Google has the resources to win AI, but I still don't see a way to resolve the tension between good AI and ad revenue. A useful AI tells me what I need to know, but Google's cash cow is selling users to advertisers. Those are fundamentally oppositional and I don't see a clear way to resolve it.
Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!"
Once Google has to start making money from AI, talking to Gemini is going to feel like talking to that friend that invited you to dinner only to try to pitch you on an MLM.
>maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC
Wouldn't one possible solution be just adding a sidebar with ads for products/services relevant to the current topic? They don't need to change the model output to have ads. (Not advocating for ads, just pointing out there's lots of ways to deliver ads)
How is that going to work when
1) any time a model is improved, the improvements are not spectacular (anymore), and it takes less than 9 months for the performance to be reproduced by a <1% sized model. Those 9 months are down from 2 years btw.
2) the big target for ads is becoming phones, and specifically tiktok advertisements, to the point that lots of people don't even use computers anymore for online purchases?
> Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!"
That is the nightmare scenario. The puzzle for me is why you apparently think it just a trap for Google. All of the pure AI companies are burning cash. That is going to stop. Either they go broke, or they do something with ads.
There is a third option I guess, and that is they create something that is useful enough to be worth paying for. It won't be just an LLM, but as far as I can tell they are all just fine tuning LLM's. We already know what the limits of an LLM are, as we are already there.
All except Google that is, who are building AI's for all sorts of things, such as protein folding, weather prediction and driving cars. LLM's were their invention, created by them for doing translation and OCR. And unlike everyone else, they aren't dependent on NVidia as they use their own internally developed hardware. Surely there is no argument about Google being the world's power house of AI?? Most of these efforts will be experiments Google is infamous for abandoning. But it's seems likely one or two will become the youtubes of AI.
I can't see anything remotely comparable from the other AI companies. It's difficult to see how this doesn't end with Google completely dominating the space, and all these LLM companies going broke.
Do you define "AI" as LLMs?
I ask, because earlier this year I had the chance to use a Waymo for the first time. I moved a good chunk of my portfolio to GOOG after that.
To me, Waymo felt like either Magic or stepping 15+ years into the future; Demolition Man stuff (im a child of the 80s, Xenial).
Stuff like Waymo, AlphaFold and similar are just so far away from anybody else, that Alphabet could split in several companies and all of them would be hugely dominant in the future. And none of them base their revenue in advertising.
Google is literally, today, making money from AI. Not only that but the presence of competing AI services has resulted only in record revenue and straight quarters of ad revenue growth since ChatGPT was launched.
I presume they will do what they have done successfully for the last decade or two and separate the recommendations from the ads. So you'll have gemini saying unbiasedly what it thinks and then a separate "sponsored" bit say "Buy Clearwater!"
There is no way for anyone to resolve it, you'll either be paying premium, running last gen stuff locally, or getting ads, regardless of whether you use Google, OpenAI or anyone else.
They have an entire cloud division and they just announced it grew by 33%
and you think the competitors won't put ads in?
Wtf does “put ads in” mean? Google ads is one of the most sophisticated and profitable machines on the planet. People seem to think it’s as simple as <your ad here>.
The competitors will either figure it out or run out of money and collapse (or, both)