7 ms·

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 co

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.
- ChrisLTD 3y ago
  They definitely used uncompetitive behavior, but it’s also true that IE was also a better browser than Netscape by the time version 4 rolled out.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That's a different definition than 'out of the gate' covers to me. Besides that, from those days I mostly remember IE as the utility to download another browser after a fresh windows install, and the thing that it was nearly impossible to get rid of. Not through any merit of its own, in spite of many non-standards compliant websites that favored IE.
bsaul 3y ago
in 1995 people understood very well what internet was going to become. The technology just wasn't there yet, but every kid and parents remember very well the sound of that modem and the phone lines beeing busy. That memo would have been prescient if made 5 years before.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- adalacelove 3y ago
  True but the remaining of the comment is still valid: Microsoft had time in advance to prepare. But just "internet" doesn't mean a lot. Prescient would have been predicting search, ads and social media. We now are in a similar position maybe, with some tech that looks cool, trying to build geocities with AI
- mads_ravn 3y ago
  Yeah, I also thought of Eternal September [1] in 1993, when I saw the claim to prescience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - bsaul 3y ago
    Absolutely. I just looked back at netscape wikipedia page, and it was already out in 1995 and distributed freely. Internet explorer was out in 1995 as well. Barely underground stuff. And that's just for the www. People were using BBS, FTP, email and newsgroup before that.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  The infamous Bill Gates and David Letterman interview was in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y Lots of people definitely didn't understand what a big deal it was going to be then. In October 1994 a Wired journalist registered mcdonalds.com and then tried to give it to Mcdonalds, but couldn't reach anyone who understood the importance of domain name registration: https://archive.is/tHaea https://archive.is/tHaea In my recollection it really wasn't til 1998-2001 or so that people (where I lived in the southern U.S. anyway) really started to take notice.
graycat 3y ago
> If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). Once an IBM Office Manager was offering me a job and explained "IBM is a marketing organization." So, the focus was not really on computers or phones but on the central, crucial, bet your business data processing of the larger and largest companies -- banking, insurance, manufacturing, ..., and marketing to them. So, the focus of IBM was really on their target customers. So, if some target customers needed something, then IBM would design, build, and deliver it. That may still be their focus.
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  Yeah, as a government buyer, IBM is indistinguishable from the other big integrator/consulting firms (BAH, Deloitte, Lockheed, Mitre to an extent). Literally, whatever we want, they will swear they can build. The challenge is getting the spec right.
nivenkos 3y ago
Microsoft wanted to control it all with Blackbird and ActivePlatform. Their greed ended up with them losing out (thankfully).
midasuni 3y ago
From memory Bill Gates barely mentioned the internet in his first edition of road ahead in early 95. By late 95 the second edition entire book was revolving around the internet as if he had an epiphany.
- Hydraulix989 3y ago
  In the first edition, he did describe something very much like the Internet, except he called it the "Information Superhighway"
  - DrScientist 3y ago
    Exactly. Initially, they viewed it as a faster way to download content - rather than an application platform.
    - inanutshellus 3y ago
      I don't quite follow? I'd say "s/download content/access information/g", but also by "late 1995" there still wasn't "oh, the internet is an application platform", it was still "connect to the whole world, whoaaaaaa".
  - gumby 3y ago
    In the original edition it was a centralized, walled garden, and was a library rather than any sort of application platform much less anything composable or with room for individuals to contribute. Min his view people were just “consumers”. Myhrvold, Frankston and a few others must have given him a rap on the skull because the second edition was a major rewrite in an attempt to run out in front of the parade and pretend it had always been thus. He kind of got away with it: in those days he was treated in the public mind as if he was the only person on the planet who knew anything about computers.
hyperthesis 3y ago
Christensen's disruptive vs sustaining innovations is more descriptive than predictive. But if it's the same customers, solving the same problem, in the same way (from their point of view), then it's probably "sustaining" and incumbents win. Different customers, problems, ways - and all bets are off. Worse, incumbents are dependent on their customers, having optimized the company around them. Even if they know the opportunity and could grasp it, if it means losing customers they simply can't do it. Larry is thinking people will still search... right?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  Stackexchange is most directly under threat (from the current "chat" AI UI).
  - jacurtis 3y ago
    One could argue they actually stand the most to gain and could expand under AI. Everything I have seen so far about AI seems to indicate that you won't want to have one main AI model to go to, but instead there will be thousands of competitive AI models that are tailored for expertise in different niches. StackOverflow will certaintly need to morph to get there, but the market share they already have in code-solving questions still makes it a destination. Which gives them an advantage at solving the next stage of this need. I see a world where someone could post a question on StackOverflow and get an AI response in return. This would satisfy 95% of questions on the site. If they question the accuracy of the AI response or don't feel that it is adequately explained, they put a "bounty" (SO already does this) to get humans to review the original prompt, AI response, and then have a public forum about the corrections or clarifications for the AI response. This could work in a similar manner to how it does now. A public Q+A style forum with upvoting and comments. This could actually increase the value of the site overall. Many people go to Google for quick error searches first. Only if they are truly stumped do they go to StackOverflow. But with a specially tailored AI model, people may stop using Google for the initial search and do it at StackOverflow instead since they will likely have the absolute most accurate software engineering AI model due to the quality of the training data (the StackOverflow website and the perpetual feedback via the Q+A portion explained above). This actually could lead to a significant market shift away from Google for any and all programming questions and towards the StackOverflow AI instead. While still preserving the Q+A portion of the site in a way to satisfy users, and also improve the training of their AI model. For me, I would be more interested in the site. Right now if you go there, you will see 1000's of questions posted per day, most of which are nonsense RTFM[1] questions. But there are very interesting discussions that could arise if you could only have the interesting questions and have all the bad questions answered by AI and not cluttering up the public discussion. I could see personally subscribing to all questions that the AI bot stumbles on for the language or frameworks that interest me. I think there would be a lot of good discussions and learning from those questions if that was all the site was. [1] - Read The F**ing Manual
kmmlng 3y ago
I feel like search still has its place. New information is being generated all the time. I want to be able to access it without having to retrain my LLM. It's also easier to validate that my search results are real. With LLMs, you never know if the answers are hallucinated or real. Where LLMs really shine is in understanding what I actually want. Where search still gives me many irrelevant answers, LLMs just get my question. Combining the two in some way might just get us the best of both worlds.
- nicehill 3y ago
  That's why I turn almost all of my personal notes into blog posts, so I can use Google to search my notes.
- rounakdatta 3y ago
  Phind shines here.
- midnitewarrior 3y ago
  Bing Chat searches then summarizes for you. It gets all the latest information, reads the top results and gives you a summary of what you are looking for. It's here today. Also, Bing Chat makes search by humans irrelevant for many things. "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." ― Buckminster Fuller Google needs to move fast.
  - stubish 3y ago
    I've been blown away by how much better this feels as a search interface. No longer trying to guess the best search terms or trying to narrow down searches. Just ask a question in English, and get a summarized answer with citations to let you evaluate the information. Like an actual personal assistant, and very transparent showing things like the search terms being used.
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 3y ago
      But how can you trust it to provide accurate information? When I've played around with Bing, I've been seeing hallucinations and outright false data pop up quite regularly. My initial assessment of LLVMs is that they can be great writing aids, but I fail to see how I can trust them for search, when I can't use it for simpler tasks without getting served outright falsehoods.
lallysingh 3y ago
For Google, LLMs for search responses, ad ranking, and page ranking are all quite useful. They can directly eat up the first page or so of filler responses they normally have now for queries. It's a great opportunity to clean out all the spam pages on the result pages at once, leaving high quality results and capturing that advertising/referral money back to Google. Top 10 best reviewed android phones? Just put up a list generated by the LLM. Have a conversation with a product recommender that then collects fees from whoever it recommends. Not that I think Google's got the executive capacity to do any of this anymore.
kweingar 3y ago
> In Google's case they are still really focused on search whereas LLMs arguably move the focus to answers. I would love to see what proportion of searches are questions that would benefit from natural language answers. The huge majority of my searches would not be improved by LLMs and in fact would probably be made worse. “Thai food near me”, “IRS phone number”, “golang cmp documentation”
- throwaway1777 3y ago
  Thai food near me- chatgpt can give you a list of thai restaurants near you. IRS phone number has a definitive answer. Chatgpt can also spit out the golang documentation for cmp or even give you sample code.
  - kweingar 3y ago
    Ok but what exactly is the benefit of using ChatGPT for that? It is more than a year and a half out of date. It doesn’t know the Thai place’s current hours and doesn’t automatically surface a one-click link to their menu or reviews. Why would I use ChatGPT to get the IRS phone number when I could use just as little effort typing it into a search engine and going to their actual .gov site with no risk of hallucinations? When I’m using a new library, often I want an overview of the types and functions it surfaces. Why would I use an outdated and possibly halluciniated answer (that takes 30 seconds or more to generate) instead of clicking on the link in Google and having a nice document full of internal links appear instantly? I don’t want to use the chatbot for the sake of using the chatbot. I want to use it when it’s better than what I already have. Sometimes it is better, and in those cases I use it a lot!
    - known 3y ago
      [dead]
    - re5i5tor 3y ago
      Solved problem. The solution is NOT ChatGPT, it’s something like Bing or Phind that is a hybrid of traditional search and LLM.

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.

ChrisLTD 3y ago
They definitely used uncompetitive behavior, but it’s also true that IE was also a better browser than Netscape by the time version 4 rolled out.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's a different definition than 'out of the gate' covers to me. Besides that, from those days I mostly remember IE as the utility to download another browser after a fresh windows install, and the thing that it was nearly impossible to get rid of. Not through any merit of its own, in spite of many non-standards compliant websites that favored IE.

bsaul 3y ago

in 1995 people understood very well what internet was going to become. The technology just wasn't there yet, but every kid and parents remember very well the sound of that modem and the phone lines beeing busy. That memo would have been prescient if made 5 years before.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
adalacelove 3y ago
True but the remaining of the comment is still valid: Microsoft had time in advance to prepare. But just "internet" doesn't mean a lot. Prescient would have been predicting search, ads and social media. We now are in a similar position maybe, with some tech that looks cool, trying to build geocities with AI
mads_ravn 3y ago
Yeah, I also thought of Eternal September [1] in 1993, when I saw the claim to prescience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- bsaul 3y ago
  Absolutely. I just looked back at netscape wikipedia page, and it was already out in 1995 and distributed freely. Internet explorer was out in 1995 as well. Barely underground stuff. And that's just for the www. People were using BBS, FTP, email and newsgroup before that.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
The infamous Bill Gates and David Letterman interview was in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y Lots of people definitely didn't understand what a big deal it was going to be then. In October 1994 a Wired journalist registered mcdonalds.com and then tried to give it to Mcdonalds, but couldn't reach anyone who understood the importance of domain name registration: https://archive.is/tHaea https://archive.is/tHaea In my recollection it really wasn't til 1998-2001 or so that people (where I lived in the southern U.S. anyway) really started to take notice.

graycat 3y ago

> If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). Once an IBM Office Manager was offering me a job and explained "IBM is a marketing organization." So, the focus was not really on computers or phones but on the central, crucial, bet your business data processing of the larger and largest companies -- banking, insurance, manufacturing, ..., and marketing to them. So, the focus of IBM was really on their target customers. So, if some target customers needed something, then IBM would design, build, and deliver it. That may still be their focus.

killjoywashere 3y ago
Yeah, as a government buyer, IBM is indistinguishable from the other big integrator/consulting firms (BAH, Deloitte, Lockheed, Mitre to an extent). Literally, whatever we want, they will swear they can build. The challenge is getting the spec right.

nivenkos 3y ago

Microsoft wanted to control it all with Blackbird and ActivePlatform. Their greed ended up with them losing out (thankfully).

midasuni 3y ago

From memory Bill Gates barely mentioned the internet in his first edition of road ahead in early 95. By late 95 the second edition entire book was revolving around the internet as if he had an epiphany.

Hydraulix989 3y ago
In the first edition, he did describe something very much like the Internet, except he called it the "Information Superhighway"
- DrScientist 3y ago
  Exactly. Initially, they viewed it as a faster way to download content - rather than an application platform.
  - inanutshellus 3y ago
    I don't quite follow? I'd say "s/download content/access information/g", but also by "late 1995" there still wasn't "oh, the internet is an application platform", it was still "connect to the whole world, whoaaaaaa".
- gumby 3y ago
  In the original edition it was a centralized, walled garden, and was a library rather than any sort of application platform much less anything composable or with room for individuals to contribute. Min his view people were just “consumers”. Myhrvold, Frankston and a few others must have given him a rap on the skull because the second edition was a major rewrite in an attempt to run out in front of the parade and pretend it had always been thus. He kind of got away with it: in those days he was treated in the public mind as if he was the only person on the planet who knew anything about computers.

hyperthesis 3y ago

Christensen's disruptive vs sustaining innovations is more descriptive than predictive. But if it's the same customers, solving the same problem, in the same way (from their point of view), then it's probably "sustaining" and incumbents win. Different customers, problems, ways - and all bets are off. Worse, incumbents are dependent on their customers, having optimized the company around them. Even if they know the opportunity and could grasp it, if it means losing customers they simply can't do it. Larry is thinking people will still search... right?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hyperthesis 3y ago
Stackexchange is most directly under threat (from the current "chat" AI UI).
- jacurtis 3y ago
  One could argue they actually stand the most to gain and could expand under AI. Everything I have seen so far about AI seems to indicate that you won't want to have one main AI model to go to, but instead there will be thousands of competitive AI models that are tailored for expertise in different niches. StackOverflow will certaintly need to morph to get there, but the market share they already have in code-solving questions still makes it a destination. Which gives them an advantage at solving the next stage of this need. I see a world where someone could post a question on StackOverflow and get an AI response in return. This would satisfy 95% of questions on the site. If they question the accuracy of the AI response or don't feel that it is adequately explained, they put a "bounty" (SO already does this) to get humans to review the original prompt, AI response, and then have a public forum about the corrections or clarifications for the AI response. This could work in a similar manner to how it does now. A public Q+A style forum with upvoting and comments. This could actually increase the value of the site overall. Many people go to Google for quick error searches first. Only if they are truly stumped do they go to StackOverflow. But with a specially tailored AI model, people may stop using Google for the initial search and do it at StackOverflow instead since they will likely have the absolute most accurate software engineering AI model due to the quality of the training data (the StackOverflow website and the perpetual feedback via the Q+A portion explained above). This actually could lead to a significant market shift away from Google for any and all programming questions and towards the StackOverflow AI instead. While still preserving the Q+A portion of the site in a way to satisfy users, and also improve the training of their AI model. For me, I would be more interested in the site. Right now if you go there, you will see 1000's of questions posted per day, most of which are nonsense RTFM[1] questions. But there are very interesting discussions that could arise if you could only have the interesting questions and have all the bad questions answered by AI and not cluttering up the public discussion. I could see personally subscribing to all questions that the AI bot stumbles on for the language or frameworks that interest me. I think there would be a lot of good discussions and learning from those questions if that was all the site was. [1] - Read The F**ing Manual

kmmlng 3y ago

I feel like search still has its place. New information is being generated all the time. I want to be able to access it without having to retrain my LLM. It's also easier to validate that my search results are real. With LLMs, you never know if the answers are hallucinated or real. Where LLMs really shine is in understanding what I actually want. Where search still gives me many irrelevant answers, LLMs just get my question. Combining the two in some way might just get us the best of both worlds.

nicehill 3y ago
That's why I turn almost all of my personal notes into blog posts, so I can use Google to search my notes.
rounakdatta 3y ago
Phind shines here.
midnitewarrior 3y ago
Bing Chat searches then summarizes for you. It gets all the latest information, reads the top results and gives you a summary of what you are looking for. It's here today. Also, Bing Chat makes search by humans irrelevant for many things. "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." ― Buckminster Fuller Google needs to move fast.
- stubish 3y ago
  I've been blown away by how much better this feels as a search interface. No longer trying to guess the best search terms or trying to narrow down searches. Just ask a question in English, and get a summarized answer with citations to let you evaluate the information. Like an actual personal assistant, and very transparent showing things like the search terms being used.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 3y ago
    But how can you trust it to provide accurate information? When I've played around with Bing, I've been seeing hallucinations and outright false data pop up quite regularly. My initial assessment of LLVMs is that they can be great writing aids, but I fail to see how I can trust them for search, when I can't use it for simpler tasks without getting served outright falsehoods.

lallysingh 3y ago

For Google, LLMs for search responses, ad ranking, and page ranking are all quite useful. They can directly eat up the first page or so of filler responses they normally have now for queries. It's a great opportunity to clean out all the spam pages on the result pages at once, leaving high quality results and capturing that advertising/referral money back to Google. Top 10 best reviewed android phones? Just put up a list generated by the LLM. Have a conversation with a product recommender that then collects fees from whoever it recommends. Not that I think Google's got the executive capacity to do any of this anymore.

kweingar 3y ago

> In Google's case they are still really focused on search whereas LLMs arguably move the focus to answers. I would love to see what proportion of searches are questions that would benefit from natural language answers. The huge majority of my searches would not be improved by LLMs and in fact would probably be made worse. “Thai food near me”, “IRS phone number”, “golang cmp documentation”

throwaway1777 3y ago
Thai food near me- chatgpt can give you a list of thai restaurants near you. IRS phone number has a definitive answer. Chatgpt can also spit out the golang documentation for cmp or even give you sample code.
- kweingar 3y ago
  Ok but what exactly is the benefit of using ChatGPT for that? It is more than a year and a half out of date. It doesn’t know the Thai place’s current hours and doesn’t automatically surface a one-click link to their menu or reviews. Why would I use ChatGPT to get the IRS phone number when I could use just as little effort typing it into a search engine and going to their actual .gov site with no risk of hallucinations? When I’m using a new library, often I want an overview of the types and functions it surfaces. Why would I use an outdated and possibly halluciniated answer (that takes 30 seconds or more to generate) instead of clicking on the link in Google and having a nice document full of internal links appear instantly? I don’t want to use the chatbot for the sake of using the chatbot. I want to use it when it’s better than what I already have. Sometimes it is better, and in those cases I use it a lot!
  - known 3y ago
    [dead]
  - re5i5tor 3y ago
    Solved problem. The solution is NOT ChatGPT, it’s something like Bing or Phind that is a hybrid of traditional search and LLM.