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Reading about OpenAI's success with ChatGPT it becomes quite clear that a major reason why they are perceived as being ahead isn't because they are technically superior to Google/Meta/Microsoft but simply that they have fewer inhibitions. Most of the underlying tech that powers ChatGPT was invented by the major tech firms, they simply sat on that tech and slowed down its release. Exactly why is not explicitly spelled out, but reading between the lines it does appear it was a fear of bad PR + regulatory scrutiny. OpenAI, being smaller and thus escaping the same scrutiny, decided to simply implement the readily available technology and rush it out the door.
Nobody is denying that they have great engineers, but they are not inventing anything fundamentally new. That, at least, is the view of Yann LeCun in his latest interview. Perhaps he is an embittered man trying to protect his turf, but even OpenAI boosters will admit that Google has a similar chatbot which they simply have not publicly released yet.
Google's response has been quick, basically loosening internal controls and "ethics reviews" in order to boost the release cadence. This prompted Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to publicly criticise Google. This is of course cynical, draping yourself in the flag of responsibility while having had your success based upon being more reckless than the big boys.
I think these developments are part of a larger shift. The ever-increasing "wokism" of Big Tech has not only slowed down but arguably is even starting to decline, albeit gently. The slaughter of a substantial part of Google's AI "ethics" team in recent years come to mind. Timnit Gebru was its most high-profile victim but hardly the only one. OpenAI's success is simply yet another factor that will allow the further sidelining of naysayers inside Big Tech who are preoccupied with slowing down AI development due to social concerns.
I read a lot of inflamed commentary of how SJWs will destroy Silicon Valley during the height of the BLM mania. Ultimately, these developments tell us that once the bottom lines of Big Tech companies are even remotely threatened, they will cast aside any moral qualms without a moment's hesitation. Whether or not that is good is debatable, but it seems to be final. Obviously, this also has implications for any hopes of "holding back" AGI if it ever came close to fruition, i.e. the likelihood of that ever being feasible is probably close to nil.
Google would’ve been better off just not spending all that money and returning a bunch of cash as dividends. But P-A problem leads to empire building.
In the case of a well-regarded tech company like Google, I don't think it is necessarily a P-A problem. It is hard to talk about the usual metrics like PE vs index because so much of the S&P 500 is tech megacaps nowadays, but I think for most of the last 10 years stock market investors valued $1 of cash in Larry Page's pocket higher than $1 cash in their own pocket because they thought Larry was able to buy companies like Waymo and Deepmind and they couldn't.
Notoriously, growth investors hate dividends.
I understand the argument. It just turned out not to be true. Has Google really created anything super successful outside of Google and gmail
Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.
Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).
Android
Chrome
I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.
Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.
I felt that was true pre-pandemic (and I used it, and wrote reviews), but Trip Advisor's coverage seems crap now, and it's scores not really to be trusted.
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That hasn't been my experience.
Just now I randomly picked a restaurant in Rome and it has 1300 reviews on Google maps and 800 on trip advisor.
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I’m not talking about useful; I’m talking about profitable. Android I’ll concede.
I’m in a very large professional service firm and we exclusively use office products along with everyone I know. I think it’s quite rare to use Google Drive.
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