Yes and no. Yes for the quality of search results. Google algorithm and user experience was simply better than AltaVista's, but Google had another advantage. It used a cluster of cheap consumer-grade hardware (PCs) as its backend, rather than the expensive servers AltaVista used, in fact, AltaVista started off as a way for DEC to show off its hardware.
As a result Google was not only better than its competitors at searching, it was also cheaper and scaled better, and this architecture became the new standard.
It is the opposite for these AI-based systems. AI is expensive, it uses a lot of energy, and the hardware is definitely not consumer-grade.
What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. Google don't have to do anything, it will collapse on its own. Ironically, probably in the same way that Google result became crappier by the year, but on fast forward.
> What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable.
This is the basic premise of Ed Zitron's article https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/ and others written around the same time. A lot of what he's written seems to be coming to pass, e.g. unfathomably large investments (~$100 billion) by tech giants in OpenAI and other AI startups to keep them going. That does seem unsustainable.
Can anyone make a counterpoint to this claim? I'd be very interested to hear what a viable path to profitability looks like for OpenAI.
Probably "every major corporation pays them a gazillion dollars a year for enterprise-class AI services that outperform humans while running at 100x speed"?
Yes and no. Yes for the quality of search results. Google algorithm and user experience was simply better than AltaVista's, but Google had another advantage. It used a cluster of cheap consumer-grade hardware (PCs) as its backend, rather than the expensive servers AltaVista used, in fact, AltaVista started off as a way for DEC to show off its hardware.
As a result Google was not only better than its competitors at searching, it was also cheaper and scaled better, and this architecture became the new standard.
It is the opposite for these AI-based systems. AI is expensive, it uses a lot of energy, and the hardware is definitely not consumer-grade.
What it means is that barring a significant breakthrough, cheap ChatGPT-like services are simply unsustainable. Google don't have to do anything, it will collapse on its own. Ironically, probably in the same way that Google result became crappier by the year, but on fast forward.