Comment by fooblaster
11 hours ago
There is a pretty big moat for Google: extreme amounts of video data on their existing services and absolutely no dependence on Nvidia and it's 90% margin.
11 hours ago
There is a pretty big moat for Google: extreme amounts of video data on their existing services and absolutely no dependence on Nvidia and it's 90% margin.
Google has several enviable, if not moats, at least redoubts. TPUs, mass infrastructure and own their own cloud services, they own delivery mechanisms on mobile (Android) and every device (Chrome). And Google and Youtube are still #1 and #2 most visited websites in the world.
Not to mention security. I'd trust Google more not to have a data breach than open AI / whomever. Email accounts are hugely valuable but I haven't seen a Google data breach in the 20+ years I've been using them. This matters because I don't want my chats out there in public.
Also integration with other services. I just had Gemini summarize the contents of a Google Drive folder and it was effortless & effective
While I don’t disagree with you, for historical purposes I think it’s important to highlight why google started its push for 100% wire encryption everywhere all the time:
The NSA and GHCQ and basically every TLA with the ability to tap a fibre cable had figured out the gap in Google’s armour: Google’s datacenter backhaul links were unencrypted. Tap into them, and you get _everything_.
I’ve no idea whether Snowdon’s leaks were a revelation or a confirmation for google themselves; either way, it’s arguably a total breach.
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Not that I disagree with your assessment but in the spirit of hn pedantry - google had a very significant breach where gmail was a primary target and that was “only” 16 years ago in mid 2009. So bad that it has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
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Is Google even required to inform you of a data breach?
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Don't forget the other moat.
While their competitors have to deal with actively hostile attempts to stop scraping training data, in Google's case almost everyone bends over backwards to give them easy access.
‘Actively hostile’ as in objecting to your content getting ripped off without permission?
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The biggest moat is amount of money. Google has infinite amounts of money the print out of thin air (ads). They don't need complex entangled schemes with circular debts to prop up their operations.
They also have one of the biggest negatives in that they abandon almost everything they build so it’s hard to get invested in thier products.
I agree with the rest though
They don't abandon their money makers. That's the thing people don't get about the Google graveyard meme, they only cut things that obviously aren't working to make them more money.
I have yet to be convinced the broader population has an appetite for AI produced cinematography or videos. Independence from Nvidia is no more of a liability than dependence on electricity rates; it's not as if it's in Nvidia's interest to see one of its large customers fail. And pretty much any of the other Mag7 companies are capable of developing in-house TPUs + are already independently profitable, so Google isn't alone here.
The value of YouTube for AI isn't making AI videos, it's that it's an incredibly rich source for humanity's current knowledge in one place. All of the tutorials, lectures, news reports, etc. are great for training models.
Is that actually a moat? Seems like all model providers managed to scrape the entire textual internet just fine. If video is the next big thing I don’t see why they won’t scrape that too.
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If you think they are going to catch up with Google's software and hardware ecosystem on their first chip, you may be underestimating how hard this is. Google is on TPU v7. meta has already tried with MTIA v1 and v2. those haven't been deployed at scale for inference.
I don't think many of them will want to, though. I think as long as Nvidia/AMD/other hardware providers offer inference hardware at prices decent enough to not justify building a chip in-house, most companies won't. Some of them will probably experiment, although that will look more like a small team of researchers + a moderate budget rather than a burn-the-ships we're going to use only our own hardware approach.
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It's in Nvidia's interest to charge the absolute maximum they can without their customers failing. Every dollar of Nvidia's margin is your own lost margin. Utilities don't do that. Nvidia is objectively a way bigger liability than electricity rates.
it is in every business’s best interest to charge the maximum…
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I think it will be accepted by broader population. But if generation is easy and cheap I wonder if there is demand. And I mean as total demand in the segment. Will there be enough impressions to go around to actually profit from the content. Especially if storage is also considered.
The video data is probably good for training models, including text models.
Given the fact that Apple and Coke but rushed to produce AI slop, and the agreements with Disney, we are going to see a metric fuck-ton of AI-generated cinema in the next decade. The broader population's tastes are absolute harbage when it comes to cinema, so I don't see why you need convincing. 40+ superhero films should be enough.
And yes, all their competitors are making custom chips. Google is on TPU v7. absolutely nobody is going to get this right on the first try among their competitors - Google didn't.
Bigger problem for late starts now is that it will be hard to match the performance and cost of Google/Nvidia. It's an investment that had to have started years ago to be competitive now.
In this case the difference between its and it’s does alter the meaning of the sentence.
On paper, Google should never have allowed the ChatGPT moment to happen ; how did a then non-profit create what was basically a better search engine than Google?
Google suffers from classic Innovator's Dilemma and need competition to refocus on what ought to be basic survival instincts. What is worse is the search users are not the customers. The customers of Google Search are the advertisers and they will always prioritise the needs of the customers and squander their moats as soon as the threat is gone.
Google allowed this to happen because they listened to their compliance department and were afraid of a backslash if LLM says something that could anger people.
Sergey Brin interview: https://x.com/slow_developer/status/1999876970562166968?s=20
This attitude also partially explains the black vikings incident.
Exactly, Google's business isn't search, it's ads. Is ChatGPT a more profitable system for delivering ads? That doesn't appear so, which means there's really no reason for Google to have created it first.
There was a very negative "immune" response from the users when they perceived suggestions from ChatGPT as ads.
This will be hard for them to integrate in a way that won't annoy users / will be better implemented than any other competitor in the same space.
Or perhaps we just deal with all AI across the board serving us ads.... this makes more sense unfortunately.
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Think about it in terms of the research they put out into the ether though. The research grows into something viable, they sit back and watch the response and move when it makes sense.
It's like that old concept of saying something wrong in a forum on purpose to have everyone flame you for being wrong and needing to prove themselves better by each writing more elaborate answers.
You catch more fish with bait.
Agreed. Even xAI's (Grok's) access to live data on x.com and millions of live video inputs from Tesla is a moat not enjoyed by OpenAI.
>Agreed. Even xAI's (Grok's) access to live data on x.com and millions of live video inputs from Tesla is a moat not enjoyed by OpenAI.
Tesla does not have live video feed from (every) Tesla car.
The TAM for video generation isn't as big as the other use cases.
I agree, but isn't the TAM for video generation all of movies, TV, and possibly video games, or all entertainment? That's a pretty big market.
What you’re competing for is people’s attention and the tam for that is biggest there is
YT is also a giant corpus of English via the transcription
Hasn't it all been scraped by other ai companies already?