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This article is laughable. Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. ChatGPT will not result in a trillion dollar bus

This article is laughable. Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. ChatGPT will not result in a trillion dollar business. In the event that a paid ChatGPT for say, $5/monthly resulted in a 10+ billion dollar business, Google would within the same year simply do the same with Meena or Lambda (make it paid and copy whatever UI/UX ChatGPT or other are using). Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok. Google may not be good at innovating, but they would copy it in short order. The biggest threat to Google's business is Apple, and walled gardens like TikTok, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, etc. Too many communities are not allowing their information to be indexed, or are not properly so, which results in Google being less valuable. That is, and continues to be Google's main problem. Questions people are asking each other on Reddit, Discord or Facebook about what phone to buy are questions they are not asking Google, and that costs Google money. It's as simple as that.

no_wizard 4y ago
One wonders in the case of Discord and possibly TikTok etc. if Google to pay to index. I imagine they could strike a financial deal that would make it so public channels etc are indexed and viewable via snapshots maybe?
monkpit 4y ago
Shorts are not really comparable to TikTok. Similar yes, but nowhere near the same.
scarface74 4y ago
It’s not about the technology. It’s a threat to Google’s business model.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Yes, I know - I've addressed that in the post. Unless you were referring to something else?
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    Not the OP, but you did not address the threat to the business model. In a world where questions are answered by an engine like ChatGPT instead of people going to ad-filled webpages, Google's business model evaporates. Even if google captures 100% of the new pie, the new pie is much smaller than the current one.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      In this hypothetical how is ChatGPT making money? Why can't Google make money on their equivalent the same way?
      - PeterisP 4y ago
        Of course Google can make money in the same way, but my point is that any reasonable price of what people would pay for a ChatGPT-like-service (which has to be competitive, as it can be replicated by others and the costs aren't that high) is far less than what Google can currently earn from the same queries through ads. Like, currently a Google competitor like Bing or DuckDuckGo is still sending lots of money to Google because they redirect users to websites showing Google ads. A non-Google ChatGPT pays Google nothing.
        endisneigh 4y ago
        What do you base this on? Customizable user-tailored ads through natural language would make even more money arguably and Google is uniquely positioned to do it. Also consider that paying even a dollar a month for a service will result in the addressable market going down orders of magnitude. Apple is pretty much the only company in existence that is able to make people pay so much on luxuries like that.
    - hooloovoo_zoo 4y ago
      Ads will be even more effective inserted into prose.
    - bagacrap 4y ago
sfmike 4y ago
you could argue the counter point to google. in the event a search engine became 10+ billion dollar business X company(Microsoft IBM whoever) could launch a similar algorithmic search engine. First to market and brand is very strong regardless of the technology. If everyone starts using a chat gpt like thing for all of their life that can become worth billions and seriously hamper search volume universally.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Perhaps. But Google putting a huge banner on Google.com saying, "Hey, use GoogleGPT!" would result in a high percentage of the billion+ Google searchers using it. It's not really the same scenario. For what it's worth, I do think Microsoft or Yahoo could have properly countered Google if they executed more effectively sooner.
- geoduck14 4y ago
  "First to market" You should know that ChatGPT isn't the "first". It is from OpenAI, who have multiple LLMs. And there are multiple competitors including Google and Facebook. It is a very expensive market to compete in Also, Google has already been using their LLM in their search, "in the market"
  - alimov 4y ago
    > Also, Google has already been using their LLM in their search, "in the market" And yet I still have to filter through a bunch of results to find something actually useful, vs simply asking chatGPT and getting relevant information immediately (with obv limitations of chatgpt). Why does it feel like Google search has gotten progressively worse every year?
greatpostman 4y ago
Even if they have slightly better models. The models will cannabalize traditional search. Their more is eroding
- geoduck14 4y ago
  The models are enhancing search
  - greatpostman 4y ago
    Supposedly…
torben-friis 4y ago
> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok. Google may not be good at innovating, but they would copy it in short order. Isn't that a counter example? Shorts copied tiktok, yet tiktok is still a very clear threat.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Sure, but Shorts has only been around for about a year. > Now, Shorts claims 1.5 billion monthly viewers — more than TikTok has at 1 billion viewers a month — and gets 30 billion views a day. (In October, Meta said in an earnings call that Reels gets 140 billion “plays” a day across Instagram and Facebook, which includes when videos start automatically, as well as when someone clicks play. TikTok didn’t respond to requests for comment on views per day.) But unlike the rest of YouTube, which often brags that people watch more than a billion hours of video a day, the company doesn’t disclose watch time figures for Shorts. > https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/12/20/youtube-shorts-monetization-multiformat/?sh=189818356f41 https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/12/20/youtube... Political pressure to cancel TikTok + heavy growth in Shorts and Shorts will be the main short video site within 3 years.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Hell, I would argue that Shorts lowers the value of YouTube as a whole, from a consumer point of view. It breaks UI continuity just so it can shove a product down your throat that is basically just TikTok but worse.
  - alimov 4y ago
    I agree. YT Shorts have made YT less pleasant to use.
into_infinity 4y ago
I think the examples you bring up demonstrate fairly precisely why Google should be afraid. Google is at a stage in its corporate life where they are extremely risk-averse. Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue, to upsetting regulators, to getting bad PR. It's why they publish papers about their in-house tech but never have the guts to put it out there for the general public to experiment with. A contender who shows up with a brand new way to access the knowledge on the internet, but with none of the regulatory / PR / lawyer / legacy product baggage of Google or Meta, is a serious risk. And on some level, it doesn't matter if the "OpenAI assistant" gets things wrong every now and then if they can manage expectations accordingly - something that Google, with their legacy brand and reputation, can't really pull off.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Are they at risk as long as they can replicate the competitor quickly? Plenty of companies don't invest in R&D to avoid cannibalizing existing business. Google does the R&D, but just does not deploy it to customers immediately.
  - sowbug 4y ago
    In the case of a large company like Google, "immediately" can take years.
    - kccqzy 4y ago
      I think you overestimated it. Google's LaMDA is already ready and running, it's just that it's behind the corporate firewall available only to employees. Years? That's way too long for them to scale up the service and flip a switch to open it to the public.
      - thefourthchime 4y ago
        Large corporations are great at failing to exploit their own strengths because they are afraid of anything rocking how they make money. I would be far more surprised if google reinvents itself using a transformer-based AI than I would some unknown company.
ren_engineer 4y ago
I'd imagine Google also has a far superior internal dataset for training considering their core competency literally involves indexing the entire internet. All Google needs to do is launch a superior LLM API on Google Cloud and essentially hedge their bets that any replacement for Google Search will be built on their API anyway. Or just spinoff a shell company so Google doesn't get bad PR for any bad results returned by their ChatGPT equivalent. Microsoft has avoided any real flak for the stuff that OpenAI releases The other question is how does something like ChatGPT monetize to pay for the massive costs to serve queries? Google engineers have already tested this and say that LLM queries are orders of magnitude more expensive to serve than current results and I don't seen any paid service replacing a free search engine
- xnx 4y ago
  Astute point. The greatest risk is probably reputational from weird/gamed responses. DeepMind might be a great brand to trial this with.
- IanCal 4y ago
  > All Google needs to do is launch a superior LLM API on Google Cloud and essentially hedge their bets that any replacement for Google Search will be built on their API anyway. That would still mean a huge disruption to their core business. > The other question is how does something like ChatGPT monetize to pay for the massive costs to serve queries? Google engineers have already tested this and say that LLM queries are orders of magnitude more expensive to serve than current results and I don't seen any paid service replacing a free search engine GPT costs cents, I'd happily pay that. I'm looking at how best to use the newer models personally as it's so cheap.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    I have not been able to make sense of their API for doing bulk indexing / analysis though. I work at a place that is pretty reliant on knowledge bases (KBs) and they're the ideal target for this sort of thing, where you could prompt a situation into a chat mechanism and get a response giving some variation of the following: - historical information on the issue (we've seen this before, logged here etc) - surface a solution quickly - If all else fails, auto redirects the experience to capturing useful information via branched prompts (e.g., ask the customer this, do this, record this, tell me what happened, and at the end, will record the response etc back into the KB automatically) I can't figure out how to get the model to do this though. Disclaimer: I'm not an AI / ML engineer, my background is Web Development, but this is too tasty of a situation to pass up, and I really want to build it on top of something like ChatGPT
the_duke 4y ago
Are you saying that the articles claims of Google leadership seeing this as a critical risk are false? Because if Google sees this as a "red alert", it doesn't seem to be so laughable. Even if Google can easily offer the same , and even superior functionality, it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation. Even more so if competitors can offer comparable functionality. Edit: To clarify, because this was mentioned multiple times: There are two aspects why this might be bad for Google: There are lot's of ways to monetize a chat bot, many of which would probably be even more effective than current ads, because they would feel more organic and thus more trustworthy. But they would be highly misleading, and I would very much hope for regulators to quickly step in and require a clear indication that a suggestion was paid for. There are already quite strict rules around product placement in the EU, and this is definitely worse. Sure, having to announce what is an ad is just the status quo. But I believe that would be a lot more off-putting in an "organic" conversation. Secondly, Google benefits a lot from people clicking on links which then lead to sites that show more Google ads. A more guided and effective "chat search" experience would probably cut out a lot of those ad impressions. Third: Google has enjoyed a very dominant position in terms of market capture and technology lead. A new technology always has the potential to upset the balance and significantly weaken the current leader, because there are now younger, leaner and more agile competitors.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  The chat bot doesn't need to advertise to you directly. It can gather information that you magically see ads for on other services. Increasing the effectiveness of ads is more important than cramming more ads.
- throwawayoaky 4y ago
  > it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation. why do I feel like this sentence will age poorly
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    It's already aged poorly - in the first days of ChatGPT, someone already demonstrated it can perfectly mimic a YouTuber shilling a VPN every other sentence. But in general, to the extent "chat conversation" mimics spoken conversation between individuals, then this is the medium advertisers have the most experience with - quite literally thousands of years of experience.
ProAm 4y ago
> The biggest threat to Google's business is .... I would argue it's Google themselves. They just do not provide much benefit to their user base anymore, cruising on brand name alone in today's market is a gamble. Sure they can keep paying Apple, Mozilla to make google their default search engine... But does google search still provide good results? Better than reddit, amazon, apple, <insert your favorite here>. Android is still massive in non-US markets, so they corner their audience there... But in the US, what is still dominant? Google maps?
- Agingcoder 4y ago
  I'm interested in a working search engine which is not Google (in the EU) . I don't believe it currently exists, based on my testing (and no, bing doesn't work), so Google still brings a lot of value to me, and to most people I know. The android crowd is not cornered in any way - iPhones are just so expensive most people can't afford them, so android is actually a rather sensible option, and unless Apple radically alters its pricing policy, this is unlikely to change. Whether Google has brought something new and useful to the table in the past few years is another question, but it does not diminish the current value I derive from Google, since they have no competitors.
  - ProAm 4y ago
    > The android crowd is not cornered in any way - iPhones are just so expensive most people can't afford them This is why they are cornered. They cant afford a different phone OS. You cant remove the Google search bar from the home screen. Google forces/tricks you into using their services, keeping location tracking on, etc..... > (and no, bing doesn't work), Im surprised you find Bing worse than google? In the US, the first page of google results in almost all ads, or search results close but not really what you searched for (even with an ad blocker). I dont have an answer for non-US but I just find it interesting.
    - ikt 4y ago
      As someone who went from Google to Duckduckgo to now Ecosia have to say I have no issues using Ecosia with the bing backend, do I wish I got a great result first time everytime? sure but it's not like I was getting that with Google either
stephc_int13 4y ago
Nokia was well entrenched in the Mobile Phone business, and already had a highly optimized and battle tested OS for smartphones. Microsoft was also in the business (WinCE, PocketPC, Windows Mobile) And yet, the iPhone and later Android completely changed the market. Same with Kodak, they basically invented digital photography, but they could not turn it into a business because they could not compete with their core business. The suits would not allow it. Search is ripe for disruption, and has been for years. Google search is a waay inferior product now than what it was a decade ago. Big business yes, but I would not bet on much loyalty. A competing product does not have to instantly make billion dollars, they simply have to provide a better value for their users.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Totally inappropriate comparison. A mobile OS takes 5 -10 years to develop and you ha e to onboard developers and commercial organisations like banks. Chat GPT needs no partner relatuonship and Google could have equivalent public product in 2 months. Both are just stealing public content someone else has peoduced. So nice that law protecrs ChatGPT sourcecode but not the authors of training material
  - scarface74 4y ago
    All indications is that Apple went from conception of the iPhone to introduction in two years. It took Apple 3 months to go from “we are going to introduce an App Store” to “there’s an all for that”
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Again, you are missing the point. ChatGPT has no moat, certainly not against Google. The day first iPhone was released, Nokia management didn't know this will be big. Most of the world didn't. By the time their sales were hurting, and Nokia management woke up, there were many years of development to catch up on. None of this applies here. Google already has an equivalent to ChatGPT internally and could release it any day. ChatGPT doesn't have some unique data thay Google is lacking, so what's gonna stop them?
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Questions people are asking each other on Reddit, Discord or Facebook about what phone to buy are questions they are not asking Google, and that costs Google money. It's as simple as that When your main business is to rob and plunder, any attemt at self-defence looks like a threat. We had a great ecosystem of open, public forums and websites where people had discussions and produced valuable information. Google milked it dry and turned it into a barren wasteland. Now they have nothing left to plunder and their search is filled with adspam. Well maybe they should produce some valuable content themselves. Instead they now earn money from scams, I get youtube ads for a project by Elon Musk to give British people iniversal basic income powered by AI, but you have to pay to sign up!
neosat 4y ago
>> Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. Arguably superior on what dimension? For revenue potential through a chat based AI interface, assuming revenue is going to be some function of end-user usage, there is nothing even close to ChatGPT in the open market currently. ChatGPT is being used by millions of people already, which is a way way higher number than whatever competing service Google may have. >> Google would within the same year simply do the same with Meena or Lambda Like they did with social networks? or Whatsapp? With something like ChatGPT the 'easy to copy' argument is going to be even more difficult since 1. with usage ChatGPT will get better. 2. Once people get used to ChatGPT to switch the competing service from Google will have to be significantly better (not just marginally better). So while it may not yet be a existential threat to Google, to make a point that ChatGPT should alarm Google is definitely not "laughable" IMO.
- tootie 4y ago
  I feel like AI chat has failed repeatedly to get any traction with users. Amazon have the most skin in the game by far and are dialing back their Alexa dreams. I mean, just look at the real world and how many formerly human interactions have been replaced by using forms on a 2D screen. It's just much more efficient than open-ended conversation.
  - deleted 4y ago
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h0l0cube 4y ago
> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok 2022 Revenue: TikTok ~12b (operating since 2016) YouTube ~28b (operating since 2005) YouTube, Instagram and Facebook are in damage control.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  No disagreement there. I believe walled gardens are the biggest threat to Google.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And rumors are that YouTube still isn’t profitable and if it is - just barely
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  And yet ByteDance still lose money. Revenue is not a great metric.
kbos87 4y ago
Yup. Search on TikTok is astonishingly good, especially relative to the quality of results on YouTube (acknowledgement to the irony there.) TikTok has the ability to surface hyper-recent, relevant content that covers a variety of viewpoints on literally any topic. It’s not a direct replacement for what you’d find on google search, but it’s generally higher quality and more fun to consume in a lot of cases.
kruxigt 4y ago
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nailer 4y ago
> Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. I don’t believe you. The last time we saw a practical demo of Google AI it was Duplex which was never released as a product.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  You're mistaken. It was rolled into Assistant and works exclusively with Pixel phones to book appointments and what not. Google is notoriously terrible at product communication though, so I don't even blame ya for believing that.
  - cameronh90 4y ago
    They could also live in one of the many markets that Google have elected not to deploy that product to, as is typical for Google.
  - nailer 4y ago
    So I can buy a Google Pixel today and use Duplex? I live in the UK per the other user’s comment.
axegon_ 4y ago
A few more important points: The costs of running the whole operation. Google so far has been unmatched in extracting every single cent from every customer and have tried to keep their operations as optimized as possible. ChatGPT is a gimmick. I won't lie, I've used it for some trivial tasks but I'm willing to bet it's nowhere nearly as scalable as Google. In addition, a single google query costs google less than a peanut and a few ads later, it's been paid off(plus profit) while it probably costs a big ass bag of cashew to do the same. This is not an operation you can fund with ads and byproduct services. Even if it's been announced that the service will be free forever, it's Elon Musk we are talking here. He is famous for having 90 different, completely contradicting opinions every minute. And when shit hits the fan, it's gonna be a lot more than $8/month to have access to it.
lcnmrn 4y ago
I run https://subreply.com https://subreply.com and I gave everything to Google to index, but they refuse the content.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> Although ChatGPT still has plenty of room for improvement, its release led Google’s management to declare a “code red.” For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm.
jacquesm 4y ago
> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok. But they didn't copy the engagement or the traffic figures for that segment, and that's even after doing everything they can to ram them down your throat to the point of making youtube less appealing (shades of Google+ there). Meanwhile TikTok is alive and well. It's not my thing but I've yet to see someone spontaneously point me to a Google short whereas I can seem to escape the TikTok link bombardment.
stefan_ 4y ago
Meanwhile, there are the gardens like GitHub that are not walled and indeed plenty of spammers are very actively gardening all that content to spam Google with and yet the masters themselves are incapable of indexing it. Maybe this is just a recent phenomenon but I find myself putting constants and various names from code into Google quoted for exact search and get slammed in the face with a "this literally does not exist you idiot, it has never been uttered" 0 results page.
seppel 4y ago
> This article is laughable. Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. If Google really has two products in-house which are better than ChatGPT, and they are not able able to make them proper products for the outside world (for what ever battles they are fighting internally) they are even more fucked. But the funny thing is that Google already has not one but two products for the same thing.
- redml 4y ago
  i mean even if they released it today, i wouldn't use it because i'd automatically assume it'd get killed in 3 years
roenxi 4y ago
A point to consider is what "a trillion dollar business" actually means. The math of markets forces income to match how hard it is for someone else to do some work. Take the food situation like food. Feeding someone is critical to their very existence, but cooking is such a generic skill that the margins on any restaurant get squeezed down to not so much. So even though the value of feeding someone is very high, the value add that a business can lay claim to is very low adn they don't make much money. The threat here isn't that someone will do better than Google as much as a proliferation of cheap AI might trash the "trillion" part and replace it with "billions". If someone could cheaply bundle a search engine with a web browser or OS then Google Search is vulnerable. I mean, what if an AI model could be made small enough to work offline? How does Google make money?
zx10rse 4y ago
Google is sitting on a metric ton of data, give tools like chatGPT couple of years, after all they released it just not even a month ago.
radar1310 4y ago
But Google will shut it down like almost everything else that Google does. Start it up to shut it down 5 years later.
matchagaucho 4y ago
ChatGPT's current inability to access the internet leaves Google in a safe spot IMO. However, I don't believe Google could easily pivot and offer their own solution without cannibalizing their current model. This exact same scenario basically played out between Facebook and Google+ social networks.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  OpenAI has experimented with internet access and GPT: https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/ https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/ just a matter of time.
  - sdrg822 4y ago
    Yeah this is purely a risk decision for a prototype not an actual technical limitation.
karmasimida 4y ago
How do you insert ADs in ChatGPT style service? Unless they are trained to give you ads first, in its current form, it is going to be super difficult to make money out of it. It is the Reels scenario for Facebook once again. They can copy TikTok, but they more the do, the more revenue they shift from their money maker, thus losing money. Google will have to take it slow, making ChatGPT style component in their service, while not hurting their main resource of revenue.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  to answer your question, you'd use something like the knowledge graph to tease out relevant product queries from the conversation and train the model to respond with both the general response but also what you might called the custom intent, which would vary per user. this is what search already does, but making this scale with a language model is probably expensive, hence why google doesn't already release meena
- alpineidyll3 4y ago
  Just prompt it to sell the widget... Jasper ai is already doing great with that business model.
- spyder 4y ago
  And even if they put ads in the AI's answers you could just feed it trough other AIs to adblock it (by asking to remove ads from this text). Will be interesting to see it happen because I'm sure some of them will do that.
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OJFord 4y ago
> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok. And how's that going? I don't have any interest in either of them, but as an outsider it certainly seems like a tonne of people like TikTok and nobody cares about Shorts, wishes they were normal YouTube videos. And why do you assume 'AI chat' has to be a subscriber model, but 'search' works with ads? It could easily have a 'recommended sponsor' as an example for certain queries. Or really trivially - just intersperse responses with ads... Exactly like search? And the data collection that's possible is superior too, surely?
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  > and nobody cares about Shorts Not creators though. Shorts give more revenue to the creators than TikTok equivalent. Personally, I prefer shorts, simply because I don't have to download yet another app. Don't get me wrong. I am not searching for them, but if something interesting shows up, I will watch it.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    But the thread's about Google, so if nobody cares except the creators because they get laid more by Google, that's even worse (for Google prospect). I also watch them for anyone I follow anyway, but the short & portrait format is annoying.
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      I was making the claim that creators being more interested in shorts due to the higher return would actually be good for Google. I do agree on the criticism of the format, plus the fact that I can't seem to scroll and the repetition are annoying to say the least.
- tpl 4y ago
  Right now YouTube is pushing Shorts pretty heavily. Everything I have heard from creators is that Shorts can drive a ton of subscriptions into your channel. How many of those viewers watch the long form stuff is a bit more a mystery though.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Googles business in search is spamming you with crap for money and pumping your clicks for juicy information to sell. They do this by filling the page with loosely related advertisements disguised as search results. A ChatGPT product can summarize complex questions into understandable (if often wrong) answers. Even if Google out develops openai, which I’m sure they can handily, where does all the spam go? How do they forge coherent answers to questions into a bunch of loosely related advertisements they spam at you for money? It’s not ChatGPT that’s going to kill them, it’s the fact their entire business model doesn’t work if people aren’t forced to wade through SEO and advertisements to find information. Edit: I’d note too that the walled communities don’t benefit by blocking google indexing out. These social media companies work by getting you into the community and enticing you to stay. That’s why everyone indexes YouTube.
CM30 4y ago
> The biggest threat to Google's business is Apple, and walled gardens like TikTok, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, etc. Too many communities are not allowing their information to be indexed, or are not properly so, which results in Google being less valuable. That is, and continues to be Google's main problem. This. In fact, this is just as much of an issue for things like ChatGPT too. It doesn't matter how 'smart' it seems, the model needs data to operate. That data can't be included in the training set if it's only in a Discord server somewhere, or a Google Doc only linked from such a place. It will never provide say, a good speedrunning strat for a popular game, or info on how to make mods of such, because the info required isn't publically accessible at the moment. These chat systems could possibly answer questions about things coding in JavaScript or cooking or historical trivia, but the real winner against Google would be a system that could open up these wall gardens (somehow) and make the info publically accessible without having to be a member there.
- chrischattin 4y ago
  Google search is just plain bad these days, and I think it has more to do with their attempts at algorithmic curation instead of focusing on simple indexing.
  - CM30 4y ago
    It has to do with multiple things, and that's definitely one of them. As is their attempt to try and understand poorly formatted written questions rather than traditional queries, which theoretically helps casual users at the expense of power users.
water8 4y ago
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xwdv 4y ago
You’re right about Google, but DuckDuckGo is finished.
emodendroket 4y ago
Reddit is pretty well indexed.
ALittleLight 4y ago
Going from monopoly to peer competitor in a shallow moat business would absolutely destroy Google as we know it.
edgyquant 4y ago
You’re not wrong but I think the “code red” is the marketing edge ChatGPT gets. GPT isn’t doing anything Google doesn’t have infra in place to do likely at the drop of a hat. Why have they not been innovating search but instead have been adding expanding advertisements at the expend of organic listings. Why has it become so difficult to search for CS questions? Obviously because Google allows blatant content copying (the kind of which would have got my small circle of blogs infracted in the early 2010s, and these are stack overflow clones.) It’s proof that either a. Google has spent the past decade of free money not caring about providing more utility to the user or b. They are systemically incapable of doing such at this time due to inertia.
lamontcg 4y ago
> The biggest threat to Google's business is Apple If Apple could improve on ChatGPT to the point where it really replaced >95% of my web searches, without pushing advertisement on me, then I certainly wouldn't be using Google.
- freediver 4y ago
  At what price point?
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    I mean I already shovel a ton of money at Apple. They can probably just bake it into the prices of everything else, but I'd probably do another "Siri+" subscription on top of it all if it meant fixing internet search. What I worry though is that middle managers at Apple are going to start grabbing for their share of the advertising pie and everything is going to go to shit across the board in 5-10 years or so.
sagarpatil 4y ago
I think you're underestimating the power of a fresh start and the potential for ChatGPT to carve out its own niche in the market. Meena and Lambda may have their own strengths, but they are also weighed down by Google's reputation and regulatory constraints. ChatGPT has the opportunity to differentiate itself and appeal to users looking for a new and innovative search experience. Plus, it's not as if Google has a track record of successfully copying and monetizing other platforms (just look at Google+). Don't count ChatGPT out just yet.
- N3cr0ph4g1st 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/AiBreakfast/status/1606507519999868928?t=KpXMTxqYoqJhCQMIUSXlOw&s=08 https://twitter.com/AiBreakfast/status/1606507519999868928?t... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi-A0kWXEO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi-A0kWXEO4 A combined google and PaLM like experience along with the fact that google can scale this up much more easily and cheaply than any competitor due to their in house TPUs makes me think otherwise but we shall see. Very cool stuff happening.
arcturus17 4y ago
> The biggest threat to Google's business is Apple, and walled gardens like TikTok, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, etc. I agree with what your sentiment, but I'd offer a synthesis on your point and the opposite view. AI APIs are going to be massive boosters of walled gardens. It will be possible to build not only better walled social experiences, but also interactive and content-driven ones. The gold rush won't be about ChatGPT, but about the APIs. And while Google may have superior underlying AI tech, no one has productized an API better thus far than OpenAI - it's simple enough that even some non-tech people are reading the docs. Also, Amazon and Microsoft have a stronger hold of the world of the enterprise. In other words this will be a race to see who sells shovels the fastest, and Google may lose by not making as much money as their rivals doing so, and also if those shovels are used to threaten its dominance, like damage by a trillion paper cuts.
perlgeek 4y ago
> ChatGPT will not result in a trillion dollar business. In the event that a paid ChatGPT for say, $5/monthly resulted in a 10+ billion dollar business, Google would within the same year simply do the same with Meena or Lambda (make it paid and copy whatever UI/UX ChatGPT or other are using). So you are saying that Google Search (+ads) could be disrupted by an "only" 10+ billion dollar business. Googles revenue in 2021 was around 256 billion dollar, replacing all the search revenue with a $5/month subscription with lots of competition sounds painful, from a business POV.

no_wizard 4y ago

One wonders in the case of Discord and possibly TikTok etc. if Google to pay to index. I imagine they could strike a financial deal that would make it so public channels etc are indexed and viewable via snapshots maybe?

monkpit 4y ago

Shorts are not really comparable to TikTok. Similar yes, but nowhere near the same.

scarface74 4y ago

It’s not about the technology. It’s a threat to Google’s business model.

endisneigh 4y ago
Yes, I know - I've addressed that in the post. Unless you were referring to something else?
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Not the OP, but you did not address the threat to the business model. In a world where questions are answered by an engine like ChatGPT instead of people going to ad-filled webpages, Google's business model evaporates. Even if google captures 100% of the new pie, the new pie is much smaller than the current one.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    In this hypothetical how is ChatGPT making money? Why can't Google make money on their equivalent the same way?
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      Of course Google can make money in the same way, but my point is that any reasonable price of what people would pay for a ChatGPT-like-service (which has to be competitive, as it can be replicated by others and the costs aren't that high) is far less than what Google can currently earn from the same queries through ads. Like, currently a Google competitor like Bing or DuckDuckGo is still sending lots of money to Google because they redirect users to websites showing Google ads. A non-Google ChatGPT pays Google nothing.
      - endisneigh 4y ago
        What do you base this on? Customizable user-tailored ads through natural language would make even more money arguably and Google is uniquely positioned to do it. Also consider that paying even a dollar a month for a service will result in the addressable market going down orders of magnitude. Apple is pretty much the only company in existence that is able to make people pay so much on luxuries like that.
  - hooloovoo_zoo 4y ago
    Ads will be even more effective inserted into prose.
  - bagacrap 4y ago

sfmike 4y ago

you could argue the counter point to google. in the event a search engine became 10+ billion dollar business X company(Microsoft IBM whoever) could launch a similar algorithmic search engine. First to market and brand is very strong regardless of the technology. If everyone starts using a chat gpt like thing for all of their life that can become worth billions and seriously hamper search volume universally.

endisneigh 4y ago
Perhaps. But Google putting a huge banner on Google.com saying, "Hey, use GoogleGPT!" would result in a high percentage of the billion+ Google searchers using it. It's not really the same scenario. For what it's worth, I do think Microsoft or Yahoo could have properly countered Google if they executed more effectively sooner.
geoduck14 4y ago
"First to market" You should know that ChatGPT isn't the "first". It is from OpenAI, who have multiple LLMs. And there are multiple competitors including Google and Facebook. It is a very expensive market to compete in Also, Google has already been using their LLM in their search, "in the market"
- alimov 4y ago
  > Also, Google has already been using their LLM in their search, "in the market" And yet I still have to filter through a bunch of results to find something actually useful, vs simply asking chatGPT and getting relevant information immediately (with obv limitations of chatgpt). Why does it feel like Google search has gotten progressively worse every year?

greatpostman 4y ago

Even if they have slightly better models. The models will cannabalize traditional search. Their more is eroding

geoduck14 4y ago
The models are enhancing search
- greatpostman 4y ago
  Supposedly…

torben-friis 4y ago

> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok. Google may not be good at innovating, but they would copy it in short order. Isn't that a counter example? Shorts copied tiktok, yet tiktok is still a very clear threat.

endisneigh 4y ago
Sure, but Shorts has only been around for about a year. > Now, Shorts claims 1.5 billion monthly viewers — more than TikTok has at 1 billion viewers a month — and gets 30 billion views a day. (In October, Meta said in an earnings call that Reels gets 140 billion “plays” a day across Instagram and Facebook, which includes when videos start automatically, as well as when someone clicks play. TikTok didn’t respond to requests for comment on views per day.) But unlike the rest of YouTube, which often brags that people watch more than a billion hours of video a day, the company doesn’t disclose watch time figures for Shorts. > https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/12/20/youtube-shorts-monetization-multiformat/?sh=189818356f41 https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/12/20/youtube... Political pressure to cancel TikTok + heavy growth in Shorts and Shorts will be the main short video site within 3 years.
AussieWog93 4y ago
Hell, I would argue that Shorts lowers the value of YouTube as a whole, from a consumer point of view. It breaks UI continuity just so it can shove a product down your throat that is basically just TikTok but worse.
- alimov 4y ago
  I agree. YT Shorts have made YT less pleasant to use.

into_infinity 4y ago

I think the examples you bring up demonstrate fairly precisely why Google should be afraid. Google is at a stage in its corporate life where they are extremely risk-averse. Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue, to upsetting regulators, to getting bad PR. It's why they publish papers about their in-house tech but never have the guts to put it out there for the general public to experiment with. A contender who shows up with a brand new way to access the knowledge on the internet, but with none of the regulatory / PR / lawyer / legacy product baggage of Google or Meta, is a serious risk. And on some level, it doesn't matter if the "OpenAI assistant" gets things wrong every now and then if they can manage expectations accordingly - something that Google, with their legacy brand and reputation, can't really pull off.

MattGaiser 4y ago
Are they at risk as long as they can replicate the competitor quickly? Plenty of companies don't invest in R&D to avoid cannibalizing existing business. Google does the R&D, but just does not deploy it to customers immediately.
- sowbug 4y ago
  In the case of a large company like Google, "immediately" can take years.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    I think you overestimated it. Google's LaMDA is already ready and running, it's just that it's behind the corporate firewall available only to employees. Years? That's way too long for them to scale up the service and flip a switch to open it to the public.
    - thefourthchime 4y ago
      Large corporations are great at failing to exploit their own strengths because they are afraid of anything rocking how they make money. I would be far more surprised if google reinvents itself using a transformer-based AI than I would some unknown company.

ren_engineer 4y ago

I'd imagine Google also has a far superior internal dataset for training considering their core competency literally involves indexing the entire internet. All Google needs to do is launch a superior LLM API on Google Cloud and essentially hedge their bets that any replacement for Google Search will be built on their API anyway. Or just spinoff a shell company so Google doesn't get bad PR for any bad results returned by their ChatGPT equivalent. Microsoft has avoided any real flak for the stuff that OpenAI releases The other question is how does something like ChatGPT monetize to pay for the massive costs to serve queries? Google engineers have already tested this and say that LLM queries are orders of magnitude more expensive to serve than current results and I don't seen any paid service replacing a free search engine

xnx 4y ago
Astute point. The greatest risk is probably reputational from weird/gamed responses. DeepMind might be a great brand to trial this with.
IanCal 4y ago
> All Google needs to do is launch a superior LLM API on Google Cloud and essentially hedge their bets that any replacement for Google Search will be built on their API anyway. That would still mean a huge disruption to their core business. > The other question is how does something like ChatGPT monetize to pay for the massive costs to serve queries? Google engineers have already tested this and say that LLM queries are orders of magnitude more expensive to serve than current results and I don't seen any paid service replacing a free search engine GPT costs cents, I'd happily pay that. I'm looking at how best to use the newer models personally as it's so cheap.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I have not been able to make sense of their API for doing bulk indexing / analysis though. I work at a place that is pretty reliant on knowledge bases (KBs) and they're the ideal target for this sort of thing, where you could prompt a situation into a chat mechanism and get a response giving some variation of the following: - historical information on the issue (we've seen this before, logged here etc) - surface a solution quickly - If all else fails, auto redirects the experience to capturing useful information via branched prompts (e.g., ask the customer this, do this, record this, tell me what happened, and at the end, will record the response etc back into the KB automatically) I can't figure out how to get the model to do this though. Disclaimer: I'm not an AI / ML engineer, my background is Web Development, but this is too tasty of a situation to pass up, and I really want to build it on top of something like ChatGPT

the_duke 4y ago

Are you saying that the articles claims of Google leadership seeing this as a critical risk are false? Because if Google sees this as a "red alert", it doesn't seem to be so laughable. Even if Google can easily offer the same , and even superior functionality, it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation. Even more so if competitors can offer comparable functionality. Edit: To clarify, because this was mentioned multiple times: There are two aspects why this might be bad for Google: There are lot's of ways to monetize a chat bot, many of which would probably be even more effective than current ads, because they would feel more organic and thus more trustworthy. But they would be highly misleading, and I would very much hope for regulators to quickly step in and require a clear indication that a suggestion was paid for. There are already quite strict rules around product placement in the EU, and this is definitely worse. Sure, having to announce what is an ad is just the status quo. But I believe that would be a lot more off-putting in an "organic" conversation. Secondly, Google benefits a lot from people clicking on links which then lead to sites that show more Google ads. A more guided and effective "chat search" experience would probably cut out a lot of those ad impressions. Third: Google has enjoyed a very dominant position in terms of market capture and technology lead. A new technology always has the potential to upset the balance and significantly weaken the current leader, because there are now younger, leaner and more agile competitors.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
The chat bot doesn't need to advertise to you directly. It can gather information that you magically see ads for on other services. Increasing the effectiveness of ads is more important than cramming more ads.
throwawayoaky 4y ago
> it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation. why do I feel like this sentence will age poorly
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  It's already aged poorly - in the first days of ChatGPT, someone already demonstrated it can perfectly mimic a YouTuber shilling a VPN every other sentence. But in general, to the extent "chat conversation" mimics spoken conversation between individuals, then this is the medium advertisers have the most experience with - quite literally thousands of years of experience.

ProAm 4y ago

> The biggest threat to Google's business is .... I would argue it's Google themselves. They just do not provide much benefit to their user base anymore, cruising on brand name alone in today's market is a gamble. Sure they can keep paying Apple, Mozilla to make google their default search engine... But does google search still provide good results? Better than reddit, amazon, apple, <insert your favorite here>. Android is still massive in non-US markets, so they corner their audience there... But in the US, what is still dominant? Google maps?

Agingcoder 4y ago
I'm interested in a working search engine which is not Google (in the EU) . I don't believe it currently exists, based on my testing (and no, bing doesn't work), so Google still brings a lot of value to me, and to most people I know. The android crowd is not cornered in any way - iPhones are just so expensive most people can't afford them, so android is actually a rather sensible option, and unless Apple radically alters its pricing policy, this is unlikely to change. Whether Google has brought something new and useful to the table in the past few years is another question, but it does not diminish the current value I derive from Google, since they have no competitors.
- ProAm 4y ago
  > The android crowd is not cornered in any way - iPhones are just so expensive most people can't afford them This is why they are cornered. They cant afford a different phone OS. You cant remove the Google search bar from the home screen. Google forces/tricks you into using their services, keeping location tracking on, etc..... > (and no, bing doesn't work), Im surprised you find Bing worse than google? In the US, the first page of google results in almost all ads, or search results close but not really what you searched for (even with an ad blocker). I dont have an answer for non-US but I just find it interesting.
  - ikt 4y ago
    As someone who went from Google to Duckduckgo to now Ecosia have to say I have no issues using Ecosia with the bing backend, do I wish I got a great result first time everytime? sure but it's not like I was getting that with Google either

stephc_int13 4y ago

Nokia was well entrenched in the Mobile Phone business, and already had a highly optimized and battle tested OS for smartphones. Microsoft was also in the business (WinCE, PocketPC, Windows Mobile) And yet, the iPhone and later Android completely changed the market. Same with Kodak, they basically invented digital photography, but they could not turn it into a business because they could not compete with their core business. The suits would not allow it. Search is ripe for disruption, and has been for years. Google search is a waay inferior product now than what it was a decade ago. Big business yes, but I would not bet on much loyalty. A competing product does not have to instantly make billion dollars, they simply have to provide a better value for their users.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Totally inappropriate comparison. A mobile OS takes 5 -10 years to develop and you ha e to onboard developers and commercial organisations like banks. Chat GPT needs no partner relatuonship and Google could have equivalent public product in 2 months. Both are just stealing public content someone else has peoduced. So nice that law protecrs ChatGPT sourcecode but not the authors of training material
- scarface74 4y ago
  All indications is that Apple went from conception of the iPhone to introduction in two years. It took Apple 3 months to go from “we are going to introduce an App Store” to “there’s an all for that”
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Again, you are missing the point. ChatGPT has no moat, certainly not against Google. The day first iPhone was released, Nokia management didn't know this will be big. Most of the world didn't. By the time their sales were hurting, and Nokia management woke up, there were many years of development to catch up on. None of this applies here. Google already has an equivalent to ChatGPT internally and could release it any day. ChatGPT doesn't have some unique data thay Google is lacking, so what's gonna stop them?

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> Questions people are asking each other on Reddit, Discord or Facebook about what phone to buy are questions they are not asking Google, and that costs Google money. It's as simple as that When your main business is to rob and plunder, any attemt at self-defence looks like a threat. We had a great ecosystem of open, public forums and websites where people had discussions and produced valuable information. Google milked it dry and turned it into a barren wasteland. Now they have nothing left to plunder and their search is filled with adspam. Well maybe they should produce some valuable content themselves. Instead they now earn money from scams, I get youtube ads for a project by Elon Musk to give British people iniversal basic income powered by AI, but you have to pay to sign up!

neosat 4y ago

>> Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. Arguably superior on what dimension? For revenue potential through a chat based AI interface, assuming revenue is going to be some function of end-user usage, there is nothing even close to ChatGPT in the open market currently. ChatGPT is being used by millions of people already, which is a way way higher number than whatever competing service Google may have. >> Google would within the same year simply do the same with Meena or Lambda Like they did with social networks? or Whatsapp? With something like ChatGPT the 'easy to copy' argument is going to be even more difficult since 1. with usage ChatGPT will get better. 2. Once people get used to ChatGPT to switch the competing service from Google will have to be significantly better (not just marginally better). So while it may not yet be a existential threat to Google, to make a point that ChatGPT should alarm Google is definitely not "laughable" IMO.

tootie 4y ago
I feel like AI chat has failed repeatedly to get any traction with users. Amazon have the most skin in the game by far and are dialing back their Alexa dreams. I mean, just look at the real world and how many formerly human interactions have been replaced by using forms on a 2D screen. It's just much more efficient than open-ended conversation.
- deleted 4y ago
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h0l0cube 4y ago

> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok 2022 Revenue: TikTok ~12b (operating since 2016) YouTube ~28b (operating since 2005) YouTube, Instagram and Facebook are in damage control.

endisneigh 4y ago
No disagreement there. I believe walled gardens are the biggest threat to Google.
scarface74 4y ago
And rumors are that YouTube still isn’t profitable and if it is - just barely
disgruntledphd2 4y ago
And yet ByteDance still lose money. Revenue is not a great metric.

kbos87 4y ago

Yup. Search on TikTok is astonishingly good, especially relative to the quality of results on YouTube (acknowledgement to the irony there.) TikTok has the ability to surface hyper-recent, relevant content that covers a variety of viewpoints on literally any topic. It’s not a direct replacement for what you’d find on google search, but it’s generally higher quality and more fun to consume in a lot of cases.

kruxigt 4y ago

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nailer 4y ago

> Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. I don’t believe you. The last time we saw a practical demo of Google AI it was Duplex which was never released as a product.

endisneigh 4y ago
You're mistaken. It was rolled into Assistant and works exclusively with Pixel phones to book appointments and what not. Google is notoriously terrible at product communication though, so I don't even blame ya for believing that.
- cameronh90 4y ago
  They could also live in one of the many markets that Google have elected not to deploy that product to, as is typical for Google.
- nailer 4y ago
  So I can buy a Google Pixel today and use Duplex? I live in the UK per the other user’s comment.

axegon_ 4y ago

A few more important points: The costs of running the whole operation. Google so far has been unmatched in extracting every single cent from every customer and have tried to keep their operations as optimized as possible. ChatGPT is a gimmick. I won't lie, I've used it for some trivial tasks but I'm willing to bet it's nowhere nearly as scalable as Google. In addition, a single google query costs google less than a peanut and a few ads later, it's been paid off(plus profit) while it probably costs a big ass bag of cashew to do the same. This is not an operation you can fund with ads and byproduct services. Even if it's been announced that the service will be free forever, it's Elon Musk we are talking here. He is famous for having 90 different, completely contradicting opinions every minute. And when shit hits the fan, it's gonna be a lot more than $8/month to have access to it.

lcnmrn 4y ago

I run https://subreply.com https://subreply.com and I gave everything to Google to index, but they refuse the content.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> Although ChatGPT still has plenty of room for improvement, its release led Google’s management to declare a “code red.” For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm.

jacquesm 4y ago

> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok. But they didn't copy the engagement or the traffic figures for that segment, and that's even after doing everything they can to ram them down your throat to the point of making youtube less appealing (shades of Google+ there). Meanwhile TikTok is alive and well. It's not my thing but I've yet to see someone spontaneously point me to a Google short whereas I can seem to escape the TikTok link bombardment.

stefan_ 4y ago

Meanwhile, there are the gardens like GitHub that are not walled and indeed plenty of spammers are very actively gardening all that content to spam Google with and yet the masters themselves are incapable of indexing it. Maybe this is just a recent phenomenon but I find myself putting constants and various names from code into Google quoted for exact search and get slammed in the face with a "this literally does not exist you idiot, it has never been uttered" 0 results page.

seppel 4y ago

> This article is laughable. Google already has Meena and Lambda which are the same thing and arguably superior. If Google really has two products in-house which are better than ChatGPT, and they are not able able to make them proper products for the outside world (for what ever battles they are fighting internally) they are even more fucked. But the funny thing is that Google already has not one but two products for the same thing.

redml 4y ago
i mean even if they released it today, i wouldn't use it because i'd automatically assume it'd get killed in 3 years

roenxi 4y ago

A point to consider is what "a trillion dollar business" actually means. The math of markets forces income to match how hard it is for someone else to do some work. Take the food situation like food. Feeding someone is critical to their very existence, but cooking is such a generic skill that the margins on any restaurant get squeezed down to not so much. So even though the value of feeding someone is very high, the value add that a business can lay claim to is very low adn they don't make much money. The threat here isn't that someone will do better than Google as much as a proliferation of cheap AI might trash the "trillion" part and replace it with "billions". If someone could cheaply bundle a search engine with a web browser or OS then Google Search is vulnerable. I mean, what if an AI model could be made small enough to work offline? How does Google make money?

zx10rse 4y ago

Google is sitting on a metric ton of data, give tools like chatGPT couple of years, after all they released it just not even a month ago.

radar1310 4y ago

But Google will shut it down like almost everything else that Google does. Start it up to shut it down 5 years later.

matchagaucho 4y ago

ChatGPT's current inability to access the internet leaves Google in a safe spot IMO. However, I don't believe Google could easily pivot and offer their own solution without cannibalizing their current model. This exact same scenario basically played out between Facebook and Google+ social networks.

endisneigh 4y ago
OpenAI has experimented with internet access and GPT: https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/ https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/ just a matter of time.
- sdrg822 4y ago
  Yeah this is purely a risk decision for a prototype not an actual technical limitation.

karmasimida 4y ago

How do you insert ADs in ChatGPT style service? Unless they are trained to give you ads first, in its current form, it is going to be super difficult to make money out of it. It is the Reels scenario for Facebook once again. They can copy TikTok, but they more the do, the more revenue they shift from their money maker, thus losing money. Google will have to take it slow, making ChatGPT style component in their service, while not hurting their main resource of revenue.

endisneigh 4y ago
to answer your question, you'd use something like the knowledge graph to tease out relevant product queries from the conversation and train the model to respond with both the general response but also what you might called the custom intent, which would vary per user. this is what search already does, but making this scale with a language model is probably expensive, hence why google doesn't already release meena
alpineidyll3 4y ago
Just prompt it to sell the widget... Jasper ai is already doing great with that business model.
spyder 4y ago
And even if they put ads in the AI's answers you could just feed it trough other AIs to adblock it (by asking to remove ads from this text). Will be interesting to see it happen because I'm sure some of them will do that.

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OJFord 4y ago

> Look how quickly Shorts copied TikTok. And how's that going? I don't have any interest in either of them, but as an outsider it certainly seems like a tonne of people like TikTok and nobody cares about Shorts, wishes they were normal YouTube videos. And why do you assume 'AI chat' has to be a subscriber model, but 'search' works with ads? It could easily have a 'recommended sponsor' as an example for certain queries. Or really trivially - just intersperse responses with ads... Exactly like search? And the data collection that's possible is superior too, surely?

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
> and nobody cares about Shorts Not creators though. Shorts give more revenue to the creators than TikTok equivalent. Personally, I prefer shorts, simply because I don't have to download yet another app. Don't get me wrong. I am not searching for them, but if something interesting shows up, I will watch it.
- OJFord 4y ago
  But the thread's about Google, so if nobody cares except the creators because they get laid more by Google, that's even worse (for Google prospect). I also watch them for anyone I follow anyway, but the short & portrait format is annoying.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    I was making the claim that creators being more interested in shorts due to the higher return would actually be good for Google. I do agree on the criticism of the format, plus the fact that I can't seem to scroll and the repetition are annoying to say the least.
tpl 4y ago
Right now YouTube is pushing Shorts pretty heavily. Everything I have heard from creators is that Shorts can drive a ton of subscriptions into your channel. How many of those viewers watch the long form stuff is a bit more a mystery though.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Googles business in search is spamming you with crap for money and pumping your clicks for juicy information to sell. They do this by filling the page with loosely related advertisements disguised as search results. A ChatGPT product can summarize complex questions into understandable (if often wrong) answers. Even if Google out develops openai, which I’m sure they can handily, where does all the spam go? How do they forge coherent answers to questions into a bunch of loosely related advertisements they spam at you for money? It’s not ChatGPT that’s going to kill them, it’s the fact their entire business model doesn’t work if people aren’t forced to wade through SEO and advertisements to find information. Edit: I’d note too that the walled communities don’t benefit by blocking google indexing out. These social media companies work by getting you into the community and enticing you to stay. That’s why everyone indexes YouTube.

CM30 4y ago

> The biggest threat to Google's business is Apple, and walled gardens like TikTok, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, etc. Too many communities are not allowing their information to be indexed, or are not properly so, which results in Google being less valuable. That is, and continues to be Google's main problem. This. In fact, this is just as much of an issue for things like ChatGPT too. It doesn't matter how 'smart' it seems, the model needs data to operate. That data can't be included in the training set if it's only in a Discord server somewhere, or a Google Doc only linked from such a place. It will never provide say, a good speedrunning strat for a popular game, or info on how to make mods of such, because the info required isn't publically accessible at the moment. These chat systems could possibly answer questions about things coding in JavaScript or cooking or historical trivia, but the real winner against Google would be a system that could open up these wall gardens (somehow) and make the info publically accessible without having to be a member there.

chrischattin 4y ago
Google search is just plain bad these days, and I think it has more to do with their attempts at algorithmic curation instead of focusing on simple indexing.
- CM30 4y ago
  It has to do with multiple things, and that's definitely one of them. As is their attempt to try and understand poorly formatted written questions rather than traditional queries, which theoretically helps casual users at the expense of power users.

water8 4y ago

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xwdv 4y ago

You’re right about Google, but DuckDuckGo is finished.

emodendroket 4y ago

Reddit is pretty well indexed.

ALittleLight 4y ago

Going from monopoly to peer competitor in a shallow moat business would absolutely destroy Google as we know it.

edgyquant 4y ago

You’re not wrong but I think the “code red” is the marketing edge ChatGPT gets. GPT isn’t doing anything Google doesn’t have infra in place to do likely at the drop of a hat. Why have they not been innovating search but instead have been adding expanding advertisements at the expend of organic listings. Why has it become so difficult to search for CS questions? Obviously because Google allows blatant content copying (the kind of which would have got my small circle of blogs infracted in the early 2010s, and these are stack overflow clones.) It’s proof that either a. Google has spent the past decade of free money not caring about providing more utility to the user or b. They are systemically incapable of doing such at this time due to inertia.

lamontcg 4y ago

> The biggest threat to Google's business is Apple If Apple could improve on ChatGPT to the point where it really replaced >95% of my web searches, without pushing advertisement on me, then I certainly wouldn't be using Google.

freediver 4y ago
At what price point?
- lamontcg 4y ago
  I mean I already shovel a ton of money at Apple. They can probably just bake it into the prices of everything else, but I'd probably do another "Siri+" subscription on top of it all if it meant fixing internet search. What I worry though is that middle managers at Apple are going to start grabbing for their share of the advertising pie and everything is going to go to shit across the board in 5-10 years or so.

sagarpatil 4y ago

I think you're underestimating the power of a fresh start and the potential for ChatGPT to carve out its own niche in the market. Meena and Lambda may have their own strengths, but they are also weighed down by Google's reputation and regulatory constraints. ChatGPT has the opportunity to differentiate itself and appeal to users looking for a new and innovative search experience. Plus, it's not as if Google has a track record of successfully copying and monetizing other platforms (just look at Google+). Don't count ChatGPT out just yet.

N3cr0ph4g1st 4y ago
https://twitter.com/AiBreakfast/status/1606507519999868928?t=KpXMTxqYoqJhCQMIUSXlOw&s=08 https://twitter.com/AiBreakfast/status/1606507519999868928?t... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi-A0kWXEO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi-A0kWXEO4 A combined google and PaLM like experience along with the fact that google can scale this up much more easily and cheaply than any competitor due to their in house TPUs makes me think otherwise but we shall see. Very cool stuff happening.

arcturus17 4y ago

> The biggest threat to Google's business is Apple, and walled gardens like TikTok, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, etc. I agree with what your sentiment, but I'd offer a synthesis on your point and the opposite view. AI APIs are going to be massive boosters of walled gardens. It will be possible to build not only better walled social experiences, but also interactive and content-driven ones. The gold rush won't be about ChatGPT, but about the APIs. And while Google may have superior underlying AI tech, no one has productized an API better thus far than OpenAI - it's simple enough that even some non-tech people are reading the docs. Also, Amazon and Microsoft have a stronger hold of the world of the enterprise. In other words this will be a race to see who sells shovels the fastest, and Google may lose by not making as much money as their rivals doing so, and also if those shovels are used to threaten its dominance, like damage by a trillion paper cuts.

perlgeek 4y ago

> ChatGPT will not result in a trillion dollar business. In the event that a paid ChatGPT for say, $5/monthly resulted in a 10+ billion dollar business, Google would within the same year simply do the same with Meena or Lambda (make it paid and copy whatever UI/UX ChatGPT or other are using). So you are saying that Google Search (+ads) could be disrupted by an "only" 10+ billion dollar business. Googles revenue in 2021 was around 256 billion dollar, replacing all the search revenue with a $5/month subscription with lots of competition sounds painful, from a business POV.