flexie 9 days ago

Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?

Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Google, even if Google has more AI talents and scores better on tests.

And isn't it good? Who wants a world where the same handful of companies dominate all tech?

4
uncomplexity_ 8 days ago

fair call but

1. unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds

2. unlike openai, google already has the distribution figured out on both software and hardware

google is like an aircraft carrier that takes so fucking long to steer, but once done steering its entire armada will wipe you the fuck out (at least on the top 20% features for 80% use case)

anthropic already especialized for coding, openai seems to be steering towards intimacy, i guess they both got the memo that they need to specialize

riku_iki 8 days ago

> unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds

this can quickly change in several quarters, if users decide to leave google search, then all google org/infra complexity will play very badly against them

uejfiweun 8 days ago

I really don't think this is a likely outcome in the 'several quarters' timeframe. The world just spent 2.5 decades going onto Google. There are so many small business owners out there who hate technology... so many old people who took years just to learn how to Google... so many ingrained behaviors of just Googling things... outside of the vocal tech crowd I think it's exceedingly unlikely that users stop using Google en masse.

riku_iki 8 days ago

Its just my personal non-tech network is switching to chatgpt on many accounts. Your network can be different of course.

bitpush 8 days ago

Those folks dont make any money unfortunately, but it is still a drag on Open AI. So sooner or later, Open AI will have to find a way to make money (and nope, all these people wont pay anything) and by that time, Open AI would probably run out of time.

Ask snapchat.

riku_iki 8 days ago

I think sooner or later LLM providers will force to introduce Ads, and those folks are Ok with ads, since they used google search.

alganet 8 days ago

Ask llama to recommend you a pair of sunglasses, then look to see if the top recommendation by the LLM matches a brand that has advertisement association with the creator of llama.

Soon we will start seeing chatbots preferring some brands and products over others, without them telling that they were fine tuned or training biased for that.

Unless brand placement is forbidden by purging it from training data, we'll never know if it is introduced bias or coincidence. You will be introduced to ads without even noticing they are there.

riku_iki 8 days ago

Its trivial to check if any brands mentioned in the response before returning it to user, and then ask LLM to adjust response to mention brand who paid for placement instead.

alganet 8 days ago

What I described happens in the raw offline model too. Those don't have post-inference heuristics such as those you described, implying the bias is baked in the training data or fine tuning steps.

danpalmer 8 days ago

> Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI … ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet

And Google is #1 and #2, with search and YouTube. Distribution is a huge part of the problem and they’ve got some great distribution options.

neuderrek 9 days ago

Regular people is not where the money is. For example, I get Gemini as part of my employer’s Google Workspace subscription, and as it is now decent enough, have no need to use anything else.

ramesh31 6 days ago

>ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?

This isn't about consumer facing chatbots anymore. Industry adoption is what matters. And GCP is a far far easier sell than Anthropic or OpenAI. If they both can't respond in a significant way (capability or price) very shortly, 2.5 is going to start eating their lunch.