[arbuge]

And they own Youtube...

That will be a massive benefit when it comes to training AI-powered robots I think. Conceivably, an AI that's seen every plumbing-related video on Youtube would be superior to any human plumber you can imagine, assuming a good mapping between the human hand movements in the video and its own robotic arms. And so on for other domains.

[ben_w]

Eventually we'll develop an AI that, if shown every plumbing video, would be better than any human.

Right now there's a few million Tesla cars on the road, in principle all could gather training data and gather tens of billions of miles of real world experience each year compared to the low single-digit millions of miles that a professional driver would see in their lifetime… and despite that, FSD has yet to earn the "F".

Cracking the data requirement for training AI is high value research; I don't think anyone has solved it yet, but this field being what it is it may have happened months ago behind closed doors, or it might be something that's just been added to the HN feed while I write this, or we may still be saying the same things in 2034.

[Rick76]

It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

In a sense, I am slowly preparing for a variant of that event now by archiving items I wanna keep using youtubedl.

I can't honestly say youtube disappearing won't have an impact, but it will not be the end of the world even I won't get to archive all the items I want. Something will replace it. And if it doesn't, that is ok too.

[tomschwiha]

For me personally it wouldn't matter too much if YouTube would be gone. I think I have several days or even weeks I don't use YouTube at all. But I agree for alot of people the entertainment factor (and for some the educational one) would be hugely broken if YouTube went offline.

[jononor]

Personally I would be fine too. But there is a lot of information which is not written down anywhere online, but exists on YouTube. This is anything from conference talks, to people showing how to use or fix some equipment/machinery. And it seems that informational content is getting more and more video centric. So there is a long tail of valuable information there, I believe.

[konfusinomicon]

as an avid youtube junkie, I mainline it right to the jugular several times a day, and if it went away maybe I could finally find the time to tackle my ever growing todo list

[immibis]

Go and join the Distributed YouTube Archive project

[tomrod]

For a little bit of time. Vimeo, etc. offer readily available alternatives, there are some open source initiatives to improve availability, and frankly VOD is a commoditized service these days. So YouTube going away would impact a mostly-not-connecting ad channel, and savvy creators that preserved their videos and farmed emails will survive without too much hiccup.

[dartos]

Imagine if chrome had a bug that required users to reinstall it.

Imagine the falloff of internet traffic.

[jjulius]

I mean, in a sense, the entire internet is likely ephemeral.

[xnx]

Is owning YouTube a big advantage? I assumed that nearly every public video has already been downloaded and is being used to train non-Google AI. Google definitely has some extra data (viewing behavior, clickstream, likes, etc.) that others don't, but that doesn't see critical to AI training.