Comment by riffraff

6 months ago

That's not true at all.

I am confident some companies will make bank with AI. I am also confident xAI is not one of those.

It's as if you said "if you don't think Lycos is a good business you don't think search engines can work in general".

26 comments

riffraff

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lacy_tinpot  6 months ago

>I am also confident xAI is not one of those

Surely you're going to buy long Put options with that confidence, right?

  • ZitchDog  6 months ago

    You can’t trade options on an IPO.

    • groby_b  6 months ago

      You can post-IPO - depending on liquidity. I don't think that'll be an issue here.

      And if the thesis of "it's going to look good for the first 15 days" holds, you can indeed be very profitable by e.g. buying ATM puts. (The problem being that markets don't like sticking to time tables just to accommodate your investment thesis ;)

      So yes, you'll be able to take a bearish position fairly shortly after the IPO.

      2 replies →

sublinear  6 months ago

I kinda disagree because while most search engines failed and Google succeeded, they did not succeed by simply being a better search engine.

This is only further demonstrated by their excellent leverage of Gemini. Google continues to succeed at being Google.

  • irishcoffee  6 months ago

    They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time.

    No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.

    • compass_copium  6 months ago

      I used Dogpile "because it searches all of them at once!" until I realized that only Google's results were worth anything.

    • microtherion  6 months ago

      The way I remember it is that I used at least Lycos and AltaVista before Google. In both cases, a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads.

      So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.

    • sublinear  6 months ago

      Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much.

      I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people.

      I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage.

      Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there.

      This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.

      8 replies →

  • atombender  6 months ago

    As the other commenters point out, Google was absolutely a game changer. Their user adoption growth was stunning for good reason. Just a few months after launch, "everyone" was using Google.

    That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).

    They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.

    But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.

  • riffraff  6 months ago

    (I don't think your comment deserved the downvotes, it wasn't me)

    I think Google _did_ succeed as a better search engine, but ,y point was just that even if you think a company won't do well it does not imply the whole sector won't.

    You can consider the example of Nikola/electric trucks, if you disagree on google/search engines :)