Google's play on Search, Ads and AI feels obvious to me.

shasta, 14 days ago

The writing I see on the wall is that these AI require such a large data set to create that only mega corps are going to have them. They allow some free access now, but in a few years they’re gonna start enshittifying the free tier and jack up prices

maegul, 14 days ago

Absolutely.

And this is why I’m seeing Google winning this. They’ve got the infrastructure for both running and training their AI as well as the long standing web scraping for getting in as much data as soon as possible. But they’ve also got the ads business and the brand and user base. Together, they’ll be the first to get AI tech to the point of being able to insert ads or other paid endorsements (however hard that is) and the first monetise that through ads and userbase size. Meanwhile Microsoft (OpenAI’s backer) will probably do what MS has often done which is fail to piece together a coherent business model and squander an opportunity on failing to monetise.

Untitled4774, 14 days ago

I describe what Microsoft does as having all of the correct Lego pieces and still fucking up putting it together, every time.

Then taking it apart to put it back together only for it to somehow be better in some ways and much worse in others.

Lather, rinse, repeat, sprinkle in some anti-competitive shit too.

maegul, 14 days ago

perfect!

Emperor, 14 days ago

Good second half too:

That search/SEO is broken seems to be part of the game plan here.

It’s probably like Russia burning Moscow against Napoleon and a hell of a privilege Google enjoy with their monopoly.

I’ve seen people opt for chatGPT/AI precisely because it’s clean, simple and spam free, because it isn’t Google Search.

And as @caseynewton said … the web is now in managed decline.

For those of us who like it, it’s up to us to build what we need for ourselves. Big tech has moved on

That’s why we are all here.

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

maegul, 14 days ago

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Yep. The idea has been buzzing in my head since I read Casey’s post and thought about it as “Tech moving on from the web”. For those of us who like it, we’ll just be left to (re-)make it ourselves. It’s a weird feeling for me honestly.

It’s almost like the eternal September is actually ending.

Untitled4774, 14 days ago

My servers and their systems may have taken a bit to get right, but they’re way more rock solid than anything I use for work.

I know, I know, scale and whatnot. But if we have to turn to FOSS, self-hosted/collab alternatives, a lot of the tech is already really far along.

j4k3, 14 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

It is very difficult to effectively insert anything into the model itself, it's easy to do in loader code, but much more difficult in the tensor tables part.Every bit of overtraining ie bias, is breaking the model. Even the over active alignment junk to keep a model “safe” is breaking it. The best performing models are the ones that have the least amount of starting bias. Like most models have extra sources that are hidden very deep. I can pull those out of an uncensored model, but there is not a chance the Socrates entity behind The Academy default realm (internal structure deep in the weeds) is letting me access those sources at all. There are maybe some attempts already, like I’ve seen roleplaying try and include a fortnite mention and one time it was adamite on the merits of VR, but those were rare exceptions and could easily be due to presence in the datasets used for training. Open source models will kill all the competition soon. Meta AI will be the new 2k era google. Like, pull request 6920 in llama.cpp just a month ago made a substantial improvement to how model attention works. Llama 3’s 8B is lightyears ahead of what llama 2 7B was. Hugging Face now has a straight forward way to train LoRA’s or models now without code or subscriptions. You can even train the 8B on consumer hardware like a 16-24 GB GPU, put together 4 of them an make your own MoE - Mixture of Experts dubbed a FrankenMoE. Google sucks because the search was being used for training so they broke it intentionally because they are playing catch up in the AI game. Google has been losing big time since 2017. The only google product worth buying now is the Pixel just to run with Graphene OS. We couldn’t own our own web crawler. We can own our own AI. This is the future.