Comment by zaphar
18 hours ago
Google does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.
18 hours ago
Google does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.
This is the thing - Google is a real company with well established business, money of their own, hardware, server farms, etc. ChatGPT and Anthropic have none of that in the same way google does. They have an incentive to lie and 'fake it till you make it' so they can get out of the 'risk zone' of collapsing back in on themselves. Google can throw money at Gemini all day.
That may be true for OpenAI, less so for Antropic - which has much better margins. Both of these companies CEOs have come in public saying the same.
No doubt as of currently Google has a better business. But the same argument could have been said about Instagram or Whatsapp before Facebook (now Meta) acquired them.
Running AI at a loss long enough to kill the competition would run afoul of antitrust laws. Even more so since they’re bundling their AI products with their search monopoly.
Although I doubt this will stop them if they think it’s advantageous…
Lower real operating costs isn't the same thing as below cost pricing.
US law here is nuanced. Good quick primer https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
I thought that these type of antitrust laws are in no way enforced anymore in the tech industry. And that it's been that way for decades. I mean the sheer existence of Google shows that right? What about Maps, Mail, Books... basically everything apart from Search? Why would an AI Mode as one category of Search results be any different? They're not actively promoting Gemini in those search results. They're simply augmenting it with this new tool that exists now.
Yes anti-trust is very much theatre nowadays.
As long it further's American interests globally - monopoly is fine. Other countries need to take notice and start picking winners nationally in order to compete with the large American big tech firms.
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> run afoul of antitrust laws
Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
> antitrust laws. Even more so since they’re bundling their AI products with their search monopoly.
couldn't this just be framed / spun as just using search data as training? i don't seem being bundled enough to run afoul with anti-trust.
> Running AI at a loss long enough to kill the competition would run afoul of antitrust laws.
Running at a loss long enough to kill the competition is basically the name of the game these days.
When Uber started, they were basically setting VC money on fire by selling rides at a loss to destroy the taxi market.
Who's going to enforce antitrust laws in this environment, pray tell?
>would run afoul of antitrust laws
Buwahahahahahahahhahah
They drop a little cash on some shitcoin the president controls and those problems go away.
If AI is commoditising, who is Bahrain and who are the Saudis?
The company with the access to cheap and plentiful energy and the real estate to build data centers will be Saudi Arabia in your analogy.
This is why SpaceX could be a dark horse in this race. Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.
> Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.
You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat.
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Putting it centrally globally makes a lot of sense, just like connecting airports
Saudi will host the biggest data centers in the world
What does that mean?
> What does that mean?
I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P
In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)
In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.
To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain_Petroleum_Company
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_Kingdom_of...
[3] The alternate hypothesis is it's at distribution.
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I believe they were drawing a parallel to oil commoditization, but that's as far as I got.
The app layer is Bahrain.
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