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by into_infinity 1277 days ago
And it will never be, because they will be always worried about PR, about regulators, about cannibalizing legacy business, etc. A new player who isn't held back by this has a good chance of disrupting the market with inferior technology. It happened over and over in the history of tech.

I'm sure there were quite a few SGI, Sun, and IBM executives laughing at that amateurish thing called Linux...

2 comments

This is a fair observation, and it’s certainly possible that they get disrupted like this. (I find the “cannibalizing legacy business” fear most plausible of these).

However I question your level of confidence. The idea that a company is incapable of avoiding being disrupted is pretty dubious; now that disruption theory is well understood by all executives, it’s possible to take steps to avoid it.

For example, DeepMind is an Alphabet company, and they could push them to make chatbots profitable completely ignoring Google’s ad market. They could even transfer tech/people over and to give them a boost in productionizing their efforts.

> And it will never be, because they will be always worried about PR, about regulators, about cannibalizing legacy business, etc.

They don't have to completely come up with a ChatGPT clone. They could do some of the following things:

- Enable some use cases on Google Search - for searches which are purely information based - above the search results. They already show such cards right now.

- Integrate it with Google Assistant. They already have excellent voice recognition devices. Assistant responding with generated answers, would be a game changer. You don't even have to type anywhere.