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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Google is stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire. They foolishly derive 50+% of their income from search, where there is no longer a moat.

The golden goose is cooked.

Edit: It's quite possible that anyone will be able to enter this race right now and build LLM silos for their own domain. This cracks monolithic search wide open.

GameFaqs becomes ChatGG, where you can ask, "How do I beat Ridley for the second time in Metroid Prime?"

Etc.

Websites will become less of a thing. All the people building websites will switch to building AI products.

If traffic to Google leaves by X%, they've lost. Now there are lots of new destinations.

The race is on, and apex tech companies are not the only ones that can win. Google, in fact, has to sacrifice its most important product to come out alive. That's dangerous.

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Too early to say. Microsoft has to execute well, as a first-mover, while Google has to fail to execute. This could easily blow up in Microsoft's face (infrastructure failure or safety/correctness issues), or Google could put out a peer product and win simply due to existing momentum in search.

> Google could put out a peer product and win simply due to existing momentum in search.

This is the likely outcome, but I don't see how it's anything but an utter disaster for Google. The only way for chatbots to monetize at the rate google is currently monetizing search is by the responses themselves being ads. Would people use such a product or would they reject in favor of a product that has simple banner ads? I think the answer is clear. Even if Google retained 99.9% market share in search their revenue would nosedive and their expenses would surely skyrocket with the amount of compute required to run these models.

If I were an advertiser, I would be keenly interested in how my client's products can be embedded into natural-sounding AI conversation. That is an extraordinary valuable innovation and Google can charge accordingly.

Meanwhile, MS has a lot of catching up to do in the ad space.

I don't see how such a product gains any footing in the market when Bing is over there not putting ads in the chatbot itself and just showing some banners. I certainly would instantly switch away from google if they released that.

1) If Google can't afford it, how does Microsoft?

2) The deployment of ads would be subtle and hard to detect. To use the example from the announcement, when someone asks "give me a 5 day itinerary for Mexico", you would prioritize suggesting locations or activities that are backed by ad spend. The end user has no way of knowing, they just asked an open-ended question.

1) If google goes from making .1 cents to .05 cents per search they've got big, big existentially sized problems. If microsoft does they're extremely happy to have users at all.

2) This might work for a while, but I refuse to believe people are that dumb. They'd find out eventually.

1) Fair.

2) The masses aren't remotely aware of how their ideas and behaviors have been manipulated by PR experts for their entire lives, and that isn't about to change.

Big difference between "don't care" and "uninformed". I don't care that google is advertising to me in the way they currently do, I would if all the responses were ads though, or if I wasn't able to tell what is from what isn't.

>...or if I wasn't able to tell what is from what isn't.

That's exactly my assertion, that the average person has no idea how the bulk of their opinions and behaviors have been suggested to them by a handful of media conglomerates and other powerful organizations.

“After you dismember the body and put the bagged parts in the trunk of your new Chevy Bolt (_finance now for $0 down and $300/mo_), use Simple Green(R) to thoroughly clean the floor. Then stop at an _Electrify America_ chargers to top up to 80% in just 15 minutes before dropping the bagged parts at _Waste Management_ (for 15% off _click here_)

Lol.

In this new world, building Google-like products will be easy, which is the most threatening problem for Google.

Some like to point at the resources required to build training sets -- and moreover -- to train, yet open source efforts will not lag in any area except for product deployment. And there will be a host of companies willing to solve for that.

The product with the fewest ads and best results will win. A monumental problem for Google.

Rumor is that google will be deploying an 8 billion parameter version of lamda for their competitor, compared to the 176 Billion parameters used for GPT3.5. If that holds true, they might have already fatally fumbled the execution.

If it means average latency is 100ms instead of 1s or whatever the huge GPT model can currently serve to millions of content users, that matters a lot for search.

But Google is also adding ChatGPT-like functionality? This seems like a pretty premature declaration.

You're right in one respect; it's the Innovator's Dilemma. It's how monopolies have historically been weakened and eventually destroyed. I don't think we've seen enough actual leadership (aside from simple rent-seeking) from Google, and I'm not even sure the erstwhile thought leaders haven't already left the building and been replaced by people who are more concerned with stock prices and DEI than with actual innovation.

On the other hand, Google is still an incredibly formidable force, and it would be incredibly foolish for any prospective competitor (even in an adjacent field like AI) to ignore them. But, lest you be too freaked out: just remember Google Stadia.

Getting users to switch from an ingrained habit is hard. I wouldn't write things off so fast.

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