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Comment by svantana | Hacker News Reader

> get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan

Not necessarily. Google is valued 7x that and most people don't pay them anything. They just make ridiculous money from ads for insurance and loans. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is the #1 app and the #5 website, which should really worry google (and it does by all accounts).

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Yes, and they have a monopoly on the ad market. Whereas a SOTA LLM can be used to bootstrap an almost-as-good LLM. The gap is shrinking between SOTA models and there's now fierce competition.

Moreover, ads are a very high ROI business. The profit margins on SOTA LLM offerings are razor thin or negative.

> they have a monopoly on the ad market

Only if you look narrowly at search ads, but really they compete with Meta, Tiktok and X for ad spend. And the quality of the LLMs is beside the point, just like search engine quality. ChatGPT has a near monopoly on 'AI' mindshare, with the general public.

What they mean is there's no moat in a SOTA model.

It’s worth noting that Google became dominant in the first place specifically because PageRank was deeply superior to the methodologies of other search engines.

Just because search engine quality is now quite low across the board (except perhaps Kagi) doesn’t mean that search engine quality was not once the determining factor to success.

yeah, it's pretty easy to see how openai could steal those high paying queries from Google, if they continue growing at this rate.

I assume the plan is getting AI into everything and making millions of data centipedes that eventually lead back to their APIs.

Then embed ads.

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