It's interesting to read the comments and then look at Slack vs Microsoft Teams. Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Google has huge scale distribution on all levels. When the time comes they'll put out the right product and it will scale to millions upon millions of users within a very short time span. The quality of the experience will also be vastly superior. Google's at a stage where they're not about making speculative moves or putting out half baked products because it's just not worth it. That's the nature of big companies with a brand, reputation and scale. Look at Apple, you're not seeing terrible product launches, they take their time and do it right. Honestly, I don't think this is a one horse market, many players will be in the game, just like other markets. They don't need to be #1 and probably won't be, but it will be a quality product that either drives a new search format or a revenue stream for other things e.g plugs into services you already use, increases usage, adoption and costs.
Could they acquire an OpenAI competitor, maybe, but anti-trust is a pretty big problem right now. It's most likely that we're just going the route of everyone copying the form factor and whoever has the best experience/data and speed of response wins.
Google made lots of half baked products before and terminated them when they didn't work as expected (https://killedbygoogle.com/).
I agree with some of your points regarding scalability and add the fact that Transformer architecture (which GPT-3 was trained on) was created at Google. They also have all the data in the world to train a better model.
If you look at the history of companies that failed to adapt to new technology then you see that it is mostly when the new technology requires a significantly different organisation. For example, digital cameras are a very different beast from old analogue cameras. For Google+, that isn't Googles expertise either. Google is full of scientists and algorithm nerds, creating engaging experience or understanding social was never their strong suit.
In Google and ChatGPT's case, a chat bot that functions like an answering machine needs almost exactly the same kind of people, infrastructure and workflows as their current search team. Google could at anytime decide to make those work on a ChatGPT clone, and that would be supported by all of their search pipelines and data models and release workflows they designed for search.
Will chat make less money than search? Probably. But search isn't such a large part of Google, worst case Google will have to kill some more side projects.
> Slack was the clear leader in at-work group messaging, people thought it was a run away success and then Teams basically obliterated it. Google has huge scale distribution on all levels. When the time comes they'll put out the right product and it will scale to millions upon millions of users within a very short time span. The quality of the experience will also be vastly superior.
That is certainly what happened for Google Plus – who even remembers Facebook now?
Google hasn’t shipped a big success since the 2000s, with G+ and the Reader shutdown marking the end of the period when they built things which were good for users rather than what their executives wanted to sell ads. It’s possible that this could be the big reversal but given how much worse search has become I’m skeptical that they can do so without different managers at ggd top.
Counterpoint to “chromecast as successful product”, I’ve been given/gifted in promotional stuff… more physical chromecast dongle/devices… than the number of times I’ve ever used a chromecast.
I use Apple and iOS devices because I have to do iOS development for work… I use Linux and Windows where they make sense and I live a cross platform lifestyle… but I think I’ve actively used a chromecast once in my entire life, because it’s never been better than plugging my own shit into a hdmi port with a cable from my bag…
Whats the point beyond TVs that aren’t smart? (Mine isn’t smart… but I’ve got an Apple TV as a dev device for testing.)
Is there a point beyond that? I’m genuinely curious as someone that’s given away literally a dozen chromecast dongles because I give zero fucks about the Google ecosystem of lock in garbage that might be abandoned tomorrow… oh and fuck attaching physical spyware dongles to my home network… cannot emphasise that enough.
i personally loved stadia. as a linux guy i got to play AAA games, got a sweet controller, all for free! thanks google!
seriously though they have just been building their base while also trying to grow. they do have a bit of a short attention span regarding growing though. if you don't catch on like gmail yer gone.
They totally ignored the experience of other gaming platform holders.
It took a generation for xbox to "catch on". It really took off only in x360 era and later. Imagine if the xbox was killed off in 2004.
Stadia was shut down after 3 years and first party devs were laid off even earlier. That's completely insane - it takes years to develop proper AAA games.
Just look what SONY first party studios are doing. Imagine if Naughty Dog was dissolved after 3 years.
The Wii U was weak, but Nintendo didn't leave gamedev business. They learned from their mistakes and the Switch became a huge success.
PSNow streaming service is still running just fine and SONY doesn't plan to shut it down. So game streaming business model is certainly viable.
It seems like that Google didn't even try to make Stadia a success.
Teams won because like you said, MSFT was able to bundle it into their existing products and make it almost free vs slack which is expensive at like 12 plus dollars per user.
However it is not a superior product to Slack. It has a lot of basic issues.
However Google could probably do better. My hope is they add it to G cloud.
I want to have a simpler way to deploy infra without needing to fuck with yaml and know a million AWS specific things. Gcloud is already a decent experience compared to AWS, and maybe it can be even better if spinning up instances can be made so easy that a product manager can just ask to have a build ready to have feature demo for a customer without needing engineers to do anything prior . Let them focus on building and have Gcloud robust enough to handle it well.
Consider the possibility that Google is politically incapable of launching an advanced AI that disrupts its only real cash cow, search. If they were to launch this perfected GPT clone, what if their Adsense revenues dropped by 10x? Monetizing GPT at Google level is a complete unknown and it may never be as profitable as adsense.
I think it's unknown in the sense that its unknown what it will look like in principle. But some kind of thorough monetization is inevitable. Those GPUs don't pay for themselves!
And it's not that hard to imagine at all: ChatGPT as it is shows how much coercing out and baking in certain things into a model can create a pretty serious product--the whole thing is honestly begging for ad injections.
In general we live very far away from a world where these things aren't immediately going to be bastardized for profit, however well it "works" to do that. Even if this was all truly revolutionary, it wouldn't be worth it if it doesn't extract money from consumers, it wouldn't even count as "revolutionary" in the way we use that word these days. There is no hope for a non-adsensed ChatGPT, thinking otherwise is like wondering if the sun will rise tomorrow. Maybe it wont be OpenAI, or Google, but whatever it is, it will rise to the top.
In general, there will never be a technology in our world that can achieve much through solely its own merits, it can only ever succeed by virtue of how efficiently it can turn around money. We are in a small honeymoon right now, but don't forget the rules!
HN people see politics behind everything these days, which is sad, because in this instance the business reasons are so obvious that it makes these comments sound like 4chan rants.
ChatGPT is slowing down at its current scale. The scale on day one for Google or Apple will be elephantine compared to the scale at ChatGPT right now. Someone has to engineer a credible solution to those issues.
Then there's legal.
And don't even get me started on UX and monetization. For Google, there has to be some way to monetize this before you butcher your market. And believe me, Google has a lot of very smart people searching for a monetization model. It really is just not as easy as people are making it out to be.
Ex:
"Sure, I can answer that question! [But first, were you aware that 9 out of 10 americans surveyed prefer Fruit of the Loom brand underwear? We weren't! That's why we sent our designers undercover in public restrooms to yada yada yada for 4 more sentences. Click here to learn more!]
Now, on the question of sigmoid vs relu, [Remember to watch Last of Us! Now streaming on HBO Max! blah blah blah] in most back propaga....
Nope. The entire hiring system was not to hire people like that. They need some “street smarts” / “cowboys” - but these people did not pass Google interviews. Or they were not able to prosper at Google.
With no actual experience of having worked at Google, this is exactly my sense. They hire tons of engineering and other talent but not enough people who can figure out how to build something the market wants.
Or even if such people are hired, they aren’t empowered to the extent that they can impact the company.
They’ll just use Google’s (or whoever’s) chatbot, but pipe it through another LLM that detects and removes ads, or highlights product placement or something
Slack is time sink because it's not task focused. MS Teams users' approach of creating mostly small dedicated or task-related adhoc chat groups is a better format, even if the tool itself doesn't have all the bells and whistles of slack.
Chat isn't designed for project management, but your average slack user thinks that if everyone vents their opinions that somehow a consensus will develop - but more often than not, nothing gets done.
Teams is Conway’s law in action. It’s like SharePoint vs wiki. Everyone here should be thankful for ms teams, it lets one quickly gauge whether or not a business is an actual threat.
Teams is probably the better pan-company tool if interested in preventing cross-company discussions and a new culture from forming. I wouldn’t say that everyone with experience has a preference for that kind of operation.
OpenAI went for the lowest hanging fruit and got a lot of credit (and money) for it. Creating a competing large deep neural network isn't hard and I guess it will soon be too available because of Google. Remember when OCR was the hottest thing and we got the best version of it for free in Google docs.
Teams is atrocious and it sells only because companies go all in on M$.
I don't think expect Google to provide something better than openai, they will likely provide something just because everyone else is doing it, but I think openai will keep a technological edge, purely because of the people they have
Could they acquire an OpenAI competitor, maybe, but anti-trust is a pretty big problem right now. It's most likely that we're just going the route of everyone copying the form factor and whoever has the best experience/data and speed of response wins.