I would have loved to be in the room when this decision was made, but my guess is that they decided that it was better to face some subtle nerd backlash now rather than having this quoted at the start of countless congressional hearings over the next decade.
You're confounding your subjective personal experience with the whole. Google can eat the cake and have it. They already are profitable, they already have scale, they already have market penetration, Google is already installed in 72% of mobile devices, they have cost efficiency due to TPUs, they probably have the best data, at least for serving ads. OpenAI has no chance in outcompeting Google, not in ad-based revenue.
Importantly: OpenAI doesn't need to outcompete Google, it just needs to show it can bleed.
As to the rest of Google's dominant position, it's an advantage for sure, but every leading vendor whose products turned to shit went the way of the dodo one way or another.
And it's important to mention that this includes GAds, not just the loss leader (Search). They have been so good at squeezing advertisers dry that ROI is barely there in many categories.
Actually I believe Google is the one caught between a rock and a hard place here because their stock will reprice once the market realizes how much their position has weakened re: search ads.
They commanded an absurd premium on ads by virtue of being monopolistic leaders of search. They don't have a better product anymore, only a scale/distribution advantage.
They seem to have been actively making search worse for at least a decade. No surprise they made it worse, that's [seemingly] what they were trying to do.
They presumably were doing it to increase "engagement". More time spent getting infuriated with their worsening search meant more time seeing their ads.
They deserve to go under.
Meanwhile 1 minute unskippable ads on 30s YouTube videos, pop-ups on mobile that cover the video when you close an ad. I hope the UK TV ombudsman grows some balls and starts applying the law on advertising-to-tv-programming ratio. It needs to be applied when programs have ads in them too.
Given how nowadays the payoff of a stock seems to just be from selling it later rather than having any direct correlation to the companies finances, it's all just a Ponzi scheme based on vibes.
> When was the payoff of a stock not from selling it later?
This is such a funny comment, historically you bought stocks to extract profits, ie dividends. Now you make money from houses and stocks by value appreciation instead of rent and dividends, you can see how that leads to very different behaviours and how that is not very stable compared to buying based on rent and dividends.
You mean, other than describing 5 possible approaches to the "bootstrapping a marketplace" problem, including a specific solution that worked in the real world to get to 7 figures GMV for the exact marketplace the OP is describing?
Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.
Was largely asking for all the people looking for specifics, since people were asking, and vague advice isn't very helpful when first starting out with this stuff. Like broadly, I've had luck with Linkedin messages for b2b and SEO for consumer, but mostly after the product is in an ok place. The initial users can be tough to find.
But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.
Off the top of my head (don't expect any revelations here, but mostly for people wondering how to approach this type of thing for the first time):
* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd
* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)
* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps
How about this counter offer? I give you 50% of the revenue for any sale you make for https://seaquel.app. If you tell me we need a lifetime offer, consider it done.
From the title and the beginning, I was sure this was going to be about the imminent brand age in software with the commoditization of the software engineering discipline brought on by AI.
I.e. in the early days (2023-2025, lol), companies were mostly differentiated by the quality of their LLM, i.e. GPT-3.5 was leagues ahead of anyone else, so was for serious work the only game in town. Until recently it was basically only the US based companies (OpenAI/Anthropic) with models worth using.
Now, Anthropic and OpenAI are neck-and-neck, and Chinese models are catching up fast, and the models are becoming commodities, and as long as they reach some threshold of quality/capability, it doesn't really matter to most customers.
So now we might be reaching the branding stage of LLMs. I.e. do you go for Anthropic, who are branding themselves as the responsible ones, or OpenAI, who are branding themselves as... the innovators? Not sure what they are going for these days.
If all models are roughly equally capable, all that's left is branding.
At least those are the thoughts it provoked in me. If that's what Paul Graham meant or not I have no idea.
I think you’re right about the impetus for the piece. I’ll say that branding is for things consumed in public, I expect vendor lock in before branding. But as you know this site is awash in speculation about how the lack of differentiation will play out
Don't worry even if your heirs have the password, it's extremely likely that Google will find the login attempts "suspicious" and try to verify your identity by sending SMS codes to a phone number you last had in 2005, despite your best attempts to prevent it.
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