4 ms·
Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?
by abakker 2mo ago
Wouldn't this be a demonstration of the downsides of the anticompetitiveness of monopolies?
- jaccola 2mo agoWhat is anticompetitive about it? The comment above is literally claiming they’ve been outcompeted.
- SpicyLemonZest 2mo agoNot sure that's the right way to look at it, given that Google's huge head start in capital and talent did not prevent AI competition at all. It's a demonstration of reasonable, non-problematic dynamics between smaller and larger companies. (Of course, there's an implicit risk here, the folks at Cruise probably worked harder and more passionately than Waymo staff too.)
- abakker 2mo agoyou are right. I guess what I was thinking was that google's bigness was essentially a bad capital allocation strategy, since they were lazy and not motivated by absolute return, but some combination of acceptable risk, politics, personal preferences, etc in a large management team that has seemed...disconnected for quite some time. They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability is also a handicap when disruption is the objective.
- SpicyLemonZest 2mo agoIt's a notoriously double edged sword. When you create huge absolute return incentives, you get things like the Airtable acquisition, where everyone's sad that you built a $1.2B company because some investor at some point mistakenly thought it was an $11B company.
- abakker 2mo agoYeah, that makes sense. I suppose the flip side of all of this is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have made a lot of money relative to their spending. Google is probably just trying to be more prudent. But, AI so far is a money spending contest, more than a money making one.