Comment by AviationAtom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AviationAtom | Hacker News Reader

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Google is held hostage by their current revenue model (ads, ads, ads) and their belief that it can't carry over to AI-based products. I can't blame them for focusing so much on it, but they also forget how they got to ads making up so much of their revenue. They shook up the ad market back when, and AI can help do so again.

Microsoft is focused more on incubating OpenAI, getting a viable product to market now, and focusing on monetizing it down the road. Microsoft knows AI can complement an ad revenue model.

Google just opened up Bard to testers and I've found it to be complete garbage in comparison to what Bing Chat/GPT-4 can do. Bard was not afraid to just make up random things, that were verifiably false, and present them as fact. GPT seems to know enough to let you know when it's unsure.

> Google is held hostage by their current revenue model (ads, ads, ads) and their belief that it can't carry over to AI-based products.

What tells you that Google thinks that ad-based monetization can't carry over to AI-based product?

There was an article posted here on Hacker News about a Google exec basically saying AI was a fad not worth chasing, and it had no viable means of monetizing with ads. I was shocked to read the article and flabbergasted that Google could have such a view.

To me it felt like maybe they were saying one thing, while doing another, to attempt to calm investor nerves as they try to play catch-up.

I felt most the entrenched folks were so consumed by trying to develop their AI to be ethical that they allowed OpenAI to run laps around them.

How the next decade unfolds in the AI arena will be most interesting. I wouldn't have thought Google could ever be knocked of their throne as dominant search engine in the space previously, but I now feel they have never been more vulnerable than they are now.

Do you have the article link? That does seem shocking.

Of course Microsoft doesn’t have the same cultural attachment to an ad model, they were born and raised as a selling software company. Shipping software to renting it was a leap, but one they made long ago.

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