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Comment by jamroom | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't appear to say that OpenAI is a monopolist - it's more a conflict of interest:

   However, YC is also closely tied to OpenAI, which is now directly competing against Google on search. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman used to run YC, while OpenAI was the first group affiliated with YC Research.

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Which is a strange statement because OpenAI is not directly competing against Google on search. They don’t have a public search engine and rely on Bing for search results — they do something greater and more broad than search. Conflating product categories to make this point is not effective for whatever argument they are making here.

ChatGPT is absolutely taking people away from Google. People are turning to that instead of a search engine for more and more things now.

Here's one article about it: https://www.techradar.com/tech/people-are-increasingly-swapp...

It’s like saying Netflix is competing in cable television because people switched from Comcast. Netflix changed the experience so significantly we came up with a new category of streaming entertainment. OpenAI and Google aren’t competing on search per se (Bing, DDG, etc), they are competing in something more abstract which is organizing information which could include full text search of a crawled index or generative AI techniques like LLM. The space they are actually “competing” in is so broad it’s hard to say they are direct competitors. Further to my point, ChatGPT is so not a search engine that it relies on Bing for accessing indexed website content.

I feel like Netflix did pretty successfully compete with cable tv? they're not the same product but you could reasonably say it's the same market

I agree, let’s say they competed in home entertainment. A category so broad that Netflix themselves considered any potential option a household member had at the couch as competition. That includes video game consoles, cable boxes, other streaming apps, etc. Hypothetically: Would you say Netflix is such a competitor with Nintendo that we shouldn’t accept their investing partners criticism of Nintendo if they had a monopoly?

Netflix does have games now, so they're not a bad comparison.

That's the parent's point

FWIW, I think a lot of that is an echo chamber distortion here at HN. In the real world, frankly the best AI-enhanced search provider[1] is... Google. And honestly it isn't really very close. Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently? My sense is that most HN commenters don't, on principle.

[1] And yes, I work there, but on boring firmware and wouldn't know a transformer if you hit me with one. I'm just a consumer who's recently learned that typing detailed questions into the search prompt gives shockingly great summary answers with references.

> Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently?

I do sometimes. It's not too bad when it comes to answers to simple programming questions lately, but I've found I mostly can't trust it with answers to other things, like medical or news or history. It sounds right but I dig into the actual articles and find it misinterpreted things often enough I can't trust it. But I also don't use ChatGPT for that purpose either (but Google insists on giving me those answers anyway when I'm just trying to search for articles).

I actually wish it didn't do A.I. responses by default. Like I'd rather it didn't spend the processing power for that when I actually really want to use it for a search engine and not for A.I. (I heard that A.I. uses approximately 10x more compute power than a standard search, on average... I'm not certain that's true, but I don't doubt it's at least significantly more than a search).

I'd rather only use processing power for A.I. when I specifically want to do so. I'm actually contemplating switching my standard search engine away from Google so I don't keep getting A.I. responses.

It competes because people like me use it for search. I would say I primarily use it for search.

> OpenAI is not directly competing against Google on search. They don’t have a public search engine

This is like the railroad arguing they don’t compete with trucks before promptly going bankrupt in the late 60s / early 70s.

Except a truck is actually better than a train (except in the case of moving huge quantities of cargo). ChatGPT is far worse at "searching" than Google is, it blows my mind that people are willing to subject themselves to it.

> a truck is actually better than a train (except in the case of moving huge quantities of cargo). ChatGPT is far worse at "searching"

A truck and train are both transport. Google and ChatGPT are both fuzzy information retrieval functions. As a Kagi user, I’m not really seeing a massive difference in quality between first-page Google results and whatever nonsense LLMs serve up for the average searcher, who is not typically searching out of hardened utility as much as rough convenience.

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