Stuff like this is the main reason I end up switching to Apple Maps on the occasions that I do so. Another example is refusing to tell me the number of the upcoming exit I'm taking.
In general I would say Google Maps is still superior to Apple Maps, but between the aforementioned baffling design decisions and Google maps now including ads in destinations search results, I find myself experiencing more and more mental friction whenever I use it.
Eventually switched to Waze, which is now also cluttering things up with (basically) ads.
On google maps, these national boundaries have the same line weight and a similar style to highways. It’s really annoying.
There's no way a single company can fine tune an LLM to meet all the needs of every person on the planet. It would be like expecting a single company to build every website, every app for a phone, etc.
Let the world gnaw and chew on it. See what comes out, and use what you can. It's basically free labor worth billions of dollars.
Also looking at their bike routing - it gives me an idea. Road should be rated on whether they have a dedicated bike lane and on the danger of riding on said road at particular times of day. I just input a src/dest and it gave me a really busy road with tons of "paperboy" level risky side roads on it. I would never want someone to take that route at 5pm on a weekday.
To figure out why directions are bad you need to see which criteria the routing engine is using to create the route and decide either to change the constraints used to generate the bike route or what added data you need to place on the streets for the routing engine to avoid/prefer certain streets.
Does this sound like an opaque nightmare? Yes. That's why very few people use it. Apple has been doing some great work doing mapping and adding it into the OSM DB, which they use for their own maps, but they have their own proprietary routing system for directions. If you're looking for a good app to use just OSM data, I use OSMAnd for Android. I still prefer Google Maps because their routing and geocoding tend to be much better for urban areas but for hikes and country bike rides, OSM tends to outperform GMaps.
People in the real world care about things like hours of operation. Google makes it really easy for businesses to keep them up to date on things like holiday closures. OSM makes it a nightmare.
While the generic interface is pretty bad (you have to edit the machine-readable values), StreetComplete provides a very nice UI
So yeah, OSM is a nightmare for businesses to deal with. And unless that changes, its access to business information that people expect will remain severely limited.
What prevents a nasty competitor from making daily false updates to your opening hours?
If you're a verified business owner in a non-collaborative platform, you can update your holiday hours/one-off closure with a simple edit on that platform's business management page/API. How is OSM even in same category as Apple maps/bing/Google maps?
Examples:
Specifically I was a developer for a company whose job was to update business information in Google Maps, Apple, Facebook and so on. We'd get the data from companies like Cheesecake Factory, Walmart and Trader Joe's, then we would update all of the sites for them.
All of the sites have some sort of API or upload mechanism that makes it easy to do things like publish phone numbers, hours of operation, hours for specific departments and so on. All of them were happy to let us automate it. All were happy to accept data based on street addresses.
I tried to make it work for OSM. It was a disaster. I have an address. Google et al understand that a street often has multiple names. If the address I was given named the street something else, Google took care of understanding that route 33 is also such and so street and they accepted the data. If I said that there was a restaurant inside of a mall, Google didn't insist that I know more than that. If I was publishing holiday hours, Google accepted us as the default authority. (And gave ways of resolving it if someone else disagreed.)
OSM did NONE of that. It was all roadblocks. If I didn't have the One True Name that OSM in its wisdom determined was right, good luck matching on address. If I couldn't provide OSM with the outline of the restaurant on the floor plan, OSM had no way to accept that there was a restaurant in the mall. If a random OSM contributor had gone to the location and posted store hours, OSM refused to accept my claim of its reduced hours on Christmas Day. And so on.
All of the brands that I named and more don't publish to OSM for one reason, and one reason only. OSM make it impossible for businesses to work with them in any useful way to provide that information. And therefore OSM is not on the list of sites that that data gets published to.
In short, if it isn't perfect, OSM doesn't want your data. And the data off of a spreadsheet some business uses to manage this stuff usually is nothing like perfect. I respect how much work went into getting OSM just right. But they made it impossible for real businesses to work with them, and so they don't get that business data.
When I'm lost in a forest, I look at OSM to see where the footpaths are.
Let alone the panning and zooming, there is no open source solution which is capable of doing it with such a correctness, even if we ignore Google's superb "satellite" imagery with its 3D conversion. I have no access to Apple Maps, so I can't compare (DuckDuckGo does not offer Apple's 3D view).
And even in markets with very dominant free offers like video consumption, programming languages or VCS, you can still make tons of money by providing a service around it. E.G: github, netflix, etc.
OpenAI has a good product, a good team, a good brand and a good moving speed.
Selling them short is a bit premature.
It's the only map anyone can actually integrate into anything without an api key and a wallet with a wad of greens in it, so that keeps it relevant for now. Maybe if/when Starship lowers cost to orbit, then we'll see non-profit funded satellites that can source that dataset and keep it up to date.
A better analogy would be paywalled general-purpose programming languages, where any access to running code is restricted. Such a programming language would get virtually no mindshare.
This Google employee is just saying, let's not make that mistake.
Even if Google fired all AI researchers tomorrow and just used open source models going forward, they could still build killer products on them due to their data moat. That's the takeaway.
The (supposedly) leaked article attempts to show that this aspect isn't that relevant in the AI/LLM context.
The sheer size of the OSM project is staggering. Putting it next to Wikipedia, where missing content at some point wouldn't cause much fuss, makes it a bad example.
Besides that, your limited knowledge of the popularity of OSM gives you a wrong picture. OSM is already the base for popular businesses. Like Strava for example. TomTom is on board with it. Meta for longer with their AI tool, same as Microsoft. In some regions of the world where the community is very active, it IS better than Google Maps. Germany for example where I live. In many regions of the world, it is the superior map model for cycling or nature activities in general. Sometimes less civilised areas of the world have better coverage too because Google doesn't care about those regions. See parts of Africa or weird countries like North Korea.
One should also not forget the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team which provides humanitarian mapping in areas Google didn't care. You can help out too. It's quite easy: https://www.hotosm.org/
> What's more every company I've worked at since has paid Google for access to their Maps API.
Many others have switched away after google lifted their prices. They'll lose the race here too. A simple donation of up-to-date world satellite imaginary would already be enough for an even faster grow.
So the “higher ups” were using too coarse a heuristic or maybe had some other pretty severe error in their reasoning.
The right approach here is to do a more detailed analysis. A crude start: the community approach wins when the MVP can be built by 1-10 people and then find a market where 0.01% of the users can sufficiently maintain it.[1]
Wikipedia’s a questionable comparison point, because it’s such an extraordinary outlier success. Though a sufficiently detailed model could account for it.
1. Yochai Benkler has done much more thorough analysis of win/loss factors. See e.g. his 2006 book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks
I've had to try a fair few mapping applications that works for me (I can recommend Organic Maps on android)
OSM map data easy exeeds Google map data, the only time I do use google maps is for street view images and satalite info.
Bing is good in the UK because that has Ordnance survey maps - OS mapping data is generally better than OSM (for what I need it for)
This isn't a prediction, it's an observation. There's no moat because the castle has already been taken.
The people doing many of these projects often want the short term kudos, upvotes, or research articles. They may iterate fast, and do all kinds of neat advancements, except in a month they'll move to the next "cool" project.
Unfortunately, with a lot of open source projects, they don't want to deal with the legalese, the customer specific integration, your annoying legacy system, the customer support and maintenance, or your weird plethora of high-risk data types (medical industry I'm looking at you)
Not sure what the Wikipedia reference is, since how many people use any form of encyclopedia other than crowdsourced Wikipedia?
However, to note, there are some examples of successful long term open source. Blender for example being a relatively strong competitor for 3D modeling (although Maya still tends to be industry dominant).
Mapping intersections is extremely boring in comparison. The sheer quantity of boring work needed to bring open street maps up to the quality of google maps in insurmountable.
LLMs are freaking cool, and that bodes well for their viability as open source projects.
The issue is search. Searching for things that you don't know precisely (music bars in this area). This type of data/processing on top of the geospatial was always subpar and very hit or miss in my experience.
I don't buy this for Maps, but it's worth highlighting that this isn't the usual "community supported stuff will eat commercial stuff once it gets to critical mass" type of argument.
In Wikipedia, the user is same as the content creator: the general public, with a subset of it contributing to the Wikipedia content.
In OpenStreetMaps, one category of users are also creators: general public needs a "map" product, and a subset of them like contributing to the content.
But there's another category of users: businesses, who keep their hours/contact/reviews updated. OpenStreetMap doesn't have a nice UX for them.
As for use cases: underlying map data sure, but one needs strong navigation features, "turn right after the Starbucks", up-to-date traffic data.
This all makes it so different from Wikipedia vs Encarta.
Been using Apple Maps now for six months, and very happy with it. No lag, and very useful directions like “turn left at the second stop light from here”.
TIL
Won't any company that can stay a couple years ahead of open source for something this important will be dominant as long as it can do this?
Can an open source community fine tuning on top of a smaller model consistently surpass a much larger model for the long tail of questions?
Privacy is one persistent advantage of open source, especially if we think companies are too scared of model weights leaking to let people run models locally. But copyright licenses give companies a way to protect their models for many use cases, so companies like Google could let people run models locally for privacy and still have a moat, if that's what users want, and anyway most users will prefer running things in the cloud for better speed and to not have to store gigabytes of data on their devices, no?
Crowdsource is significantly different from open source.
Open source is Linux winning because you don't need to pay Microsoft, anyone can fork, Oracle/IBM and Microsoft's enemies putting developers to make it better and so on. Today .NET runs on Linux.
Crowdsource is the usual bs that either through incentives (like crypto) or by heart, people will contribute to free stuff. It doesn't have the openness, liberty or economic incentives open source has.
And Google has lots of crowdsourced data on Maps, I know lots of people who loves to be a guide there.
I use Apple's notably inferior maps because they're not feeding my data straight into their map and navigation products. It's a tradeoff most wouldn't be willing to make, but that tradeoff is why their maps are better.
It boils down to out of date maps are worse than worthless and google has a scheme to keep theirs up to date. It's a huge maintenance problem...unless your users are also the product.
So maps might be a bad comparison to ML/AI development.
*Google using their user data can be interpreted as google being good at it, sure.
As an aside, I stopped using Google maps/waze because I got the distinct impression I was being used as a guinea pig to find new routes during the awful commute I used to have. I would deliberately kill the app when I went to use a shortcut I knew about so that the horde wouldn't also find it via those tools.
After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap.
Just like Encarta and Wikipedia we were told - once the open source community gets their hands on something there's just no moat from an engineering perspective and once it's crowdsourced there's no moat from a data perspective. You simply can't compete.
Of course it's more than a decade later now and I still use Google Maps, Bing Maps still suck, and the view times I've tried OpenStreetMaps I've found it far behind both.
What's more every company I've worked at since has paid Google for access to their Maps API.
I guess the experience made me skeptical of people proclaiming that someone does or does not have a moat because the community will just eat away at any commercial product.