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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Google has the data and the TPUs and the massive cash to advance.

Microsoft has GitHub - the world’s biggest pile of code training data, plus infinite cash.

OpenAI has …… none of these advantages.

And Google and Microsoft have huge distribution advantages that OpenAI doesn’t. Google and Microsoft can add AI to their operating systems, browsers, and office apps that users are already using. OpenAI just has a website and a niche browser. To Google and Microsoft, AI is a feature, not a product.

this is the argument i continue to have with people. first mover isnt always an advantage - i think openai will be sold or pennies on these dollars someday (next 5 years after they run out of funding).

Google has data, TPUs, and a shitload of cash to burn

>first mover isnt always an advantage

but in this case it is, ChatGPT name is really, really strong, it's like "just google it" instead of "just search the web"

Maybe but it's far from profitable. People largely don't want to pay for it either.

Who cares? profitability is not the most important thing at every stage of the product

Altman is a horrible CEO also, which wont help. He table-side manners are horrible.

I'm not sure because google was by far the best search engine for a long time in the early 2000s and there are a lot of models close to what openai has right now.

Name recognition only gets you so far. "Just Google it" happened because Google was better than Hotbot/Altavista/Yahoo! etc by orders of magnitude. Nobody even bothered to launch a competing search engine in the 2000s because of this (until Microsoft w/ Bing in 2009). There is no such parallel with ChatGPT; Google, Bing, even DuckDuckGo has AI search.

First mover advantage matters only if it has long-lasting network effects. American schools are run on Chromebooks and Google Docs/Slides, but these have no penetration in enterprise, as college students have been discovering when they enter their first jobs.

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