no one around me can imagine that people would not google stuff anymore and use a chatbot instead, so why should they be worried about their business that is driven by web traffic from google? all the while they stop googling on their own and only using chatGPT personally.
I think its a combination of not being able to imagine that this giant can fall like previous economic giants, in a rather short time, and things on the progress side (AI) moves TOO FAST for many to really grasp
ChatGPT is slow, its usecase is quite narrow, average ppl do not give a fuck/doesn't help them that much, hype will die down. Google will be fine, they have their own solution and they have the biggest surface area where they can advertise their stuff. Just think back when chrome launched and they advertised it on the search front page. And their browser market share just went up and up. So they can only fuck this up and that would be quite a feat.
I see a lot of opportunities, but I don't get it why people are not buying up CC companies. There are a lot of good buys out there for not so much money. And there are companies which gobble up so much user input and their sole purpose is to pull out as much information from real humans as possible, so the only sane explanation to their existence is that they had AI in mind decades before AI was in the headlines.
> average ppl do not give a fuck/doesn't help them that much
I shared this opinion no more than a month ago. Then I decided to keep a ChatGPT-4 tab open for a week and lean on it for questions. I'm around 3x more productive. It's wild.
Anyone that uses a computer for work will benefit from this technology, or be upended by it.
I agree though, Google has the ability to catch up. But will they? They're a big boring company now. Slow and risk averse.
Yeah, I'm waiting for MS/Bing to open it for everyone. Until then I use perplexity. It's quite good, mostly because it gives back the relevant answers with source included, from sites that have almost zero chance to pop up in a google result.
don't you think that Microsoft Azure engineers are right now working hard at scaling/tuning stuff from openAI? I see this as a solved problem soon
> its usecase is quite narrow, average ppl do not give a fuck/doesn't help them that much
I think you vastly underestimate whats going on. even the metro every day is full of people with GPT open on their phone/laptop/tablet, they use it for filling out some sonline form fields, tune cooking recipes, as some chat partner for fun (like a specific person as personal coach), pasting stuff they don't understand to let it explain, or even just summarize stuff before reading, and obviously also for responding to mails, I even saw someone copypasting in/from whatsapp
that product is not only valuable for everyone and his dog, its also free and highly accessible - not to mention cool right now. also THE fastest growing product in history, breaking all records
> hype will die down
the hype hasn't even started. most stuff, like multimodal, GPT4 or the new plugins/integrations aren't even accessible/known to most people out there. the actual hypetrain is still at the train station. Wait for when people casually _talk_ via voice with the bot and it makes some transaction for them, like a table reservation for lunch - especially what happens when other people see this on the streets.
> Google will be fine
its no longer growing (!), in march traffic even DROPPED by 1%, and the hype is still to come. google search is dying soon, its only a matter of months to be realized, and then wall street chicken runs start to drop the stock like a hot potato, you can already see the amount of options to short google popping up left and right. at some point its a self-fulfilling prophecy
> they have their own solution
Bard is utter garbage compared to even GPT3, and no one cares even what google does anymore in this space. you can see every announcement being basically ignored because something else is happening at microsoft/openAI - even on HN. Even IF they would be able to really nail the next-gen bot ahead of everyone, people wouldn't use it since its on the graveyard soon like everything else they launch nowadays.
> they have the biggest surface area
still the majority of millenials/genZ does its "search" via tiktok nowadays (not kidding), google is mostly a thing boomers use and think its cool for some reason. Now the chatbots enter the game and it's basically game over for that "surface area". They still have some longform-tiktok (youtube) and of course android - the latter one they can't really leverage because of antitrust the day they try it (see microsoft/internet explorer in the 90s)
> Just think back when chrome launched
this was really a great product to be fair - I personally evangelized it. Now I mostly regret it and, aside from gmail, have degoogled and help people all around me to do the same.
> So they can only fuck this up and that would be quite a feat
they are already fucking this up. to the point they currently can't do anything anymore against it, except they find a new business model soon that can cover the lost profits from imploding search/ads - but I see no indication they are able to do that level of productization, and haven't been for many years.
The problem is that the bottleneck is the human. You have to know a way to formulate the question and need creativity in order to benefit from it in order to expand your horizons. It will be like tiktok, and onlyfans, where people are copying each other and mirroring what they saw others do or press writes about. So in essence the masses will be on the same level all the time. One upside, that maybe this might help elevate the general level of knowledge of the masses (just like tiktok/yt shorts does in its own way), so we'll see.
GOOG's advertising revenue is around 220 bln. Ms's ad revenue from ChatGPT is around 0-1 bln right now. So you are a bit over enthusiastic right now.
1) pretty sure microsoft is willing to operate at a loss when there is a chance to destroy google in the process - comparing billions is not wrong but irrelevant here
2) there is a significant chance that lets say 25% revenue loss occurs within a single quarter once the actual hypetrain starts moving - which will freak out wallstreet - and an uncontrolled downward spiral happens in a very short amount of time including panic reactions and sudden lawsuites further fueling the downfall of the giant.
... and i will do whatever I can to support that, and many people I know can't wait for that to happen, too.
I'm not protecting GOOG, just trying to remain rational. People also forget what MSFT did for the internet and how it shat on developers with Internet Explorer. It's like running from one shady actor to another while throwing away your past 20 years or so memories/experience in the field. Look we've changed our CEO, now EVERYTHING CHANGED, we are the good guys now! Suuuuuuuure.
These are trillion dollar behemots with their own interests and strategies, and none of them are charities. They are gobbling up whatever crosses their path. And the less people laud them, the better. Keep your distance, keep your own interests in mind.
you are completely right, but for today I strictly want to see google burn for all the things they have done, all the companies that got killed by them (including some friends getting laid off and so on) and destroying the open web (www) I really loved into the current cesspool of spam and crap.
after that, we can have a look into microsoft again, and I expect that the AI tech will be democratized/public by then, iE as the final strikes a dying google (or meta) can do. therefore, I am not worried so far
I think its a combination of not being able to imagine that this giant can fall like previous economic giants, in a rather short time, and things on the progress side (AI) moves TOO FAST for many to really grasp