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Comment by marcus_holmes

Kodak problem. Kodak invented the digital camera but their revenue came from making photographic film. They were unable to take advantage of their invention because it would cannibalise their revenue. That didn't stop other people and the revenue died anyway.

Google's main revenue is ads based on search. LLMs are a competitor to search. Creating better LLMs will cut into search volumes.

In any large organisation this is extraordinarily difficult to manage - they have to incentivise the new tech that is actively harming the current revenues, while maintaining as much of the old revenues as possible, without creating internal conflict between these two parts of the organisation that will kill it.

Though in fairness to Google they do seem to realise this and are trying to adapt - they're letting the LLM folks mess with search. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

parent marcus_holmes 5 months ago

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