Edit: Downvote all you want, OpenAI is a half trillion USD company now and quickly rising.
Besides I dont think the top people at Google's DeepMind - and I can only "infer" this from watching them speek online - actually think LLM's are "the one".
Note also that many of Google's previous attempts with LLM generated significant press controversy, and it was in Google's interest to let other groups take the heat for a while while the overton window shifted.
>a dead end
Sure, pal.
They should have buried it or been first. Instead they’re playing catchup.
Recently one of their top reasoning researchers switched to OpenAI, likely leaking Google's internal reasoning secret sauce, if they even knew anything that OpenAI didn't. I doubt they will catch up.
They're only using it in preference to Google today because it is ad-free.
They have, subscriptions:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-first-half-revenu...
Arguably the most mainstream and well-known subscription company is Netflix. People all around the world know about it, most have subscriptions and yet it hasn't "taken over" the world.
That's before we consider any other company (Anthropic, Google) can undercut OpenAI in price or just simply be good
Unless something drastically changes, OpenAI will have tough time justifying high valuation.
I actually believe that Google will survive OpenAI.
Quite the opposite, they have plenty of hindsight. One might argue it's 20/20 even!
With DeepSeek what we found was that the moat wasn't that deep (pun intended!) and they may have lacked some foresight, they caught up pretty well.
Or, you might think, if Google had the technology, and they knew how to turn it into a trillion-dollar product, it's beyond ridiculous to think they would just hand the win over to someone else.
In this day-and-age, it feels like HN refuses to advocate for anything that isn't a monopoly. Are we incapable of imagining competitive markets now?
I am talking about the 70s.
AI has cooled in the past, even generating the term “AI winter,” but it’s hot now. Quantum could be big again, but this current wave of specialized computers is played out. There won’t be hype at the level that AI currently gets until there is general purpose quantum computing.
Which, to be clear, could be never. Aside from factoring numbers, solving certain optimization problems, and simulating quantum systems, there are very few known applications where quantum computers even theoretically outperform classical computers.
Of course, it's possible that as quantum computers become more powerful/robust, it will inspire discovery of new classes of problems/algorithms that they excel at. But I'm not holding my breath.
For QC startups it's a different story, but of course startups have to hype themselves into the stratosphere to survive, so I don't really hold it against them (or at least, not any more than I would any other startup).
That’s very different from AI that will be applicable to very general and broad areas
We already have quantum transformers [1], so the PR points are there for the taking.
That said, I dislike the quantum computing craziness we're in where big claims are made without proof or data.
"We have the fastest clock speeds, lowest error rates, and most scalable architecture... no data, just take our word for it."
It will be interesting to see how they do in the DARPA QBI program.
condensedcrab•4mo ago
On a more serious note, I’m not convinced that solving NISQ scaling with ML can overcome interconnect scaling. Interconnects are needed to make logical qubits, but introduce increased error rates.
Even with better hardware, the scaling problem remains hard. It’s like getting LLM agents thru complex agentic paths and the hard problem of decreasing error rates.
Yoric•4mo ago