Is Google (and Meta) funding AI training from the profits of ad business, eating the losses in order to prevent pure-AI companies from making a profit, is this legal?
In principle, I mean. Obviously there's a sense in which it doesn't matter if they only get fined for cross-subsidising/predatory pricing/whatever *after* OpenAI et al run out of money.
I do think this is a bubble and I do expect most or all the players to fail, but that's because I think they're in an all-pay auction and may be incentivised to keep spending way past the break-even point just for a chance to cut their losses.
Do we know Google is operating at a loss? It seem most likely to me that they are paying for the model development straight out of search where it is employed on almost every search
Fair question. That's the kind of "who knows?" which might make it hard to defeat them in litigation, unless Google staff have been silly enough to write it down in easy-to-find-during-discovery emails.
But as a gut-check, even if all the people not complaining about it are getting use out of any given model, does this justify the ongoing cost of training new models?
If you could delete the ongoing training costs of new models from all the model providers, all of them look a lot healthier.
I guess I have a question about your earlier comment:
> Google is always going to be training a new model and are doing so while profitable.
While Google is profitable, or while the training of new models is profitable?
In principle, I mean. Obviously there's a sense in which it doesn't matter if they only get fined for cross-subsidising/predatory pricing/whatever *after* OpenAI et al run out of money.
I do think this is a bubble and I do expect most or all the players to fail, but that's because I think they're in an all-pay auction and may be incentivised to keep spending way past the break-even point just for a chance to cut their losses.