The Google AI strategy is to use their weight and flood the market with everything AI so any competitor is either very niche and/or more expensive than "free".<p>Typical big co move.<p>Also the amount of tweets that suddenly popped up on Twitter with the same template of "ChatGPT is finished! Now that Bard has launched here 10 tips on how to..". It was clearly a Google marketing push ( scummy as always, but Google have done way worse in the past ).<p>This leads me to believe that Bard is at best OK and has no "AI advantage" over other competitors and it's basically who has the bigger ranch and deeper pockets until everything is dead around them.
Google’s problem is that if it wanted to not break its current business model it would need a chatbot that answers whatever the highest bidder desires.<p>The fast pace of ‘internet time’ means Amazon, AOL, Facebook and Google can follow the trajectory of Ford, AMC, Chrysler, and GM in a fraction of the time. Amazon was a leader in e-commerce once, now they count on someone who subscribed to Prime for the last 15 years to subscribe for the next 15 years. Google search used to be good, but now it is corrupt. Search for a ‘used Honda Fit’ and the first search result is an ad from the one car dealer that owns all the new car dealerships in town for new cars and even though they presumably have used cars in their lot, they’ll try to sell you the same CR-V they’d try to sell you in person. I’d accept any kind of ad from someone who is selling what i am buying but Google aids and abets numerous acts of brand destruction every day.<p>They know how to walk the line of running a corrupt ads engine and not get anybody arrested but it is an unsolved problem in A.I. ethics to get away with running a corrupt chatbot —- and that is why Google is in so much trouble.
I read through the full article and the cognitive leaps the author makes are too big for me to follow.<p>It’s like listening to a mad scientist connect totally unrelated (seemingly) events.<p>E.g., I don’t at all understand the linkage between current events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants denoms.<p>Maybe I’m just too dumb to follow this much brilliance.
Google's brand is only bested by Apple in the minds of consumers. They will never go away. It doesn't matter if ChatGPT or anything else comes along - 95% of the billions of daily Google users will wait for Google's version. I am honestly surprised that the Alphabet market cap hasn't reached $2T yet.
I am curious if there will be a requirement in the future, possibly enforced by the EU or US law, for content such as books, videos, music, PDF files, news articles, or blog posts to be labeled as produced by either a human author or AI. I'm talking about ethical disclosure. While it is uncertain, it is important to be transparent about the content's origins. As we know, AI is here to stay, and it is likely that governments will be the biggest investors (or spenders) in AI technology for military purposes.<p>Despite Bing having a head start, it's unlikely that Google will lose to AI battle to Bing and others. Google's strong brand image and popular properties, such as Gmail, YouTube, Search, Chrome, and Android, used by billions of users daily, give them a significant advantage. It's doubtful that Bing will take over the search market anytime soon. But, who knows? Ha!
Google is going to be just fine. The most important slide in the article is that Google has 6(!) 2B+ user products. Even if slightly behind in capability, they have superior reach. They'll deeply integrate AI into every part of that stack and this way put it into people's hands. They also have the data, infrastructure, people and capital to make it work.<p>Microsoft has little consumer push (no mobile presence) hence they will likely dominate in the business market. Integrating it into Office, private training on company data, etc.<p>Apple is the big mystery. Supposedly the big consumer-facing competitor to Google but very little is known about what's coming from them. Honestly, I'm quite convinced they're in panic mode as well, they just hide it better.
It just means that lots of these new so-called AI startups using wrappers around AI APIs don't have a moat to go with since these new announcements by Google has effectively destroyed them for free or close to free.<p>It is only going to accelerate and AI research will increasingly be more closed. There is now no difference between O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com or Google DeepMind.<p>Either way it will have to take more than LLMs like 'ChatGPT' to even come close to dethroning Google. [0] There is more to 'AI' than the LLM chatbot hype.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-growth-flattens/" rel="nofollow">https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-gro...</a>
On a side note, we're experiencing the death of SEO I believe since content can't be trusted any more and knowledge, expertise and competence is available to everyone that can ask the proper questions.
If the eu makes those laws then it will exclude itself from all ai development, push ai to other countries, and lead to an ai brain drain.<p>I do think all government should require AI to disclose all the material ingested.
Courious question: how difficult and expensive is to train these models? Being the technology open source and assuming that we can collaborate on the training phase and have big open training sets, what will be the competitive advantage of companies such Google beyond the brand?
Speaking of "AI Battles", the conversation I'd like to see more is about how these 2 giants are crushing entire industries in their search for higher stock prices. Far more interesting than Bard vs. ChatGPT imo.
Google right now are Netscape in 1997. They see AI in the rear view mirror. They think it’s going to eat their primary revenue stream. The question is are they going to keep staring in the rear view mirror and go over the cliff or can they reinvent themselves?<p>Given that Google still gets the vast majority of its revenue from search its hard to see that this doesn’t cause then a huge amount of pain. I suspect they’ve made the mistake of not starting to cannibalize their revenue stream and now it might be too late.<p>It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
From my experiences with Google integrated AI, I'm skeptical that Google can win any battle with it.<p>ChatGPT and other modern AI tools are useful specifically because they do what I want when I want to do it. Compare this to Gmail's smart compose: by the time the AI makes a suggestion I'm already half-way through typing that text, so its prediction is completely useless even if it's correct.<p>(Also, I really enjoy the random historical rambling at the end of some Stratechery articles).
The example of the new EU regulation in the article is a great example of how regulation typically only serves to enable regulatory capture, thereby playing into the same goals of creating a monopoly or duopoly that governments otherwise say they’re opposed to.
Google hasn’t cared even slightly about how it has developed a reputation for cancelling projects, leading to developer mistrust of any new Google initiative.<p>It’s going to bite them when they need developers to embrace their ai ecosystem.<p>Their CEO should have been fired years ago.
> AI is zero marginal generation of information (well, nearly zero, relative to humans). As I wrote last year generative models unbundle idea creation from idea substantiation, which can then be duplicated and distributed at zero marginal cost.<p>I find this quote a little bit hard to believe. Are the current models genuinely capable of innovation? I've been productive in using image generation for my album covers, but I haven't found a similar use for Large Language Models yet.