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It’s not a fumble, more like a fundamental limit of the public corporation. Google has an established cash flow that relies on search and people clicking throug

It’s not a fumble, more like a fundamental limit of the public corporation. Google has an established cash flow that relies on search and people clicking through to websites full of more ads. Once Google perfected that revenue model, they were pretty much locked in. They could explore new revenue streams in new areas like cars or speakers, but investors would howl for blood if they tried to reinvent the search experience at the cost of revenue growth. These LLMs change the revenue model too much. Imagine how many ads a person sees over the course of researching the best TV to buy. Clicking and clicking on dozens of pages and seeing hundreds of ads. In the Bing demo, they asked for the best gaming TV and boom, there was the gaming TV I just bought after doing the research myself the long way. No clicks, no revenue.

braingenious 4y ago
I don’t really understand this line of reasoning. >In the Bing demo, they asked for the best gaming TV and boom, there was the gaming TV I just bought after doing the research myself the long way. No clicks, no revenue. In this example “no clicks, no revenue” applies more to Google than it does Bing. Bing maybe didn’t make any money off that particular search but they did demonstrate that they have a better product, increasing the chances that someone will use Bing instead of Google. Bing didn’t get the click revenue, but Google didn’t even get the search in the first place. The way forward for Google is to… continue to maximize dollars per click? The exact same behavior that’s made their search laughably bad for many people?
- dougmwne 4y ago
  The reasoning is: Google should continue to maximize dollars per click. They have an established revenue model and should not try to disrupt themselves. Short term profits over long term profits are favored by Wall Street. Microsoft has a tiny portion of the search and ads market. They have no substantial revenue to protect. If they try to disrupt search and succeed, but kill the click through ratio and number of searches per user in the process, that’s no problem for them. They can steal away Google’s users first and worry about making money off it later. They might even make search less profitable in the long run and something that offered as a loss leader to get users into the rest of their ecosystem.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    I still do not see how this makes any logical sense for Google. If: >Short term profits over long term profits are favored by Wall Street. Then: Why did they spend so much money inventing tech that so far has pretty much only allowed Microsoft to take money out of their pockets? I’m genuinely trying to figure out a perspective where Google doesn’t look like a clown car.
    - freediver 4y ago
      Google originally developed Transformers in 2017, and then proceeded to deploy them to enhance the results on a dead end of search they were already on. [1] It could be argued that nobody saw what will happen 6 years later. When we wrote the "Age of Page Rank is Over" article [2] just 4 months ago, many people did not understand what we talked about in the second part of the article although GPT3 was already a thing. [1] https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/ https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513
      - braingenious 4y ago
        GPT-3 was unveiled 2.5 years ago, and it was very well-received at the time… and since. As was DALL-E and Midjourney. This entire time Google has just responded with “Yeah, all this AI stuff like transformers and diffusers, GANs etc? That’s transformative tech. We’ve got something way better though. No you can’t see it or use it, no we won’t use it to make it so our website stops being primarily an index of Pinterest and Yummly. Our product is literally so good that we cannot bring it to market.” It is… hilarious

braingenious 4y ago

I don’t really understand this line of reasoning. >In the Bing demo, they asked for the best gaming TV and boom, there was the gaming TV I just bought after doing the research myself the long way. No clicks, no revenue. In this example “no clicks, no revenue” applies more to Google than it does Bing. Bing maybe didn’t make any money off that particular search but they did demonstrate that they have a better product, increasing the chances that someone will use Bing instead of Google. Bing didn’t get the click revenue, but Google didn’t even get the search in the first place. The way forward for Google is to… continue to maximize dollars per click? The exact same behavior that’s made their search laughably bad for many people?

dougmwne 4y ago
The reasoning is: Google should continue to maximize dollars per click. They have an established revenue model and should not try to disrupt themselves. Short term profits over long term profits are favored by Wall Street. Microsoft has a tiny portion of the search and ads market. They have no substantial revenue to protect. If they try to disrupt search and succeed, but kill the click through ratio and number of searches per user in the process, that’s no problem for them. They can steal away Google’s users first and worry about making money off it later. They might even make search less profitable in the long run and something that offered as a loss leader to get users into the rest of their ecosystem.
- braingenious 4y ago
  I still do not see how this makes any logical sense for Google. If: >Short term profits over long term profits are favored by Wall Street. Then: Why did they spend so much money inventing tech that so far has pretty much only allowed Microsoft to take money out of their pockets? I’m genuinely trying to figure out a perspective where Google doesn’t look like a clown car.
  - freediver 4y ago
    Google originally developed Transformers in 2017, and then proceeded to deploy them to enhance the results on a dead end of search they were already on. [1] It could be argued that nobody saw what will happen 6 years later. When we wrote the "Age of Page Rank is Over" article [2] just 4 months ago, many people did not understand what we talked about in the second part of the article although GPT3 was already a thing. [1] https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/ https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537513
    - braingenious 4y ago
      GPT-3 was unveiled 2.5 years ago, and it was very well-received at the time… and since. As was DALL-E and Midjourney. This entire time Google has just responded with “Yeah, all this AI stuff like transformers and diffusers, GANs etc? That’s transformative tech. We’ve got something way better though. No you can’t see it or use it, no we won’t use it to make it so our website stops being primarily an index of Pinterest and Yummly. Our product is literally so good that we cannot bring it to market.” It is… hilarious