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The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other Big Tech continue to control these billion-user platforms, they have AI reach, even if they are temporarily behind in capability. They'll also find a way to integrate this in a way where you don't have to directly pay for the capability, as it's paid in other ways: ads. OpenAI faces the existential risk, not Google. They'll catch up and will have the reach/subsidy advantage. And it doesn't end there. This so-called "competition" from open source is going to be free labor. Any winning idea ported into Google's products on short notice. Thanks open source!

htss2013 3y ago
Thats like saying in 1995 search is going to be integrated into everything, not a destination. That'd be true but also very wrong. Google.com ended up as the main destination.
ArthurAardvark 3y ago
Stupid, silly me who knows little-to-nothing about the lore of OS. Why can't OS devs simply write out in the OS licensing that their wonderful work is usable by anyone and everybody unless you belong to Alphabet/Meta/Oracle/Adobe/Twitter/Microsoftpen– McCorps & their subsidiaries? I imagine it comes down to ol' Googly & the boys taking advantage of the OS work -> OS devs backed by weak NFOs sue X corp. -> X corp. manages to delay the courts and carries on litigation so the bill is astronomical aka ain't nobody footing that -> ??? I imagine 90% end up taking some sort of $ and handover the goods like Chromium, though. So back to square one, guess we kowtow and pray for us prey?
narrator 3y ago
I think the problem with AI being everywhere and ubiquitous is that AI is the first technology in a very long time that requires non-trivial compute power. That compute power costs money. This is why you only get a limited number of messages every few hours from GPT4. It simply costs too much to be a ubiquitous technology. For example, the biggest LLama model only runs on an A100 that costs about $15,000 on ebay. The new H100 that is 3x faster goes for about $40,000 and both of these cards can only support a limited number of users, not the tens of thousands of users who can run off a high-end webserver. I'd imagine Google would lose a lot of money if they put GPT4 level AI into every search, and they are obsessed with cost per search. Multiply that by the billions and it's the kind of thing that will not be cheap enough to be ad supported.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Is the assumption that GPU power and advancements in AI will not get to a reasonable price point in the near future? Because it seems to me that advances in computation have not slowed down at all since it started.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  We used to get only a limited number of Internet hours. By the time December 2003 rolled around my family had always on internet. Besides what Google does here is besides the point, because Bing has already unleashed ai search. Google will either follow along or stop being relevant.
- airstrike 3y ago
  Time for a dedicated "AI box" at home with hotswapping compute boards? Maybe put it inside a humanoid or animal-like robot with TTS capabilities? Sign me up for that kickstarter! EDIT: based on some quick googling (should I have asked ChatGPT instead?), Nvidia sells the Jetson Xavier Nx dev kit for ~$610 https://www.electromaker.io/shop/product/nvidia-jetson-xavier-nx-developer-kitpre-order https://www.electromaker.io/shop/product/nvidia-jetson-xavie... Just need the robot toy dog enclosure (See https://www.electromaker.io/blog/article/best-sbc-for-ai-single-board-computer-for-artificial-intelligence https://www.electromaker.io/blog/article/best-sbc-for-ai-sin... for a list of alternatives if that one is too expensive)
  - yayr 3y ago
    each billion parameters using 16 bit floats requires around 2 GB of GPU or TPU RAM. ChatGPT is expected to have around 1000 billion. Good open source LLMs have around 7-20 billion currently. Consumer GPUs currently max out at 24 GB. You can now quantize the model to e.g. 4 bits instead of 32 per parameter and do other compressions, but still there is quite a limit what you can do with 24 GB of RAM. The Apple unified memory approach may be a path forward to increase that... so one box gives you access to the small models, for a GPT4 like model you'd need (for inference and if you had the model and tools) probably 100 of those 4090s or 25 of H100 with 96 GBs I guess to fit in 2 TB of model data.
4ndrewl 3y ago
This is 100% correct - products evolve to become features. Not sure OpenAI faces the existential risk as MS need them to compete with Google in this space.
- chabons 3y ago
  > Not sure OpenAI faces the existential risk as MS need them to compete with Google in this space. I think OP is arguing that in that partnership Microsoft holds the power, as they have the existing platforms. The linked article argues that AI technology itself is not as much of a moat as previously thought, and the argument therefore is that Microsoft likely doesn't need OpenAI in the long term.
kelipso 3y ago
To be fair, the open source model has been what's been working for the last few decades. The concern with LLMs was that open source (and academia) couldn't do what the big companies are doing because they couldn't get access to enough computing resources. The article is arguing (and I guess open source ML groups are showing) you don't need those computing resources to pave the way. It's still an open question whether OpenAI or the other big companies can find a most in AI via either some model, dataset, computing resources, whatever. But then you could ask that question about any field.
- dahwolf 3y ago
  That makes sense. But I would argue to smaller/cheaper models are not a threat to Google, they are a solution. They will still have the reach advantage and can more cheaply integrate small/low costs models at every touch point.
- not2b 3y ago
  But none of the "open source" AI models are open source in the classic sense. They are free but they aren't the source code; they are closer to a freely distributable compiled binary where the compiler and the original input hasn't been released. A true open source AI model would need to specify the training data and the code to go from the training data to the model. Certainly it would be very expensive for someone else to take this information, build the model again, and verify that the same result is obtained, and maybe we don't really need that. But if we don't have it, then I think we need some other term than "open source" to describe these things. You can get it, you can share it, but you don't know what's in it.
  - kbrkbr 3y ago
    RWKV does: https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM It uses „the Pile“: https://pile.eleuther.ai/ https://pile.eleuther.ai/ And I’ve seen some more in the last weeks.
    - not2b 3y ago
      Good to hear. Let's reserve "open source" for cases like that.
zoiksmeboiks 3y ago
Eventually Google will still lose to open models and AI chips. Hardware performance is what’s making AI “work” now, not LLMs which are a cognitive model for humans not machines. LLMs are incompatible with the resources of a Pentium 3 era computer. Managing electron state is just math. Human language meaning is relative to our experience, it does not exist elsewhere in physical reality. All the syntax and semantics we layered on was for us not the machines. End users buy hardware, not software. Zuckerberg needs VR gadgets to sell because Meta is not Intel, Apple, AMD, nVidia. The software industry is deluding itself if it does not see the massive contraction on the horizon.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Honestly, I can't see Google failing here. Like other tech giants, they're sitting on a ridiculously large war chest. Worst case, they can wait for the space to settle a bit and spend a few billion to buy the market leader. If AI really is an existential threat to their business prospects, spending their reserves on this is a no-brainer.
- blowski 3y ago
  That was true for IBM in the 1970s and Microsoft in the 90s. Despite holding a royal flush, they managed to lose the game through a combination of arrogance, internal fighting, innovator's dilemma, concern over anti-trust, and bureaucratic inertia. It will be hard for Google to pull this off.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Microsoft aint doing so bad now
    - htormey 3y ago
      After Microsoft swapped out the CEO. New guys better than Balmer.
    - oska 3y ago
      Microsoft is always doing bad. They've done bad for the life of the company. Microsoft has never 'done good'. They have always been a negative force in computing and society at large. This toxic culture comes from their founder, about which all the preceding also applies.
      - dartharva 3y ago
        No idea whether this comment is satirical or not. As a reader I think that's marvelous (please don't break the suspense)
- taneq 3y ago
  The threat isn’t that another company has AI, it’s that they don’t (yet) have a good way to sell ads with a chat bot. Buying the chat bot doesn’t change that.
vosper 3y ago
> OpenAI faces the existential risk, not Google. Yes, but the quickest way for anyone to get themselves to state-of-the-art is to buy OpenAI. Their existential risk is whether they continue to be (semi)independent, not whether they shutdown or not. Presumably Microsoft is the obvious acquirer, but there must be a bunch of others who could also be in the running.
- sgt101 3y ago
  But if you wait a month you can get that model for free...
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Where?
    - heliophobicdude 3y ago
      It's in reference to the article's open source free laborers. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither#:~:text=And%20they%20are%20doing%20so%20in%20weeks%2C%20not%20months.%20This%20has%20profound%20implications%20for%20us%3A https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
titzer 3y ago
> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. I...kinda don't want this? UIs have already changed in so many different fits, starts, waves, and cycles. I used to have skills. But I have no skills now. Nothing works like it used to. Yeah they were tricky to use but I cannot imagine that a murky AI interface is going to be any easier to use, and certainly impossible to master. Even if it is easier to use, I am not sure I want that either. I don't know where the buttons are. I don't know what I can do and what I can't. And it won't stay the same, dodging my feckless attempts to commit to memory how it works and get better at it...?
- amelius 3y ago
  An AI interface in Office brings back memories of Clippy.
  - taneq 3y ago
    We may not have seen the last of Clippy yet… https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
  - Izkata 3y ago
    Now imagine Clippy on a car touchscreen.
    - speedgoose 3y ago
      NIO sells cars with a tiny cute robot that moves on the dashboard, named NOMI. A lot of people hate it as it’s closer to Google assistant than GPT4 and it makes mechanical noise when it rotates but I don’t think it’s a terrible idea. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human traits to things, is common with cars. I would like my car to run a LLM instead of being so stupid at understanding my voice commands.
  - jimmySixDOF 3y ago
    XR will solve the AI UI problem https://twitter.com/jasminezroberts/status/1605611451674025989?t=d3aeSAHcY5CcRvQNlgo0mg&s=19 https://twitter.com/jasminezroberts/status/16056114516740259...
aero-deck 3y ago
Disagree. What you have in mind is already how the masses interact AI. There is little value-add for making machine translation, auto-correct and video recommendations better. I can think of a myriad of use-cases for AI that involve custom-tuning foundation models to user-specific environments. Think of an app that can detect bad dog behavior, or an app that gives you pointers on your golf swing. The moat for AI is going to be around building user-friendly tools for fine-tuning models to domain-specific applications, and getting users to spend enough time fine-tuning those tools to where the switch-cost to another tool becomes too high. When google complains that there is no moat, they're complaining that there is no moat big enough to sustain companies as large as Google.
- jimsimmons 3y ago
  Making video recs better translates to direct $$$ There’s a reason YT or TikTok recommendation is so revered
- computerex 3y ago
  Fine tuning isn't a thing for foundational models though, it's all about in context learning.
  - aero-deck 3y ago
    that means there's no money in making foundation models - the economics are broken.
bhl 3y ago
> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like Agreed but I don’t think the products that’ll gain market share from this wave of AI will be legacy web 2 apps; rather it’ll be AI-native or first apps that are build from ground up to collect user data and fulfill user intent. Prime example is TikTok.
- heliophobicdude 3y ago
  You bottled up exactly my disappointment with some large companies' legacy AI offerings. They don't do both: iterate off of telemetry data and fulfill user's needs.
unicornmama 3y ago
Google makes almost all its money from search. These platforms are all there to reinforce its search monopoly. ChatGPT has obsoleted search. ChatGPT will do to Google search what the Internet did to public libraries - make them mostly irrelevant.
- baryphonic 3y ago
  How has ChatGPT obsoleted search, when hallucination and the token limits are major problems? It's (sort of) obviated search for certain kinds of queries engineers make, but not normies. I say sort of, because IMO it's pretty bad at spitting out accurate (or even syntactically correct) code for any nontrivial problem. I have to give it lots of corrections, and often it will just invent new code that also is broken in some way.
  - unicornmama 3y ago
    I've replaced almost all my usage of Google Search with ChatGPT. The only reason's I've had to use Google search is to look up current news, and do some fact checking. In my experience, GPT-4 rarely provides incorrect results. This includes things like asking for recipes, food recommendations, clarifying what food is safe to eat when pregnant, how to drain my dog tricks, translating documents, explaining terminology from finance, understanding different kinds of whiskey, etc.
    - scarface74 3y ago
      Try this simple question with ChatGPT. No need to verify the ages. You will immediately find the problem. “List the presidents of the us in the order of their ages when they were first inaugurated”
    - lexandstuff 3y ago
      This was true for me too, but I'm starting to find the data's cutoff date a problem, and it gets worse every day. I was reminded about it yesterday when it knew nothing about the new programming language Mojo or recent voice conversion algorithms. The eventual winner will have a model that stays up-to-date.
irrational 3y ago
It being everywhere worries me a lot. It outputs a lot of false information and the typical person doesn’t have the time or inclination to vet the output. Maybe this is a problem that will be solved. I’m not optimistic on that front.
- mattferderer 3y ago
  Same can be said about the results that pop up on your favorite search engine or asking other people questions. If anything advances in AI & search tech will do a better job at providing citations that agree & disagree with the results given. But this can be a turtles all the way down problem.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - izacus 3y ago
    No it won't and random search popup results are already a massive societal problem (and they're not even used like people are attempting to use AI - to make decisions over other peoples lives in insurance, banking, law enforcement and other areas where abuse is common when unchecked).
  - acdha 3y ago
    There’s a real difference in scale and perceived authority: false search results already cause problems but many people have also been learning not to blindly trust the first hit and to check things like the site hosting it. That’s not perfect but I think it’s a lot better than building things into Word will be. There’s almost no chance that people won’t trust suggestions there more than random web searches and the quality of the writing will make people more inclined to think it’s authoritative. Consider what happened earlier this year when professor Tyler Cowen wrote an entire blog post on a fake citation. He certainly knows better but it’s so convenient to use the LLM emission rather than do more research… https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-publishers-lawsuit-chatbot/ https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-p...
  - 3y ago
patmorgan23 3y ago
OpenAI=Microsoft for all intents and purposes. Microsoft has a stake in OpenAI and has integrated into Azure, Bing and Microsoft 365.
- ArlenBales 3y ago
  Microsoft will probably eventually integrate it into their Xbox services, and possibly games via their own first-party studios. In my opinion Microsoft has equal or more reach/subsidy advantage than Google for AI, at least toward general consumers.
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    Honestly, this makes me excited for future RPGs from bethesda. I've already seen mod demos where chatgpt does dialog for NPCs. Imagine a future elderscrolls or fallout where one could negotiate safe passage with the local raiders / bandits for a wheel of cheese or a 6 pack of nuka cola. A man can dream.
version_five 3y ago
I think this won't work out: AI is so popular now because it's a destination. It's been rebranded as a cool thing to play with, that anyone can immediately see the potential in. That all collapses when it's integrated into Word or other "productivity" tools and it just becomes another annoying feature that gives you some irrelevant suggestions. OpenAI has no moat, but at least they have first mover advantage on a cool product, and may be able to get some chumps (microsoft) to think this will translate into a lasting feature inside of office or bing.
asdfman123 3y ago
It already is built seamlessly into a lot of Google products. OpenAI just beat Google to the cool chatbot demo.
bburnett44 3y ago
The problem is that the llms are better at search (for an open ended question) than Google is and that’s where most of googles revenue comes from. So it actually gives a new company like openai the opportunity to change consumers destinations from google
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"Any winning idea ported into Google's products on short notice." Imagine for a moment, in a different universe, in a different galaxy, another planet is ostensibly a mirror image of Earth, evolving along the same trajectory. However on this hypothetical planet, anything is possible. This has resulted in some interesting differences. The No Google License Neither Google, its subsidiaries, business partners nor its academic collaborators may use this software. Under no circumstance may this software be directly or indirectly used to further Google's business or other objectives. If 100s or 1000s or more people on planet X started adopting this license for their open source projects, then of course it won't stop Google from copying them or even using the code as is. But it would muddy the waters with 100s or 1000s or more potential lawsuits. Why would any company risk it. There is nothing stopping anyone writing software for which they have no intention of charging license fees. It's done all the time these days. There is also nothing stopping anyone from prohibiting certain companies from using it, or prohibiting certain uses. I recall in the early days of the web when "shareware" licenses often tried to distinguish commercial from non-commercial use. Commercial use would presumably incur higher fees. Non-commercial use was either free or low cost. I always wondered, "How is the author going to discover if XYZ, LLC is using his software?" (This is before telemetry was common.) The license seemed unworkable, but that did not stop me from using the software. I was never afraid that I would be mistaken for a commercial user and the author would come knocking asking me to agree to a commercial license. I doubt I was the only one bold enough to use software with licenses prohibiting commercial use. Even a "No Microsoft License" would make Github more interesting. One could pick some random usage. Microsoft may not this software for X. Would this make MSFT's plans more complicated. Try it and see what happens. Only way to know for sure. Instead, MSFT is currently trying to out the plaintiffs in the Doe v Github case, over MSFT's usage of other peoples' code who put their stuff on Github, and as the Court gets ready to decide the issue, it's becoming clear IMO that if these individual are named, these brave individuals will lose their jobs and be blackballed from ever working in software again. The No Internet Advertising License This software may not be used to create or support internet advertising services for commercial gain.
- nine_k 3y ago
  The license that prevents use by a particular list of corporations can likely be easily crafted. But because any particular invention about LLMs is not a specific product but an approach, it would just be re-implemented. One could imagine patenting an approach, if it ends up being patentable, and then giving everyone but some excluded entities a grant of royalty-free use. But, unless the use if that particular approach is inevitably very obvious (which is really unlikely with ML models), you would have hard time detecting violations and especially enforcing your patent.
zelon88 3y ago
> And we should not expect to be able to catch up. The modern internet runs on open source for a reason. Open source has some significant advantages that we cannot replicate. I don't have faith in OpenAI as a company, but I have faith in Open-Source. What you're trying to say, if I understand correctly, is that Google will absorb the open-source and simply be back on top. But who will maintain this newly acquired status quo for Google? Google cannot EEE their own developer base. They said that much in the article; > We cannot hope to both drive innovation and control it. History as an example, Android did not kill *nix. Chrome did not kill Firefox. Google Docs has not killed Open Office. For the simple fact that Google needs all of these organizations to push Google forward. Whether that means Google gets access to code, or whether that means Google becomes incentivized to improve in some way. If Google wants to eat another free lunch tomorrow they have no choice but to leave some of that free labor standing, if not prop it up a little. The real question becomes, how much market share can we realistically expect without eating tomorrow's lunch?
- spyckie2 3y ago
  They're not saying that they should absorb open-source. They're arguing towards a strategy/direction for how to approach AI models from a business perspective, laying down the facts that open-source has a superior positional advantage in terms of development costs. Probably, internally Googlers are arguing that the "AI explosion" is short lived and people will be stop paying for AI as soon as open source PC models become cost and quality competitive. So they shouldn't chase the next big revenue stream that OpenAI is currently enjoying because it's short lived.
personjerry 3y ago
As I understand it, the open source community is working to make models: - usable by anyone - feasible on your desktop Thereby at least levelling the playing field for other developers.
rewgs 3y ago
This is why I think Apple's direction of building a neural engine into the M1 architecture is low-key brilliant. It's just there and part of their API; as AI capabilities increase and the developer landscape solidifies, they can incrementally expand and improve its capabilities. As always, Apple's focus is hardware-first, and I think it will once again pay off here.
thereisnospork 3y ago
I agree with your assertion that AI will seamlessly integrate into existing software and services but my expectation is that it will be unequivocally superior as a 3rd party integration[0]. People will get to know 'their AI' and vice versa. Why would I want Bard to recommend me a funny YouTube clip when my neutral assistant[1] has a far better understanding of my sense of humor? Bard can only ever learn from the context of interaction with google services -- something independent can pull from a larger variety of sources supersetting a locked system. Nevermind more specialized tools that don't have the resources to develop their own competent AI - google might pull it off but adobe won't, and millions Saas and small programs won't even try. As another example, how could an Adobe AI ever have a better interpretation of 'Paint a pretty sunset in the style of Picasso' than a model which can access my photos, wallpapers, location, vacations, etc? [0]Much how smart phones seamlessly integrate with automobiles via CarPlay and not GM-play. Once AI can use a mouse, if a person can integrate with a service an AI can do so on their behalf. [1]Mind it's entirely possible it will be Apple or MSFT providing said 'neutral' AI.
ekanes 3y ago
Everything you say is true, and Google has cards left to play, but this is absolutely an existential threat to Google. How could it be otherwise? For the first time in a very long time, people are open to a new search/answers engine. The game they won must now be replayed, and because it was so dominant, Google has nowhere to go but downwards.
newswasboring 3y ago
> This so-called "competition" from open source is going to be free labor. Any winning idea ported into Google's products on short notice. Thanks open source! How else, exactly, is open source supposed to work? Nobody wants to make their code GPL but everybody complains when companies use their code. I get that open source projects will like companies to contribute back, but shouldn't that go for everyone using this code? Like, I don't get what the proposed way of working is here.
- krapp 3y ago
  Developers nowadays want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to develop FOSS code because capitalism is evil and proprietary software is immoral and Micro$oft is the devil, man, and so give their work away for free... but whenever a company makes money on it and gives nothing back, completely in line with the letter and spirit of FOSS (because requiring compensation would violate user freedom,) they also want to get paid. Like the entire premise of FOSS is that money doesn't matter, only freedom matters. You're not supposed to care that Google made a billion dollars off your library as long as they keep it open.
  - newswasboring 3y ago
    I see this as part of the decline of hacker culture and rise of brogrammers. I see very few people programming for fun, everyone seems to be looking for a monetization opportunity for every breath they take.
    - scarface74 3y ago
      For some strange reason (maybe moral failure?) people seem to have this insatiable addiction to food and shelter and most people have found no better way to support that addiction than to exchange labor for money. The list of things I consider “fun” besides programming when I get off work is a mile long.
      - newswasboring 3y ago
darig 3y ago
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stu432 3y ago
Yes, bring back Clippy!!!
- essive 3y ago
  You must mean the new Albert Clippy!
user_named 3y ago
LLMs are just better ML models, are just better statistical models. I agree that they're going to to be in everything, but invisible and in the background.
deleted 3y ago
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onion2k 3y ago
They'll catch up and will have the reach/subsidy advantage. This is only true if they're making progress faster than OpenAI. There isn't much evidence for that.
safety1st 3y ago
There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Google's case they are still really focused on search whereas LLMs arguably move the focus to answers. I don't use an LLM to search for stuff, it just gives me an answer. Whether this is a huge shift for how Google's business works and whether they will be able to execute it quickly and effectively remains to be seen. Bill Gates' "Internet Tidal Wave" memo from 1995 is a great piece of relevant historical reading. You can see that he was amazingly prescient about the potential of the Internet at a time when barely anyone was using it. Despite Microsoft having more resources than anyone, totally understanding what a big deal the Internet was going to be, and even coming out of the gate pretty strong by dominating the browser market, they lost a lot of relevancy in the long run because their business was just too tied up in the idea of a box sitting on a desktop in an office as the center of value. (When Windows was dethroned as the company's center of gravity and they put Satya and DevDiv with its Azure offerings in charge, things started to turn around!) [1] https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave/ https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave...
- poulpy123 3y ago
  That weird because I remember clearly Microsoft was late in the internet game, and managed to catch up because they could use their monopoly on personal computers for internet explorer
- la64710 3y ago
  1995 lot of people We’re using the internet. It was made of dial up modems , terminal servers , BBS , AOL , IRC chat rooms , Alta vista search engine , emails , browser (probably Netscape or earlier can’t remember) … but yeah in 1995 lot of people were using it though much less than now , but not negligible.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > even coming out of the gate pretty strong by dominating the browser market They were out of the gate about as weak as could be, Windows didn't have a native tcp/ip stack for the longest time (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and they only dominated the browser market through grossly uncompetitive behavior after they had lost the initial 5 rounds of the battle.
reissbaker 3y ago
I think Satya Nadella put it pretty well in an interview: ad revenue, especially from search, is incremental to Microsoft; to Google, it's everything. So while Microsoft is willing to have worse margins on search ads in order to win marketshare from Google, Google has to defend all of their margins — or else they become significantly less profitable in their core business. LLMs cost a lot more than traditional search, and Google can't just drop-in replace its existing product lines with LLMs: that hikes their bottom line, literally. Microsoft is willing to swap out the existing Bing with the "new Bing" based on OpenAI's technology, because they make very little money comparatively on search, and winning marketshare will more than make up for having smaller margins on that marketshare. Google is, IMO, in between a rock and a hard place on this one: either they dramatically increase their cost of revenue to defend marketshare, or they risk losing marketshare to Microsoft in their core business. Meanwhile, OpenAI gets paid by MS. Not that MS minds! They own a 49% stake in OpenAI, so what's good for OpenAI is what's good for MS. If Google had decades to figure it out, I think your analysis might be right — although I'm not certain that it is, since I'm not certain that the calculus of "free product, for ad revenue" makes as much sense when the products are much more expensive to run than they were previously. But even if it's correct in the long run, if Google starts slipping now it turns into a death spiral: their share prices slip, meaning the cost of compensation for key employees goes up, meaning they lose critical people (or cut even further into their bottom line, hurting their shares more, until they're forced to make staffing cuts), and they fall even further behind. Just as Google once ate Yahoo! via PageRank, it could get eaten by a disruptive technology like LLMs in the future.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  "OpenAI gets paid by MS" Actually, MS gets paid by OpenAI at 70% of profits until they make back their investment (according to articles on the terms)
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Note that MS cost-offsets much OpenAI infrastructure including their top-5 TOP500 class supercomputer (similar to a full TPUv4 pod)
weinzierl 3y ago
As running the models seems to be relatively cheap but making them is not I believe that's where the money is. That and generic cloud services because ultimately the majority will train and run their models in the cloud. So, I would bet on AWS before OpenAI and I would bet the times of freely available high quality models will come to an end soon. If open source can keep up with that is to be seen.
squiggy22 3y ago
If Openai can win the developer market with cheap api access and a better product, then distribution becomes through third parties with everyone else becoming the product sending training data back to the model. I'd see that as their current strategy.
lelanthran 3y ago
> OpenAI faces the existential risk, not Google. They'll catch up and will have the reach/subsidy advantage. Doesn't Microsoft products get used more times in a day by more paying customers than Google products? OpenAI won't have a problem because they reach more paying customers via Microsoft than Google can.
jasfi 3y ago
Yes, AI is like social in that regard. You can add social features to any app, and the same applies to AI. But there are also social-centric sites/apps, and it will be the same for AI.
acomar 3y ago
this was exactly what the free software advocates have been saying would happen (has happened) without protections to make sure modifications got contributed back to free software projects.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
There are two things that make a good LLM. The amount of data available for training, and the amount of compute available. Google's bard sucks in comparison to Open AI, and even compared to Bing. It's pretty clear that GPT4 has some secret sauce that's giving them a competitive edge. I also don't think that Open Source LLMs are that big of a threat, for exactly this reason. They will always be behind on the amount of data and compute available to the 'big players'. Sure, AI will increasingly be incorporated into various software products, but those products will be calling out to big tech apis with the best model. There will be some demand for private LLMs trained on company data, but they will only be useful in narrow specialties.
- codethief 3y ago
  Did you read the article? It refutes almost every claim you're making and, I must say, rather convincingly so.
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    I'll admit, I skimmed it. I went back and re-read it, and the timeline of events was especially shocking. I still think the big models hold an edge, simply because it will most likely be better at handling edge cases, but wow, my days of underestimating the oss llms are certainly coming to a middle
InCityDreams 3y ago
>They'll also find a way to integrate this in a way where you don't have to directly pay for the capability, as it's paid in other ways: ads. I fear you are correct.
b33j0r 3y ago
It’s an obvious cycle. “I’m idealistic!” “I’m starting a moral company!” “Oh dear this got big. I need investors and a board.”
scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
OpenAI is more of a lab than a company though, no? Aren’t they, in some sense, kind of like that lab division that invented the computer mouse? Or for that matter, any other laboratory that made significant breakthroughs but left the commercialization to others? It would make sense to me what you’re describing. Only, we will probably be laughing from the future the extent of our current imagination with this stuff is still limited to GUI’s, excels and docs.

htss2013 3y ago

Thats like saying in 1995 search is going to be integrated into everything, not a destination. That'd be true but also very wrong. Google.com ended up as the main destination.

ArthurAardvark 3y ago

Stupid, silly me who knows little-to-nothing about the lore of OS. Why can't OS devs simply write out in the OS licensing that their wonderful work is usable by anyone and everybody unless you belong to Alphabet/Meta/Oracle/Adobe/Twitter/Microsoftpen– McCorps & their subsidiaries? I imagine it comes down to ol' Googly & the boys taking advantage of the OS work -> OS devs backed by weak NFOs sue X corp. -> X corp. manages to delay the courts and carries on litigation so the bill is astronomical aka ain't nobody footing that -> ??? I imagine 90% end up taking some sort of $ and handover the goods like Chromium, though. So back to square one, guess we kowtow and pray for us prey?

narrator 3y ago

I think the problem with AI being everywhere and ubiquitous is that AI is the first technology in a very long time that requires non-trivial compute power. That compute power costs money. This is why you only get a limited number of messages every few hours from GPT4. It simply costs too much to be a ubiquitous technology. For example, the biggest LLama model only runs on an A100 that costs about $15,000 on ebay. The new H100 that is 3x faster goes for about $40,000 and both of these cards can only support a limited number of users, not the tens of thousands of users who can run off a high-end webserver. I'd imagine Google would lose a lot of money if they put GPT4 level AI into every search, and they are obsessed with cost per search. Multiply that by the billions and it's the kind of thing that will not be cheap enough to be ad supported.

colordrops 3y ago
Is the assumption that GPU power and advancements in AI will not get to a reasonable price point in the near future? Because it seems to me that advances in computation have not slowed down at all since it started.
tomjen3 3y ago
We used to get only a limited number of Internet hours. By the time December 2003 rolled around my family had always on internet. Besides what Google does here is besides the point, because Bing has already unleashed ai search. Google will either follow along or stop being relevant.
airstrike 3y ago
Time for a dedicated "AI box" at home with hotswapping compute boards? Maybe put it inside a humanoid or animal-like robot with TTS capabilities? Sign me up for that kickstarter! EDIT: based on some quick googling (should I have asked ChatGPT instead?), Nvidia sells the Jetson Xavier Nx dev kit for ~$610 https://www.electromaker.io/shop/product/nvidia-jetson-xavier-nx-developer-kitpre-order https://www.electromaker.io/shop/product/nvidia-jetson-xavie... Just need the robot toy dog enclosure (See https://www.electromaker.io/blog/article/best-sbc-for-ai-single-board-computer-for-artificial-intelligence https://www.electromaker.io/blog/article/best-sbc-for-ai-sin... for a list of alternatives if that one is too expensive)
- yayr 3y ago
  each billion parameters using 16 bit floats requires around 2 GB of GPU or TPU RAM. ChatGPT is expected to have around 1000 billion. Good open source LLMs have around 7-20 billion currently. Consumer GPUs currently max out at 24 GB. You can now quantize the model to e.g. 4 bits instead of 32 per parameter and do other compressions, but still there is quite a limit what you can do with 24 GB of RAM. The Apple unified memory approach may be a path forward to increase that... so one box gives you access to the small models, for a GPT4 like model you'd need (for inference and if you had the model and tools) probably 100 of those 4090s or 25 of H100 with 96 GBs I guess to fit in 2 TB of model data.

4ndrewl 3y ago

This is 100% correct - products evolve to become features. Not sure OpenAI faces the existential risk as MS need them to compete with Google in this space.

chabons 3y ago
> Not sure OpenAI faces the existential risk as MS need them to compete with Google in this space. I think OP is arguing that in that partnership Microsoft holds the power, as they have the existing platforms. The linked article argues that AI technology itself is not as much of a moat as previously thought, and the argument therefore is that Microsoft likely doesn't need OpenAI in the long term.

kelipso 3y ago

To be fair, the open source model has been what's been working for the last few decades. The concern with LLMs was that open source (and academia) couldn't do what the big companies are doing because they couldn't get access to enough computing resources. The article is arguing (and I guess open source ML groups are showing) you don't need those computing resources to pave the way. It's still an open question whether OpenAI or the other big companies can find a most in AI via either some model, dataset, computing resources, whatever. But then you could ask that question about any field.

dahwolf 3y ago
That makes sense. But I would argue to smaller/cheaper models are not a threat to Google, they are a solution. They will still have the reach advantage and can more cheaply integrate small/low costs models at every touch point.
not2b 3y ago
But none of the "open source" AI models are open source in the classic sense. They are free but they aren't the source code; they are closer to a freely distributable compiled binary where the compiler and the original input hasn't been released. A true open source AI model would need to specify the training data and the code to go from the training data to the model. Certainly it would be very expensive for someone else to take this information, build the model again, and verify that the same result is obtained, and maybe we don't really need that. But if we don't have it, then I think we need some other term than "open source" to describe these things. You can get it, you can share it, but you don't know what's in it.
- kbrkbr 3y ago
  RWKV does: https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM It uses „the Pile“: https://pile.eleuther.ai/ https://pile.eleuther.ai/ And I’ve seen some more in the last weeks.
  - not2b 3y ago
    Good to hear. Let's reserve "open source" for cases like that.

zoiksmeboiks 3y ago

Eventually Google will still lose to open models and AI chips. Hardware performance is what’s making AI “work” now, not LLMs which are a cognitive model for humans not machines. LLMs are incompatible with the resources of a Pentium 3 era computer. Managing electron state is just math. Human language meaning is relative to our experience, it does not exist elsewhere in physical reality. All the syntax and semantics we layered on was for us not the machines. End users buy hardware, not software. Zuckerberg needs VR gadgets to sell because Meta is not Intel, Apple, AMD, nVidia. The software industry is deluding itself if it does not see the massive contraction on the horizon.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Honestly, I can't see Google failing here. Like other tech giants, they're sitting on a ridiculously large war chest. Worst case, they can wait for the space to settle a bit and spend a few billion to buy the market leader. If AI really is an existential threat to their business prospects, spending their reserves on this is a no-brainer.

blowski 3y ago
That was true for IBM in the 1970s and Microsoft in the 90s. Despite holding a royal flush, they managed to lose the game through a combination of arrogance, internal fighting, innovator's dilemma, concern over anti-trust, and bureaucratic inertia. It will be hard for Google to pull this off.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Microsoft aint doing so bad now
  - htormey 3y ago
    After Microsoft swapped out the CEO. New guys better than Balmer.
  - oska 3y ago
    Microsoft is always doing bad. They've done bad for the life of the company. Microsoft has never 'done good'. They have always been a negative force in computing and society at large. This toxic culture comes from their founder, about which all the preceding also applies.
    - dartharva 3y ago
      No idea whether this comment is satirical or not. As a reader I think that's marvelous (please don't break the suspense)
taneq 3y ago
The threat isn’t that another company has AI, it’s that they don’t (yet) have a good way to sell ads with a chat bot. Buying the chat bot doesn’t change that.

vosper 3y ago

> OpenAI faces the existential risk, not Google. Yes, but the quickest way for anyone to get themselves to state-of-the-art is to buy OpenAI. Their existential risk is whether they continue to be (semi)independent, not whether they shutdown or not. Presumably Microsoft is the obvious acquirer, but there must be a bunch of others who could also be in the running.

sgt101 3y ago
But if you wait a month you can get that model for free...
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Where?
  - heliophobicdude 3y ago
    It's in reference to the article's open source free laborers. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither#:~:text=And%20they%20are%20doing%20so%20in%20weeks%2C%20not%20months.%20This%20has%20profound%20implications%20for%20us%3A https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

titzer 3y ago

> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. I...kinda don't want this? UIs have already changed in so many different fits, starts, waves, and cycles. I used to have skills. But I have no skills now. Nothing works like it used to. Yeah they were tricky to use but I cannot imagine that a murky AI interface is going to be any easier to use, and certainly impossible to master. Even if it is easier to use, I am not sure I want that either. I don't know where the buttons are. I don't know what I can do and what I can't. And it won't stay the same, dodging my feckless attempts to commit to memory how it works and get better at it...?

amelius 3y ago
An AI interface in Office brings back memories of Clippy.
- taneq 3y ago
  We may not have seen the last of Clippy yet… https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
- Izkata 3y ago
  Now imagine Clippy on a car touchscreen.
  - speedgoose 3y ago
    NIO sells cars with a tiny cute robot that moves on the dashboard, named NOMI. A lot of people hate it as it’s closer to Google assistant than GPT4 and it makes mechanical noise when it rotates but I don’t think it’s a terrible idea. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human traits to things, is common with cars. I would like my car to run a LLM instead of being so stupid at understanding my voice commands.
- jimmySixDOF 3y ago
  XR will solve the AI UI problem https://twitter.com/jasminezroberts/status/1605611451674025989?t=d3aeSAHcY5CcRvQNlgo0mg&s=19 https://twitter.com/jasminezroberts/status/16056114516740259...

aero-deck 3y ago

Disagree. What you have in mind is already how the masses interact AI. There is little value-add for making machine translation, auto-correct and video recommendations better. I can think of a myriad of use-cases for AI that involve custom-tuning foundation models to user-specific environments. Think of an app that can detect bad dog behavior, or an app that gives you pointers on your golf swing. The moat for AI is going to be around building user-friendly tools for fine-tuning models to domain-specific applications, and getting users to spend enough time fine-tuning those tools to where the switch-cost to another tool becomes too high. When google complains that there is no moat, they're complaining that there is no moat big enough to sustain companies as large as Google.

jimsimmons 3y ago
Making video recs better translates to direct $$$ There’s a reason YT or TikTok recommendation is so revered
computerex 3y ago
Fine tuning isn't a thing for foundational models though, it's all about in context learning.
- aero-deck 3y ago
  that means there's no money in making foundation models - the economics are broken.

bhl 3y ago

> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like Agreed but I don’t think the products that’ll gain market share from this wave of AI will be legacy web 2 apps; rather it’ll be AI-native or first apps that are build from ground up to collect user data and fulfill user intent. Prime example is TikTok.

heliophobicdude 3y ago
You bottled up exactly my disappointment with some large companies' legacy AI offerings. They don't do both: iterate off of telemetry data and fulfill user's needs.

unicornmama 3y ago

Google makes almost all its money from search. These platforms are all there to reinforce its search monopoly. ChatGPT has obsoleted search. ChatGPT will do to Google search what the Internet did to public libraries - make them mostly irrelevant.

baryphonic 3y ago
How has ChatGPT obsoleted search, when hallucination and the token limits are major problems? It's (sort of) obviated search for certain kinds of queries engineers make, but not normies. I say sort of, because IMO it's pretty bad at spitting out accurate (or even syntactically correct) code for any nontrivial problem. I have to give it lots of corrections, and often it will just invent new code that also is broken in some way.
- unicornmama 3y ago
  I've replaced almost all my usage of Google Search with ChatGPT. The only reason's I've had to use Google search is to look up current news, and do some fact checking. In my experience, GPT-4 rarely provides incorrect results. This includes things like asking for recipes, food recommendations, clarifying what food is safe to eat when pregnant, how to drain my dog tricks, translating documents, explaining terminology from finance, understanding different kinds of whiskey, etc.
  - scarface74 3y ago
    Try this simple question with ChatGPT. No need to verify the ages. You will immediately find the problem. “List the presidents of the us in the order of their ages when they were first inaugurated”
  - lexandstuff 3y ago
    This was true for me too, but I'm starting to find the data's cutoff date a problem, and it gets worse every day. I was reminded about it yesterday when it knew nothing about the new programming language Mojo or recent voice conversion algorithms. The eventual winner will have a model that stays up-to-date.

irrational 3y ago

It being everywhere worries me a lot. It outputs a lot of false information and the typical person doesn’t have the time or inclination to vet the output. Maybe this is a problem that will be solved. I’m not optimistic on that front.

mattferderer 3y ago
Same can be said about the results that pop up on your favorite search engine or asking other people questions. If anything advances in AI & search tech will do a better job at providing citations that agree & disagree with the results given. But this can be a turtles all the way down problem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- izacus 3y ago
  No it won't and random search popup results are already a massive societal problem (and they're not even used like people are attempting to use AI - to make decisions over other peoples lives in insurance, banking, law enforcement and other areas where abuse is common when unchecked).
- acdha 3y ago
  There’s a real difference in scale and perceived authority: false search results already cause problems but many people have also been learning not to blindly trust the first hit and to check things like the site hosting it. That’s not perfect but I think it’s a lot better than building things into Word will be. There’s almost no chance that people won’t trust suggestions there more than random web searches and the quality of the writing will make people more inclined to think it’s authoritative. Consider what happened earlier this year when professor Tyler Cowen wrote an entire blog post on a fake citation. He certainly knows better but it’s so convenient to use the LLM emission rather than do more research… https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-publishers-lawsuit-chatbot/ https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-p...
- 3y ago

patmorgan23 3y ago

OpenAI=Microsoft for all intents and purposes. Microsoft has a stake in OpenAI and has integrated into Azure, Bing and Microsoft 365.

ArlenBales 3y ago
Microsoft will probably eventually integrate it into their Xbox services, and possibly games via their own first-party studios. In my opinion Microsoft has equal or more reach/subsidy advantage than Google for AI, at least toward general consumers.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Honestly, this makes me excited for future RPGs from bethesda. I've already seen mod demos where chatgpt does dialog for NPCs. Imagine a future elderscrolls or fallout where one could negotiate safe passage with the local raiders / bandits for a wheel of cheese or a 6 pack of nuka cola. A man can dream.

version_five 3y ago

I think this won't work out: AI is so popular now because it's a destination. It's been rebranded as a cool thing to play with, that anyone can immediately see the potential in. That all collapses when it's integrated into Word or other "productivity" tools and it just becomes another annoying feature that gives you some irrelevant suggestions. OpenAI has no moat, but at least they have first mover advantage on a cool product, and may be able to get some chumps (microsoft) to think this will translate into a lasting feature inside of office or bing.

asdfman123 3y ago

It already is built seamlessly into a lot of Google products. OpenAI just beat Google to the cool chatbot demo.

bburnett44 3y ago

The problem is that the llms are better at search (for an open ended question) than Google is and that’s where most of googles revenue comes from. So it actually gives a new company like openai the opportunity to change consumers destinations from google

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"Any winning idea ported into Google's products on short notice." Imagine for a moment, in a different universe, in a different galaxy, another planet is ostensibly a mirror image of Earth, evolving along the same trajectory. However on this hypothetical planet, anything is possible. This has resulted in some interesting differences. The No Google License Neither Google, its subsidiaries, business partners nor its academic collaborators may use this software. Under no circumstance may this software be directly or indirectly used to further Google's business or other objectives. If 100s or 1000s or more people on planet X started adopting this license for their open source projects, then of course it won't stop Google from copying them or even using the code as is. But it would muddy the waters with 100s or 1000s or more potential lawsuits. Why would any company risk it. There is nothing stopping anyone writing software for which they have no intention of charging license fees. It's done all the time these days. There is also nothing stopping anyone from prohibiting certain companies from using it, or prohibiting certain uses. I recall in the early days of the web when "shareware" licenses often tried to distinguish commercial from non-commercial use. Commercial use would presumably incur higher fees. Non-commercial use was either free or low cost. I always wondered, "How is the author going to discover if XYZ, LLC is using his software?" (This is before telemetry was common.) The license seemed unworkable, but that did not stop me from using the software. I was never afraid that I would be mistaken for a commercial user and the author would come knocking asking me to agree to a commercial license. I doubt I was the only one bold enough to use software with licenses prohibiting commercial use. Even a "No Microsoft License" would make Github more interesting. One could pick some random usage. Microsoft may not this software for X. Would this make MSFT's plans more complicated. Try it and see what happens. Only way to know for sure. Instead, MSFT is currently trying to out the plaintiffs in the Doe v Github case, over MSFT's usage of other peoples' code who put their stuff on Github, and as the Court gets ready to decide the issue, it's becoming clear IMO that if these individual are named, these brave individuals will lose their jobs and be blackballed from ever working in software again. The No Internet Advertising License This software may not be used to create or support internet advertising services for commercial gain.

nine_k 3y ago
The license that prevents use by a particular list of corporations can likely be easily crafted. But because any particular invention about LLMs is not a specific product but an approach, it would just be re-implemented. One could imagine patenting an approach, if it ends up being patentable, and then giving everyone but some excluded entities a grant of royalty-free use. But, unless the use if that particular approach is inevitably very obvious (which is really unlikely with ML models), you would have hard time detecting violations and especially enforcing your patent.

zelon88 3y ago

> And we should not expect to be able to catch up. The modern internet runs on open source for a reason. Open source has some significant advantages that we cannot replicate. I don't have faith in OpenAI as a company, but I have faith in Open-Source. What you're trying to say, if I understand correctly, is that Google will absorb the open-source and simply be back on top. But who will maintain this newly acquired status quo for Google? Google cannot EEE their own developer base. They said that much in the article; > We cannot hope to both drive innovation and control it. History as an example, Android did not kill *nix. Chrome did not kill Firefox. Google Docs has not killed Open Office. For the simple fact that Google needs all of these organizations to push Google forward. Whether that means Google gets access to code, or whether that means Google becomes incentivized to improve in some way. If Google wants to eat another free lunch tomorrow they have no choice but to leave some of that free labor standing, if not prop it up a little. The real question becomes, how much market share can we realistically expect without eating tomorrow's lunch?

spyckie2 3y ago
They're not saying that they should absorb open-source. They're arguing towards a strategy/direction for how to approach AI models from a business perspective, laying down the facts that open-source has a superior positional advantage in terms of development costs. Probably, internally Googlers are arguing that the "AI explosion" is short lived and people will be stop paying for AI as soon as open source PC models become cost and quality competitive. So they shouldn't chase the next big revenue stream that OpenAI is currently enjoying because it's short lived.

personjerry 3y ago

As I understand it, the open source community is working to make models: - usable by anyone - feasible on your desktop Thereby at least levelling the playing field for other developers.

rewgs 3y ago

This is why I think Apple's direction of building a neural engine into the M1 architecture is low-key brilliant. It's just there and part of their API; as AI capabilities increase and the developer landscape solidifies, they can incrementally expand and improve its capabilities. As always, Apple's focus is hardware-first, and I think it will once again pay off here.

thereisnospork 3y ago

I agree with your assertion that AI will seamlessly integrate into existing software and services but my expectation is that it will be unequivocally superior as a 3rd party integration[0]. People will get to know 'their AI' and vice versa. Why would I want Bard to recommend me a funny YouTube clip when my neutral assistant[1] has a far better understanding of my sense of humor? Bard can only ever learn from the context of interaction with google services -- something independent can pull from a larger variety of sources supersetting a locked system. Nevermind more specialized tools that don't have the resources to develop their own competent AI - google might pull it off but adobe won't, and millions Saas and small programs won't even try. As another example, how could an Adobe AI ever have a better interpretation of 'Paint a pretty sunset in the style of Picasso' than a model which can access my photos, wallpapers, location, vacations, etc? [0]Much how smart phones seamlessly integrate with automobiles via CarPlay and not GM-play. Once AI can use a mouse, if a person can integrate with a service an AI can do so on their behalf. [1]Mind it's entirely possible it will be Apple or MSFT providing said 'neutral' AI.

ekanes 3y ago

Everything you say is true, and Google has cards left to play, but this is absolutely an existential threat to Google. How could it be otherwise? For the first time in a very long time, people are open to a new search/answers engine. The game they won must now be replayed, and because it was so dominant, Google has nowhere to go but downwards.

newswasboring 3y ago

> This so-called "competition" from open source is going to be free labor. Any winning idea ported into Google's products on short notice. Thanks open source! How else, exactly, is open source supposed to work? Nobody wants to make their code GPL but everybody complains when companies use their code. I get that open source projects will like companies to contribute back, but shouldn't that go for everyone using this code? Like, I don't get what the proposed way of working is here.

krapp 3y ago
Developers nowadays want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to develop FOSS code because capitalism is evil and proprietary software is immoral and Micro$oft is the devil, man, and so give their work away for free... but whenever a company makes money on it and gives nothing back, completely in line with the letter and spirit of FOSS (because requiring compensation would violate user freedom,) they also want to get paid. Like the entire premise of FOSS is that money doesn't matter, only freedom matters. You're not supposed to care that Google made a billion dollars off your library as long as they keep it open.
- newswasboring 3y ago
  I see this as part of the decline of hacker culture and rise of brogrammers. I see very few people programming for fun, everyone seems to be looking for a monetization opportunity for every breath they take.
  - scarface74 3y ago
    For some strange reason (maybe moral failure?) people seem to have this insatiable addiction to food and shelter and most people have found no better way to support that addiction than to exchange labor for money. The list of things I consider “fun” besides programming when I get off work is a mile long.
    - newswasboring 3y ago

darig 3y ago

[dead]

stu432 3y ago

Yes, bring back Clippy!!!

essive 3y ago
You must mean the new Albert Clippy!

user_named 3y ago

LLMs are just better ML models, are just better statistical models. I agree that they're going to to be in everything, but invisible and in the background.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

onion2k 3y ago

They'll catch up and will have the reach/subsidy advantage. This is only true if they're making progress faster than OpenAI. There isn't much evidence for that.

safety1st 3y ago

There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Google's case they are still really focused on search whereas LLMs arguably move the focus to answers. I don't use an LLM to search for stuff, it just gives me an answer. Whether this is a huge shift for how Google's business works and whether they will be able to execute it quickly and effectively remains to be seen. Bill Gates' "Internet Tidal Wave" memo from 1995 is a great piece of relevant historical reading. You can see that he was amazingly prescient about the potential of the Internet at a time when barely anyone was using it. Despite Microsoft having more resources than anyone, totally understanding what a big deal the Internet was going to be, and even coming out of the gate pretty strong by dominating the browser market, they lost a lot of relevancy in the long run because their business was just too tied up in the idea of a box sitting on a desktop in an office as the center of value. (When Windows was dethroned as the company's center of gravity and they put Satya and DevDiv with its Azure offerings in charge, things started to turn around!) [1] https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave/ https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave...

poulpy123 3y ago
That weird because I remember clearly Microsoft was late in the internet game, and managed to catch up because they could use their monopoly on personal computers for internet explorer
la64710 3y ago
1995 lot of people We’re using the internet. It was made of dial up modems , terminal servers , BBS , AOL , IRC chat rooms , Alta vista search engine , emails , browser (probably Netscape or earlier can’t remember) … but yeah in 1995 lot of people were using it though much less than now , but not negligible.
jacquesm 3y ago
> even coming out of the gate pretty strong by dominating the browser market They were out of the gate about as weak as could be, Windows didn't have a native tcp/ip stack for the longest time (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and they only dominated the browser market through grossly uncompetitive behavior after they had lost the initial 5 rounds of the battle.

reissbaker 3y ago

I think Satya Nadella put it pretty well in an interview: ad revenue, especially from search, is incremental to Microsoft; to Google, it's everything. So while Microsoft is willing to have worse margins on search ads in order to win marketshare from Google, Google has to defend all of their margins — or else they become significantly less profitable in their core business. LLMs cost a lot more than traditional search, and Google can't just drop-in replace its existing product lines with LLMs: that hikes their bottom line, literally. Microsoft is willing to swap out the existing Bing with the "new Bing" based on OpenAI's technology, because they make very little money comparatively on search, and winning marketshare will more than make up for having smaller margins on that marketshare. Google is, IMO, in between a rock and a hard place on this one: either they dramatically increase their cost of revenue to defend marketshare, or they risk losing marketshare to Microsoft in their core business. Meanwhile, OpenAI gets paid by MS. Not that MS minds! They own a 49% stake in OpenAI, so what's good for OpenAI is what's good for MS. If Google had decades to figure it out, I think your analysis might be right — although I'm not certain that it is, since I'm not certain that the calculus of "free product, for ad revenue" makes as much sense when the products are much more expensive to run than they were previously. But even if it's correct in the long run, if Google starts slipping now it turns into a death spiral: their share prices slip, meaning the cost of compensation for key employees goes up, meaning they lose critical people (or cut even further into their bottom line, hurting their shares more, until they're forced to make staffing cuts), and they fall even further behind. Just as Google once ate Yahoo! via PageRank, it could get eaten by a disruptive technology like LLMs in the future.

DannyBee 3y ago
"OpenAI gets paid by MS" Actually, MS gets paid by OpenAI at 70% of profits until they make back their investment (according to articles on the terms)
- dekhn 3y ago
  Note that MS cost-offsets much OpenAI infrastructure including their top-5 TOP500 class supercomputer (similar to a full TPUv4 pod)

weinzierl 3y ago

As running the models seems to be relatively cheap but making them is not I believe that's where the money is. That and generic cloud services because ultimately the majority will train and run their models in the cloud. So, I would bet on AWS before OpenAI and I would bet the times of freely available high quality models will come to an end soon. If open source can keep up with that is to be seen.

squiggy22 3y ago

If Openai can win the developer market with cheap api access and a better product, then distribution becomes through third parties with everyone else becoming the product sending training data back to the model. I'd see that as their current strategy.

lelanthran 3y ago

> OpenAI faces the existential risk, not Google. They'll catch up and will have the reach/subsidy advantage. Doesn't Microsoft products get used more times in a day by more paying customers than Google products? OpenAI won't have a problem because they reach more paying customers via Microsoft than Google can.

jasfi 3y ago

Yes, AI is like social in that regard. You can add social features to any app, and the same applies to AI. But there are also social-centric sites/apps, and it will be the same for AI.

acomar 3y ago

this was exactly what the free software advocates have been saying would happen (has happened) without protections to make sure modifications got contributed back to free software projects.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

There are two things that make a good LLM. The amount of data available for training, and the amount of compute available. Google's bard sucks in comparison to Open AI, and even compared to Bing. It's pretty clear that GPT4 has some secret sauce that's giving them a competitive edge. I also don't think that Open Source LLMs are that big of a threat, for exactly this reason. They will always be behind on the amount of data and compute available to the 'big players'. Sure, AI will increasingly be incorporated into various software products, but those products will be calling out to big tech apis with the best model. There will be some demand for private LLMs trained on company data, but they will only be useful in narrow specialties.

codethief 3y ago
Did you read the article? It refutes almost every claim you're making and, I must say, rather convincingly so.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  I'll admit, I skimmed it. I went back and re-read it, and the timeline of events was especially shocking. I still think the big models hold an edge, simply because it will most likely be better at handling edge cases, but wow, my days of underestimating the oss llms are certainly coming to a middle

InCityDreams 3y ago

>They'll also find a way to integrate this in a way where you don't have to directly pay for the capability, as it's paid in other ways: ads. I fear you are correct.

b33j0r 3y ago

It’s an obvious cycle. “I’m idealistic!” “I’m starting a moral company!” “Oh dear this got big. I need investors and a board.”

scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago

OpenAI is more of a lab than a company though, no? Aren’t they, in some sense, kind of like that lab division that invented the computer mouse? Or for that matter, any other laboratory that made significant breakthroughs but left the commercialization to others? It would make sense to me what you’re describing. Only, we will probably be laughing from the future the extent of our current imagination with this stuff is still limited to GUI’s, excels and docs.