Is this really relevant? Google was formed when there were no gazillion phones to do searches a million times a day.
ChatGPT was formed recently, when every strata of society, and every country in the world has double digit internet penetration.
However this is relevant because this is an investor report helping people forecast, and this stat helps calibrate readers expectations of just how fast a product can scale in this day & age, using a relevant comparison of products in the same category that when launched offered the same step change in value.
Also, quantity has a quality of its own.
The point is to compare current era of scaling to the previous era and see how much faster it is.
It’s not comparing Google to Open Ai. It’s comparing the environment that produced Google to the environment that produced Open Ai.
It’s kind of obvious that new eras will produce faster scaling. But what if you ran the numbers and it wasn’t true?
There are plenty of times when this happens, the obvious is actually something different. This time isn’t the case but that’s the point of research, to back up common sense with evidence.
Also, it is very different to know that it is faster vs it is 5.5x faster. The 5.5x might not be completely accurate but it’s more in depth than just your intuition.
There is wisdom in simple, profound statements that open up new lines of thought. But There is also wisdom in doing research to make things you already know quantified and more concrete.
One example of research being wisdom is demographics. It’s one thing to know that there are more whites than blacks in the US, it’s another thing to know that there are 200m whites and 40m blacks. The numbers shed light into precision and also validate or clarify your thinking. For instance maybe you thought that blacks should be the second largest demographic since they have been here longest. Not so, Hispanic is at around 60m. Or maybe you knew that already. But if you wanted to argue with others about demographic growth and what is actually happening in immigration, knowing the numbers is wisdom, and going off of intuition leads to “they took my job” hot takes.
Maybe this will turn out to be a valuable user segment, but I'm not sure.
Practices learned during school do enter the workforce. Messaging during class turned into messaging during meetings.
So, if 100% try using it to do their work toil for them...
I saw another one recently that said something like "ChatGPT has 350 millions unique visits per month, if it were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world"
Or something along those lines.
I hate this so much I actually ran the numbers and saw that per capita box office revenues have remained generally stable since the 1980s.
Instead, we have this monstrosity of metrics that make no sense.
Data scientists bring out relevant, thought-provoking metrics. They work for the people who work for the people who are the target audience here.
With all due respect, I’ve seen more corporate drivel and slide-show sugar out of data scientists than VCs. (Largely as a product of attention span.)
Meeker is illustrating a material change in the environment.
Yes. The question isn’t which team is better. The question is how fast they can grow. Similar companies in Pakistan and America will grow disparately. Same for companies on the Internet in 1998 versus, practically, 2022. That isn't fair. But nobody cares about fair, we’re measuring what’s true. It’s fair, from those data, to conclude that the latter should beat the former's record, whether separated by space or time.
(You correctly conclude, from that slide, that Google grew in a less favourable environment than OpenAI et al. You just need to take it one step further into the potential rate for growth and disruption today versus in the past. Put another way, Google could be disrupted quicker than it could disrupt.)