| They know Google has a ton of data to train LLMs on. Recently I have been asking YouTube's new AI about some videos ("when is Steam metrics mentioned in the video?" for example), which means they also index videos. This is an unthinkable amount of data. I'm actually impressed at how bad Alphabet is with LLMs since they invented the thing as we know AND have all the data to train on, yet OpenAI and Anthropic are eating their pie. |
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.