[sanderjd]

Yeah but I remember when search first started getting integrated with the browser and the "switch search engine" thing was significantly more prominent. Then Google became the default and nobody ever switched it and the rest is history.

So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if it was, how did they win and defend their default status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time (Microsoft) beat them at this game?

I have my own answers for these, and I'm sure all the smart people figuring out strategy at Open AI have thought about similar things.

It's not clear if Open AI will be able to overcome this commodification issue (personally, I think they won't), but I don't think it's impossible, and there is prior art for at least some of the pages in this playbook.

[reasonableklout]

Yes, I think people severely underrate the data flywheel effects that distribution gives an ML-based product, which is what Google was and ChatGPT is. It is also an extremely capital-intensive industry to be in, so even if LLMs are commoditized, it will be to the benefit of a few players, and barring a sustained lead by any one company over the others, I suspect the first mover will be very difficult to unseat.

Google is doing well for the moment, but OpenAI just closed a $40 billion round. Neither will be able to rest for a while.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, a very interesting metric to know would be how many tokens of prompt data (that is allowed to be used for training) the different products are seeing per day.

[skydhash]

> So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if it was, how did they win and defend their default status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time (Microsoft) beat them at this game?

Maybe the big amount of money they've given to Apple which is their direct competitor in the mobile space. Also good amount of money given to Firefox, which is their direct competitor in the browser space, alongside side Safari from Apple.

Most people don't care about the search engine. The default is what they will used unless said default is bad.

[sanderjd]

I don't think my comment implied that the answers to these questions aren't knowable! And indeed, I agree that the deals to pay for default status in different channels is a big part of that answer.

So then apply that to Open AI. What are the distribution channels? Should they be paying Cursor to make them the default model? Or who else? Would that work? If not, why not? What's different?

My intuition is that this wouldn't work for them. I think if this "pay to be default" strategy works for someone, it will be one of their deeper pocketed rivals.

But I also don't think this was the only reason Google won search. In my memory, those deals to pay to be the default came fairly long after they had successfully built the brand image as the best search engine. That's how they had the cash to afford to pay for this.

A couple years ago, I thought it seemed likely that Open AI would win the market in that way, by being known as the clear best model. But that seems pretty unclear now! There are a few different models that are pretty similarly capable at this point.

Essentially, I think the reason Google was able to win search whereas the prospects look less obvious for Open AI is that they just have stronger competition!

To me, it just highlights the extent to which the big players at the time of Google's rise - Microsoft, Yahoo, ... Oracle maybe? - really dropped the ball on putting up strong competition. (Or conversely, Google was just further ahead of its time.)