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Comment by gboss | Hacker News Reader

Ever heard of the innovator’s dilemma? Don’t underestimate the inertia of large companies and their unwillingness to pivot from their cash cow.

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Google specifically has a track record. You could have made the same argument about social media (Google+) a decade ago.

social media is a completely different market though - since there are massive returns to scale, it's incredibly hard for a new entrant to break in.

model training and inference is the opposite. people switch LLMs like people change clothes in the morning. there are popular services (openrouter) that make moving as easy as changing a model string.

Which poses the question: Why does Google even need to catch up? At least currently, the name of the game is integration. The actual model is a commodity.

Demis will get an offer he can’t refuse - they’ll make him the CEO of Alphabet and have the whole company go all in - the question is when.

How is the company not "all in" now? Google is going to spend $200B on AI buildout this year.

Doesn't mean much for DeepMind if that's spent on Google Cloud, to rent out for Anthropic et al.

If the new cow doesn’t have cash, it is better to stick to the cow you know.

Unfortunately the new cow is cannibalizing the old cow, so Google is in a bit of a bind here. (So far I cannot imagine them monetizing AI overviews enough to compensate for the sharp loss of ads on SERPs.)

To its credit Google seems willing to disrupt itself before its competitors can.

One option would be to become vegetarian.

You don't eat the cash cow, you milk the cash cow.

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