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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

> It's pretty clear that the best engineering will decide the winners, not the popularity of the CEO.

This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results.

Ilja can follow Google's Bard by holding it back until they have countermodels trained to remove conflicts ("safety"), but this will not win them any compute contracts, nor keep them the existing GPU hours. It's only mass, not smarts. Ilja lost this one.

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When google came out it had the best algothitm backed by good hardware (as far as I understand often off the shelf hardware - anyway the page simply "just worked"). Difference between google and competitors was like night and day when it came out. It gained marker share very quickly because once you started using it - you didnt have any incentive to go back.

Now google search has a lot of problems, much better competition. But seriously you probably dont understand how it was years ago.

Also I thought that in ML still the best algorhitms win, since all the big companies have money. If someone came and developed a "pagerank-equivalent" for AI that is better than the current algs, customerd would switch quickly since there is no loyalty.

On a side note: Microsoft is playing the game very smart by adding AI to their products what makes you stick to them.

Oh, the pagerank myth.

Google won against initially Alta Vista, because they had so much money to buy themselves into each countries interxion to produce faster results. With servers and cheap disks.

The pagerank and more bots approach kept them in front afterwards, until a few years ago when search went downhill due to SEO hacks in this monoculture.

This is anegdotical evidence, but I was there when Google came out and it was simply much better than the competition. I learned one day about this new websitr - and it was so much better than the other alternatives that I never went back. Same with gmail, trying to get that invite for that sweet 1GB mailbox when the ones from your country offered only 20MB and sent you 10 spammy ads per day, every day.

As an anegdote: before google I was asked to show the internet to my grandmother. So I asked her what she wants to search for. She asked me about some author, let's say William Shakespeare - guess what did the other search engine find for me and my grandma: porn...

I don't remember response speed mattered until at least ten years after Google's start.

Certainly not when they won.

They were better. Basic PageRank was better than anything else. And once they figured out advertisement, they kept making it better to seal their dominance.

Google gave better results. Few people cared about faster servers at the time, not when most of the world was still on dialup or ADSL.

> This is ML, not Software engineering. Money wins, not engineering. Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results.

This is an absurd retcon. Google won because they had the best search. Ask Jeeves and AltaVista and Yahoo had poor search results.

Now Google produces garbage, but not in 2004.

> Same as it with Google, which won because they invested massively into edge nodes, winning the ping race (fastest results), not the best results.

What in the world are you talking about? Internet search? I remember Inktomi. Basch's excuses otherwise, Google won because PageRank produced so much better results it wasn't even close.

The faster results came after they had already won the race for best search results. Initially, Google wasn't faster than the competition in returning a full page. I vividly remeber the joy of patiently waiting 2-3 seconds for an answer, and jolting up every time Google Search came back with exactly what I wanted.

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