> What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they’re not coming to office anyway.

This has been a major part of the FAANG strategy: crush competition by giving people who might work for or become potential competitors an offer they can't refuse. 80% of the company ostensibly produces minimal value, but the real reason you're giving them huge compensation and oat milk lattes is to make sure they don't work for, or found, a Google competitor at some point in the future.

This has led to a perpetual feedback loop: FAANG company gives their engineers big stock grants, which ensures no competition in their markets, which increases the value of their stock due to no competition, which allows them to hire more engineers with big stock grants, etc...

We're suddenly entering an era where FAANG stocks aren't continually moving upward. This is largely unprecedented territory; these companies have never experienced an extended downturn since this became the industry hiring strategy.

If the recession continues through 2023, I would not be surprised to see these companies abandon this strategy and only retain necessary talent. Would not be surprised to see 50%, even 75% staff cuts at Goog and Meta specifically.

I wonder, once talent hoarding ends, if we’re going to see a bunch of new companies hit the scene in 5 years?

Depends on how well those laid off have saved.

Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt? Don't they have similar research and tech around these AI systems?

80% of their revenue comes from ads, which is google search. Chatgpt and any other startup who invests in something like chatgpt can upend googles core business model.

and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space. “Innovation” behind search was to slowly increase no. if paid ads in your results, driven by need to increase revenue and keep the rest of the 80% of biz afloat.

> and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space

LAMBDA and PaLM are literally the answer to Chat-GPT. Google is their closest competitor.

I do agree that they will lose their moat, and soon Google search will just be another tool among many.

And Google developed LaMDA model (superior to chatGPT) a lot of time before OpenAI, additionally without their research into transformers and publishing results, OpenAI would probably not even have ChatGPT now/yet.

Something I find very curious - Google are doing the same kind of research and are in many ways futher along. They have thier own models like T5 that supposedly perform better. Are their exec unaware of their own strengths?

For that matter, wasn't Google collecting masses of GIS data and doing intense self driving car research? Where is that product?

Serious q - do google have so much money that they are doing tons of research and then just forgetting to make a product out of it?

> For that matter, wasn't Google collecting masses of GIS data and doing intense self driving car research? Where is that product?

https://waymo.com/

Research does not need to lead to a product to be profitable. Another strategy is to patent all of your work, then steal the profits from anyone that attempts to enter that market.

> Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt?

The NYTimes and the rest of the media misread between the lines on this story.

Google aren't worried about competition. They are worried about losing the war with SEO.

ChatGPT showed them a glimpse of the SEO endgame. It upsets the balance between search ranking/boosting and SEO. Whatever adaptations they put into their boosting algo, GPT-style AI can eventually learn. Once learned, it can be subverted.

Fundamentally search boosting is at a disadvantage, because SEO has (blackbox) access to the boosting algo by feeding content to the crawlers and running searches. However the booster doesn't have access to the SEO algo; in fact it doesn't even know (beyond a guess) how many discrete SEO algos it is fighting, or which sites are optimized by which algos. So there is great asymmetry there.

That is why the fire alarm was pulled.

You underestimate the staying power of monopolies.

No, but i think you do have a point. Googles board and company execs had convinced themselves they’re an untouchable money printing machine. This year, they’ve been violently woken up.

They have tens of thousands of top engineers, billions in the bank, half a dozen products used by over a billion people and their main product is ads for people who use the internet. Companies always face existential threats but as far as moats go, Google has one a mile wide. Their downfall will be slow and obvious and even after their decline in cultural relevance they’ll still churn out billions of dollars a year.

Like AOL and MySpace?

No, like Exxon and IBM.

What is ChatGPT’s actual competitive advantage over search? It can’t tell you the second largest country in South America correctly, it’s an extremely cool demo but I can’t think of anything it could replace Google for. The underlying technology is extremely powerful, but it’s been powering Google for years

First try:

The second largest country in South America is Argentina. It has a land area of about 2.8 million square kilometers (1.1 million square miles). Argentina is located in the southern part of South America and is bordered by Chile to the west, Bolivia and Paraguay to the north, Brazil to the northeast, Uruguay and the South Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Drake Passage to the south. The country has a diverse landscape, ranging from the Andes mountain range in the west to the Pampas grasslands in the center, and the subtropical rainforests in the northeast. The capital of Argentina is Buenos Aires, which is known for its rich cultural heritage, vibrant nightlife, and tango music and dance.

By population it’s Colombia, by land it’s Peru

From google, the total area of South American countries:

1. Brazil: 3,287,957 sq miles

2. Argentina: 1,073,518 sq miles

3. Peru: 496,225 sq miles

Lol. The irony is delicious. Largest is size, populous is population.

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." "

How did you manage to get this wrong?

I asked it: "What is ChatGPT’s actual competitive advantage over search?

ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) language model that has been specifically designed to generate human-like text in a chatbot-like fashion. One of the main advantages of ChatGPT is its ability to generate natural and coherent responses to user inputs in real-time. This makes it well-suited for use in chatbots and other interactive applications where users expect a quick and personalized response.

In contrast, search engines like Google rely on pre-existing content and do not generate responses in real-time. While search engines can be very useful for finding information that already exists on the internet, they are not designed to generate original responses to user queries.

Overall, ChatGPT's main advantage is its ability to generate human-like text in real-time, which makes it well-suited for use in interactive applications such as chatbots."

There are many Google searches that are low effort queries for advice. ChatGPT can provide realistic answers to those in a way Google never could. I've received compelling advice on how to have a telephone conversation with an awkward relative and how to handle a complaint in customer service. Each response seems genuine and well thought out. In contrast Google might spit out a few lines extracted from a possibly relevant website but then I'd have to trawl through a million ads and back story to know if it actually was relevant. Even if the chat bot returned an irrelevant response I could clarify my question and it would remember the context.

How do you know Google execs are in full panic over OpenGPT?

someone on the internet said they were :D (there was some article on HN the other day. Personally I suspect this is just standard over exaggeration by reporters dependent on page views)

> What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome? 20% of company drives profits while 80% is a decorated R&D lab chock full of benefits, upset about cutbacks in their free oatmilk lattes, even though they're not coming to office anyway.

Transformers were invented at Google, which is the underlying tech on which GPT is built. I would say that counts as innovation.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learnin...

This misses the point.

Google has done interesting stuff. Ideas, research papers, R&D in AI, cloud gaming, leading in all kinds of niches… Google Docs with real time collab editing for example.

But can experiment all day and come up with all kinds of cool stuff but at end of day you need to monetize and make money.

To make money, Google depends entirely on X and unless they quickly course correct, they risk massive disruption to their biz.

After july, the vast majority of new reqs are going to GCP and Android, two places that aren’t ads that have pretty strong revenues. I think the G has finally decided to put more wood behind fewer arrows.

> What was last major innovation at Google.. chrome?

There’s alphago and alpha star etc. What about Waymo (splitting the company into pieces doesn’t make it a different company)? Since chrome they have made a lot of hardware too. Not to mention the dead attempts at innovation which didn’t pan out like stadia