Honestly, I can't see Google failing here. Like other tech giants, they're sitting on a ridiculously large war chest. Worst case, they can wait for the space to settle a bit and spend a few billion to buy the market leader. If AI really is an existential threat to their business prospects, spending their reserves on this is a no-brainer.
> Honestly, I can't see Google failing here. Like other tech giants, they're sitting on a ridiculously large war chest. Worst case, they can wait for the space to settle a bit and spend a few billion to buy the market leader.
It seems incredibly likely that the FTC will block that. New leadership seems to be of the opinion that consumer harm is the wrong standard. Buying the competition with profits from a search monopoly leaves all parties impoverished.
Anyways, I don't think the risk is failure, but of non-success. The article claims meta won but it seems like nvidia is the winner: everyone uses their chipsets for training, fine tuning and inference. And the more entrants and niche applications show up the more demand there is for their product. TPUs theoretically play into this, but the "leak" doesn't mention them at all.
> The article claims meta won but it seems like nvidia is the winner: everyone uses their chipsets for training, fine tuning and inference. And the more entrants and niche applications show up the more demand there is for their product.
Like the saying goes: during a gold rush, sell shovels.
That was true for IBM in the 1970s and Microsoft in the 90s. Despite holding a royal flush, they managed to lose the game through a combination of arrogance, internal fighting, innovator's dilemma, concern over anti-trust, and bureaucratic inertia. It will be hard for Google to pull this off.
Microsoft is always doing bad. They've done bad for the life of the company. Microsoft has never 'done good'. They have always been a negative force in computing and society at large. This toxic culture comes from their founder, about which all the preceding also applies.
GCP is a product, too, but it’s not as good as either of the top two, that’s a low margin market, and a key theme in this article is that people have made model tuning less expensive.
There’s no path forward for Google which doesn’t involve firing a lot of managers and replacing them with people who think their income depends on being a lot better at building and especially maintaining products.
I don't think google is ever going to get it's mojo back, Pichai has no vision.
Long term I think google will see massive layoffs, and new products will come via alphabet acquisitions following the YouTube model.
The threat isn’t that another company has AI, it’s that they don’t (yet) have a good way to sell ads with a chat bot. Buying the chat bot doesn’t change that.
What I mean is, if they can't figure out the ad angle and end up facing an existential threat, they have enough money to just drop their existing ad business almost entirely, and buy out the leading AI company to integrate as a replacement business model. It would be bloody (in the business sense, at least), but Google would likely survive such drastic move.
