LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
These all feel incredibly shallow now. A few dedicated people could build these systems and begin dismantling the margin and monopoly of every major piece of software we know and use.
If ChatGPT has ads, how hard would it be for a different startup to offer an LLM alternative?
Distribution and branding might be the only things that matter going forward. We may have just turned the tech industry into the 1960's cigarette industry.
LLMs are a Google killer. I don't think it'll be long before people start using their power to take away market share from big tech.
Big tech laying off so many senior engineers might have created the dry kindling to set this off.
(Because people always comment - this is not sarcasm. I'm being serious.)
A small team and an llm will tackle search?
They will run into many problems. The Google brand for search, the inability to index most of the web as a new crawler, the lack of the top browser, your own mobile OS, default search placement deals with everyone. And that doesn't even look at the technical issues, scaling or the lack of a business model to pay for it.
You could build your own Google drive many have from dropbox to mega or onedrive. Doc suite is possible but harder then you think.
LLMs were invented by people working at Google. LLMs won't kill Google it will offer them a new profit center.
LinkedIn is that way.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
And who has seen success with that? It's all theory now.
> LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
Because most of the tech that has been built was not super valuable at all. Linux, GCC, docker maybe. But your average SaaS was always a commodity.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
yes, an LLM can write you a web crawler.
whose hardware are you going to run it on? what is the bill for that storage and compute going to look like, just to get to a baseline where you can answer a single general-purpose query?
Google famously sells ads to subsidize its search product. how are you going to bootstrap your ad revenue? and how much capital are you going to burn through while you do that?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
many open-source clones of GDocs / GSuite already exist. many predate the LLM era and were human-written.
can your LLM slop-fork them? certainly.
but those existing clones already have a niche marketshare compared to Google's behemoth. what reason do you have to believe that yours will be any different?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
hoo boy this one is the most detached from reality of them all.
for what hardware?
iPhones are famously locked-down, so you're probably going to be running on Android.
you can fork AOSP and call it Diordna if you want. you could even use good ol' search & replace to save some money on tokens doing the rename.
or, do you want to run it on your own custom hardware? head over to Shenzhen with a binder full of ChatGPT printouts showing your hardware design?
and again, how much capital are you going to burn through, in order to have your first "could be sold to a real customer" quality device?
This comment just goes to show that tech people definitely aren't business people barring few exceptions, therefore thinking like a tech person will not actually solve a business problem.
I'm earning $3m run rate from a business I launched in February and I've signed a few hundred thousand in monthly commitments for a new B2B SaaS I'm launching soon.
Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. If you don't have the vision for it, then fine. Someone else will take the opportunity.
Good for you, but generally engineers do not have the vision. And whether you have your business or not has no bearing on the questions you asked, the scale is monumental over your 7 figure business.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
Extremely hard, because it would need a modest capital investment which won’t happen.
Every subsequent example you give is harder.
I've been thinking along these lines for a while.
It isn't just about building an alternate cheaply, it is about convincing people to switch. I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying, just that building the thing is just the beginning of a long journey.
Tens of millions in tokens for a code base which no one will understand in the end.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
Impossible
Fable look up this paper called Page Rank and remember you're a senior software engineer, make no mistakes.
Building the indexer is the easy part.
The hard part is indexing the vast seas of the web. You need a large pile of cash to do that. One of those cases where running the software is harder than making it.
And once you've spent your large pile of cash, you're probably gonna want to earn it back somehow. Your competition doesn't charge for search, and your whole raison d'etre is to not serve ads.
Good luck!
Nah bro the LLM will figure out how to make the hardware run for free and scale globally and everything.
It’s a great time to be in computer hardware if nothing else.
Haven't you heard? Ideas are cheap. It's the execution that will make or break you. Are you the first who thought, "Google is successful, let's just go and clone their business"?
The problem will always be to get your hands on hardware.
Software never was the problem.