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> Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue. I don't understand your argument here. Like Chrome and Android, these

> Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue. I don't understand your argument here. Like Chrome and Android, these products exist to establish foothold, precisely so that Microsoft or OpenAI can't take Google's lunch. My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff. All of this will make it harder for OpenAI to maintain moat and stop burning money. Especially when their path to making money is to make LLMs worse (i.e., product placement / ads), while Google has more than enough income to let people enjoy untainted AI products for a very long time. Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear. I'm not saying it's a forgone conclusion, but I think that OpenAI is at a pretty significant disadvantage.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
> My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff. I couldn't disagree more with this statement. So far I've seen companies trying to shoehorn AI into all these existing apps and lots of us hate it. I want Docs to be Docs - even if I'm writing some sort of research paper on a topic, I still don't want to do my research in Docs, because they're two completely separate mental tasks for me. There have been legions of failed attempts to make "everything and the kitchen sink" apps, and they usually suck. > Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear. I'm sure that's true for older people, where Google is "the default", but just look at all the comments in this thread about where younger people/teenagers go first for information. For a lot of these folks ChatGPT is "the default", as as that is Google's big fear, that they will lose a generation of folks who associate "ChatGPT" with "AI" just like a previous generation associated "Google" with "search".
- sagarm 1y ago
  You're absolutely right about ChatGPT's consumer mindshare, and I think a lot of people undervalue that. Having Gemini in docs is useful, though. You can ask questions about the document without copying back and forth and context switching. Plus, it has access to the company's entire corpus, and so can understand company-specific concepts and acronyms. Hell, I had a manager jokingly ask it for a status update meeting for another related project. According to someone actually involved with that project, it actually gave a good answer.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

> My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff. I couldn't disagree more with this statement. So far I've seen companies trying to shoehorn AI into all these existing apps and lots of us hate it. I want Docs to be Docs - even if I'm writing some sort of research paper on a topic, I still don't want to do my research in Docs, because they're two completely separate mental tasks for me. There have been legions of failed attempts to make "everything and the kitchen sink" apps, and they usually suck. > Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear. I'm sure that's true for older people, where Google is "the default", but just look at all the comments in this thread about where younger people/teenagers go first for information. For a lot of these folks ChatGPT is "the default", as as that is Google's big fear, that they will lose a generation of folks who associate "ChatGPT" with "AI" just like a previous generation associated "Google" with "search".

sagarm 1y ago
You're absolutely right about ChatGPT's consumer mindshare, and I think a lot of people undervalue that. Having Gemini in docs is useful, though. You can ask questions about the document without copying back and forth and context switching. Plus, it has access to the company's entire corpus, and so can understand company-specific concepts and acronyms. Hell, I had a manager jokingly ask it for a status update meeting for another related project. According to someone actually involved with that project, it actually gave a good answer.