Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
EthanHeilman | on: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
I disagree. Google is one of the few parties that can monetize AI because Google has a massive moat in the form of their products: gmail, chrome, photos, search, etc... and Google already has the custom-built chips and datacenters.

Google spending money on competing head to head with your LLMs is a waste of money for Google. If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both. All the investors throwing money into OpenAI, Anthropic, are just accidentally subsidizing Google's product development. Google shouldn't spend its AI research capital in an arms race with Anthropic but instead should invest in AI approaches that no one else is investigating at scale. That way Google can hedge against LLMs hitting a wall.

There is a real but small danger to Google that Anthropic replaces Google as a search engine, but that is an uphill fight for Anthropic. Google has massive brand recognition, network effects with gmail and chrome, Anthropic can't just copy what works from Google. On the other hand Google can copy what works for Anthropic. Google would have to play poorly to lose that fight.

Probably the worse case for Google is that software becomes so cheap and easy to create and maintain that all of Google's product offerings become commoditized. Even in that world Google has a lock on infrastructure. Perhaps ASI software creation completely removes that as well? If so we are living in a post-singularity world and probably the stockmarket doesn't exist anymore either.

hyperadvanced | parent | next
In retrospect this is very similar to the Apple strategy: don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency, position for novel uses of the tech but don’t build it per se. Apple probably would have benefitted in the last 4 quarters from hyping a custom model stack but it doesn’t seem that this strategy paid off to even close to 20% ROI while Apple got to hold their cash and organizational focus on their main thing
kgwgk | root | parent | next
> don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency

“Heavily” it’s a high bar at their scale. They spent over $10bn playing with cars.

chermi | root | parent
But paying so little attention to it that it no longer is a core competency? As in, the people most representative of that competency leaving in droves? I doubt that was the plan.
asdfman123 | parent | next
And Gemini seems about as good as a search engine as any of the other LLMs, if you use them casually. And Google has the brand-name recognition.

Right now AI companies are competing to make LLMs better at graduate-school level tasks. They all can already competently tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or when the first Led Zeppelin album was released.

EthanHeilman | root | parent
Gemini seems like a better search engine than the alternatives because it has access to Google's massive crawler feeds. I think Google could charge 30 dollars month for Gemini + all the data Google has locked up (Scholar, Books, crawled webpages, Google Groups, Usenet archives + search of your personalized datasets such as calendars, photos, emails, docs, slides, etc...). I'd pay that easily.
htrp | root | parent
Legal will have a shit fit at all of the things that you just mentioned.
EthanHeilman | root | parent
And that might be why Google loses, they are competing with companies that are willing to operate outside the law (or at least pay Trump to have the DoJ look the other way).
jatins | parent
> If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both

Google buys Anthropic for cheap? How?

EthanHeilman | root | parent
Anthropic has no moat, their models just get distilled and resold. They can maybe get good margins when LLM improvement rate is very high but as it slows down they are looking at commodity margins. Google has the products that makes that commodity more than just cost of electricity + 0.5%.

My case is based on the assumption that Anthropic will not hit RSI or if it does RSI rapidly hits a wall. Faster your growth curve, the faster you eat all the low hanging fruit and s-curve. I could be wrong here, maybe RSI will cause a hard takeoff singularity by 2030 and just keep going, but if that happens the world fundamentally changes.

anonreplier | root | parent
Why would Google be the only interested buying party?
EthanHeilman | root | parent
They wouldn't be the only party, but they are in my opinion the most likely party.

What the people that can monetize it? Microsoft, X, IBM, Salesforce, Discord, Google

Microsoft would likely buy OpenAI due to their investment and integration with OpenAI. Making Anthropic not that valuable.

Google would likely buy Anthropic due to their investment and ties to Anthropic.

X, Salesforce maybe. Not sure Discord has the money. No idea if IBM capable of growing.

All this changes if Anthropic figures out a moat/sticky product that doesn't just depend on having the best LLM. If they pull off https://claude.com/solutions/healthcare then all bets are off.