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Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles

200 points by Amorymeltzer 3y ago

retskrad 3y ago
Google's brand is only bested by Apple in the minds of consumers. They will never go away. It doesn't matter if ChatGPT or anything else comes along - 95% of the billions of daily Google users will wait for Google's version. I am honestly surprised that the Alphabet market cap hasn't reached $2T yet.
- throwuxiytayq 3y ago
  Waiting for a Google product to start working well (or to start respecting you as a user) isn’t a strategy that gets you very far these days.
- samwillis 3y ago
  > I am honestly surprised that the Alphabet market cap hasn't reached $2T yet. Because online advertising, particularly search ads, are working less well for advertisers and regulators are pushing for more changes. The vast majority of Google revenue comes from an industry that is facing massive risks. On top of that I don't think it's clear that "AI" in search will help Google sell advertising or increase revenue. It's also likely to bring them under even more scrutiny from regulators. In many ways AI is harder to sell ads against, Google is payed when people leave the page via a click on an ad. That doesn't happen when Google is summarising the content. Microsoft/Bing have found a brilliant way to attack Google, build a product that they have to copy that (potentially) decimates ad revenue.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    > Microsoft/Bing have found a brilliant way to attack Google, build a product that they have to copy that (potentially) decimates ad revenue. Didn't 0-click search as a trend for google search predate bing's changes?
  - trasz4 3y ago
    >Google is payed when people leave the page via a click on an ad Not really. The click rate is iirc usually around 5%; I'm not convinced this is much higher than the "noise floor" generated by a human equivalent of drunk racoons. So in practice Google is being paid for displays.
- v4dok 3y ago
  Google is an advertising business. Can you sell more ads with AI? I would say no. And even if you can, having an automated smart assistant being able to "cut" through the BS is certainly not as good for Google as clicking a bunch of sites trying to battle SEO. However the judge is still out in regards to how much can AI allow Google to squeeze the profit margins of businesses by offering even better conversion rates. Personally, I don't think it will make a big difference, the AI will not make you buy more. I suspect Google makes more money by having multiple companies fight for the same customer than actually making a conversion. IMO best case scenario for Google is to keep their search market. Table stakes is keeping search relevant at all.
  - mtrovo 3y ago
    Wouldn't this help google on second order effects tho? I guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to less incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made searching in Google so awful in the past years. Also for queries asking for product recommendation, where ad price is quite high, they could still plug ads into an LLM and have it write a summary back to you similar to what magazines do with sponsored content.
    - trasz4 3y ago
      >I guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to less incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made searching in Google so awful in the past years. Main part of Google's business is selling infrastructure for that SEO junk, AdWords et al. Sure, you meant the _other_ SEO junk, but from AI point of view both would be noise to be separated from actual content.
  - tscherno 3y ago
    Can't they massively improve their ad-targeting by analyzing conversations with the AI?
    - SiempreViernes 3y ago
      People are already freaked out plenty by the idea that googles products spies on you to sell ads. To start doing it outright will definitely kill uptake of any AI service they provide.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  That's what we thought about Google Plus. What's the last time Google launched a product that everyone really uses?
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    when's the last time any company has launched a product everyone really uses? for the sake of conversation let's say 2 billion+ for everyone.
    - iTokio 3y ago
      ChatGPT
      - oittaa 3y ago
        Not even close to 2B users. Google have probably 10 different products with more than 2B monthly users.
        raincole 3y ago
        It's very hard to believe. Besides search, Android, Chrome and Gmail are in 2B~4B range. Are there really another 6 products that are ubiquitous as these 3? Google Docs definitely doesn't have 2B monthly users. Some built-in Android apps might be installed on >2B phones, but it doesn't mean they have that many active users.
        rpdillon 3y ago
        The article mentions they have six products with 2 billion users.
        avrionov 3y ago
        Google Search, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Play Store, and YouTube Also Google Maps, Google Photos and Google Drive have more than 1B users.
    - 3y ago
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  Its because unlike Microsoft and Apple. Google has no real presence in China which keeps it out of one of the world's largest and fast growing economies
- silvestrov 3y ago
  > They will never go away. History would say otherwise. Look at how quickly Nokia went south. Look at how quickly Google took over from the AltaVista search engine.
  - denismenace 3y ago
    The Nokia example makes much more sense in this case since it was an established company. On the other hand AltaVista was on the early days of the internet where everything was much more turbulent.
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    Don't think that with GCP and play store it'll be as easy to replace Google though
    - TexanFeller 3y ago
      Compared to AWS, no one uses GCP. Compared to IOS App Store, Play Store doesn't sell any paid apps and subscriptions, only adware.
      - kernal 3y ago
        Google Play 2021 revenue was 48 Billion and 42 Billion in 2022. I suggest you google in the future. Also, I have an iPhone and it's filled with just as much adware, crapware and ridiculous subscription apps.
    - spiralpolitik 3y ago
      You don’t have to replace them. You just need to reduce the income from search based ads by enough to cause them to implode. Hard to fund loss leaders like Android with say 20% less revenue.
      - jsnell 3y ago
        None of us know what the direct profitability of Android is. Given the revenue from Play Store, it at the very least is not obvious that it's a loss-leader. But one thing that is obvious is that having 20% less revenue would not mean Google was unable to work on Android. We know that, because they were able to already fund Android in the distant past of 2021, when their revenue was 20% lower than now. (In fact, they were able to afford Android in 2010, with 90% lower revenue.)
- pyrale 3y ago
  Really? To me, Google's image is much closer to that of Microsoft : You may hear of them in a few innovative projects, but most of what you know and use from them is boring office stuff, or personal stuff that you take for granted and don't think twice about. Having an Android or using Chrome isn't a personal statement like having an iphone or a macbook is. And in terms of ethics, the perception of them being a force for good eroded a lot. When thinking about the typical googler, people around here will sooner think about an exec trying to skip some tax than about a techie doing innovative stuff, because that's what their media coverage is about these days in Europe. I'll give you that Microsoft is very unlikely to go away either, unless the US govt finally remembers they have antitrust laws.
  - oblio 3y ago
    You're a techie (and/or business tech person). Go ask 10 non-tech people what they think of Google.
    - pyrale 3y ago
      Likely the same as they think about fb, microsoft, netflix, amazon-tech, uber, etc: employees are probably handsomely paid, and taxes probably aren't. Actually as a factoid, I recently changed jobs, and got handed an iphone for work. People noticed it and commented on it, whereas a pixel would probably have not raised much attention.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - kernal 3y ago
      You mean the same people that use it as a verb? Which is the highest compliment you could give a product and is so rare that companies can only dream about it.
  - alphabetting 3y ago
    Youtube and Google are the top two highest favorability brands among gen Z https://archive.is/8Ippr https://archive.is/8Ippr
- m0llusk 3y ago
  Never is a really long time.
- EduardoBautista 3y ago
  Some of Google's success comes from being "free". It's not necessarily because consumers believe Google has the best services/products. It's hard for a software company to compete against the largest ad network ever created.
- 1980phipsi 3y ago
  Google does annoy the shit out of me when using it behind a VPN. Constantly asking me to do Captchas. Never have that problem with bing or duckduckgo.
- siva7 3y ago
  Yeah, that's what Microsoft (Windows era), Xerox, Kodak, IBM (PC era) and so on also thought back then about their own "monopoly" and brand ;)
- munchler 3y ago
  ChatGPT is the fastest growing application in history. It had 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch. No one is “waiting” for Google’s version.
- fomine3 3y ago
  On Enterprise, Microsoft >> Google
nixcraft 3y ago
I am curious if there will be a requirement in the future, possibly enforced by the EU or US law, for content such as books, videos, music, PDF files, news articles, or blog posts to be labeled as produced by either a human author or AI. I'm talking about ethical disclosure. While it is uncertain, it is important to be transparent about the content's origins. As we know, AI is here to stay, and it is likely that governments will be the biggest investors (or spenders) in AI technology for military purposes. Despite Bing having a head start, it's unlikely that Google will lose to AI battle to Bing and others. Google's strong brand image and popular properties, such as Gmail, YouTube, Search, Chrome, and Android, used by billions of users daily, give them a significant advantage. It's doubtful that Bing will take over the search market anytime soon. But, who knows? Ha!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- samwillis 3y ago
  Just as with labelling for Vegan and Vegitarian food, "Fair Trade" or Organic, there is going to be similar movements in the creative arts for "AI Free" content. So no, I don't believe there will be regulation on labelling "AI" derived content, but there will be a drive to label and certify "organic content".
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Cool, then I will know what to avoid. People who boast that their company is <insert identity here> owned do that, because their product can't compete otherwise.
- ipsum2 3y ago
  It's not clear where to draw the line on what is AI or not, and I suspect most content will be at least partially generated by AI. Is spell-checking AI? grammar-checking? Rewriting sentences for clarity? Summarization?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
classified 3y ago
The author seems shocked by the demonstration of the difference between marketing and reality at Google.
rvz 3y ago
It just means that lots of these new so-called AI startups using wrappers around AI APIs don't have a moat to go with since these new announcements by Google has effectively destroyed them for free or close to free. It is only going to accelerate and AI research will increasingly be more closed. There is now no difference between O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com or Google DeepMind. Either way it will have to take more than LLMs like 'ChatGPT' to even come close to dethroning Google. [0] There is more to 'AI' than the LLM chatbot hype. [0] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-growth-flattens/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-gro...
tiniuclx 3y ago
> AI is zero marginal generation of information (well, nearly zero, relative to humans). As I wrote last year generative models unbundle idea creation from idea substantiation, which can then be duplicated and distributed at zero marginal cost. I find this quote a little bit hard to believe. Are the current models genuinely capable of innovation? I've been productive in using image generation for my album covers, but I haven't found a similar use for Large Language Models yet.
- magarnicle 3y ago
  He didn't mention innovation, just 'idea substantiation' i.e. actually making the end product you have in your head.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
The example of the new EU regulation in the article is a great example of how regulation typically only serves to enable regulatory capture, thereby playing into the same goals of creating a monopoly or duopoly that governments otherwise say they’re opposed to.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  Regulation “typically only” serves the interests of incumbents? Surely that’s an overstatement, no? Personally I tend to think that the inability to move fast and break things is a good thing when it comes to, say, air travel or food safety.
- Seeemi 3y ago
  Ah yes the USB regulation which did nothing for the consumers. And the safety regulations which made our products less toxic and less shoking
  - oblio 3y ago
    Plus the 40 hour workweek, 2 day weekends, healthcare (not in the US, outlier among developed countries), pensions, equal rights acts, ... Or in the EU, roaming charges removal, flight reimbursement regulations, etc. Heck, speaking of flying, the entire airline industry is regulated up the wazoo and a few years ago we had a full year of metal coffins flying through the skies at 10 000m going 950 kmph without any fatalities.
- pavlov 3y ago
  This is a popular talking point but it feels ahistorical to me. Was Ralph Nader really working for General Motors all along when he called for more regulation?
  - oblio 3y ago
    > Was Ralph Nader really working for General Motors all along when he called for more regulation? You don't get it! Only big companies can make safe cars cheaply, so it was all a big ploy against small car manufacturers. I'm being sarcastic in case someone missed it :-)
Sai_ 3y ago
I read through the full article and the cognitive leaps the author makes are too big for me to follow. It’s like listening to a mad scientist connect totally unrelated (seemingly) events. E.g., I don’t at all understand the linkage between current events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants denoms. Maybe I’m just too dumb to follow this much brilliance.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Use ChatGPT to make sense of it. In future idiocracy we all will
  - mikhasev 3y ago
    Sad but true.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  > E.g., I don’t at all understand the linkage between current events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants denoms. His point is that LLMs are a disruptive technology at the level of the printing press. The power structure most famously disrupted by the printing press was that of the Catholic Church. EDIT: Yeah this isn't what he's saying. His analogy is more like the major LLM companies like OpenAI or Google are like the Catholic Church which is being disrupted by European regulations which are like the protestants. Or the opposite. He literally says both ways as possibilities. And in this analogy the open models (the refinements of the 'leaked' LLaMa models which can fit on a single GPU) are like the wacky persecuted fringe sects which were exiled to the United States and which he thinks shouldn't be called as either Catholic or Protestant. At the end he says "This is, admittedly, a rather speculative and far-reaching Article" which I have to agree.
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    That’s what I thought too but I went and reread that part. He’s saying something else. The American companies like Google/OpenAI (trying to export AI globally) are on one side, opposing them are Europeans (who want AI to be controlled, licensed, and regulated). Together, these two regimes are the Catholic Church and mainstream Protestantism of AI. Opposing both these sides are open source AI models. He calls this group radical reformers like the Amish. Yeah, don’t ask. This much brilliance in way above my pay grade.
PedroBatista 3y ago
The Google AI strategy is to use their weight and flood the market with everything AI so any competitor is either very niche and/or more expensive than "free". Typical big co move. Also the amount of tweets that suddenly popped up on Twitter with the same template of "ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard has launched here 10 tips on how to..". It was clearly a Google marketing push ( scummy as always, but Google have done way worse in the past ). This leads me to believe that Bard is at best OK and has no "AI advantage" over other competitors and it's basically who has the bigger ranch and deeper pockets until everything is dead around them.
- wfhBrian 3y ago
  > ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard has launched here 10 tips on how to.. As if the spammy AI threads couldn't get worse, they managed to do it.
- blululu 3y ago
  This seems like attributing intent where there is none. AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them they just shill whatever the latest thing is. Google has no central AI strategy because the company has weak leadership and is largely directionless. The distributed actions of a lot of people does not amount to any concerted plan.
  - loudmax 3y ago
    Absolutely this. Google could develop an AI that's superior to GPT-4. They may have already. Under their current leadership, it wouldn't make a difference anyway as they wouldn't know what to do with it. Google is on a fast track to becoming Xerox.
    - anonylizard 3y ago
      Its called Gemini. Google's own mega-multimodal model. Google merged google brain and deepmind to start developing Gemini. All the talent left at Google to go all in on this. The other AI products at google were just polishing up their old stuff to hastily release. Gemini is their real attempt at catching up to GPT-4.
andrewstuart 3y ago
If the eu makes those laws then it will exclude itself from all ai development, push ai to other countries, and lead to an ai brain drain. I do think all government should require AI to disclose all the material ingested.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  [flagged]
andrewstuart 3y ago
Google hasn’t cared even slightly about how it has developed a reputation for cancelling projects, leading to developer mistrust of any new Google initiative. It’s going to bite them when they need developers to embrace their ai ecosystem. Their CEO should have been fired years ago.
- fakedang 3y ago
  Honestly, is it Pichai's fault for canceling the projects? Or is it Schmidt's fault for starting them, and for creating that short termism culture in the first place. It could be the case that Pichai is Immelt while Schmidt is the Google Jack Welch.
wslh 3y ago
Courious question: how difficult and expensive is to train these models? Being the technology open source and assuming that we can collaborate on the training phase and have big open training sets, what will be the competitive advantage of companies such Google beyond the brand?
- criddell 3y ago
  Google scanned 25 million books. That has to help them at least a little.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - wslh 3y ago
    But it is possible to crawl Internet in a distributed way. Also Wikipedia is a treasure.
    - criddell 3y ago
      That's all true, but everybody has access to that. None of that is scarce so the value is basically 0. You asked for advantages that Google has and the text of 25 million books is one thing. A lot of the text is going to be scarce and so it's something of value Google has and others do not. Google also has built a massive GIS database from driving their cars around the world. Apple has a smaller database and there are some third parties (like ESRI) that will sell you access to their database. If you want to ask an AI something about your neighborhood, Google has more data than anybody on that front.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Courious question: how difficult and expensive is to train these models? Being the technology open source and assuming that we can collaborate on the training phase and have big open training sets, what will be the competitive advantage of companies such Google beyond the brand? Zero to none? I mean, it's much much much easier for collaborators to produce better (or even competitive) map data than training LLMs, and yet the open alternatives to google maps are hardly ever used, have spotty data for some locations and have made no compelling feature for user's to adopt.
spiralpolitik 3y ago
Google right now are Netscape in 1997. They see AI in the rear view mirror. They think it’s going to eat their primary revenue stream. The question is are they going to keep staring in the rear view mirror and go over the cliff or can they reinvent themselves? Given that Google still gets the vast majority of its revenue from search its hard to see that this doesn’t cause then a huge amount of pain. I suspect they’ve made the mistake of not starting to cannibalize their revenue stream and now it might be too late. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
PaulHoule 3y ago
Google’s problem is that if it wanted to not break its current business model it would need a chatbot that answers whatever the highest bidder desires. The fast pace of ‘internet time’ means Amazon, AOL, Facebook and Google can follow the trajectory of Ford, AMC, Chrysler, and GM in a fraction of the time. Amazon was a leader in e-commerce once, now they count on someone who subscribed to Prime for the last 15 years to subscribe for the next 15 years. Google search used to be good, but now it is corrupt. Search for a ‘used Honda Fit’ and the first search result is an ad from the one car dealer that owns all the new car dealerships in town for new cars and even though they presumably have used cars in their lot, they’ll try to sell you the same CR-V they’d try to sell you in person. I’d accept any kind of ad from someone who is selling what i am buying but Google aids and abets numerous acts of brand destruction every day. They know how to walk the line of running a corrupt ads engine and not get anybody arrested but it is an unsolved problem in A.I. ethics to get away with running a corrupt chatbot —- and that is why Google is in so much trouble.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  To be honest... it actually would be entirely unsurprising and perfectly workable for Google to sell off the top AI answers. Something along the lines of Your query: "Google, show me the best place to eat in manhattan" "Bard's partners at Manhattan steakhouse are known for their delicious chargrilled steaks. Other options include..." Sure, Google won't do that today, but they didn't do ads at the top of search for a while... until they did.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Google promised never to blend the ads with the content back in the “don’t be evil” days. Their first ad product was simple text ads that went on the side of the search results that maybe left some dollars on the table but actually kept the table open by looking squeaky clean legitimate. Google has a massive valuation because whenever Wall Street demands “M0R M0NEY!” they can just increase the ad load. The thing is they and their investors depend on every penny of ad revenue they get and any innovation that reduces it, even just a little bit, is an absolute disaster for them. That’s why it is a ‘disruptive’ technology to Google…. It eats their lunch right now and the possibility they might be able increase their ad load someday doesn’t make up for losing it. I mean, shareholders can hit the SELL button and run in as much time as it takes me to write this sentence.
mFixman 3y ago
From my experiences with Google integrated AI, I'm skeptical that Google can win any battle with it. ChatGPT and other modern AI tools are useful specifically because they do what I want when I want to do it. Compare this to Gmail's smart compose: by the time the AI makes a suggestion I'm already half-way through typing that text, so its prediction is completely useless even if it's correct. (Also, I really enjoy the random historical rambling at the end of some Stratechery articles).
s1k3s 3y ago
Speaking of "AI Battles", the conversation I'd like to see more is about how these 2 giants are crushing entire industries in their search for higher stock prices. Far more interesting than Bard vs. ChatGPT imo.
anonyfox 3y ago
I think the main battle for google will be that corpus poisoning might be the new SEO - wait for it!
- pphysch 3y ago
  What differentiates second-degree corpus poisoning from first-degree advertising?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chimen 3y ago
On a side note, we're experiencing the death of SEO I believe since content can't be trusted any more and knowledge, expertise and competence is available to everyone that can ask the proper questions.
dahwolf 3y ago
Google is going to be just fine. The most important slide in the article is that Google has 6(!) 2B+ user products. Even if slightly behind in capability, they have superior reach. They'll deeply integrate AI into every part of that stack and this way put it into people's hands. They also have the data, infrastructure, people and capital to make it work. Microsoft has little consumer push (no mobile presence) hence they will likely dominate in the business market. Integrating it into Office, private training on company data, etc. Apple is the big mystery. Supposedly the big consumer-facing competitor to Google but very little is known about what's coming from them. Honestly, I'm quite convinced they're in panic mode as well, they just hide it better.
- magarnicle 3y ago
  It's really 5 products: would the Play store have 2B users if it didn't come with Android?
  - dahwolf 3y ago
    You can say the same thing about Chrome. Irrespective, doesn't matter how the numbers came to be, they're massive opportunities to integrate AI into.
wasabinator 3y ago
Should have just called it Google A/I this year

200 points by Amorymeltzer 3y ago

Google's brand is only bested by Apple in the minds of consumers. They will never go away. It doesn't matter if ChatGPT or anything else comes along - 95% of the billions of daily Google users will wait for Google's version. I am honestly surprised that the Alphabet market cap hasn't reached $2T yet.

throwuxiytayq 3y ago
Waiting for a Google product to start working well (or to start respecting you as a user) isn’t a strategy that gets you very far these days.
samwillis 3y ago
> I am honestly surprised that the Alphabet market cap hasn't reached $2T yet. Because online advertising, particularly search ads, are working less well for advertisers and regulators are pushing for more changes. The vast majority of Google revenue comes from an industry that is facing massive risks. On top of that I don't think it's clear that "AI" in search will help Google sell advertising or increase revenue. It's also likely to bring them under even more scrutiny from regulators. In many ways AI is harder to sell ads against, Google is payed when people leave the page via a click on an ad. That doesn't happen when Google is summarising the content. Microsoft/Bing have found a brilliant way to attack Google, build a product that they have to copy that (potentially) decimates ad revenue.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > Microsoft/Bing have found a brilliant way to attack Google, build a product that they have to copy that (potentially) decimates ad revenue. Didn't 0-click search as a trend for google search predate bing's changes?
- trasz4 3y ago
  >Google is payed when people leave the page via a click on an ad Not really. The click rate is iirc usually around 5%; I'm not convinced this is much higher than the "noise floor" generated by a human equivalent of drunk racoons. So in practice Google is being paid for displays.
v4dok 3y ago
Google is an advertising business. Can you sell more ads with AI? I would say no. And even if you can, having an automated smart assistant being able to "cut" through the BS is certainly not as good for Google as clicking a bunch of sites trying to battle SEO. However the judge is still out in regards to how much can AI allow Google to squeeze the profit margins of businesses by offering even better conversion rates. Personally, I don't think it will make a big difference, the AI will not make you buy more. I suspect Google makes more money by having multiple companies fight for the same customer than actually making a conversion. IMO best case scenario for Google is to keep their search market. Table stakes is keeping search relevant at all.
- mtrovo 3y ago
  Wouldn't this help google on second order effects tho? I guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to less incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made searching in Google so awful in the past years. Also for queries asking for product recommendation, where ad price is quite high, they could still plug ads into an LLM and have it write a summary back to you similar to what magazines do with sponsored content.
  - trasz4 3y ago
    >I guess having an AI summarizing the web would lead to less incentive to create the type of SEO junk that made searching in Google so awful in the past years. Main part of Google's business is selling infrastructure for that SEO junk, AdWords et al. Sure, you meant the _other_ SEO junk, but from AI point of view both would be noise to be separated from actual content.
- tscherno 3y ago
  Can't they massively improve their ad-targeting by analyzing conversations with the AI?
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    People are already freaked out plenty by the idea that googles products spies on you to sell ads. To start doing it outright will definitely kill uptake of any AI service they provide.
chpatrick 3y ago
That's what we thought about Google Plus. What's the last time Google launched a product that everyone really uses?
- endisneigh 3y ago
  when's the last time any company has launched a product everyone really uses? for the sake of conversation let's say 2 billion+ for everyone.
  - iTokio 3y ago
    ChatGPT
    - oittaa 3y ago
      Not even close to 2B users. Google have probably 10 different products with more than 2B monthly users.
      - raincole 3y ago
        It's very hard to believe. Besides search, Android, Chrome and Gmail are in 2B~4B range. Are there really another 6 products that are ubiquitous as these 3? Google Docs definitely doesn't have 2B monthly users. Some built-in Android apps might be installed on >2B phones, but it doesn't mean they have that many active users.
        rpdillon 3y ago
        The article mentions they have six products with 2 billion users.
        avrionov 3y ago
        Google Search, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Play Store, and YouTube Also Google Maps, Google Photos and Google Drive have more than 1B users.
  - 3y ago
xbmcuser 3y ago
Its because unlike Microsoft and Apple. Google has no real presence in China which keeps it out of one of the world's largest and fast growing economies
silvestrov 3y ago
> They will never go away. History would say otherwise. Look at how quickly Nokia went south. Look at how quickly Google took over from the AltaVista search engine.
- denismenace 3y ago
  The Nokia example makes much more sense in this case since it was an established company. On the other hand AltaVista was on the early days of the internet where everything was much more turbulent.
- fendy3002 3y ago
  Don't think that with GCP and play store it'll be as easy to replace Google though
  - TexanFeller 3y ago
    Compared to AWS, no one uses GCP. Compared to IOS App Store, Play Store doesn't sell any paid apps and subscriptions, only adware.
    - kernal 3y ago
      Google Play 2021 revenue was 48 Billion and 42 Billion in 2022. I suggest you google in the future. Also, I have an iPhone and it's filled with just as much adware, crapware and ridiculous subscription apps.
  - spiralpolitik 3y ago
    You don’t have to replace them. You just need to reduce the income from search based ads by enough to cause them to implode. Hard to fund loss leaders like Android with say 20% less revenue.
    - jsnell 3y ago
      None of us know what the direct profitability of Android is. Given the revenue from Play Store, it at the very least is not obvious that it's a loss-leader. But one thing that is obvious is that having 20% less revenue would not mean Google was unable to work on Android. We know that, because they were able to already fund Android in the distant past of 2021, when their revenue was 20% lower than now. (In fact, they were able to afford Android in 2010, with 90% lower revenue.)
pyrale 3y ago
Really? To me, Google's image is much closer to that of Microsoft : You may hear of them in a few innovative projects, but most of what you know and use from them is boring office stuff, or personal stuff that you take for granted and don't think twice about. Having an Android or using Chrome isn't a personal statement like having an iphone or a macbook is. And in terms of ethics, the perception of them being a force for good eroded a lot. When thinking about the typical googler, people around here will sooner think about an exec trying to skip some tax than about a techie doing innovative stuff, because that's what their media coverage is about these days in Europe. I'll give you that Microsoft is very unlikely to go away either, unless the US govt finally remembers they have antitrust laws.
- oblio 3y ago
  You're a techie (and/or business tech person). Go ask 10 non-tech people what they think of Google.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    Likely the same as they think about fb, microsoft, netflix, amazon-tech, uber, etc: employees are probably handsomely paid, and taxes probably aren't. Actually as a factoid, I recently changed jobs, and got handed an iphone for work. People noticed it and commented on it, whereas a pixel would probably have not raised much attention.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kernal 3y ago
    You mean the same people that use it as a verb? Which is the highest compliment you could give a product and is so rare that companies can only dream about it.
- alphabetting 3y ago
  Youtube and Google are the top two highest favorability brands among gen Z https://archive.is/8Ippr https://archive.is/8Ippr
m0llusk 3y ago
Never is a really long time.
EduardoBautista 3y ago
Some of Google's success comes from being "free". It's not necessarily because consumers believe Google has the best services/products. It's hard for a software company to compete against the largest ad network ever created.
1980phipsi 3y ago
Google does annoy the shit out of me when using it behind a VPN. Constantly asking me to do Captchas. Never have that problem with bing or duckduckgo.
siva7 3y ago
Yeah, that's what Microsoft (Windows era), Xerox, Kodak, IBM (PC era) and so on also thought back then about their own "monopoly" and brand ;)
munchler 3y ago
ChatGPT is the fastest growing application in history. It had 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch. No one is “waiting” for Google’s version.
fomine3 3y ago
On Enterprise, Microsoft >> Google

nixcraft 3y ago

I am curious if there will be a requirement in the future, possibly enforced by the EU or US law, for content such as books, videos, music, PDF files, news articles, or blog posts to be labeled as produced by either a human author or AI. I'm talking about ethical disclosure. While it is uncertain, it is important to be transparent about the content's origins. As we know, AI is here to stay, and it is likely that governments will be the biggest investors (or spenders) in AI technology for military purposes. Despite Bing having a head start, it's unlikely that Google will lose to AI battle to Bing and others. Google's strong brand image and popular properties, such as Gmail, YouTube, Search, Chrome, and Android, used by billions of users daily, give them a significant advantage. It's doubtful that Bing will take over the search market anytime soon. But, who knows? Ha!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
samwillis 3y ago
Just as with labelling for Vegan and Vegitarian food, "Fair Trade" or Organic, there is going to be similar movements in the creative arts for "AI Free" content. So no, I don't believe there will be regulation on labelling "AI" derived content, but there will be a drive to label and certify "organic content".
- zirgs 3y ago
  Cool, then I will know what to avoid. People who boast that their company is <insert identity here> owned do that, because their product can't compete otherwise.
ipsum2 3y ago
It's not clear where to draw the line on what is AI or not, and I suspect most content will be at least partially generated by AI. Is spell-checking AI? grammar-checking? Rewriting sentences for clarity? Summarization?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago

classified 3y ago

The author seems shocked by the demonstration of the difference between marketing and reality at Google.

rvz 3y ago

It just means that lots of these new so-called AI startups using wrappers around AI APIs don't have a moat to go with since these new announcements by Google has effectively destroyed them for free or close to free. It is only going to accelerate and AI research will increasingly be more closed. There is now no difference between O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com or Google DeepMind. Either way it will have to take more than LLMs like 'ChatGPT' to even come close to dethroning Google. [0] There is more to 'AI' than the LLM chatbot hype. [0] https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-growth-flattens/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-gro...

tiniuclx 3y ago

> AI is zero marginal generation of information (well, nearly zero, relative to humans). As I wrote last year generative models unbundle idea creation from idea substantiation, which can then be duplicated and distributed at zero marginal cost. I find this quote a little bit hard to believe. Are the current models genuinely capable of innovation? I've been productive in using image generation for my album covers, but I haven't found a similar use for Large Language Models yet.

magarnicle 3y ago
He didn't mention innovation, just 'idea substantiation' i.e. actually making the end product you have in your head.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

The example of the new EU regulation in the article is a great example of how regulation typically only serves to enable regulatory capture, thereby playing into the same goals of creating a monopoly or duopoly that governments otherwise say they’re opposed to.

nocoiner 3y ago
Regulation “typically only” serves the interests of incumbents? Surely that’s an overstatement, no? Personally I tend to think that the inability to move fast and break things is a good thing when it comes to, say, air travel or food safety.
Seeemi 3y ago
Ah yes the USB regulation which did nothing for the consumers. And the safety regulations which made our products less toxic and less shoking
- oblio 3y ago
  Plus the 40 hour workweek, 2 day weekends, healthcare (not in the US, outlier among developed countries), pensions, equal rights acts, ... Or in the EU, roaming charges removal, flight reimbursement regulations, etc. Heck, speaking of flying, the entire airline industry is regulated up the wazoo and a few years ago we had a full year of metal coffins flying through the skies at 10 000m going 950 kmph without any fatalities.
pavlov 3y ago
This is a popular talking point but it feels ahistorical to me. Was Ralph Nader really working for General Motors all along when he called for more regulation?
- oblio 3y ago
  > Was Ralph Nader really working for General Motors all along when he called for more regulation? You don't get it! Only big companies can make safe cars cheaply, so it was all a big ploy against small car manufacturers. I'm being sarcastic in case someone missed it :-)

Sai_ 3y ago

I read through the full article and the cognitive leaps the author makes are too big for me to follow. It’s like listening to a mad scientist connect totally unrelated (seemingly) events. E.g., I don’t at all understand the linkage between current events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants denoms. Maybe I’m just too dumb to follow this much brilliance.

EGreg 3y ago
Use ChatGPT to make sense of it. In future idiocracy we all will
- mikhasev 3y ago
  Sad but true.
ftxbro 3y ago
> E.g., I don’t at all understand the linkage between current events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants denoms. His point is that LLMs are a disruptive technology at the level of the printing press. The power structure most famously disrupted by the printing press was that of the Catholic Church. EDIT: Yeah this isn't what he's saying. His analogy is more like the major LLM companies like OpenAI or Google are like the Catholic Church which is being disrupted by European regulations which are like the protestants. Or the opposite. He literally says both ways as possibilities. And in this analogy the open models (the refinements of the 'leaked' LLaMa models which can fit on a single GPU) are like the wacky persecuted fringe sects which were exiled to the United States and which he thinks shouldn't be called as either Catholic or Protestant. At the end he says "This is, admittedly, a rather speculative and far-reaching Article" which I have to agree.
- Sai_ 3y ago
  That’s what I thought too but I went and reread that part. He’s saying something else. The American companies like Google/OpenAI (trying to export AI globally) are on one side, opposing them are Europeans (who want AI to be controlled, licensed, and regulated). Together, these two regimes are the Catholic Church and mainstream Protestantism of AI. Opposing both these sides are open source AI models. He calls this group radical reformers like the Amish. Yeah, don’t ask. This much brilliance in way above my pay grade.

PedroBatista 3y ago

The Google AI strategy is to use their weight and flood the market with everything AI so any competitor is either very niche and/or more expensive than "free". Typical big co move. Also the amount of tweets that suddenly popped up on Twitter with the same template of "ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard has launched here 10 tips on how to..". It was clearly a Google marketing push ( scummy as always, but Google have done way worse in the past ). This leads me to believe that Bard is at best OK and has no "AI advantage" over other competitors and it's basically who has the bigger ranch and deeper pockets until everything is dead around them.

wfhBrian 3y ago
> ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard has launched here 10 tips on how to.. As if the spammy AI threads couldn't get worse, they managed to do it.
blululu 3y ago
This seems like attributing intent where there is none. AI hype guys on Twitter work pro bono. Nobody pays them they just shill whatever the latest thing is. Google has no central AI strategy because the company has weak leadership and is largely directionless. The distributed actions of a lot of people does not amount to any concerted plan.
- loudmax 3y ago
  Absolutely this. Google could develop an AI that's superior to GPT-4. They may have already. Under their current leadership, it wouldn't make a difference anyway as they wouldn't know what to do with it. Google is on a fast track to becoming Xerox.
  - anonylizard 3y ago
    Its called Gemini. Google's own mega-multimodal model. Google merged google brain and deepmind to start developing Gemini. All the talent left at Google to go all in on this. The other AI products at google were just polishing up their old stuff to hastily release. Gemini is their real attempt at catching up to GPT-4.

andrewstuart 3y ago

If the eu makes those laws then it will exclude itself from all ai development, push ai to other countries, and lead to an ai brain drain. I do think all government should require AI to disclose all the material ingested.

flagrant_taco 3y ago
[flagged]

andrewstuart 3y ago

Google hasn’t cared even slightly about how it has developed a reputation for cancelling projects, leading to developer mistrust of any new Google initiative. It’s going to bite them when they need developers to embrace their ai ecosystem. Their CEO should have been fired years ago.

fakedang 3y ago
Honestly, is it Pichai's fault for canceling the projects? Or is it Schmidt's fault for starting them, and for creating that short termism culture in the first place. It could be the case that Pichai is Immelt while Schmidt is the Google Jack Welch.

wslh 3y ago

Courious question: how difficult and expensive is to train these models? Being the technology open source and assuming that we can collaborate on the training phase and have big open training sets, what will be the competitive advantage of companies such Google beyond the brand?

criddell 3y ago
Google scanned 25 million books. That has to help them at least a little.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wslh 3y ago
  But it is possible to crawl Internet in a distributed way. Also Wikipedia is a treasure.
  - criddell 3y ago
    That's all true, but everybody has access to that. None of that is scarce so the value is basically 0. You asked for advantages that Google has and the text of 25 million books is one thing. A lot of the text is going to be scarce and so it's something of value Google has and others do not. Google also has built a massive GIS database from driving their cars around the world. Apple has a smaller database and there are some third parties (like ESRI) that will sell you access to their database. If you want to ask an AI something about your neighborhood, Google has more data than anybody on that front.
lelanthran 3y ago
> Courious question: how difficult and expensive is to train these models? Being the technology open source and assuming that we can collaborate on the training phase and have big open training sets, what will be the competitive advantage of companies such Google beyond the brand? Zero to none? I mean, it's much much much easier for collaborators to produce better (or even competitive) map data than training LLMs, and yet the open alternatives to google maps are hardly ever used, have spotty data for some locations and have made no compelling feature for user's to adopt.

spiralpolitik 3y ago

Google right now are Netscape in 1997. They see AI in the rear view mirror. They think it’s going to eat their primary revenue stream. The question is are they going to keep staring in the rear view mirror and go over the cliff or can they reinvent themselves? Given that Google still gets the vast majority of its revenue from search its hard to see that this doesn’t cause then a huge amount of pain. I suspect they’ve made the mistake of not starting to cannibalize their revenue stream and now it might be too late. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Google’s problem is that if it wanted to not break its current business model it would need a chatbot that answers whatever the highest bidder desires. The fast pace of ‘internet time’ means Amazon, AOL, Facebook and Google can follow the trajectory of Ford, AMC, Chrysler, and GM in a fraction of the time. Amazon was a leader in e-commerce once, now they count on someone who subscribed to Prime for the last 15 years to subscribe for the next 15 years. Google search used to be good, but now it is corrupt. Search for a ‘used Honda Fit’ and the first search result is an ad from the one car dealer that owns all the new car dealerships in town for new cars and even though they presumably have used cars in their lot, they’ll try to sell you the same CR-V they’d try to sell you in person. I’d accept any kind of ad from someone who is selling what i am buying but Google aids and abets numerous acts of brand destruction every day. They know how to walk the line of running a corrupt ads engine and not get anybody arrested but it is an unsolved problem in A.I. ethics to get away with running a corrupt chatbot —- and that is why Google is in so much trouble.

SilverBirch 3y ago
To be honest... it actually would be entirely unsurprising and perfectly workable for Google to sell off the top AI answers. Something along the lines of Your query: "Google, show me the best place to eat in manhattan" "Bard's partners at Manhattan steakhouse are known for their delicious chargrilled steaks. Other options include..." Sure, Google won't do that today, but they didn't do ads at the top of search for a while... until they did.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Google promised never to blend the ads with the content back in the “don’t be evil” days. Their first ad product was simple text ads that went on the side of the search results that maybe left some dollars on the table but actually kept the table open by looking squeaky clean legitimate. Google has a massive valuation because whenever Wall Street demands “M0R M0NEY!” they can just increase the ad load. The thing is they and their investors depend on every penny of ad revenue they get and any innovation that reduces it, even just a little bit, is an absolute disaster for them. That’s why it is a ‘disruptive’ technology to Google…. It eats their lunch right now and the possibility they might be able increase their ad load someday doesn’t make up for losing it. I mean, shareholders can hit the SELL button and run in as much time as it takes me to write this sentence.

mFixman 3y ago

From my experiences with Google integrated AI, I'm skeptical that Google can win any battle with it. ChatGPT and other modern AI tools are useful specifically because they do what I want when I want to do it. Compare this to Gmail's smart compose: by the time the AI makes a suggestion I'm already half-way through typing that text, so its prediction is completely useless even if it's correct. (Also, I really enjoy the random historical rambling at the end of some Stratechery articles).

s1k3s 3y ago

Speaking of "AI Battles", the conversation I'd like to see more is about how these 2 giants are crushing entire industries in their search for higher stock prices. Far more interesting than Bard vs. ChatGPT imo.

anonyfox 3y ago

I think the main battle for google will be that corpus poisoning might be the new SEO - wait for it!

pphysch 3y ago
What differentiates second-degree corpus poisoning from first-degree advertising?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

chimen 3y ago

On a side note, we're experiencing the death of SEO I believe since content can't be trusted any more and knowledge, expertise and competence is available to everyone that can ask the proper questions.

dahwolf 3y ago

Google is going to be just fine. The most important slide in the article is that Google has 6(!) 2B+ user products. Even if slightly behind in capability, they have superior reach. They'll deeply integrate AI into every part of that stack and this way put it into people's hands. They also have the data, infrastructure, people and capital to make it work. Microsoft has little consumer push (no mobile presence) hence they will likely dominate in the business market. Integrating it into Office, private training on company data, etc. Apple is the big mystery. Supposedly the big consumer-facing competitor to Google but very little is known about what's coming from them. Honestly, I'm quite convinced they're in panic mode as well, they just hide it better.

magarnicle 3y ago
It's really 5 products: would the Play store have 2B users if it didn't come with Android?
- dahwolf 3y ago
  You can say the same thing about Chrome. Irrespective, doesn't matter how the numbers came to be, they're massive opportunities to integrate AI into.

wasabinator 3y ago

Should have just called it Google A/I this year