The best decision for Google happened like 10 years ago when they started manufacturing their own silicon for crunching neural nets. No matter if they had a really good crystal ball back then, smart people, time travel machine or just luck, it pays for them now. They don't need to participate in that Ponzi scheme that OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft created, and they don't need to wait in line to buy Nvidia cards.
It had to have been launched longer ago than that because their first public-facing, TPU-using generative product was Inbox Smart Reply, which launched more than 10 years ago. Add to that however much time had to pass up to the point where they had the hardware in production. I think the genesis of the project must have been 12-15 years ago.
The acquired podcast did a nice episode on the history of AI in Google recently going back all the way to when they were trying to do the "I feel lucky", early versions of translate, etc. All of which laid the ground work for adding AI features to Google and running them at Google scale. That started early in the history of Google when they did everything on CPUs still.
The transition to using GPU accelerated algorithms at scale started happening pretty early in Google around 2009/2010 when they started doing stuff with voice and images.
This started with Google just buying a few big GPUs for their R&D and then suddenly appearing as a big customer for NVidia who up to then had no clue that they were going to be an AI company. The internal work on TPUs started around 2013. They deployed the first versions around 2015 and have been iterating on those since then. Interestingly, OpenAI was founded around the same time.
OpenAI has a moat as well in terms of brand recognition and diversified hardware supplier deals and funding. Nvidia is no longer the only game in town and Intel and AMD are in scope as well. Google's TPUs give them a short term advantage but hardware capabilities are becoming a commodity long term. OpenAI and Google need to demonstrate value to end users, not cost optimizations. This is about where the many billions on AI subscription spending is going to go. Google might be catching up, but OpenAI is the clear leader in terms of paid subscriptions.
Google has been chasing different products for the last fifteen years in terms of always trying to catch up with the latest and greatest in terms messaging, social networking, and now AI features. They are doing a lot of copycat products; not a lot of original ones. It's not a safe bet that this will go differently for them this time.
but cost is critical. It's been proven customers are willing to pay +- 20/month, no matter how much underlying cost there is to the provider.
Google is almost an order of magnitude cheaper to serve GenAI compared to ChatGPT. Long term, this will be a big competitive advantage to them. Look at their very generous free tier compared to others. And the products are not subpar, they do compete on quality. OpenAI had the early mover advantage, but it's clear the crowd who is willing to pay for these services, is not very sticky and churn is really high when a new model is release, it's one of the more competitive markets.
I don't even know if it amounts to $20. If you already pay for Google One the marginal cost isn't that much. And if you are all in on Google stuff like Fi, or Pixel phones, YouTube Premium, you get a big discount on the recurring costs.
Office 365 app suddenly is not called that. It's called copilot. When you open it it just shows chat. No files, no word, no documents. You have to try hard to find your files back.
So suddenly an app that you used to edit word documents and print PDFs is completely gone with no warning. Word doesn't exist. Even Office doesn't exist :D How are clients supposed to navigate that shitshow?
I wonder if all this shoving of AI down peoples throats could trigger a bit of a backlash around vendor software updates / proprietary software in general. There's this huge infrastructure of Windows Update, chrome auto-updates, app stores and SaaS that predated and enabled all this... and people accepted it when they were getting bugfixes and security updates out of it, but now it's getting used to take away the features they wanted and replace them with worse and worse versions of crapware.
All of a sudden... the free software world of updating when _you_ want the new version, and being able to fork the old version if you want, starts to look pretty great.
Our company at the time forced us to use Bing as the default search engine, so people started searching “google” on Bing to just to get back to Google. We were told “they’re both search engines, just use this one”, just like a person who bought an iPhone from a dollar store.
I refuse to enter the website until it implements https. A free Let's Encrypt certificate will do. Otherwise I don't even know if I'm reading what the author published on the site, or what a man-in-the-middle provided me.
It'd end when we implement a next generation IP addressing scheme. I'm not very big fan of IPv6 though. I'd prefer a 64-bit address format. IPv6 would only promote incautious distribution which would again result in address space exhaustion, more abuse and increased cybercrime.
It's going to take those conservative netadmins another 10 to 20 years to learn that HTTP/3 or QUIC works over UDP and that it needs to be enabled. So... happy buffering and watching spinners until then.
This is a great addition to the best patterns and practices in Rust. Worth noting and using. In JavaScript there's the proposal of "do expressions" which accomplish the same.
I don't believe that it's about the wellbeing of children. They will introduce total digital control in the name of high ideas, when in fact they'll be above that. We've seen this already with age verification for porn sites in UK. Even those exact people who voted for it, used VPNs to bypass the law they've created themselves. It's a laughterhouse.
In addition to that, one must be really naive to think that well-organized criminals won't arrange non-mainstream devices with custom modified Android or a new kind of Linux-based OS and/or protocol, without central authority, or with central servers in "certain" countries, that will bypass the stupid limitations.
Anybody who thinks that criminal gangs with paying members use WhatsApp for CSAM is an idiot.
When it comes to porn sites, only those big ones are going to be affected by this, but they're going to be affected badly. Stuff will be shared via some covert file-sharing mechanisms that will ALWAYS slip under the radar.
This surveillance will only target and affect normal people, and will take away your privacy for good, forever.
Remember that politicians are voted for on the basis of who's a better stand-up speaker, after only a few minutes of hearing/watching them, or even less than this, because your sibling told you so. They're not selected based on objective judgement of their competence, balanced view of the world which they base on data and science, but who's able to light your emotions sufficiently so that you remember that until you cast the ballot. Therefore most of them are just great drama actors, but are incompetent in all other areas.
Some say "I don't care, let them proceed, because I don't do anything wrong, and have nothing to hide". You'll see people arrested, investigated and imprisoned due to false positives. We've seen that already, but not to the extent this law is going to bring.
And one more. Not very far from now we'll experience AI and robots enforcing this digital utopia. West is going downhill. There will come a time when you'll call China with its social scoring system a "truly free world".
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