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What exactly is the bottleneck here? What is it about ChatGPT that makes it better than Google's stuff? Is it more compute power? Better algorithms used in the

What exactly is the bottleneck here? What is it about ChatGPT that makes it better than Google's stuff? Is it more compute power? Better algorithms used in the models? More talent? Better work culture? Some proprietary technical innovations? Quality of data? Quantity of data? Some combination of all of these?

pixl97 4y ago
I think for Google it may be profits. If you're already a near monopoly that's captured most of the market using a (relatively) cheap means of data processing, an extremely expensive competitor is terrible news. You're in a position where the winning move where you keep your marketshare means far lower profits, at least for some amount of time.
- mikece 4y ago
  And the aggressive competitor right now isn't ChatGTP but it's TikTok: many people are now turning to TikTok for search instead of Google.
  - adaptbrian 4y ago
    any data to back this up or is this anecdotal? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=tiktok%20search,google%20search https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... and https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=tiktok%20search https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... doesnt point to anything meteoric here.
    - dvngnt_ 4y ago
      I don't but I've seen many people on the app say as much. I've seen many more people appending reddit to Google searches. google should be more worried about reddit getting their search together
      - roundandround 4y ago
        The same would have hypothetically been true for plenty of sites like Stack Overflow.. Which is an example that sites themselves penalize anonymous internal search over fresh Google search. Controlling the search pages is of low value compared to staying fixed at the top of Google searches (thanks to obfuscated interaction rankings) by having a lot of people who search dozens of times a day always selecting only your page in Google's responses and of course never applying captcha to a new visitor from Google.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      Google search gets worse and worse every year. It's actually becoming painful to search for things now. It gives me nothing but spammy low quality results unless I restrict resuts to reddit and HN and other old school forums where people actually talk about stuff and exchange information.
    - shanemhansen 4y ago
      I think google search trends might not provide good data on interest in TikTok search.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Google is definitely becoming the source of last resort for a lot of queries. I also turn to it just to search other websites. The biggest search tragedy is Twitter. There’s an incredible amount of information on that platform but most of it is hard to find because of the awful search.
      - corbulo 4y ago
        The problem with Twitter is everything has much greater semantic similarity due to brevity. How the hell do you SEO a tweet? LLM might actually come in handy for that kind of backend search usecase. IMO the real issue with twitter is how it only loads tweets on a page to your monitor size. Impossible to CTRL+F if you know what you're looking for even on the right author's page.
    - tarsinge 4y ago
      What are you trying to see? If they are not using Google you'll not see it in these data.
davidktr 4y ago
Google has something to loose now: their reputation. OpenAI can be maverick, any mistakes are "move fast and break things". Same reason why Mercedes or Audi did not bring automated driving on the road, even though they were technologically more advanced than Tesla. History proved them right.
moonchrome 4y ago
Just from reading ycombinator on this topic I would say ChatGPT went all in on productizing - so like they hired developers to solve tasks for it to get training data etc. Maybe Google treated it as a research project and didn't pour billions in to productizing it sooner because like you said - they had the same algorithms/hardware/developer/researcher caliber and didn't view it as a threat. And then when ChatGPT launched they got caught with their pants down and rushed to save face.
- krackers 4y ago
  For years now Google has been shoving the word "AI" into its presentations. Just go through the past GoogleIO and see how many times they mention "AI". All along they've painted a picture of having some grand plan, that they've got something cooking internally that they're perfecting. Maybe some investors even believed it, after all if they're publishing cutting edge papers surely they must have a product backing this as well. And now Microsoft has called their bluff. And the irony is that if they had simply worked on perfecting standard keyword based information retrieval, the thirst for a LLM integrated search engine would not be as high.
- Sai_ 4y ago
  Reminds me of their experience with the iPhone. They were sitting on android until the iPhone launched to mass appeal and left Google scrambling to catch up.
canes123456 4y ago
Change in the status quo. Even if there AI is better than ChatGPT, it might monetize as well search queries. When you are a monopoly, any change means possible losses.
cloudking 4y ago
Execs: We need to implement ChatGPT functionality into Google search to stay relevant and protect our moat! Engineers: Okay, we have LaMDA which is a more powerful language model, we'll implement it. Execs: Great, what are the risks? Engineers: Well each search is going to cost 5x more compute power, and may reduce the amount of clicks to ads and search results since we're answering all their questions directly. Execs: Hold on... we need to have a bunch of meetings about why not to do this.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  >compute power, and may reduce the amount of clicks to ads and search results since we're answering all their That's the literal bottom line. How is Google going to insert ads into an AI system. There's probably people being paid a fortune to try to find out.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Google went from searching when you click the search button, to searching as you type, which increased compute spend per search, and they kind of just did it. I don't think it's cost of compute per search that's holding things back.
knaik94 4y ago
The bottleneck is clearly Google's hesitancy. ChatGPT is better because I can use it right now. I don't care how good the research demos are if I can't interact with them myself. Google has a track record of discontinuing products and having weird user/developer unfriendly policies. One of the most recent was Chrome's plan to force manifest v3. But many of the features promised to devs from v3 wouldn't have been ready by the time v3 was supposed to release. I would approach Google's AI stuff with similar hesitancy as I would have approached Stadia within the last few months before it shut down. Just like with Stadia, Google very clearly does not care to prioritize this kind of AI tech. Google failed to proofread its own ad about Bard. I can't understand how rushed they would have to be for something like that to happen. In my opinion, this is why new ChatGPT users are going to stay with ChatGPT, even as the aggressive filtering makes the output slightly worse as time goes on.
tobiasSoftware 4y ago
I'd say it is about the accessibility of data. First, there is the issue of paid ads. An example is if I look up "How to learn C++", the top link is a paid ad for CodeAcademy, which claims to be free, but then has three tiers with only the basic one being free. I started looking for information on C++ and ended up in a sales room being given a payment plan. Contrast this to me typing "How to learn C++" into ChatGPT, which informs me about "variables, data types, control structures, functions, and arrays", which are a lot of nice keywords that I could jump further into. Second, Google does not give you access to the information itself. As such, the style the information is stored in on a website is inconsistent, with each website displaying information in drastically different ways. For an example, I Googled "what is a pointer in c++". The top link starts with "You learned from the previous chapter, that we can get the memory address of a variable by using the & operator", leads to a single example, and is about a single screen long. This would be useless to someone who has no idea what a pointer is and just heard the name of the concept. Meanwhile the second top link starts with "In earlier chapters, variables have been explained as locations in the computer's memory which can be accessed by their identifier" and is a much more in-depth tutorial spanning over a dozen screens worth of information. This is better as it gives a lot more information, but is still assuming that I got there from following their tutorial, but instead Google just jumped me into the middle of it. However, ChatGPT homogenizes this, so the data is already organized in an easily accessible format that does not assume you have much previous knowledge. When I tried ChatGPT with this question, it started with "A pointer is a variable in C++ that stores the memory address of another variable." That is far better than either of the websites that I tried with Google that assumed you were halfway through their personal tutorials.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm going to write a one page textbook on how to learn C++. On that one page it just says "variables, data types, control structures, functions, and arrays". It's gonna be brilliant.

pixl97 4y ago

I think for Google it may be profits. If you're already a near monopoly that's captured most of the market using a (relatively) cheap means of data processing, an extremely expensive competitor is terrible news. You're in a position where the winning move where you keep your marketshare means far lower profits, at least for some amount of time.

mikece 4y ago
And the aggressive competitor right now isn't ChatGTP but it's TikTok: many people are now turning to TikTok for search instead of Google.
- adaptbrian 4y ago
  any data to back this up or is this anecdotal? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=tiktok%20search,google%20search https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... and https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=tiktok%20search https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... doesnt point to anything meteoric here.
  - dvngnt_ 4y ago
    I don't but I've seen many people on the app say as much. I've seen many more people appending reddit to Google searches. google should be more worried about reddit getting their search together
    - roundandround 4y ago
      The same would have hypothetically been true for plenty of sites like Stack Overflow.. Which is an example that sites themselves penalize anonymous internal search over fresh Google search. Controlling the search pages is of low value compared to staying fixed at the top of Google searches (thanks to obfuscated interaction rankings) by having a lot of people who search dozens of times a day always selecting only your page in Google's responses and of course never applying captcha to a new visitor from Google.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Google search gets worse and worse every year. It's actually becoming painful to search for things now. It gives me nothing but spammy low quality results unless I restrict resuts to reddit and HN and other old school forums where people actually talk about stuff and exchange information.
  - shanemhansen 4y ago
    I think google search trends might not provide good data on interest in TikTok search.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Google is definitely becoming the source of last resort for a lot of queries. I also turn to it just to search other websites. The biggest search tragedy is Twitter. There’s an incredible amount of information on that platform but most of it is hard to find because of the awful search.
    - corbulo 4y ago
      The problem with Twitter is everything has much greater semantic similarity due to brevity. How the hell do you SEO a tweet? LLM might actually come in handy for that kind of backend search usecase. IMO the real issue with twitter is how it only loads tweets on a page to your monitor size. Impossible to CTRL+F if you know what you're looking for even on the right author's page.
  - tarsinge 4y ago
    What are you trying to see? If they are not using Google you'll not see it in these data.

davidktr 4y ago

Google has something to loose now: their reputation. OpenAI can be maverick, any mistakes are "move fast and break things". Same reason why Mercedes or Audi did not bring automated driving on the road, even though they were technologically more advanced than Tesla. History proved them right.

moonchrome 4y ago

Just from reading ycombinator on this topic I would say ChatGPT went all in on productizing - so like they hired developers to solve tasks for it to get training data etc. Maybe Google treated it as a research project and didn't pour billions in to productizing it sooner because like you said - they had the same algorithms/hardware/developer/researcher caliber and didn't view it as a threat. And then when ChatGPT launched they got caught with their pants down and rushed to save face.

krackers 4y ago
For years now Google has been shoving the word "AI" into its presentations. Just go through the past GoogleIO and see how many times they mention "AI". All along they've painted a picture of having some grand plan, that they've got something cooking internally that they're perfecting. Maybe some investors even believed it, after all if they're publishing cutting edge papers surely they must have a product backing this as well. And now Microsoft has called their bluff. And the irony is that if they had simply worked on perfecting standard keyword based information retrieval, the thirst for a LLM integrated search engine would not be as high.
Sai_ 4y ago
Reminds me of their experience with the iPhone. They were sitting on android until the iPhone launched to mass appeal and left Google scrambling to catch up.

canes123456 4y ago

Change in the status quo. Even if there AI is better than ChatGPT, it might monetize as well search queries. When you are a monopoly, any change means possible losses.

cloudking 4y ago

Execs: We need to implement ChatGPT functionality into Google search to stay relevant and protect our moat! Engineers: Okay, we have LaMDA which is a more powerful language model, we'll implement it. Execs: Great, what are the risks? Engineers: Well each search is going to cost 5x more compute power, and may reduce the amount of clicks to ads and search results since we're answering all their questions directly. Execs: Hold on... we need to have a bunch of meetings about why not to do this.

mancerayder 4y ago
>compute power, and may reduce the amount of clicks to ads and search results since we're answering all their That's the literal bottom line. How is Google going to insert ads into an AI system. There's probably people being paid a fortune to try to find out.
fragmede 4y ago
Google went from searching when you click the search button, to searching as you type, which increased compute spend per search, and they kind of just did it. I don't think it's cost of compute per search that's holding things back.

knaik94 4y ago

The bottleneck is clearly Google's hesitancy. ChatGPT is better because I can use it right now. I don't care how good the research demos are if I can't interact with them myself. Google has a track record of discontinuing products and having weird user/developer unfriendly policies. One of the most recent was Chrome's plan to force manifest v3. But many of the features promised to devs from v3 wouldn't have been ready by the time v3 was supposed to release. I would approach Google's AI stuff with similar hesitancy as I would have approached Stadia within the last few months before it shut down. Just like with Stadia, Google very clearly does not care to prioritize this kind of AI tech. Google failed to proofread its own ad about Bard. I can't understand how rushed they would have to be for something like that to happen. In my opinion, this is why new ChatGPT users are going to stay with ChatGPT, even as the aggressive filtering makes the output slightly worse as time goes on.

tobiasSoftware 4y ago

I'd say it is about the accessibility of data. First, there is the issue of paid ads. An example is if I look up "How to learn C++", the top link is a paid ad for CodeAcademy, which claims to be free, but then has three tiers with only the basic one being free. I started looking for information on C++ and ended up in a sales room being given a payment plan. Contrast this to me typing "How to learn C++" into ChatGPT, which informs me about "variables, data types, control structures, functions, and arrays", which are a lot of nice keywords that I could jump further into. Second, Google does not give you access to the information itself. As such, the style the information is stored in on a website is inconsistent, with each website displaying information in drastically different ways. For an example, I Googled "what is a pointer in c++". The top link starts with "You learned from the previous chapter, that we can get the memory address of a variable by using the & operator", leads to a single example, and is about a single screen long. This would be useless to someone who has no idea what a pointer is and just heard the name of the concept. Meanwhile the second top link starts with "In earlier chapters, variables have been explained as locations in the computer's memory which can be accessed by their identifier" and is a much more in-depth tutorial spanning over a dozen screens worth of information. This is better as it gives a lot more information, but is still assuming that I got there from following their tutorial, but instead Google just jumped me into the middle of it. However, ChatGPT homogenizes this, so the data is already organized in an easily accessible format that does not assume you have much previous knowledge. When I tried ChatGPT with this question, it started with "A pointer is a variable in C++ that stores the memory address of another variable." That is far better than either of the websites that I tried with Google that assumed you were halfway through their personal tutorials.

bagacrap 4y ago
Yeah, I'm going to write a one page textbook on how to learn C++. On that one page it just says "variables, data types, control structures, functions, and arrays". It's gonna be brilliant.