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Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

Google is under existential threat. In that case, OpenAI has a very legitimate trillion dollar case for carving out a piece of Google.

Search engines were never a user friendly app to begin with. You had to know how to search well to get comprehensive answers, and the average person is not that scrupulous. Google’s product is inferior, believe it or not. There will be nothing normal about seeing a list of search results pretty soon, so Google literally has a legacy app out in the wild as far as facts are concerned.

So imagine that, Google would have to remove Search as they know it (remove their core business) and standup a app that looks the same as all the new apps.

People might like one AI persona more than others, which means people will seek out all types of new apps. LLMs is the worst thing that could have ever happened to Google quite frankly.

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Google pretty much invented LLMs. The Attention is Attention Is All You Need paper which kicked it off was done by Google scientists and the top model in the LLMArena for text is from Google. They also made $28 bn profit last quarter as against large losses for OpenAI. I think they'll survive.

I'd be more worried about OpenAI surviving. Aside from the iffy finances, much of their top talent seems to leave after falling out with Altman.

I find it more likely that the entire "second" level of software companies are in OpenAI's cross hairs more so than Google. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Intuit, DocuSign, Adobe, Workday, Atlassian, and countless others are easier to pick off than Google.

Not every kid born in the last five years will know Google as a verb as we do. They’ll be adults in 15 years, which is a paltry investment timeline for the type of Black Swan event we’re talking about, which AI is.

I don’t disagree with you entirely, but I’d argue the second level apps are harder to chase because they get so specialized.

Death of Google (as everyone knows Google today) is a tricky one. It seems impossible to believe at this exact moment. It can sit next to IBM in the long run, no shame at all, amazing run.

Those don't seem like reasonable targets at all to me. OpenAI's product is information and their power is engagement. It's more like a cross between Facebook that thrives on engagement and Google that delivers information.

Googles biggest advancement in the last ~15 years is to produce worse search results so that you spend more time engaging with Google, and doing more searches, so that Google can show more ads. Facebook is similar in that they feed you tons of rage-bait, engagement spam, and things you don't like infused with nuggets of what you actually want to see about your friends / interests. Just like a slot machine the point is that you don't always get what you want, so there's a compulsion to use because MAYBE you will get lucky.

OpenAI's potential for mooning hinges on creating a fusion of information and engagement where they can sell some sort of advertisement or influence. The problem of course is that the information and engagement is pretty much coming in the most expensive form possible.

The idea that the LLM is going to erode actual products people find useful enough to pay for is unlikely to come true. In particular people are specifically paying for software because of it's deterministic behavior. The LLM is by its nature extremely nondeterministic. That's fully in the realm of social media, search engines, etc. If you want a repeatable and predictable result the LLM isn't really the go to product.

Very true. I rarely find myself "Googling" anymore. I'd rather just ask ChatGPT. Even if the enshittification (ads, etc.) will happen down the line, at least we'll have an absolutely awesome product (like Google was to Yahoo) for 5-10 years.

OpenAI is at the very least worth at least half as much as Google. I foresee Google becoming like IBM, and these new LLM companies being the new generation of tech companies.

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