The problem with Google is that their ad business brings so much revenue that no other product makes sense. They will use whatever they learn with robots to raise their ad revenue, somehow.
It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too. Google has more money than God to throw around.
Google's ad dominance will probably never go away unless antitrust action by the FTC/DOJ/EU force a breakup. So they'll continue to lead as long as they can subsidize and outspend everyone else. Their investments compound and give an almost unassailable moat into deep tech problems.
Google might win AI and robotics and transportation and media and search 2.0. They'll own everything.
chatgpt has good chance to kill google search -> kill google.
ML models like chatGPT rely on the open web for training data, particularly for information about recent events. But models like chatGPT are horrible about linking to their sources. That means that sources that rely on ad revenue or even donations to exist will effectively disappear as chatGPT steals all of the traffic. With no cash flow, the sites with current data disappear. With no new training data, chatGPT stagnates.
ChatGPT is basically a parasite on the free and open web - taking content but not giving back.
With a reasonable degree of success. In their last quarter (see https://abc.xyz/investor/earnings/) 25% of their revenue was non-ads, and that percentage has been consistently increasing.
That's just one of their many business units.
This might have been true 10-15 years ago. I assure you it is not the case today.
Search is in real danger of mostly obsolescence. Ads aren't safe.
There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon.
Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the world paid for by Google ad revenue, startup investors, and later, auto companies.
> They’ll never make their money back.
> Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
How can Waymo's software be "commoditized very shortly after it works well" if competitors don't have (2) and (3)? The training data that Waymo has incredibly valuable. (Tesla and some Chinese car companies also have mountains of it.)