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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

>Google's edge obvious here is the deep integration it already has with calendar, apps, and chats

They did handle the growth from search to email to integrated suite fantastically. And the lack of a broadly adopted ecoystem to integrate into seems to be the major stopping point for emergent challengers, e.g. Zoom.

Maybe the new paradigm is that you have your flashy product, and it goes without saying that it's stapled on to a tightly integrated suite of email, calendar, drive, chat etc. It may be more plausible for OpenAI to do its version of that than to integrate into other ecosystems on terms set by their counterparts.

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If the model companies are serious about demonstrating the models' coding chops, slopping out a gmail competitor would be a pretty compelling proof of concept.

It would be better if you did that. That way you would not accuse them of faking it.

Well, I'm not the one who owns the data center(s) full of all the GPUs it would presumably take to produce a gmail's worth of tokens.

However, I take your point - OpenAI has an interest in some other party paying them a fuckton of money for those tokens and then publicly crediting OpenAI and asserting the tokens would have been worth it at ten fucktons of money. And also, of course, in having that other party take on the risk that infinity fucktons of money worth of OpenAI tokens is not enough to make a gmail.

So they would really need to believe in the strategic necessity (and feasibility) of making their own gmail to go ahead with it.

Code is probably just 20% effort. There is so much more after that. Like manage the infra around it and the reliability when it scales, and even things like managing SPAM and preventing abuse. And the effort required to market it and make it something people want to adopt.

Sure, but the premise here is that making a gmail clone is strategically necessary for OpenAI to compete with Google in the long term.

In that case, there's some ancillary value in being able to claim "look, we needed a gmail and ChatGPT made one for us - what do YOU need that ChatGPT can make for YOU?"

Those are still largely code-able. You can write Ansible files, deploy AWS (mostly) via the shell, write rules for spam filtering and administration... Google has had all of that largely automated for a long time now.

We haven't written rules for spam filtering in a while now: it's been a successful machine learning problem for ages.

Email is one of the most disruptive systems to switch.

Even at our small scale I wouldn’t want to be locked out of something.

Then again there’s also the sign in with google type stuff that keeps us further locked in.

if email is hard to switch, imagine how hard would it be for your memories to migrate to new platform

Infinitely easier?

The challenge in migrating email isn't that you have to move the existing email messages; any standard email client will download them all for you. The challenge is that there are thousands of external people and systems pointing to your email address.

Your LLMs memory is roughly analogous to the existing email messages. It's not stored in the contacts of hundreds of friends and acquaintances, or used to log in to each of a thousand different services. It's all contained in a single system, just like your email messages are.

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