In retrospect this is very similar to the Apple strategy: don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency, position for novel uses of the tech but don’t build it per se. Apple probably would have benefitted in the last 4 quarters from hyping a custom model stack but it doesn’t seem that this strategy paid off to even close to 20% ROI while Apple got to hold their cash and organizational focus on their main thing
reply> don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency
reply“Heavily” it’s a high bar at their scale. They spent over $10bn playing with cars.
And Gemini seems about as good as a search engine as any of the other LLMs, if you use them casually. And Google has the brand-name recognition.
replyRight now AI companies are competing to make LLMs better at graduate-school level tasks. They all can already competently tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow or when the first Led Zeppelin album was released.
Gemini seems like a better search engine than the alternatives because it has access to Google's massive crawler feeds. I think Google could charge 30 dollars month for Gemini + all the data Google has locked up (Scholar, Books, crawled webpages, Google Groups, Usenet archives + search of your personalized datasets such as calendars, photos, emails, docs, slides, etc...). I'd pay that easily.
replyLegal will have a shit fit at all of the things that you just mentioned.
reply> If anthropic wins, Google copies their approach, buys anthropic for cheap or both
replyGoogle buys Anthropic for cheap? How?
Anthropic has no moat, their models just get distilled and resold. They can maybe get good margins when LLM improvement rate is very high but as it slows down they are looking at commodity margins. Google has the products that makes that commodity more than just cost of electricity + 0.5%.
replyMy case is based on the assumption that Anthropic will not hit RSI or if it does RSI rapidly hits a wall. Faster your growth curve, the faster you eat all the low hanging fruit and s-curve. I could be wrong here, maybe RSI will cause a hard takeoff singularity by 2030 and just keep going, but if that happens the world fundamentally changes.
Why would Google be the only interested buying party?
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