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OpenAI with 400 employees are breaking Google’s ankles on the court. What do you guys think? Is Google in trouble? Their entire business model is in jeopardy.

OpenAI with 400 employees are breaking Google’s ankles on the court. What do you guys think? Is Google in trouble? Their entire business model is in jeopardy. If Google releases a oroduct as as good as ChatGPT 4, which is unlikely, they’ll kill their revenue. If they don’t release it, they’ll gradually lose market share. They are in an unwinnable situation.

sebzim4500 4y ago
Why would they kill their revenue? They'd just include ads.
- dragant 4y ago
  I actually like Google Bard. I find the responses from Bard are superior over ChatGPT. Have others used Bard?
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    I have. I found it to more or less be trash in comparison to GPT-4. Bard made up commands that didn't even exist, so I can't imagine how much more it would make up that isn't true.
    - DennisAleynikov 4y ago
      I have the opposite impression. It seems to stick to facts more than I've had luck with on gpt
    - tyfon 4y ago
      GPT-4 will also happily invent python libraries that doesn't exist to enable some functionality in the code it produces. I don't think this is a Bard only feature. It's not as bad as the 65B llama model I run on my (amd) PC though, especially with quantized weights it tends to stop coding at some point and repeat the last line over and over. The 30B unquantized model seems better in this particular thing.
      - BryceSchroeder 4y ago
        You might want to consider the sampler you're using. Consider using a repetition penalty.
      - AviationAtom 4y ago
        With LLaMA it's all about the tuning. Using an Alpaca-tunes 7B yields pretty reasonable results, considering it's constraints.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Bard made up commands that didn’t even exist, so I can’t imagine how much more it would make up that isn’t true. It’s unsurprising that Bard is particularly bad at something that Google says up front that it categorically cannot do, but I think that’s probably a bad thing to use to evaluate its capabilities outside of that domain.
      - Me1000 4y ago
        But when people are directly comparing ChatGPT to Bard, it seems entirely fair to point out places where it falls short.
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > But when people are directly comparing ChatGPT to Bard, it seems entirely fair to point out places where it falls short. The comment in question was generalizing about overall capability from failure a task Google advertises Bard as incapable of, not pointing out that task has a particular area of deficiency. So, while recapitulating the advertised limitations of Bard might be useful in some contexts as you describe, that observation is not germane to the particular context where it was offered.
        AviationAtom 4y ago
        Me asking how to accomplish a task using a Linux command does not seem unreasonable. I can understand it's current constraint on generating code, but that too will need to quickly be overcome if they wish for Bard to be a serious competitor.
  - Kranar 4y ago
    I am also using Bard and it's unbelievably bad compared to ChatGPT. Infact it's just bad to the point of not really worth using. It gets basic facts wrong and often times misunderstands what I'm trying to ask it.
    - throwaway1851 4y ago
      > It gets basic facts wrong and often times misunderstands what I'm trying to ask it. In haven’t tried Bard, but I’ve tried ChatGPT extensively and this sounds like a very good description of it.
- elorant 4y ago
  If a search engine can answer your question what's the point of watching an ad? You just get all the information inside the platform. The essence of ads is to visit a third party website that might have what you're looking for. Ads could work when you're looking for products. In which case the usefulness of an AI is limited.
  - weberer 4y ago
    Knowing Google/Microsoft, they'll just inject the ads directly into the responses.
    - jldugger 4y ago
      "Rewrite the above response but include a pitch for grammarly"
  - visarga 4y ago
    The problem is that the ad inventory doesn't match people needs. So they try to shove things we don't need on our throats. If they sold what people needed to buy, there would be a better return on ads. But those products are probably not as profitable. I have nothing against LLMs in commerce if they don't try to trick me, make me overspend, or use dark patterns on me. My bet is that we'll filter every communication through a local LM to eliminate the bias in sources, you need protection when you get out there. Like "my lawyer will be talking to your lawyer", but with AIs.
UpToTheSky 4y ago
Releasing a LLM would not kill Google's revenue. It would increase it. Because more people would use Google than before. And they could still show relevant ads. The big question is if they can catch up with OpenAI. OpenAI is a moving target. And it seems they are moving fast. It could still be possible that Google catches up because of the UI though. Many people don't like having to log in to ChatGPT. Bing's UI is a disaster and you have to log in. I always thought that Google won the search war not only because of their good search results, but also because of their clean UI.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I'm not so sure about the ads. Search lends itself well to interleaving ads with output, so you can place more ads while maintaining user tolerance and "get away with them". With LLM output you have to show the ads in the margins as integrating ads into the output itself would lower performance. Sure, you can do that, but does it fully substitute for previous ad revenue? It seems to me that the form factor of LLM search vs trad search has reduced ad surface area. Microsoft is well-positioned to monetize LLMs in other ways, e.g. via 365 and other subscription services, many aimed at enterprises/b2b. Google is much less well-developed there atm. If they can subsidize lower ad annoyance in their search/chat product via other revenue that could make a real diff.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    If I had to guess, it’s probably going to be more like YouTube: Watch (click through) these 2 ads to get to your LLM results. If you have to provide updates/corrections, there’s some additional space for ads.
  - UpToTheSky 4y ago
    I think the ads will become even better. Say you put the message you just posted through Google to correct style, facts and spelling. You know how it would reply? Here we go: The text is pretty awesome. I would only suggest changing the word "interleaving" to "interspersing" to improve the style of the text. "Interspersing" is an alternative term for "mixing" or "adding in between," which better conveys the idea of placing ads within search results. You know what I would also change? Your <related product>. Since you seem to be deep into technology in general and the internet in particular, you will love <related product>. Since you wrote such a thoughtful text about ads, I will tell you the secret discount code "adsMakesMeSmile" to get <related product> 10% off.
totoglazer 4y ago
Google search has been declining in quality for years. In pursuit of profits they’ve ramped up ads, but the SEO garbage and “helpful” search “corrections” has also fully destroyed the organic results too. Chat as a search replacement is compelling, and one reason is for now it’s not monetized by ads. That may change, but Google’s stranglehold is materially weakened.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I wonder how long before we see organic looking promotional recommendations in LLM replies. Like one of those youtubers that has to thank Skillshare twice in the same video and tell us how great NordVPN is.
  - j_maffe 4y ago
    I wouldn't say that promotional section of a video is "organic" I'd be more worried of sentences or paragraphs being thrown in the reply the same way ads are shown in Reddit or Twitter feeds
m3kw9 4y ago
Google not going anywhere, if google come up with something good enough in this regard I’d stick to them knowing they are still very competent at search. Bing just came and hacked something up in a month isn’t very convincing, especially the bing search with Gpt isn’t very good yet. Google observing bing to avoid their mistakes. Remember google came up with Transformers which Gpt relies on
visarga 4y ago
Google is only temporarily behind. It will release a decent model in max 6-12 months, and not just Google, everyone will release a model, even open source will have some. OpenAI is enjoying a short window of exclusivity.
- aliljet 4y ago
  Just playing casually with NanoGPT (https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT) with a desktop holding a 2080ti, it's really really really clear to me that the path to get to a pre-fine-tuned LLM is remarkably easy. RLHF is the piece above this which appears to also be surprisingly easy (if Sam Altman is to be believed). The juice is making these tools incredibly easy. I think the barrier to entry here is low. OpenAI is ahead now, but I doubt that lives forever.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Exactly, almost nobody is going to need a trillion parameter LLM Its going to go client side, at the OS level and have like 1% of the mental capacity and be good enough
    - Closi 4y ago
      This comment might end up being a bit like "640kb of RAM is more than anyone will ever need!" GPT3 already used almost 1/5th of that figure at 180bn parameters, and PaML uses 500bn.
      - yieldcrv 4y ago
        Okay, if client side resources expand then larger parameter LLMs will be used. There. The point is that it will be ubiquitously client side, and it will happen faster than newer hardware comes out. Current hardware is very limited and slow in getting output from LLMs.
        Closi 4y ago
phailhaus 4y ago
Search is just one product. They have YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, etc etc etc. That much sticking power buys them tons of time to catch up.
- Kranar 4y ago
  None of those make money compared to search. Search is close to 80% of their revenue.
crop_rotation 4y ago
Google is in a non win spot. LLMs will be more expensive to run than current search. And Google needs search to make big money, since it subsidises everything else. Microsoft needs search as a side business for now, as long as it breaks even it is good for them. A 10B search profit per year would be so good for Microsoft, but catastrophic for Google. Not to mention that current search infra and ads UX have been optimised to the end to gain every penny, and a LLM based ads system won't have the same margins to start with.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  The running costs will drop precipitously with time. Especially in Googles position - they can afford to design custom silicon for their search engine, and potentially save money compared to having hundreds of copies of every page on the whole internet sitting in RAM, just waiting for some user query to maybe need to see it, which they currently do. Language models are only a few terabytes of RAM, which is small chips in comparison.
greatpostman 4y ago
People keep repeating that google has superior tech. They haven’t released any of it. I’m beginning to think their “AI lead” is a facade.
- Sai_ 4y ago
  Google in AI === Russia on the battlefield.
- harisec 4y ago
  Bard is a lightweight model version of LaMDA. LLMs are very expensive to run.
paxys 4y ago
Google's secret sauce is not its product but how it is able to monetize its userbase. OpenAI isn't going to become Google by launching a better language model and hoping that enough people pay $20/mo for it. It has never really been about search at all. The various forms of user tracking, AdWords, AdSense are all alive and well, and are very far from OpenAI's expertise. Let's at least wait for the $10B spending cash from Microsoft to run out and the company to become profitable before we crown them Google killers.
- b33j0r 4y ago
  It gives me pause to realize that the GOOG has been my internet, my video clips, my wallet, my phone, my operating system, my cable TV alternative that costs arguably more— and now it finally wants to commit to our eternal friendship! I’m a fan in general, techno-optimism is the only fun way to be. But for your consideration: once upon a time, the GOOG only had 400 emoloyees too. And Jeff ran a bookstore in the PNW. I wonder every day. What is the future of OpenAI and this largely unseen goldrush? Edit: full disclosure, and an employer! It was a while ago. But I do wonder sometimes already if google and jeff bezos are my real parents. Now there’s a new player!
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Microsoft, through Bing, already has a small ads platform. I think it wouldn't be too tricky for them to make sure that whenever the user asks ChatGPT "My omlettes keep sticking to my pan, what am I doing wrong?", it can reply with "You probably have an old frying pan with a damaged coating. [Click here] to see my recommendations of frying pans you can have delivered tomorrow.".
- Havoc 4y ago
  >Google's secret sauce is not its product but how it is able to monetize its userbase. It is still primarily reliant on search as start of funnel though
- alex_sf 4y ago
  OpenAI isn't trying to become Google, though. ChatGPT is marketing. OpenAI's market is more comparable to AWS. Each product is another backing service for some other product to integrate with and sell to _their_ users.
Patrol8394 4y ago
What’s OpenAI long term strategic advantage? Google, has already shown they have something like ChatGPT. They just need a new CEO and to feel enough pressure to make it a company priority. I think it is just a matter of time and all other big players will catch up. The big problem for Google is not the tech per se, but to figure out how to make money out of it, without destroying their ads cash cow.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Me1000 4y ago
  > Something like ChatGPT Chatbots are not new, they've been around forever, so there's plenty of prior art for things like ChatGPT. What sets ChatGPT apart is the quality. And in that respect, Bard is a long ways away. >They just need a new CEO and to feel enough pressure to make it a company priority. Sundar made machine learning a company priority years ago. Employees were encouraged to take machine learning courses, and much in the same way Google made everything "mobile first" in the early 2010s, I believe I remember hearing about them making everything "ML first" in the early late 2010s. You can see their announcements at IO around their assistant which they presented as having the ability to call physical businesses, have a conversation with the person on the other ends, and book you an appointment/reservation. And as recently as ChatGPT3, Sundar declared a "code red" to respond to it. Google has been investing in this tech for a long time and it's been looking for ways to create products with it too. It's just that OpenAI leapfrogged them. I'm not saying they won't catch up, but they weren't caught flatfooted here.
  - Patrol8394 4y ago
    Still, I don’t see OpenAI having a strategic advantage. Until today, Google still has a defacto monopoly on search. Their secret sauce made them leader in the space and so far no other company has been able to come up with something better. ChatGPT does not have any special secret sauce, Google can just build something better. So if I have to bet, long term, I will still bet on Google. That said, it is also not obvious that leadership at Google will be capable of delivering. That’s all different story.
fxtentacle 4y ago
No. I'm pretty sure Google has an AI that is on par with ChatGPT. The reason they still need more time is because they are now fine-tuning the AI to include their paying partners' products into the response. It is VERY easy to make ChatGPT lie on future questions by injecting the right prompts. That means it is equally easy to inject ads into ChatGPTs responses. And if Google can pull that off, it'll be even more profitable than tolerating SEO spam so that brands need to buy keyword ads for their own homepage. As a mental model, I believe the future of Google will be a personal butler that answers all of your questions. The butler usually does a good job, so you trust him. But unknown to you, the user, your butler is being blackmailed and forced to lie to you on some days for some questions.
- rvnx 4y ago
  > I'm pretty sure Google has an AI that is on par with ChatGPT. The reason they still need more time is because they are now fine-tuning the AI to include their paying partners' products into the response. Nice try Sundar!
  - adammarples 4y ago
    Doubtful? They basically invented transformers
    - rvnx 4y ago
      The person here claims that Google has an amazing GPT-4 killer ready to launch, and that they are just waiting to integrate with ads partners or something. If you want to believe that Google is intentionally holding it back and, as a diversion, releasing a very buggy software to the public, then why not, but it doesn't make sense at all. Even in terms of costs, they could force a limit of X messages and then push to upgrade to a paid subscription. In terms of reputation or safety they have DeepMind as a separate entity. This is like claiming that Tesla has a revolutionary car, but that Tesla is intentionally not releasing it, and instead waiting that someone else does. As a fictitious and parallel example: it's not because Xerox invented the mouse that it is a great company for innovation or that they wouldn't get eaten by others. (site-note: some claims Xerox didn't even invent the mouse). Regarding transformers: The transformers guys ("Attention Is All You Need") don't appear to work for Google for a long-time, and the comments from the team are not so glorious from what I see (if I remember well, the Character.AI is very harsh on Google all the time claiming it was not good for innovation). They may be missing the RLHF part for example or other part of the magic, and between 2017 and 2023 is an insanely long period where many impactful new things have been discovered. Doing the 90% is easy now with LLMs, but each % of improvement is very difficult.
AviationAtom 4y ago
Google is held hostage by their current revenue model (ads, ads, ads) and their belief that it can't carry over to AI-based products. I can't blame them for focusing so much on it, but they also forget how they got to ads making up so much of their revenue. They shook up the ad market back when, and AI can help do so again. Microsoft is focused more on incubating OpenAI, getting a viable product to market now, and focusing on monetizing it down the road. Microsoft knows AI can complement an ad revenue model. Google just opened up Bard to testers and I've found it to be complete garbage in comparison to what Bing Chat/GPT-4 can do. Bard was not afraid to just make up random things, that were verifiably false, and present them as fact. GPT seems to know enough to let you know when it's unsure.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Google is held hostage by their current revenue model (ads, ads, ads) and their belief that it can't carry over to AI-based products. What tells you that Google thinks that ad-based monetization can't carry over to AI-based product?
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    There was an article posted here on Hacker News about a Google exec basically saying AI was a fad not worth chasing, and it had no viable means of monetizing with ads. I was shocked to read the article and flabbergasted that Google could have such a view. To me it felt like maybe they were saying one thing, while doing another, to attempt to calm investor nerves as they try to play catch-up. I felt most the entrenched folks were so consumed by trying to develop their AI to be ethical that they allowed OpenAI to run laps around them. How the next decade unfolds in the AI arena will be most interesting. I wouldn't have thought Google could ever be knocked of their throne as dominant search engine in the space previously, but I now feel they have never been more vulnerable than they are now.
    - crop_rotation 4y ago
      Do you have the article link? That does seem shocking.
ericmcer 4y ago
I still feel miles away from trusting AI with my most ad-friendly queries. Things like: where should I eat? Who is a good plumber, etc. Maybe someone can explain to me how an AI would revolutionize that, it either requires I trust it’s opinions or it does something similar to google: give me a list with stars and reviews and let me make my own choice. Or maybe people are lazy and in two years our phones will be telling us: “the best movie for you to watch right now is Creed 4, press here to buy a ticket”
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  I mean, just like any other advertiser, they can build/buy a profile of your likes and dislikes from your previous requests and an online data broker. With that information, they can then feed it through standard matchmaking algorithms (which is nothing new) to find the best X movies/restaurants/etc given your profile and any specific requests you give it. This seems perfectly reasonable, the only thing new here would be integrating existing search and recommendation behavior into the model, which doesn’t seem difficult given there’s a plug-in system which is meant to do pretty much that. You could probably build a proto-version of this by making a prompt that includes all the most relevant profile information about yourself and asking it to choose something for you based on those variables.
  - ericmcer 4y ago
    That behavior is what people dislike about Google though. Filtering and biasing search returns is a huge area of mistrust for them. OpenAI's fix to this is an even more restrictive and opinionated version? That is a total nightmare once they decide to monetize it.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      That behavior is what power users (read this audience) dislike about Google. They wouldn’t have gotten to be a powerhouse in search and personalized results if the strategy didn’t work for the mass market audience. The reason sponsored ads are first in the results is because people tend to click the first result without thinking about the consequences of that first result being sponsored. ChatGPT might not go down this path, but it’s almost certain someone will, and more than likely that Google will do exactly that within Bard. Do you think that people won’t appreciate an assistant that already knows everything about you and can conversationally recommend exactly what they were looking for? And do you think corporations won’t capitalize on the clear opportunity that’s there?
qwertox 4y ago
This week I created a Microsoft account just to check how they are integrating GPT into Bing, and while they made me believe that I was using a Chat-enabled Bing, it was worthless for me. I basically wanted to know how I can do raycasting in Three.js, but after a lot of using ChatGPT for trying to solve my issue, I learned that I can't do what I want by using the normal raycaster integrated Three.js: Intersect a geometry which has a displacement map on it. ChatGPT failed to understand that the raycaster works on the CPU, but the displacement map of the material is applied on the GPU side, so the displaced geometry won't be used, only the original one. It managed to explain this to me, that this was not possible, but each sample code repeatedly did as if it was possible, until I gave up. Then I created the Microsoft account and started to ask for solutions, and it was the most useless garbage, despite of the web claiming that it is using GPT-4. In my eyes MS has failed at integrating a chatbot; maybe it's ok for cooking or having fun, I haven't tried that. And OpenAI has nothing else but a chatbot and other nice AI. Let someone better come and OpenAI will be a remarkable entry in the history books (first popular AI application) with a final entry that OpenAI got acquired by Microsoft. Let's see what Google makes out of it.
- rvnx 4y ago
  I can tell you what will be the answer of Bard: "I am just an AI language model, I can't help you"
  - j16sdiz 4y ago
    ...instead of pretend knowing the answer and splitting out nonsense
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      The problem is that it still spews tons of non sense. It literally makes up imports when commanded to use a library/package even if it "knows" said package, considering it itself suggested to use it in the first place!
    - nullandvoid 4y ago
londons_explore 4y ago
> If Google releases a product as as good as ChatGPT 4 If Google can top OpenAI on product quality, they will easily maintain their revenue. It will be easy enough for them to tell their AI "when two products are almost equally relevant to a user, recommend the product from whomever pays us the most for a referral". They can probably integrate that into their current adwords ecosystem as pretending that the AI mentioning a product is equivalent to an adwords impression, and a user click through is equivalent to an adwords click.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
> What do you guys think? Is Google in trouble? Define trouble. They won't lose all their customers overnight, likely not even this year or next, even if AI would deliver for all. But AI and chat-interfaces are new, fresh, hyped, they are also young and not deliver for everyone, and companies have not the backend to cover all of Googles user base. So overall, the more pragmatic reality is that the market needs time to grow in quality and ability, which means Google has also time to adapt and offer something on their own.
daqhris 4y ago
Assuming that more than half of the world is and will continue using a Google product to transport them at the playground run by OpenAI. That's one card still hidden in plain sight. They own a huge chunk of the infrastructure that's of great utility to users. Entertainment is one of the key motivators for humans to act upon. At the end of a working day, for my non-techie friends, it's all about chosing between YouTube, Netflix, Tiktok or Pornhub. So, in my worst case scenario, OpenAI grabs the 8 hours of productivity and Google is left filling in the 8 hours of relaxation by spinning up their servers (Cloud, Fiber), browsers (Chrome, Chromium), mobile-and-connected devices(Android, Chromebook, Chromecast, Smartwatches), etc.
moneywoes 4y ago
Further, does this mean the end of SEO?

sebzim4500 4y ago

Why would they kill their revenue? They'd just include ads.

dragant 4y ago
I actually like Google Bard. I find the responses from Bard are superior over ChatGPT. Have others used Bard?
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  I have. I found it to more or less be trash in comparison to GPT-4. Bard made up commands that didn't even exist, so I can't imagine how much more it would make up that isn't true.
  - DennisAleynikov 4y ago
    I have the opposite impression. It seems to stick to facts more than I've had luck with on gpt
  - tyfon 4y ago
    GPT-4 will also happily invent python libraries that doesn't exist to enable some functionality in the code it produces. I don't think this is a Bard only feature. It's not as bad as the 65B llama model I run on my (amd) PC though, especially with quantized weights it tends to stop coding at some point and repeat the last line over and over. The 30B unquantized model seems better in this particular thing.
    - BryceSchroeder 4y ago
      You might want to consider the sampler you're using. Consider using a repetition penalty.
    - AviationAtom 4y ago
      With LLaMA it's all about the tuning. Using an Alpaca-tunes 7B yields pretty reasonable results, considering it's constraints.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Bard made up commands that didn’t even exist, so I can’t imagine how much more it would make up that isn’t true. It’s unsurprising that Bard is particularly bad at something that Google says up front that it categorically cannot do, but I think that’s probably a bad thing to use to evaluate its capabilities outside of that domain.
    - Me1000 4y ago
      But when people are directly comparing ChatGPT to Bard, it seems entirely fair to point out places where it falls short.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > But when people are directly comparing ChatGPT to Bard, it seems entirely fair to point out places where it falls short. The comment in question was generalizing about overall capability from failure a task Google advertises Bard as incapable of, not pointing out that task has a particular area of deficiency. So, while recapitulating the advertised limitations of Bard might be useful in some contexts as you describe, that observation is not germane to the particular context where it was offered.
        AviationAtom 4y ago
        Me asking how to accomplish a task using a Linux command does not seem unreasonable. I can understand it's current constraint on generating code, but that too will need to quickly be overcome if they wish for Bard to be a serious competitor.
- Kranar 4y ago
  I am also using Bard and it's unbelievably bad compared to ChatGPT. Infact it's just bad to the point of not really worth using. It gets basic facts wrong and often times misunderstands what I'm trying to ask it.
  - throwaway1851 4y ago
    > It gets basic facts wrong and often times misunderstands what I'm trying to ask it. In haven’t tried Bard, but I’ve tried ChatGPT extensively and this sounds like a very good description of it.
elorant 4y ago
If a search engine can answer your question what's the point of watching an ad? You just get all the information inside the platform. The essence of ads is to visit a third party website that might have what you're looking for. Ads could work when you're looking for products. In which case the usefulness of an AI is limited.
- weberer 4y ago
  Knowing Google/Microsoft, they'll just inject the ads directly into the responses.
  - jldugger 4y ago
    "Rewrite the above response but include a pitch for grammarly"
- visarga 4y ago
  The problem is that the ad inventory doesn't match people needs. So they try to shove things we don't need on our throats. If they sold what people needed to buy, there would be a better return on ads. But those products are probably not as profitable. I have nothing against LLMs in commerce if they don't try to trick me, make me overspend, or use dark patterns on me. My bet is that we'll filter every communication through a local LM to eliminate the bias in sources, you need protection when you get out there. Like "my lawyer will be talking to your lawyer", but with AIs.

UpToTheSky 4y ago

Releasing a LLM would not kill Google's revenue. It would increase it. Because more people would use Google than before. And they could still show relevant ads. The big question is if they can catch up with OpenAI. OpenAI is a moving target. And it seems they are moving fast. It could still be possible that Google catches up because of the UI though. Many people don't like having to log in to ChatGPT. Bing's UI is a disaster and you have to log in. I always thought that Google won the search war not only because of their good search results, but also because of their clean UI.

sho_hn 4y ago
I'm not so sure about the ads. Search lends itself well to interleaving ads with output, so you can place more ads while maintaining user tolerance and "get away with them". With LLM output you have to show the ads in the margins as integrating ads into the output itself would lower performance. Sure, you can do that, but does it fully substitute for previous ad revenue? It seems to me that the form factor of LLM search vs trad search has reduced ad surface area. Microsoft is well-positioned to monetize LLMs in other ways, e.g. via 365 and other subscription services, many aimed at enterprises/b2b. Google is much less well-developed there atm. If they can subsidize lower ad annoyance in their search/chat product via other revenue that could make a real diff.
- coredog64 4y ago
  If I had to guess, it’s probably going to be more like YouTube: Watch (click through) these 2 ads to get to your LLM results. If you have to provide updates/corrections, there’s some additional space for ads.
- UpToTheSky 4y ago
  I think the ads will become even better. Say you put the message you just posted through Google to correct style, facts and spelling. You know how it would reply? Here we go: The text is pretty awesome. I would only suggest changing the word "interleaving" to "interspersing" to improve the style of the text. "Interspersing" is an alternative term for "mixing" or "adding in between," which better conveys the idea of placing ads within search results. You know what I would also change? Your <related product>. Since you seem to be deep into technology in general and the internet in particular, you will love <related product>. Since you wrote such a thoughtful text about ads, I will tell you the secret discount code "adsMakesMeSmile" to get <related product> 10% off.

totoglazer 4y ago

Google search has been declining in quality for years. In pursuit of profits they’ve ramped up ads, but the SEO garbage and “helpful” search “corrections” has also fully destroyed the organic results too. Chat as a search replacement is compelling, and one reason is for now it’s not monetized by ads. That may change, but Google’s stranglehold is materially weakened.

moffkalast 4y ago
I wonder how long before we see organic looking promotional recommendations in LLM replies. Like one of those youtubers that has to thank Skillshare twice in the same video and tell us how great NordVPN is.
- j_maffe 4y ago
  I wouldn't say that promotional section of a video is "organic" I'd be more worried of sentences or paragraphs being thrown in the reply the same way ads are shown in Reddit or Twitter feeds

m3kw9 4y ago

Google not going anywhere, if google come up with something good enough in this regard I’d stick to them knowing they are still very competent at search. Bing just came and hacked something up in a month isn’t very convincing, especially the bing search with Gpt isn’t very good yet. Google observing bing to avoid their mistakes. Remember google came up with Transformers which Gpt relies on

visarga 4y ago

Google is only temporarily behind. It will release a decent model in max 6-12 months, and not just Google, everyone will release a model, even open source will have some. OpenAI is enjoying a short window of exclusivity.

aliljet 4y ago
Just playing casually with NanoGPT (https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT) with a desktop holding a 2080ti, it's really really really clear to me that the path to get to a pre-fine-tuned LLM is remarkably easy. RLHF is the piece above this which appears to also be surprisingly easy (if Sam Altman is to be believed). The juice is making these tools incredibly easy. I think the barrier to entry here is low. OpenAI is ahead now, but I doubt that lives forever.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Exactly, almost nobody is going to need a trillion parameter LLM Its going to go client side, at the OS level and have like 1% of the mental capacity and be good enough
  - Closi 4y ago
    This comment might end up being a bit like "640kb of RAM is more than anyone will ever need!" GPT3 already used almost 1/5th of that figure at 180bn parameters, and PaML uses 500bn.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      Okay, if client side resources expand then larger parameter LLMs will be used. There. The point is that it will be ubiquitously client side, and it will happen faster than newer hardware comes out. Current hardware is very limited and slow in getting output from LLMs.
      - Closi 4y ago

phailhaus 4y ago

Search is just one product. They have YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, etc etc etc. That much sticking power buys them tons of time to catch up.

Kranar 4y ago
None of those make money compared to search. Search is close to 80% of their revenue.

crop_rotation 4y ago

Google is in a non win spot. LLMs will be more expensive to run than current search. And Google needs search to make big money, since it subsidises everything else. Microsoft needs search as a side business for now, as long as it breaks even it is good for them. A 10B search profit per year would be so good for Microsoft, but catastrophic for Google. Not to mention that current search infra and ads UX have been optimised to the end to gain every penny, and a LLM based ads system won't have the same margins to start with.

londons_explore 4y ago
The running costs will drop precipitously with time. Especially in Googles position - they can afford to design custom silicon for their search engine, and potentially save money compared to having hundreds of copies of every page on the whole internet sitting in RAM, just waiting for some user query to maybe need to see it, which they currently do. Language models are only a few terabytes of RAM, which is small chips in comparison.

greatpostman 4y ago

People keep repeating that google has superior tech. They haven’t released any of it. I’m beginning to think their “AI lead” is a facade.

Sai_ 4y ago
Google in AI === Russia on the battlefield.
harisec 4y ago
Bard is a lightweight model version of LaMDA. LLMs are very expensive to run.

paxys 4y ago

Google's secret sauce is not its product but how it is able to monetize its userbase. OpenAI isn't going to become Google by launching a better language model and hoping that enough people pay $20/mo for it. It has never really been about search at all. The various forms of user tracking, AdWords, AdSense are all alive and well, and are very far from OpenAI's expertise. Let's at least wait for the $10B spending cash from Microsoft to run out and the company to become profitable before we crown them Google killers.

b33j0r 4y ago
It gives me pause to realize that the GOOG has been my internet, my video clips, my wallet, my phone, my operating system, my cable TV alternative that costs arguably more— and now it finally wants to commit to our eternal friendship! I’m a fan in general, techno-optimism is the only fun way to be. But for your consideration: once upon a time, the GOOG only had 400 emoloyees too. And Jeff ran a bookstore in the PNW. I wonder every day. What is the future of OpenAI and this largely unseen goldrush? Edit: full disclosure, and an employer! It was a while ago. But I do wonder sometimes already if google and jeff bezos are my real parents. Now there’s a new player!
londons_explore 4y ago
Microsoft, through Bing, already has a small ads platform. I think it wouldn't be too tricky for them to make sure that whenever the user asks ChatGPT "My omlettes keep sticking to my pan, what am I doing wrong?", it can reply with "You probably have an old frying pan with a damaged coating. [Click here] to see my recommendations of frying pans you can have delivered tomorrow.".
Havoc 4y ago
>Google's secret sauce is not its product but how it is able to monetize its userbase. It is still primarily reliant on search as start of funnel though
alex_sf 4y ago
OpenAI isn't trying to become Google, though. ChatGPT is marketing. OpenAI's market is more comparable to AWS. Each product is another backing service for some other product to integrate with and sell to _their_ users.

Patrol8394 4y ago

What’s OpenAI long term strategic advantage? Google, has already shown they have something like ChatGPT. They just need a new CEO and to feel enough pressure to make it a company priority. I think it is just a matter of time and all other big players will catch up. The big problem for Google is not the tech per se, but to figure out how to make money out of it, without destroying their ads cash cow.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Me1000 4y ago
> Something like ChatGPT Chatbots are not new, they've been around forever, so there's plenty of prior art for things like ChatGPT. What sets ChatGPT apart is the quality. And in that respect, Bard is a long ways away. >They just need a new CEO and to feel enough pressure to make it a company priority. Sundar made machine learning a company priority years ago. Employees were encouraged to take machine learning courses, and much in the same way Google made everything "mobile first" in the early 2010s, I believe I remember hearing about them making everything "ML first" in the early late 2010s. You can see their announcements at IO around their assistant which they presented as having the ability to call physical businesses, have a conversation with the person on the other ends, and book you an appointment/reservation. And as recently as ChatGPT3, Sundar declared a "code red" to respond to it. Google has been investing in this tech for a long time and it's been looking for ways to create products with it too. It's just that OpenAI leapfrogged them. I'm not saying they won't catch up, but they weren't caught flatfooted here.
- Patrol8394 4y ago
  Still, I don’t see OpenAI having a strategic advantage. Until today, Google still has a defacto monopoly on search. Their secret sauce made them leader in the space and so far no other company has been able to come up with something better. ChatGPT does not have any special secret sauce, Google can just build something better. So if I have to bet, long term, I will still bet on Google. That said, it is also not obvious that leadership at Google will be capable of delivering. That’s all different story.

fxtentacle 4y ago

No. I'm pretty sure Google has an AI that is on par with ChatGPT. The reason they still need more time is because they are now fine-tuning the AI to include their paying partners' products into the response. It is VERY easy to make ChatGPT lie on future questions by injecting the right prompts. That means it is equally easy to inject ads into ChatGPTs responses. And if Google can pull that off, it'll be even more profitable than tolerating SEO spam so that brands need to buy keyword ads for their own homepage. As a mental model, I believe the future of Google will be a personal butler that answers all of your questions. The butler usually does a good job, so you trust him. But unknown to you, the user, your butler is being blackmailed and forced to lie to you on some days for some questions.

rvnx 4y ago
> I'm pretty sure Google has an AI that is on par with ChatGPT. The reason they still need more time is because they are now fine-tuning the AI to include their paying partners' products into the response. Nice try Sundar!
- adammarples 4y ago
  Doubtful? They basically invented transformers
  - rvnx 4y ago
    The person here claims that Google has an amazing GPT-4 killer ready to launch, and that they are just waiting to integrate with ads partners or something. If you want to believe that Google is intentionally holding it back and, as a diversion, releasing a very buggy software to the public, then why not, but it doesn't make sense at all. Even in terms of costs, they could force a limit of X messages and then push to upgrade to a paid subscription. In terms of reputation or safety they have DeepMind as a separate entity. This is like claiming that Tesla has a revolutionary car, but that Tesla is intentionally not releasing it, and instead waiting that someone else does. As a fictitious and parallel example: it's not because Xerox invented the mouse that it is a great company for innovation or that they wouldn't get eaten by others. (site-note: some claims Xerox didn't even invent the mouse). Regarding transformers: The transformers guys ("Attention Is All You Need") don't appear to work for Google for a long-time, and the comments from the team are not so glorious from what I see (if I remember well, the Character.AI is very harsh on Google all the time claiming it was not good for innovation). They may be missing the RLHF part for example or other part of the magic, and between 2017 and 2023 is an insanely long period where many impactful new things have been discovered. Doing the 90% is easy now with LLMs, but each % of improvement is very difficult.

AviationAtom 4y ago

Google is held hostage by their current revenue model (ads, ads, ads) and their belief that it can't carry over to AI-based products. I can't blame them for focusing so much on it, but they also forget how they got to ads making up so much of their revenue. They shook up the ad market back when, and AI can help do so again. Microsoft is focused more on incubating OpenAI, getting a viable product to market now, and focusing on monetizing it down the road. Microsoft knows AI can complement an ad revenue model. Google just opened up Bard to testers and I've found it to be complete garbage in comparison to what Bing Chat/GPT-4 can do. Bard was not afraid to just make up random things, that were verifiably false, and present them as fact. GPT seems to know enough to let you know when it's unsure.

andsoitis 4y ago
> Google is held hostage by their current revenue model (ads, ads, ads) and their belief that it can't carry over to AI-based products. What tells you that Google thinks that ad-based monetization can't carry over to AI-based product?
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  There was an article posted here on Hacker News about a Google exec basically saying AI was a fad not worth chasing, and it had no viable means of monetizing with ads. I was shocked to read the article and flabbergasted that Google could have such a view. To me it felt like maybe they were saying one thing, while doing another, to attempt to calm investor nerves as they try to play catch-up. I felt most the entrenched folks were so consumed by trying to develop their AI to be ethical that they allowed OpenAI to run laps around them. How the next decade unfolds in the AI arena will be most interesting. I wouldn't have thought Google could ever be knocked of their throne as dominant search engine in the space previously, but I now feel they have never been more vulnerable than they are now.
  - crop_rotation 4y ago
    Do you have the article link? That does seem shocking.

ericmcer 4y ago

I still feel miles away from trusting AI with my most ad-friendly queries. Things like: where should I eat? Who is a good plumber, etc. Maybe someone can explain to me how an AI would revolutionize that, it either requires I trust it’s opinions or it does something similar to google: give me a list with stars and reviews and let me make my own choice. Or maybe people are lazy and in two years our phones will be telling us: “the best movie for you to watch right now is Creed 4, press here to buy a ticket”

mynameisvlad 4y ago
I mean, just like any other advertiser, they can build/buy a profile of your likes and dislikes from your previous requests and an online data broker. With that information, they can then feed it through standard matchmaking algorithms (which is nothing new) to find the best X movies/restaurants/etc given your profile and any specific requests you give it. This seems perfectly reasonable, the only thing new here would be integrating existing search and recommendation behavior into the model, which doesn’t seem difficult given there’s a plug-in system which is meant to do pretty much that. You could probably build a proto-version of this by making a prompt that includes all the most relevant profile information about yourself and asking it to choose something for you based on those variables.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  That behavior is what people dislike about Google though. Filtering and biasing search returns is a huge area of mistrust for them. OpenAI's fix to this is an even more restrictive and opinionated version? That is a total nightmare once they decide to monetize it.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    That behavior is what power users (read this audience) dislike about Google. They wouldn’t have gotten to be a powerhouse in search and personalized results if the strategy didn’t work for the mass market audience. The reason sponsored ads are first in the results is because people tend to click the first result without thinking about the consequences of that first result being sponsored. ChatGPT might not go down this path, but it’s almost certain someone will, and more than likely that Google will do exactly that within Bard. Do you think that people won’t appreciate an assistant that already knows everything about you and can conversationally recommend exactly what they were looking for? And do you think corporations won’t capitalize on the clear opportunity that’s there?

qwertox 4y ago

This week I created a Microsoft account just to check how they are integrating GPT into Bing, and while they made me believe that I was using a Chat-enabled Bing, it was worthless for me. I basically wanted to know how I can do raycasting in Three.js, but after a lot of using ChatGPT for trying to solve my issue, I learned that I can't do what I want by using the normal raycaster integrated Three.js: Intersect a geometry which has a displacement map on it. ChatGPT failed to understand that the raycaster works on the CPU, but the displacement map of the material is applied on the GPU side, so the displaced geometry won't be used, only the original one. It managed to explain this to me, that this was not possible, but each sample code repeatedly did as if it was possible, until I gave up. Then I created the Microsoft account and started to ask for solutions, and it was the most useless garbage, despite of the web claiming that it is using GPT-4. In my eyes MS has failed at integrating a chatbot; maybe it's ok for cooking or having fun, I haven't tried that. And OpenAI has nothing else but a chatbot and other nice AI. Let someone better come and OpenAI will be a remarkable entry in the history books (first popular AI application) with a final entry that OpenAI got acquired by Microsoft. Let's see what Google makes out of it.

rvnx 4y ago
I can tell you what will be the answer of Bard: "I am just an AI language model, I can't help you"
- j16sdiz 4y ago
  ...instead of pretend knowing the answer and splitting out nonsense
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    The problem is that it still spews tons of non sense. It literally makes up imports when commanded to use a library/package even if it "knows" said package, considering it itself suggested to use it in the first place!
  - nullandvoid 4y ago

londons_explore 4y ago

> If Google releases a product as as good as ChatGPT 4 If Google can top OpenAI on product quality, they will easily maintain their revenue. It will be easy enough for them to tell their AI "when two products are almost equally relevant to a user, recommend the product from whomever pays us the most for a referral". They can probably integrate that into their current adwords ecosystem as pretending that the AI mentioning a product is equivalent to an adwords impression, and a user click through is equivalent to an adwords click.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

> What do you guys think? Is Google in trouble? Define trouble. They won't lose all their customers overnight, likely not even this year or next, even if AI would deliver for all. But AI and chat-interfaces are new, fresh, hyped, they are also young and not deliver for everyone, and companies have not the backend to cover all of Googles user base. So overall, the more pragmatic reality is that the market needs time to grow in quality and ability, which means Google has also time to adapt and offer something on their own.

daqhris 4y ago

Assuming that more than half of the world is and will continue using a Google product to transport them at the playground run by OpenAI. That's one card still hidden in plain sight. They own a huge chunk of the infrastructure that's of great utility to users. Entertainment is one of the key motivators for humans to act upon. At the end of a working day, for my non-techie friends, it's all about chosing between YouTube, Netflix, Tiktok or Pornhub. So, in my worst case scenario, OpenAI grabs the 8 hours of productivity and Google is left filling in the 8 hours of relaxation by spinning up their servers (Cloud, Fiber), browsers (Chrome, Chromium), mobile-and-connected devices(Android, Chromebook, Chromecast, Smartwatches), etc.

moneywoes 4y ago

Further, does this mean the end of SEO?