7 ms·

While you are spot on, I cannot avoid thinking of 1996 or so. On one corner: IBM Deep Blue winning vs Kasparov. A world class giant with huge research experien

While you are spot on, I cannot avoid thinking of 1996 or so. On one corner: IBM Deep Blue winning vs Kasparov. A world class giant with huge research experience. On the other corner, Google, a feisty newcomer, 2 years in their life, leveraging the tech to actually make something practical. Is Google the new IBM?

behnamoh 3y ago
google is the new IBM. apple is the new Nokia. openai is the new google. microsoft is the new apple.
- brandall10 3y ago
  How is MS the new Apple? Apple has always been a product company, not seeing MS ever being that.
  - jboy55 3y ago
    Apple is the new Sony might be better. I'm trying to figure out who is the upcoming premium tech product company... not thinking of any. I think Tesla wants to be
    - bozhark 3y ago
      They can’t even get panels to line up right. Still.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      The issue with new premium tech is that you can't over-the-top existing ecosystems (Android, iOS). It's difficult to compete with an excellent product if whether you have a blue bubble in iMessage is more important.
    - sebastiennight 3y ago
      Humane definitely wants to be.
  - alaskamiller 3y ago
    Xbox, Surface. Holo didn't go far. May return back to mobile in some form soon. Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point. Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now. The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Afaict, Windows Phone mostly failed because of timing. In the same way that XBox mostly succeeded because of timing. (In the sense that timing dominated the huge amount of excellent work that went into both) Microsoft is a decent physical product company... they've usually just missed on the strategic timing part.
      - Wazako 3y ago
        It's not a question of timing, but of Microsoft's brand image (Internet Explorer) and the fact that Android was already open source.
        ethbr1 3y ago
        "Open source" in the sense there was open source. Which you could use if you were willing to jettison Maps et al. Given dog eat dog of early Android manufacturers, most couldn't afford to recreate Google services.
        Wazako 3y ago
        By this I mean that Microsoft had the positioning of an iPhone in a not-so-great version. Where as Android relied on the "Open source" and free side for manufacturers to adapt to their phones, even if Google's services remained proprietary. Can we really talk about timing, when it's above all a problem of a product that didn't fit the market?
        brandall10 3y ago
        Timing was definitely an issue - first Windows Phone came 3 years after iOS and 2 after Android. AFA the product itself, I think the perception it needed to overcome was more PocketPC/Windows Mobile having an incredibly substandard image in the market after the iOS release which seemed light years ahead, esp. since MS had that market to themselves for so many years. That said, it got great reviews and they threw $$ at devs to develop for it, just couldn't gain traction. IME it was timing more than anything and by the time it came to market felt more reactionary than truly innovative.
- troupe 3y ago
  > apple is the new Nokia. You obviously haven't dropped an iphone on to concrete. :)
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    When did you last try? I’m too embarrassed to say how often and onto what kind of surfaces my iPhone 12 has been dropped, but I’m amazed it’s still seemingly completely functional. My iPhone 4, on the other hand, shattered after one incident…
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    I was more referring to Nokia's complacency which led to its demise. Nokia was infamous for incremental updates to their phone line, making users upgrade regularly. You could never find a "complete" Nokia phone; each phone was deliberately crippled some how. Apple does the same with their iDevices.
  - LASR 3y ago
    Have you dropped the iPhone 14 Pro? Or 11 Pro? These are literally stainless steel. The 15s with their titanium is a step back. The 11 Pro with its older curved edges has been the most solidly built phone ever IMO.
  - kolinko 3y ago
    Happens to me regularly, I think they reached a level of Nokia a few years back :) I even dropped my iPhone 13 four floors (onto wood), and not a scratch :o
- bionhoward 3y ago
  No, because OpenAI and Microsoft both have “CUSTOMER NONCOMPETE CLAUSES” in their terms of use. I didn’t check Apple, but Google doesn’t have any shady monopolistic stuff like that. Proof OpenAI has this shady monopolistic stuff: https://archive.ph/vVdIC https://archive.ph/vVdIC “What You Cannot Do. You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not: […] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.” (Hilarious how that reads btw) Proof Microsoft has this shady monopolistic stuff: https://archive.ph/N5iVq https://archive.ph/N5iVq “AI Services. ”AI services” are services that are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using, powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.” That 100% does include GitHub Copilot, by the way. I canceled my sub. After I emailed Satya, they told me to post my “feedback” in a forum for issues about Xbox and Word (what a joke). I emailed the FTC Antitrust team. I filed a formal complaint with the office of the attorney general of the state of Washington. I am just one person. You should also raise a ruckus about this and contact the authorities, because it’s morally bankrupt and almost surely unlawful by virtue of extreme unfairness and unreasonableness, in addition to precedent. AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA also all have similar Customer Noncompete Clauses. I meekly suggest everyone immediately and completely boycott OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA, until they remove these customer noncompete clauses (which seem contrary to the Sherman Antitrust Act). Just imagine a world where AI can freely learn from us, but we are forbidden to learn from AI. Sounds like a boring dystopia, and we ought to make sure to avoid it.
  - dash2 3y ago
    Why's it wrong to not let people use your output to build their own services? 1. I wouldn't let someone copy my code written directly by me. Why should I let someone copy the code my machine wrote? 2. There are obvious technical worries about feedback loops.
    - nacs 3y ago
      > Why should I let someone copy the code my machine wrote Because that machine/openAI was built on literally scraping the internet (regardless of copyright or website's ToS) and ingesting printed books.
- pwarner 3y ago
  I have considered Oracle and MS to be competing for the title of new IBM. Maybe MS is shaking it off with their AI innovation, but I think a lot of that is just lipstick.
brokencode 3y ago
I don’t think Google is the same as IBM here. I think Google’s problem is its insanely low attention span. It frequently releases innovative and well built products, but seems to quickly lose interest. Google has become somewhat notorious for killing off popular products. On the other hand, I think IBM’s problem is its finance focus and longterm decay of technical talent. It is well known for maintaining products for decades, but when’s the last time IBM came out with something really innovative? It touted Watson, but that was always more of a gimmick than an actually viable product. Google has the resources and technical talent to compete with OpenAI. In fact, a lot of GPT is based on Google’s research. I think the main things that have held Google back are questions about how to monetize effectively, but it has little choice but to move forward now that OpenAI has thrown down the gauntlet.
- carbocation 3y ago
  > its insanely low attention span. It frequently releases innovative and well built products, but seems to quickly lose interest quickly. Google has become somewhat notorious for killing off popular products. I understood this problem to be "how it manages its org chart and maps that onto the customer experience."
  - dweekly 3y ago
    How it manages its promotions, even moreso than org.
    - halbritt 3y ago
      To add some color to this, the culture for a very long time would reward folks that came up with novel solutions to problems or novel products. These folks would dedicate some effort into the implementation, land the thing, then secure a promo with no regard for the sustainability of the aforementioned solution. Once landed, attention goes elsewhere and the thing is left to languish. This behavior has been observed publicly in the Kubernetes space where Google has contributed substantially.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
OpenAI was at least around in 2017 when YCR HARC was closed down (because...the priority would be OpenAI).
antipaul 3y ago
Hmm, what was that tech from IBM deep blue, that apparently Google leveraged to such a degree? Was it “machine learning”? If so, I don’t think that was actually the key insight for Google search… right? Did deep blue even machine learn? Or was it something else?
- tavavex 3y ago
  Deep Blue was the name of the computer itself rather than the software, but to answer your question - it didn't use machine learning, its program was written and tweaked by hand. It contained millions of different games and positions, and functioned by evaluating all possible moves at a certain depth. As far as I know, practical machine learning implementations wouldn't be a thing for a decent while after Deep Blue.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Wasn't that mostly a hardware problem? Both for research and implementation? Circa-Deep Blue, we were still at Quake levels of SIMD throughput.
tavavex 3y ago
I think the analogy is kind of strained here - at the current stage, OpenAI doesn't have an overwhelming superiority in quality in the same way Google once did. And, if marketing claims are to be believed, Google's Gemini appears to be no publicity stunt. (not to mention that IBM's "downfall" isn't very related to Deep Blue in the first place)
- ethbr1 3y ago
  I'd say IBM's downfall was directly related to failing to monetize Deep Blue (and similar research) at scale. At the time, I believe IBM was still "we'll throw people and billable hours at a problem." They had their lunch eaten because their competitors realized they could undercut IBM on price if they changed the equation to "throw compute at a problem." In other words, sell prebuilt products instead of lead-ins to consulting. And harness advertising to offer free products to drive scale to generate profit. (e.g. Google/search)
  - tavavex 3y ago
    I don't really see how IBM would ever be able to monetize something like Deep Blue. It was a research project that was understood to not be a money-maker (outside of PR, probably), and it resulted in highly specialized hardware running highly specialized software, working for its one purpose. I agree that their business model and catering to big business first is what likely led to them scaling down today, but it's still disconnected from Deep Blue.
- raydev 3y ago
  > OpenAI doesn't have an overwhelming superiority in quality in the same way Google once did The comparison is between a useful shipping product available to everyone for a full year vs a tech demo of an extremely limited release to privileged customers. There are millions of people for whom OpenAI's products are broadly useful, and the specifics of where they fall short compared to Gemini are irrelevant here, because Google isn't offering anything comparable that can be tested.
robbomacrae 3y ago
It's an interesting analogy. I think Googles problem is how disruptive this is to their core products monetization strategy. They have misaligned incentives in how quickly they want to push this tech out vs wait for it to be affordable with ads. Whereas for OpenAI there are no such constraints. Did IBM have research with impressive web reverse indexing tech that they didn't want to push to market because it would hurt their other business lines? It's not impossible... It could be as innocuous as discouraging some research engineer from such a project to focus on something more in line. This is why I believe businesses should be absolutely willing to disrupt themselves if they want to avoid going the way of Nokia. I believe Apple should make a standalone apple watch that cannibalizes their iPhone business instead of tying it to and trying to prop up their iPhone business (ofc shareholders won't like it). Whilst this looks good from Google - I think they are still sandbagging.. why can't I use Bard inside of their other products instead of the silly export thing.

behnamoh 3y ago

google is the new IBM. apple is the new Nokia. openai is the new google. microsoft is the new apple.

brandall10 3y ago
How is MS the new Apple? Apple has always been a product company, not seeing MS ever being that.
- jboy55 3y ago
  Apple is the new Sony might be better. I'm trying to figure out who is the upcoming premium tech product company... not thinking of any. I think Tesla wants to be
  - bozhark 3y ago
    They can’t even get panels to line up right. Still.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    The issue with new premium tech is that you can't over-the-top existing ecosystems (Android, iOS). It's difficult to compete with an excellent product if whether you have a blue bubble in iMessage is more important.
  - sebastiennight 3y ago
    Humane definitely wants to be.
- alaskamiller 3y ago
  Xbox, Surface. Holo didn't go far. May return back to mobile in some form soon. Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point. Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now. The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Afaict, Windows Phone mostly failed because of timing. In the same way that XBox mostly succeeded because of timing. (In the sense that timing dominated the huge amount of excellent work that went into both) Microsoft is a decent physical product company... they've usually just missed on the strategic timing part.
    - Wazako 3y ago
      It's not a question of timing, but of Microsoft's brand image (Internet Explorer) and the fact that Android was already open source.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        "Open source" in the sense there was open source. Which you could use if you were willing to jettison Maps et al. Given dog eat dog of early Android manufacturers, most couldn't afford to recreate Google services.
        Wazako 3y ago
        By this I mean that Microsoft had the positioning of an iPhone in a not-so-great version. Where as Android relied on the "Open source" and free side for manufacturers to adapt to their phones, even if Google's services remained proprietary. Can we really talk about timing, when it's above all a problem of a product that didn't fit the market?
      - brandall10 3y ago
        Timing was definitely an issue - first Windows Phone came 3 years after iOS and 2 after Android. AFA the product itself, I think the perception it needed to overcome was more PocketPC/Windows Mobile having an incredibly substandard image in the market after the iOS release which seemed light years ahead, esp. since MS had that market to themselves for so many years. That said, it got great reviews and they threw $$ at devs to develop for it, just couldn't gain traction. IME it was timing more than anything and by the time it came to market felt more reactionary than truly innovative.
troupe 3y ago
> apple is the new Nokia. You obviously haven't dropped an iphone on to concrete. :)
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  When did you last try? I’m too embarrassed to say how often and onto what kind of surfaces my iPhone 12 has been dropped, but I’m amazed it’s still seemingly completely functional. My iPhone 4, on the other hand, shattered after one incident…
- behnamoh 3y ago
  I was more referring to Nokia's complacency which led to its demise. Nokia was infamous for incremental updates to their phone line, making users upgrade regularly. You could never find a "complete" Nokia phone; each phone was deliberately crippled some how. Apple does the same with their iDevices.
- LASR 3y ago
  Have you dropped the iPhone 14 Pro? Or 11 Pro? These are literally stainless steel. The 15s with their titanium is a step back. The 11 Pro with its older curved edges has been the most solidly built phone ever IMO.
- kolinko 3y ago
  Happens to me regularly, I think they reached a level of Nokia a few years back :) I even dropped my iPhone 13 four floors (onto wood), and not a scratch :o
bionhoward 3y ago
No, because OpenAI and Microsoft both have “CUSTOMER NONCOMPETE CLAUSES” in their terms of use. I didn’t check Apple, but Google doesn’t have any shady monopolistic stuff like that. Proof OpenAI has this shady monopolistic stuff: https://archive.ph/vVdIC https://archive.ph/vVdIC “What You Cannot Do. You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not: […] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.” (Hilarious how that reads btw) Proof Microsoft has this shady monopolistic stuff: https://archive.ph/N5iVq https://archive.ph/N5iVq “AI Services. ”AI services” are services that are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using, powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.” That 100% does include GitHub Copilot, by the way. I canceled my sub. After I emailed Satya, they told me to post my “feedback” in a forum for issues about Xbox and Word (what a joke). I emailed the FTC Antitrust team. I filed a formal complaint with the office of the attorney general of the state of Washington. I am just one person. You should also raise a ruckus about this and contact the authorities, because it’s morally bankrupt and almost surely unlawful by virtue of extreme unfairness and unreasonableness, in addition to precedent. AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA also all have similar Customer Noncompete Clauses. I meekly suggest everyone immediately and completely boycott OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA, until they remove these customer noncompete clauses (which seem contrary to the Sherman Antitrust Act). Just imagine a world where AI can freely learn from us, but we are forbidden to learn from AI. Sounds like a boring dystopia, and we ought to make sure to avoid it.
- dash2 3y ago
  Why's it wrong to not let people use your output to build their own services? 1. I wouldn't let someone copy my code written directly by me. Why should I let someone copy the code my machine wrote? 2. There are obvious technical worries about feedback loops.
  - nacs 3y ago
    > Why should I let someone copy the code my machine wrote Because that machine/openAI was built on literally scraping the internet (regardless of copyright or website's ToS) and ingesting printed books.
pwarner 3y ago
I have considered Oracle and MS to be competing for the title of new IBM. Maybe MS is shaking it off with their AI innovation, but I think a lot of that is just lipstick.

brokencode 3y ago

I don’t think Google is the same as IBM here. I think Google’s problem is its insanely low attention span. It frequently releases innovative and well built products, but seems to quickly lose interest. Google has become somewhat notorious for killing off popular products. On the other hand, I think IBM’s problem is its finance focus and longterm decay of technical talent. It is well known for maintaining products for decades, but when’s the last time IBM came out with something really innovative? It touted Watson, but that was always more of a gimmick than an actually viable product. Google has the resources and technical talent to compete with OpenAI. In fact, a lot of GPT is based on Google’s research. I think the main things that have held Google back are questions about how to monetize effectively, but it has little choice but to move forward now that OpenAI has thrown down the gauntlet.

carbocation 3y ago
> its insanely low attention span. It frequently releases innovative and well built products, but seems to quickly lose interest quickly. Google has become somewhat notorious for killing off popular products. I understood this problem to be "how it manages its org chart and maps that onto the customer experience."
- dweekly 3y ago
  How it manages its promotions, even moreso than org.
  - halbritt 3y ago
    To add some color to this, the culture for a very long time would reward folks that came up with novel solutions to problems or novel products. These folks would dedicate some effort into the implementation, land the thing, then secure a promo with no regard for the sustainability of the aforementioned solution. Once landed, attention goes elsewhere and the thing is left to languish. This behavior has been observed publicly in the Kubernetes space where Google has contributed substantially.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

OpenAI was at least around in 2017 when YCR HARC was closed down (because...the priority would be OpenAI).

antipaul 3y ago

Hmm, what was that tech from IBM deep blue, that apparently Google leveraged to such a degree? Was it “machine learning”? If so, I don’t think that was actually the key insight for Google search… right? Did deep blue even machine learn? Or was it something else?

tavavex 3y ago
Deep Blue was the name of the computer itself rather than the software, but to answer your question - it didn't use machine learning, its program was written and tweaked by hand. It contained millions of different games and positions, and functioned by evaluating all possible moves at a certain depth. As far as I know, practical machine learning implementations wouldn't be a thing for a decent while after Deep Blue.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Wasn't that mostly a hardware problem? Both for research and implementation? Circa-Deep Blue, we were still at Quake levels of SIMD throughput.

tavavex 3y ago

I think the analogy is kind of strained here - at the current stage, OpenAI doesn't have an overwhelming superiority in quality in the same way Google once did. And, if marketing claims are to be believed, Google's Gemini appears to be no publicity stunt. (not to mention that IBM's "downfall" isn't very related to Deep Blue in the first place)

ethbr1 3y ago
I'd say IBM's downfall was directly related to failing to monetize Deep Blue (and similar research) at scale. At the time, I believe IBM was still "we'll throw people and billable hours at a problem." They had their lunch eaten because their competitors realized they could undercut IBM on price if they changed the equation to "throw compute at a problem." In other words, sell prebuilt products instead of lead-ins to consulting. And harness advertising to offer free products to drive scale to generate profit. (e.g. Google/search)
- tavavex 3y ago
  I don't really see how IBM would ever be able to monetize something like Deep Blue. It was a research project that was understood to not be a money-maker (outside of PR, probably), and it resulted in highly specialized hardware running highly specialized software, working for its one purpose. I agree that their business model and catering to big business first is what likely led to them scaling down today, but it's still disconnected from Deep Blue.
raydev 3y ago
> OpenAI doesn't have an overwhelming superiority in quality in the same way Google once did The comparison is between a useful shipping product available to everyone for a full year vs a tech demo of an extremely limited release to privileged customers. There are millions of people for whom OpenAI's products are broadly useful, and the specifics of where they fall short compared to Gemini are irrelevant here, because Google isn't offering anything comparable that can be tested.

robbomacrae 3y ago

It's an interesting analogy. I think Googles problem is how disruptive this is to their core products monetization strategy. They have misaligned incentives in how quickly they want to push this tech out vs wait for it to be affordable with ads. Whereas for OpenAI there are no such constraints. Did IBM have research with impressive web reverse indexing tech that they didn't want to push to market because it would hurt their other business lines? It's not impossible... It could be as innocuous as discouraging some research engineer from such a project to focus on something more in line. This is why I believe businesses should be absolutely willing to disrupt themselves if they want to avoid going the way of Nokia. I believe Apple should make a standalone apple watch that cannibalizes their iPhone business instead of tying it to and trying to prop up their iPhone business (ofc shareholders won't like it). Whilst this looks good from Google - I think they are still sandbagging.. why can't I use Bard inside of their other products instead of the silly export thing.