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drivebyhooting

It’s looking like Google may outdo OpenAI.

ChatGPT has brand recognition and adoption, but not the best product anymore.

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Google also has $100 billion in profit each year from it's core business to wait out OpenAI.

And the search engine and crawler actually powering these LLMs

How is that not a conflict of interest by the way, when Google's AI search results prevent the websites it trained on from getting clicks?

Am I the only one that clicks through to the sources cited?

I usually do the same, but not always. And I believe clicking through is a behavior of a minority of people and interactions, judging by the click through rate drops sites have seen recently. (On mobile at the moment, so apologies for not grabbing a source for the rate drops sites.)

In the grand scheme of things? Yes.

How is it different than Google Summaries or AMP or any of the other ways Google tried to keep people from actually visiting the websites that drive all of their traffic.

Google is also conflicted though.

The more they emulate ChatGPT's clean UI, the more they are failing to push ads in people's faces, which is what generates that $100B for them.

Their business model fails if their users don't experience a confusing crap-fest of ads.

As always, they will keep it clean until they can crank that enshitification dial to 11.

> Their business model fails if their users don't experience a confusing crap-fest of ads.

I bet you OpenAI will implement ads far sooner than Google can hypothetically run out of money.

Google also has GCP where it can monetize its hardware investments.

> the more they are failing to push ads in people's faces

Won't be long until chat AI will include sponsored products and services in the output.

OpenAI isn't burning through tens of billions of dollars every year on its free tier for charity. It will dial up the advertising knob (and every other knob) to 11 the moment the cash starts to runs out.

They don't have to do that today, though. Remember original Google? Or original Gmail? Neither had prominent ads for the first few years, a couple decades later the ads are everywhere.

If ads are the future of revenue for AI then every AI company is in trouble, because ads won’t even come close to covering the costs.

And they also have their own chips (TPUs), no need for Nvidia

> ChatGPT has brand recognition and adoption, but not the best product anymore.

Companies with worse products win all the time based on brand and adoption. So it isn't clear to me at all that Google can win.

But what does win mean here? It's commoditized at this point, everyone's got options, and it's easy to swap models. This means the user share will be spread out among the different offerings. There's no winner take all scenario.

> Companies with worse products win all the time based on brand and adoption.

Like google.

What is the cost of delivering regular search results vs. answering an AI chat question? How do you sell ads through each of these channels?

If you consider those angles you'll see that Google does not want AI chat to replace Google search any time soon. Google is being dragged into this kicking and screaming. They are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

It’s interesting, it’s almost like if Kodak did end up making best in class digital cameras

No, it is harder. Google doesn't just have to make the best AI chat, they also have to figure out how to make profit from it. That's something no one has figured out yet. Open AI can make a loss every year, but if Google makes a loss the stock is going to tank.

Unless I’m missing something, Google doesn’t really have the “chat journal” aspect that ChatGPT has. It’s just a search engine.

For me personally this is a major feature.

What's a chat journal besides a history, which Gemini has?

There isn’t really a folder or project structure, as far as I can tell. (Just trying the app now.)

I imagine the majority of Gemini users are still via Google search, whereas ChatGPT usage is through the app.

https://gemini.google.com/

No folders or way to organize the history. It’s just a log of questions.

ChatGPT is much more designed around organizing your projects and folders.

NotebookLM?

You can get a $20 OpenAI subscription for some serious usage.

Google has no such thing for Gemini, it's subscriptions are brain-dead, expensive bundled with 2 TB of storage and other shit that I don't want.

Isn’t Gemini the same price for the same usage as OpenAI? I agree they bundle extra things in there, but you don’t have to use them. If you just used Gemini for $20 you’d be equally situated as OpenAI for $20 on the model front.

It's actually cheaper if you subscribe as family on Google One.

If you remove AGI dream from the equation, AI revenues couldn't come close everpresent ads on the internet which Google has monopoly over, and LLM directly affects Google core business.

Also Google doesn't have great business reputation for sticking to their APIs, so they need to be lot better than open model always, which it is now but my guess would be it wouldn't be for long.

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