Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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Ehh, I mildly disagree. I'm not entirely bought-in on the notion that giving one's technical innovations for free is obviously the right move, but I don't think it's why the company is in trouble.

Chrome is experiencing unprecedented competition because it faltered on the product. Chrome went from synonymous with fast-and-snappy to synonymous with slow-and-bloated.

Likewise Google invented transformers - but the sin isn't giving it away, it's failing to exercise the technology itself in a compelling way. At any moment in time Google could have released ChatGPT (or some variation thereof), but they didn't.

I've made this point before - but Google's problems have little to do with how it's pursuing fundamental research, but everything to do with how it pursues its products. The failure to apply fundamental innovations that happened within its own halls is organizational.

> Chrome is experiencing unprecedented competition

From where? 65% globally use Chrome (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers).

The only widespread competition is from Safari and FF, both of which have been around longer than it.

Well, Google could have easily not have shared its technology.

However, the bloat problem you’ve described are difficult problems to solve, and are to some degree endemic to large businesses with established products.

> "Well, Google could have easily not have shared its technology."

Sure, but the idea is that if they didn't share their technology, they'd still be in the same spot: they would have invented transformers and still not shipped major products around it.

Sure maybe OpenAI won't exist, but competitors will find other ways to compete. They always do.

So at best they are very very slightly better off than the alternative, but being secretive IMO wouldn't have been a major change to their market position.

Meanwhile, if Google was better at productizing its research, it matters relatively little what they give away. They would be first to market with best-in-class products, the fact that there would be a litany of clones would be a minor annoyance at best.

True, but they only feel the fire now, and you can tell they’re rapidly trying to productionalize stuff like you’ve described. It will take time though.

They were too risk averse before.

Also, these things are not secret for a very long time and eventually other people figure out (completely independently or maybe even influenced by some google's ex-employee). Then, they wouldn't even be able to say they invented it.

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