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Microsoft Discussed Selling Bing to Apple as Google Replacement
- mobilio 3y agohttps://archive.md/T4SsU https://archive.md/T4SsU
- UpToTheSky 3y agoWhy does neither Microsoft nor Google nor Apple take the lead and offer free LLM answers like Google offers free search results? Is that because there are simply not enough GPUs out there to do this at scale? If so, it will become really interesting once that constraint goes away. There might be a shift in the search space like there was a shift from analog to digital photography.
- bayindirh 3y agoGetting results from a LLM with no guarantee of correctness is like computational photography. It looks nice, but that thing is not real. Instead, I'm using Kagi, and feeding it old school search queries. Which provides me results I want in the first three slots, all the time. Why fix something ain't broken?
- ddalex 3y agoWho cares what's real if it's useful? We use all the times fictions that are not "real" but are useful, such as law codes, corporations, religions, etc.
- hcks 3y agoI hope Harari appreciators will one day realise that social constructs are real too
- bayindirh 3y agoWhen you're doing scientific research, or looking for public transport; the difference can decide your career's future or likelihood of you going home at night.
- ddalex 3y agocareers are just social constructs; and I've not seen yet Google maps fail to find me a public transport
- bayindirh 3y ago> careers are just social constructs; Well, too bad that that social construct supplies you the tokens that allows you to buy food. Or do you imply that food is not real, because everything leading to it is also unreal, even if it's physical (e.g.: money). If that's the case, try to survive without it for a couple of months. > and I've not seen yet Google maps fail to find me a public transport This is because Google Maps doesn't use LLMs, but standard and deterministic indexing methods working on hard data provided by governments.
- detourdog 3y agoSearch wasn't broken Google needed a business plan and chose web ads. That is what broke search. The bifurcation of interests between selling ads and serving search results.
- diffeomorphism 3y agoObvious answer: because it is too expensive to offer it for "free". Even if you had the GPUs, compute and electricity cost money: https://medium.com/@zodhyatech/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-consume-4cba1a7aef85 https://medium.com/@zodhyatech/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-...
- guidedlight 3y agoYouTube made a loss for many years because the storage and data costs were vastly higher than their revenue, despite offering the product for free.
- edgyquant 3y agoThose were very different market conditions though
- mrweasel 3y agoEven if there's enough GPUs they also needs to be available at a cost that makes it financially viable, both in terms of purchasing price, but also power and cooling. Environmentally it might not look to good to offer LLM answers to a wider audience, there are already concerns about the water consumption of ChatGPT in some regions, see: https://fortune.com/2023/09/09/ai-chatgpt-usage-fuels-spike-in-microsoft-water-consumption/ https://fortune.com/2023/09/09/ai-chatgpt-usage-fuels-spike-...
- guiriduro 3y agoMicrosoft does offer "Bing Chat" (derived from ChatGPT) integrated in their Edge browser, effectively free.
- alberth 3y agoSeems like a fairly simple business decision for Apple. They are receiving $19B in annual revenue today by having Google as default search engine (which is all profit for them). Or they could spend billions on the acquisition of Bing + more billions annually to run Bing. Spending huge sums of money. Or receiving huge sums of money. Which would you prefer?
- aka878 3y agoWhat about the long term, the opportunity cost, the billions/trillions they are not making by helping someone else make it?
- wslh 3y agoWe should also add a plausible hypothesis where search engines are partially replaced by other interfaces, such as LLMs prompts. In that case we are in front of the innovators dilemma for Google and Apple just need to wait until the sky clears, think again, and act.
- TradingPlaces 3y agoDoJ says $4-$7b, which Apple disputes.
- Illniyar 3y agoSimple it is not. Google is apple's main competitor and building an actual rival might be extremely beneficial for them. Google supposedly makes more money from this arrangement then the spend, which means of apple can run a successful search engine they can take more of the profit. Apple has loads of cash which they look for ways to invest, Google shows that search engine can be an immensely valuable investment. Obviously there are other concerns, chief being consumer sentiment here I imagine.
- afavour 3y agoI don’t think it’s quite that simple. Google are, after all, Apple’s biggest competitor in the mobile space and Android has Google search deeply integrated. By comparison Apple’s Google search integration is always going to look inferior, it would make sense if they sought to bring it all in house.
- drewcon 3y agoApple should rebrand it as “Ask Jobs”
- mrweasel 3y agoThe article makes it a little fuzzy if Apple would have bought Bing outright, taking it completely of Microsofts hands, or if they would have bought access to including it in Apple products. Had Apple bought Bing they'd most likely have taken it private and not offered its search API to others, effectively preventing the creation of search engines like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
- victor106 3y agoUltimately though it’s clear that Google and Microsoft place high value on Apples customers, who are much richer and spend more money than customers using Android or other devices. No company has that kind of user base that Apple has. They do this by designing the best products and services for a very high premium price that attracts those users. It’s remarkable that they can release a phone for $1600.00 (pro max with 1TB storage) and sell millions of them every year.
- gruez 3y ago>It’s remarkable that they can release a phone for $1600.00 (pro max with 1TB storage) and sell millions of them every year. So? The galaxy s23 ultra 1tb has msrp of $1619.99 https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s23-ultra/buy/ https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s23-ultra/buy/
- mathgeek 3y agoIn this case it’s likely the ratio of units sold rather than “millions” that expresses GP’s point. You have a point that Samsung is the only company really competing in this space though. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/08/29/top-10-selling-smartphones-all-from-2-companies-apple-and-samsung/?sh=da2e74857d16 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/08/29/top-10-...
- johnnyworker 3y ago> the best products and services Stuff so great you'd have to pay me to use it. In my books, Apple prices are just a tax on people who are bad with computers and organizing their own stuff in the same way lotteries are a tax on not understanding basic math.
- criddell 3y ago> Apple prices are just a tax on people who are bad with computers That's kind of the beauty of it. You don't have to be good at computers to use Apple devices and get things done. I think people forget that nobody buys a computer because they want to use a computer. They buy one because they want to run Office or GarageBand or Photoshop or Portal etc...
- ColinHayhurst 3y ago"The money generated by the Google deal was a key reason why Apple declined acquiring Bing, according to the people" .... "with knowledge of the matter" At current P/E and an estimated $18bn the deal is worth half a trillion $.
- bsuvc 3y agoIn light of recent AI advancements, deciding not to buy a search engine seems like it might have been a good decision. A lot is going to change in how search, and the associated business model, works in the next few years.
- ColinHayhurst 3y agoOr perhaps not. You may note that yesterday Head of Engineering and Product for Bing said [0]: "Many people ask me whether LLMs will make web search engines less valuable, but the opposite is actually the case. LLMs make web search more critical than ever, since the combination of LLMs + web search is what produces fresher and more accurate chat results." This is true, but what he didn't mention is where the the biggest source of pre-training data is from. This was revealed earlier this week by his colleague Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of Microsoft Ad and Web Services, in the Google antitrust trial. Apparently he revealed "Bing Chat and Google Bard leverage indexes." [1]. A point on which I speculated on back in February [2]. [0] https://twitter.com/JordiRib1/status/1707103407050477772 https://twitter.com/JordiRib1/status/1707103407050477772 [1] https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1706866080130498939 https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1706866080130498939 [2] https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/02/will-chatbots-kill-the-search-star.html https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/02/will-chatbots-kill-the-searc...
- jddj 3y agoWhile valid points, let's not ask the head of engineering and product for a search engine whether search engines have a future as products.
- hackerbeat 3y agoThey don‘t need Bing. They‘re working on their own AI, and AI will replace all search engines. ChatGPT is already slowly but steadily killing Google as we speak.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMore discussion over here earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696992