It gives me pause to realize that the GOOG has been my internet, my video clips, my wallet, my phone, my operating system, my cable TV alternative that costs arguably more—

and now it finally wants to commit to our eternal friendship!

I’m a fan in general, techno-optimism is the only fun way to be.

But for your consideration: once upon a time, the GOOG only had 400 emoloyees too. And Jeff ran a bookstore in the PNW. I wonder every day. What is the future of OpenAI and this largely unseen goldrush?

Microsoft, through Bing, already has a small ads platform.

I think it wouldn't be too tricky for them to make sure that whenever the user asks ChatGPT "My omlettes keep sticking to my pan, what am I doing wrong?", it can reply with "You probably have an old frying pan with a damaged coating. [Click here] to see my recommendations of frying pans you can have delivered tomorrow.".

>Google's secret sauce is not its product but how it is able to monetize its userbase.

It is still primarily reliant on search as start of funnel though

OpenAI isn't trying to become Google, though. ChatGPT is marketing.

OpenAI's market is more comparable to AWS. Each product is another backing service for some other product to integrate with and sell to _their_ users.

At some point, we have to move away from ad based model. I already pay for youtube premium, love the experience. I am happy to pay for ChatGPT as well, especially it is a good assistant to knowledge based workers, those who wouldn't shy away from paying for it. I still believe Google can win this race just like they did with Android.

$20/month? I can bet that Apple executives are already trying to broker an exclusive deal for Siri-GPT-4 for tens of billions.

Since ChatGPT became publicly accessible, I can tell that my use of google has gone down

1. I had an interview for a CIO position - I fed the job description, ask ChatGPT to generate top 10 questions to be asked based on it , I was asked 90% similar or the same questions. Heck I even asked to provide best answers and they were great. It even generated a question on personalization and a/b testing which I thought would be highly unlikely to be asked, but was indeed asked. It was as if the interviewer also generated the same question.

2. For my current company, I am in charge of building a brand new engineering team, for which I wanted to write vision, mission and strategy statements. Previously I would have googled stuff, this time I asked ChatGPT to improve it based on my rough draft. And boy they are great.

I can go on.

My point is that not everyone needs to ask ChatGPT to generate ray tracing code using three.js or whatever. Most of us are just regular folk need regular help and ChatGPT is a game changer for it. Heck it even helped me with some excel macro I needed to write to do some data manipulation.

Random and silly use case from today: I needed to import a list of Polish bank holidays into our shared calendar. Last year, I tried to Google for a ready-made .ical file, and after failing to find one in 30 minutes, ended up manually entering everything into the calendar myself. This year, I just opened the first page, copy-pasted the listing to ChatGPT, and prefixed it with a very trivial prompt:

"Below is a list of holidays in Poland for 2023. Please rewrite it into ICAL format."

Five seconds later, I had a blob of text I could copy over to a text editor, save as .ical, and import to the calendar.

The most crazy thing is just how natural these kinds of interactions are becoming to me. It literally took me more time to write this comment than it took to do the thing I just described.

Heh, I’m glad it worked for your interview! Reminds me of when I’ve suspected that the interviewer and candidate both googled their way to the same “50 best project manager interview questions” site.

I pirate and the private usenet website I use has this funky search rules for "sphinx" they call it. Never seen it before.

I copied and pasted the search engine query term rules they have on the page, then said I want to find all American Dad episodes for season 18 with x265 codec. And it gave me the query to use.

This thing saves a bunch of time all over the place. This is truly the bicycle for the mind.

Sphinx is open source search engine. Sphinx allows full-text searches over large data sources.

It's not open source since 2017. The open source fork is https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch