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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

Yep. If Microsoft somehow overtakes Google from the back with Bing and ChatGPT, it'll be the tech coup of the century. And it's so fascinating how Google's position as an AI think tank put them at a tremendous disadvantage. They didn't cut a deal with OpenAI because why should they? After all, they originated much of the research that led to GPT3. But then they didn't really do anything with it at all because they didn't have to. They were still printing money so effectively with their tried and true search product. They really are a victim of their own success. Frankly, that's how competition is supposed to work. I'm definitely getting a sense of schadenfreude watching all this.

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> they didn't really do anything with it at all because they didn't have to.

They didn't do anything with it because chatbots are unequivocally a worse business model than the current search paradigm. They cost exponentially more to run and are much harder to organically advertise with without scaring away users by making the chat responses themselves ads. If the future of search is chatbots Google is facing existential problems, even if they maintain complete control over the market, because the market size will be drastically smaller.

It reminds me of the Tiktok vs Youtube comparison. Ad revenue was way higher on long format content, but the success of Tiktok means that Youtube now has to pay more to creators, even if their margins are lower. AI as search is lower margin but Google will need to implement it just to stay relevant.

It's really hard to move fast on a Python codebase i think. The solution should be rewriting it .

Tiktok succeeded because it offered something that the public wanted. I don't know that a chat bot is something that the public wants. I know I have no use for it.

Now youtube trying to catch up with Tiktok is ruining their users experience with their 'Shorts' feature. My opinion at least. I wish I could hide shorts and never see them again...

Does anyone know if parental controls can hide shorts? Especially from the mobile toolbar.

I think (Re)Vanced can do it if you are on Android

I take the opinion of the sibling comment. These short form videos are heroin. And as a service provider YouTube needs to offer the number one in-demand product if they want to maintain clientele, even at the cost of their "core" product (medium to long form video).

“There are only two industries that refer to their customers as ‘users’, one is of course IT, the other is the illegal drugs trade.” — Edward Tufte

"The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

-- William S Burroughs

TikTok is like heroin. Sure there’s a market for it but it’s not a particularly great thing to provide.

A chatbot like chatGPT actually has a great potential to be useful for accomplishing real tasks.

Judging by the reaction it would seem you’re in the minority here

It is astonishing to me for someone to find no uses for it.

We've been reading three custom made children adventure stories to our kids every night.

My wife made custom black history month trivia, quizzes and posters

I learned more about basic financial terms, music theory, caught up on concussion treatment and myriad other things

We created quick rhymes for school

And I feel there are astonishing things I haven't even touched on! Like ten million things.

I'm exceedingly polite to the chat AI because I cannot believe I'm lucky and privileged enough to use something this awesome in my lifetime.

I feel like a kid in candy store :). I cannot imagine that somebody can find NO USE for it!

I spent hours on ChatGPT asking questions about black holes. Like really dumb ones. I learned a lot!

I too felt like a kid in the candy store but I soon discovered that if you go in depth on anything with chatGPT it just starts to repeat the same answers after a while.

I have a feeling that when I read a book I get smarter, whereas when I interact with a chat bot I get dumber. And it's not just a feeling, I'm positive that this is what's actually happening.

That fits the candy store reference pretty well - the candy is not doing the kid any favors.

You don't need a chatbot to do any of that.

You're basically just saying your too damn lazy to do any of this stuff unless the amount of effort you need to put in is as minimal as possible.

While I get being tired and stressed (I'm a parent too) I feel like what you're doing is not much better than just zoning out.

Now go tell a farmer he’s too lazy because he uses a tractor.

Let me guess, you don't wash your family's clothes by hand, instead you use a washing machine? You don't even sew them yourself, instead you buy clothes pre-made by some factory in Bangladesh? Too damn fucking lazy.

That's a fairly uncharitable interpretation that I don't feel aided discussion.

I used chatgpt to craft stories based on events of the day, then I reviewed and modifies, printed them out, and read them out with my kids. In a given time, it multiplied what I can achieve. I could do it without chat gpt. I could do it without computer and printer. I could do it without pen and paper. Heck I could do it the normal way and just get a generic children book. But this was fun! And it was the opposite of zoning out for all involved! :)

Same for black history month quizzes and posters. It allowed my wife, in the limited time available to her (time is always limited to humans in this universe) , to do a far better job celebrating the event than ever before. I don't think she or her colleagues felt like any "zoning out" was involved, or that minimal effort was put in!

We found our initial explorations exciting and involved and rich and educating. I believe there are strong limits, and there can be accuracy issues and AI hallucinating and so on. But just the basic dozen use cases are such strong effort multipliers. I have learned more and have done more with given unit of time invested. For all the extremely legitimate moral, socio economic, legal and other issues, which are extremely valid, I stand by my awe at people who say "I can find no use for this".

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords"

Again,is that a helpful comment?

I 1000% acknowledged and am terrified of social, economic, power implications. I think they should be discussed and debated.

They are not the same thing though as "is this useful?".

We can and should have discussion on dangers of nuclear and AI and ubi and myriad other things. I will still unabashedly repeat my only point in this thread - it's shocking to me that some people find "chatgpt has no use", to the point I find it disingenuous.

If I'm to expand on my (admittedly a little facetious) parent comment, it would be to say:

I'm not arguing that ChatGPT has no use. My argument is that I strongly suspect the long term negative externalities of large language models will vastly exceed any positive impact they will have on society. And humanity has a pretty clearly established track record in terms of widespread deployment of things that bring some immediate utility but whose longterm consequences we don't understand upfront. CFC's, artificial sweeteners, cigarettes, lead paint, social media, React Hooks, so on and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

I guess I'm just surprised how easily people are able to put aside their terror (as you put it) in exchange for some of that sweet, sweet, short-term utility. They're two sides of the same coin. You're ushering in tomorrow's consequences, unseen.

Great comment. People don’t want search. They want something. Search boxes gets you something. People type URLs into search boxes because they want the website. They don’t want the search. Search boxes don’t make things. But now they can. Lego in your made up story. Now there’s some ad revenue. A good thing? New issues for sure.

I'm not sure I understand. If long form content makes more money, how can TikTok afford to pay creators to attract them away from YouTube?

They can’t/pay far less and most of its content is an alternate revenue stream/promotion vehicle for creators rather then many who’s YouTube is their primary?

YouTube is heavily investing in shorts as well but a bit late.

I'm pretty sure that this is exactly what the poster above is refering to: they would profit more out of longer contents due to the way their ads placements work, but they have to adapt and propose shorts anyway.

Are you saying that YouTube margins are lower than tiktok? Because that seems very unlikely based on estimated figures. Tiktok is still spending hundreds of millions on user acquisition. Bytedance is no closer to IPO now than 2 years ago, and so we don't have any idea the exact performance of its business lines.

Dang. You're right. Classic Innovator's Dilemma!

Since we’re on a technical site here, can I ask why ChatGPT cost exponentially more to run? The inference time for a neural net is constant so I’d say that it scales linearly with the number of users.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390123

I wasn't talking big O lol, maybe orders of magnitude would've been better?

> They didn't do anything with it because chatbots are unequivocally a worse business model than the current search paradigm.

I'm not so sure. Imagine having a human assistant that's smart enough to pass the bar, get an MBA, pass medical exams, and knows how to work on your car, and is good at brainstorming, and and and...

And having that person do searches for you. Are you sure that working with this assistant wouldn't be a better user interface to the internet than the search we have today? And what if that assistant was willing to work for pennies per hour...

Oh the chatbots absolutely have the potential to create tons of value. The question is if its creator can harvest it/how much will be left with the consumer vs the producer. I suspect that it will still be very difficult to get people to sign up for subscriptions and advertising will be less effective than current search advertising so the chatbot creator will have difficult harvesting the value they create.

It’s the innovators dillema. Google is selling the answers to questions for millions of dollars per day. If their bot answers with ads, people will use another bot.

why settle for advertisements or user subscription when they could have the Chat AI make transactions for the user and take a cut from the seller. They could publish an API spec for many transaction categories and providers would be in line to sell products and services.

The key is that AI needs to have a fiduciary duty to its users: it should always suggest the most economically advantageous deal for the user, not what is best for the AI if those are not aligned.

Make a marketplace for targeted discounts to incentivize changed behavior.

Many companies that sell consumables are happy to give a first sample free in hopes of repeat purchasing.

If I ask AI for a good lavender scented hand soap refill, it should have a fiduciary duty to give me the best economic choice for me. HOWEVER, AI could solicit discounts from this marketplace platform at the point the AI is making the decision: a new layer above and around Amazon and Walmart and every other established player. Hand soap manufacturers can compete with deals like "people who order hand soap at least twice a year can get 60% off their first purchase" and pay a commission to the AI platform for facilitating the discount. Users can trust the AI with their data because of the fiduciary responsibility and so become willing participants in keeping it accurate because it increases the ability of the AI to serve them.

I disagree with your premise. I do T want the cheapest thing automatically, especially if, as it often is, the difference is crappiness is more than the difference in price.

A fiduciary duty doesn't mean choosing the cheapest thing, it just means the AI can't base decisions off how much of a kickback the AI would receive for making/suggesting that choice.

> The key is that AI needs to have a fiduciary duty to its users: it should always suggest the most economically advantageous deal for the user, not what is best for the AI if those are not aligned.

This generally means you get what the provider can prove seems like the most sensible choice to a regulator, which would mean not being an AI because you can't show how that algorithm works.

Fully automated self-driving puts the brainpower equivalent of a squirrel at the wheel of a 2-ton vehicle.

Automated mapping sends drivers down railroad tracks and impassible abandoned roads.

We'll eventually figure that AI chatbots similarly degrade the social and intellectual commons. Enjoy your AI advisor, the bar and professional boards exist to protect the public, however imperfectly, from exactly the unpredictable charlatanism embodied by your jack-of-all-trades AI assistant.

FYI the assistant is currently working for pennies per second. It costs a few cents of compute (I think including training) to respond to the average query. There are a few orders of magnitude to go.

I disagree. There is a ton of money to be made. Advertisements can be even more lucrative, we just have to rethink the whole idea of advertisement. Imagine the chat bot as a digital salesperson, but for literally everything. It can even be optimized in a manner that if a user asks for too much work that doesn't involve selling you products (eg. writing essays) it can go "I'm Sorry Dave, but you need a ChatGPT Premium Subscription(tm) for that."

As far as computational costs. These chat bots are not remotely maximally optimized. Sure it costs more to run but it is still on the order of pennies per user per day.

If google released a sales bot and Microsoft released a chatbot with banner ads everyone would just use bing. Maybe that’s naive but I just can’t see people accepting that kind of product.

This is a competitive market with zero switching costs. You can’t just hamstring your product and expect users to stick around when another company they know and trust has a much better product.

But I don’t seek out sales people unless I desperately need what they have already.

I typically don’t frequent businesses that continue to try to upsell me once I’m already inside.

That being said there are definitely other people out that that do want this and aren’t resistant to paid messaging but if you want answers an AdBot will probably not be your first stop.

> But I don’t seek out sales people unless I desperately need what they have already.

In case you don't because you prefer to do the research yourself, I'm sure that holds for the large majority of HN users, including me. But why do we prefer to do the research ourselves? Because we don't trust the salesman's incentives, objectivity and breadth of knowledge. If we had a utopian salesman who only cared about getting the right product for us and has intimate knowledge of every relevant product, it'd be a fools errand to do the research ourselves other than as a genuine hobby.

I think the parent comment is hoping for the creation of AI Chatbots who at least get close enough to such a salesman. And while for-profit companies will surely attempt to instill perverse incentives, unlike with humans we only really need one AI salesman without them and we can all use that one. This might sound idealistic ("if everyone just used Linux..") but the barrier of usage is low enough that I see Google and MS having a much harder time competing with agents without perverse incentives than they've had competing with e.g. Linux or Firefox - especially if Google (the search engine) loses its moat.

Nobody is going to use a chat-bot if it is (a) constantly trying to sell you something or (b) going to give you biased results that are influenced by advertising spend.

So OP is right that this model is going to be financially harmful to Google.

> Nobody is going to use a chat-bot if it is (a) constantly trying to sell you something or (b) going to give you biased results that are influenced by advertising spend

I guess this is something that Google/search engines and other media like podcasts have had to navigate.

While it's not obvious how to best do it in this interface, I dunno, you still have a whole browser window to work with and the search engine solution (show the ads separately and labeled at the top) and the podcast solution (read the ads separately and clearly labeled) weren't super imaginative and seem to be working okay. Gmail ads on the right margin is maybe another example to point to.

I imagine there are probably plenty of UI things to experiment with that don't involve masking the advertisement as expert advice.

But yeah while this is all being sorted out I imagine it shrinks the monetizable surface of search a good bit.

These exact things are alredy happening in Google search right now and people are still using it.

Google ads are clearly located at the top.

Search results themselves are not influenced by how much money you pay them.

I don't want more ads

The writing was on the wall: when looking for info we don’t interact with people continuously distracted by ads. We ask, focus on the answer, act. Google business model is shortsighted when looking at tech in terms of decades of humans modeling tech after themselves

And digital cameras were a worse business model than film.

If someone is going to do it - even though it might be a worse business model - it might as well be you.

But yeah, some of the chat responses will have to be ads. How they handle it will be key.

It'd be the overtaking of the century.

Let's see.

Bing market share in the US = <7% (6.7% this year).

Edge market share in the US = <5% (it's only 5% for desktops, and >50% of internet traffic comes from phones).

Even if they get 100% of Google searches on Edge-devices to go to Bing (which they'll be lucky if they even get to 50% on their platforms) - it will hardly do anything...

The rate at which Edge is becoming irrelevant as people transition traffic to laptops (more likely Macs these days) or phones (0% MSFT) - is likely going to be larger than what Microsoft can chip away via Edge.

If they can chip away any meaningful traffic (I doubt it) - it will be a MUCH bigger threat when it comes from Apple.

And you can bet it's coming down the pike in a year or two if not sooner.

But I'm skeptical this AI search is going to be more than a fad, and I think the queries people like to ask AI search will be new types of searches (i.e. creating a new market, not taking away from the existing).

I disagree, but for totally different reasons. I think Edge's advantage is MS could build a load of corporately validated plugins and service in it for employees, making it the de facto corporate browser. Then with some decent features around work/life separation with bookmarks and password management and it could easily start bleeding back into consumerland.

Why wouldn't Google build that into Chrome (and Mozilla into Firefox and Apple into Safari) if users want it?

ChatGPT is not special.

Any of these companies can develop LLMs that are on par with ChatGPT.

I think the bar was just raised for browsers, it is like the iPhone moment. From now on every browser will have to follow suit or be left behind, can't search like it's 2019. Google could see its position taken over in 2-5 years, if we go by the speed Google itself, the iPhone, Chrome and YouTube won the market.

Instead, MS builds Edge with a load of (mind-booggling) functionality that, not-only no-one asked for, but positively put businesses off ever using Edge: things like built-in shopping price-comparisons and price-tracking[1], “Bing Rewards”[2], and most egregiously of all (and quickly back-pedalled…): directly advertising retail finance services to users[3].

All (well, most) of this unwanted functionality can be disabled via Group Policy (and MDM for non-AD computers?) but only businesses with competent/knowledgeable IT people can do that - for everyone else it’s just going to push users away.

Microsoft (and Edge, Windows and Bing) so desperately wants to be loved by users - that’s how you maintain market-share, but they can’t stop self-sabotaging everything with the most asinine things like above (…and the Windows 11 Start Menu). I don’t understand it - and I used to work at Microsoft![4]

[1]: https://www.howtogeek.com/769820/microsoft-edge-gets-yet-ano...

[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/edge-bonus

[3]: https://www.howtogeek.com/769427/microsoft-edge-wants-to-giv...

[4]: granted, I was in DevDiv, where the only objection I had to the products’ direction was the colour scheme - my friends in OSG (Windows) and Bing had lots of horror stories of orders to implement dumb ideas coming from org heads - rarely was it actual user demand. Arguably what makes Apple a standout is their internal propensity to say “no” - Microsoft needs that.

> I think Edge's advantage is MS could build a load of corporately validated plugins and service in it for employees, making it the de facto corporate browser.

I think they're already trying to do this. If you open up Edge and it's signed into an MS365 account you get a bunch of content for your tenant.

It's also the reason I quit using Edge after being a fairly early adopter. Microsoft just can't stop adding stuff. What used to be a nice clean alternative to Chrome with the convenience of always being logged in to my MS account for sync has become a bloated piece of trash that can't even reliably share a tab to another device.

It's really the constant bombardment of notifications and distractions that are trying to get me to use features that don't belong in a browser that I hate.

> could easily start bleeding back into consumerland.

That simply doesn’t work - people use O365 at work and GSuite at home.

> I think Edge's advantage is MS could build a load of corporately validated plugins and service in it for employees, making it the de facto corporate browser.

Man, I really don't want another IE. I was around back then, it was miserable.

The thing is, the current Edge is just a re-badged Chromium --- I really miss the old version which was kinder to battery life, had a smaller memory footprint, and integrated an e-reader for ePub files.

That and just having a software base that was different from everyone else. It was funny, back when MS announced the change, here I was, a big Free/Libre software guy defending Microsofts proprietary browser with a journalist from Business Insider! Never did figure out if they did anything with that.

It makes one wonder if this is another kodak moment

https://www.google.com/search?q=kodak+developed+the+digital+...

Xerox comes to mind as well.

The Innovator's Dilemma.

Presumably, Google didn't want to cannibalize their cash cow (Google search) because they don't know if LLM chatbots can be monetized as effectively.

Something that I always admired about Apple (at least in the past) was that they were willing to make old stuff obsolete even when it was wildly successful. iPhone killing iPod is a great example of this.

They were already under competitive pressure. I bought a candy bar Sony phone with built-in MP3 player app before the iPhone.

Always reminded that Nokia had one of the largest R&D budgets for mobile technology and got blind sided by iPhone and subsequent smart phones. Doesn't matter how ahead of the curve on paper you are if you cannot implement it into something that people want.

"Real Artists Ship" - Steve Jobs

Might become the largest case of the innovator's dilemma ever.

This has to be the best case of Innovator's dilemma i've ever witnessed. Even more tragic when thinking that literally every Manager at Google knows this pattern or book.

I think the Innovator's Dilemma is an inexorable part of a large middle management bureaucracy. The management and product orgs look to isolate themselves from risky bottom-up innovation because they want to avoid things that risk the brand / aren't on message. Similarly, the lower rungs are focusing on demonstrable "impact" and there's no rewards for experiments that fail which means any "risks" taken are all safe hedges that are in-line with incremental bets that can't disrupt the status quo. Therefore the only "innovation" at large companies is that which is allow-listed is that by the top of the management chain.

That being said, it's still too early to tell here. Microsoft is releasing "something". Whether it's any good or whether Google will respond too late is too hard to tell. AFAIK, there's published research that shows that Google's LLM is actually significantly better than ChatGPT, so is it going to take them all that long to productize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impact on market share)?

It sounds more like Counter-Positioning (details, e.g. [1]) by OpenAI/Microsoft. Google cannot compete or it would attack its own main income stream and risk losing income very fast. But if they wait, then people learn to work with Microsoft/OpenAI which would hurt them in the long run. Counter-Positioning creates an impossible situation which brought many giants down including Blockbuster.

[1]: https://www.lukethomas.com/counter-positioning/amp/

It would suck for Google to make $20B from AI Chat instead of making $160B in Search, it wouldn't suck for Microsoft to make $20B from AI Chat instead $2B in Search.

If the AI assistants live to the promise, Google is screwed even if they make the best and most popular one.

Yeah. It won't change your logic but they made around $12B I think.

Even if they don't make a cent from AI Chat, it's still worth burning money on if nothing but to dethrone google as the default choice from the public's mind.

Microsoft has fucked with Xerox in the 80's. Now they're doing the same with Google.

please explain re bell labs or xerox

Here you go: https://youtu.be/zLZLl3eHdzQ

It's the Xerox Parc story all over again.

Would it also be a tech coup for privacy given that DDG uses Bing?

Do you see Edge using OS Chromium at its core being an issue?

Google's browser engine monopoly is useful for pushing anti-consumer web standards like Manifest v3 and Widevine. They haven't been able to leverage it against big corporations and I'm not sure how they could.

Chrome on the other hand will certainly be weaponized even more than it is already.

Googleplex → Google Parc

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