[halflings]

This (innovator's dilemma / too afraid of disrupting your own ads business model) is the most common explanation folks are giving for this, but seems to be some sort of post-rationalization of why such a large company full of competent researchers/engineers would drop the ball this hard.

My read (having seen some of this on the inside), is that it was a mix of being too worried about safety issues (OMG, the chatbot occasionally says something offensive!) and being too complacent (too comfortable with incremental changes in Search, no appetite for launching an entirely new type of product / doing something really out there). There are many ways to monetize a chatbot, OpenAI for example is raking billions in subscription fees.

[Karrot_Kream]

Google gets much more scrutiny then smaller companies so it's understandable to be worried. Pretty much any small mistake of theirs turns into clickbait on here and the other tech news sites and you get hundreds of comments about how evil Big Tech is. Of course it's their own fault that their PR hews negative so frequently but still it's understandable why they were so shy.

[logicchains]

Sydney when initially released was much less censored and the vast majority of responses online were positive, "this is hilarious/cool", not "OMG Sydney should be banned!".

[knowriju]

You have clearly not heard about Tay and Galactica.

[Symmetry]

It's understandable that people at Google are worried because it's likely very unpleasant to see critical articles and tweets about something you did. But that isn't really bad for Google's business in any of the ways that losing to someone on AI would be.

[IX-103]

Google is constantly being sued for nearly everything they do. They create a Chrome Incognito mode like Firefox's private browsing mode and they get sued. They start restricting App permissions on Android, sued. Adding a feature where Google maps lets you select the location of your next appointment as a destination in a single click, sued (that's leveraging your calendar monopoly to improve your map app).

Google has it's hands in so many fields that any change they make that disrupts the status-quo brings down antitrust investigations and lawsuits.

That's the reason why Firefox and Safari dropping support for 3rd party cookies gets a yawn from regulators while Google gets pinned between the CMA wanting to slow down or stop 3rd party cookies deprecation to prevent disrupting the ads market and the ICO wanting Google to drop support yesterday.

This is not about bad press or people feeling bad about news articles. Google has been hit by billion dollar fines in the past and has become hesitant to do anything.

Where smaller companies can take the "Elon Musk" route and just pay fines and settle lawsuits as just the cost of doing business, Google has become an unwieldy juggernaut unable to move out of fear of people complaining and taking another pound of flesh. To be clear, I don't agree with a strategy of ignoring inconvenient regulations, but Google's excess of caution has severely limited their ability to innovate. But given previous judgements against Google, I can't exactly say that they're wrong to do so. Even Google can only pay so many multi-billion dollar fines before they have to close shop, and I can't exactly say the world would be better off if that happened.

[michaelt]

That's true for google, sure. But what about individual workers and managers at google?

You can push things forward hard, battle the many stakeholders all of whom want their thing at the top of the search results page, get a load of extra headcount to make a robust and scalable user-facing system, join an on-call rota and get called at 2am, engage in a bunch of ethically questionable behaviour skirting the border between fair use and copyright infringement, hire and manage loads of data labellers in low-income countries who get paid a pittance, battle the internal doubters who think Google Assistant shows chatbots are a joke and users don't want it, and battle the internal fearmongers who think your ML system is going to call black people monkeys, and at the end of it maybe it's great or maybe it ends up an embarrassment that gets withdrawn, like Tay.

Or you can publish some academic papers. Maybe do some work improving the automatic transcription for youtube, or translation for google translate. Finish work at 3pm on a Friday, and have plenty of time to enjoy your $400k salary.

[nemothekid]

>There are many ways to monetize a chatbot, OpenAI for example is raking billions in subscription fees.

Compared to Google, OpenAI's billions is peanuts, while costing a fortune to generate. GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?)

[ro_sharp]

> GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?)

Maybe? Hardware supply isn’t perfectly elastic

[nequo]

Wouldn't Google be better able to integrate ads into a "ChatGoogle" service than OpenAI is into ChatGPT?

[exitheone]

The cost per ad is still astronomically different between search ads and LLMs

[varjag]

There could be an opposite avenue: ad-free Google Premium subscription with AI chat as a crown jewel. An ultimate opportunity to diversify from ad revenue.

[disgruntledphd2]

There's not enough money in it, as Google's scale.

Especially because the people who'd pay for Premium tend to be the most prized people from an advertiser perspective.

And most people won't pay, under any circumstances, but they will click on ads which make Google money.

[nequo]

The low operating margin of serving a GPT-4 scale model sounds like a compelling explanation for why Google stayed out of it.

But then why did Microsoft put its money behind it? Alphabet's revenue is around $300bn, and Microsoft's is around $210bn which is lower but it is the same order of magnitude.

[varjag]

YouTube does it, at Google scale. And these same people do pay $20/mo for ChatGPT anyway.

[rs11]

Monetizing a chatbot is one thing. Beating revenues every year when you are already making 300b a year is a whole different ball game There must be tens of execs who understand this but their payout depends on keeping status quo