitor to OpenAI as a quality AI product is harmful to their search/ad business.

OpenAI is perfectly happy killing the search/ad business because they aren’t in that market. They are happy to replace a $75B search market with a $20B AI chat market. Google not so much.

My google search results now have a section on the top that an LLM generates along with the rest of the results. I don’t think they have to be separate.

My Google results already have an AI response integrated, similar to the knowledge graph answers. So seemingly they are head on competing; no reason they can't still display ads next to that.

Would you still use it though if there's a better AI answer from someone else and there's isn't a confusingly placed ad next to it?

Why do you think it is "harmful to their search/ad business"?

I see as enhancement. It will not be long before Word and Google Docs is using AI to help people write copy, correct, and translate documents. Those are just the ones I can think of and I'm not that smart. Do you really think either Google or M$ will allow a 3rd party to control something that is integrated into their products? Only companies that are out of business do things like that.

Because there are less opportunities to show ads with a chatbot, especially if its voice based. From a user perspective it’s an enhancement. From a revenue perspective, it’s harmful

Lol if they're doing 1 billion next year I bet the market is at least as big as search

SEO is slowly killing its search business and general AI is probably the only meaningful long-term solution to that threat. Compared to that, cannibalization inside Google is a more manageable problem.

Except chatgpt isn't really a google replacement. Not only is the information routinely outdated, people are starting to finally realize just how often it's either blatantly or subtly wrong.

Google is much better positioned to have AI enhanced search.

What makes them much better than MS, with Bing, especially when a small company like perplexity.ai is providing something that's years ahead of Google?

Bing injects ads into their responses ?

I think there will always be multiple large players that will compete on price, availability, performance, “smartness”, etc. Especially since GPU resources are finite and there is explosive demand.

I don’t see how you think Google could be a better service for multinationals than Microsoft, who extensively uses OpenAI models. Microsoft is the largest producer of enterprise software.

Only speculating - the point is there are multiple resource rich competitors to OpenAI. Although OpenAI appears to be having early success that may not last given the strength of the competition and the degree to which those competitors believe the technology is key to their survival. Of course there are plenty of things I don't know and are not privy to.

Sure, there will certainly be competitors. But even if OpenAI loses market share, their revenues could go up dramatically due to the increasing size of the market.

So the doom and gloom talk about OpenAI having no moat seems very overblown to me. They don’t have to maintain absolute dominance in their model. They just have to have a competitive product.

I agree, but Facebook isn't likely to build a competing product. They don't have the necessary data, and much of the data they do have can't be used to train large language models (LLMs). This is something I've heard from friends who work at Facebook AI.

Why wouldn't corporations and users just stick to the original AI chat model that gave them the best results the first time? I think that people are lazy about switching because it's very difficult to personally validate whether something is better or worse quickly/robustly, and when you do get bad responses it's really annoying and makes you churn back to the original model that you used.

I do sometimes wonder whether they could be replaced with a free model running on a user's local machine, however, on the other hand we might always wish to pay for best-in-class (according to some evaluation criteria, that we eventually give up on trying to self-evaluate).

While I’m sure that once we reach the good enough stage, people will be too lazy to switch. But I don’t think we are there yet. Especially if another one can make you save lots of time.

It’s like the beginning of search engines. Altavista. Yahoo. Lycos. There was a lot going on but none of them were good enough. Once google showed up, people switched permanently and rarely switched back. But that took years. And also that took billions of dollars to buy the default search box (creating a whole new browser or paying apple for the iOS search bar)

We've seen this story with all kinds of technologies in the past (Symbian and Blackberry -> iOS and Android. Yahoo and Altavista -> Google. Netscape -> IE, IE -> Chrome. Lotus/WordPerfect -> Word/Excel.)

Most potential users are not actually yet a users of any products in this space.

Also while nobody will just spontaneously switch to an equally good or worse product, transformative improvements can and do happen.

Finally, users can be swayed by discounts and marketing to switch to an equally good or only slighly better product.

There’s a problem that Google is too big already and that at least some people now have trust issues with them and would prefer to get their AI from a different provider than the search and email services.

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