Begun, the AI race has: Google releases Gemini; Google & antitrust; AI & Hollywood
The race for AI supremacy is on; meanwhile the Department of Justice is fighting old battles, and wither Hollywood?
Begun, the AI race has
The big news today, of course, is that Google has finally released Gemini. Or at least a version of it. Google has announced three different versions of Gemini 1.0:
Gemini Ultra: the largest and most capable model for complex tasks
Gemini Pro: the best model for scaling across a variety of tasks
Gemini Nano: an efficient model for mobile devices
You can read Sundar Pichai’s Twitter announcement here. Bard.google.com is available to the public now. I’ll have much more to say about this over the coming days and weeks. In the mean time, here’s another Twitter thread, from Rowan Cheung, if you want another take. To adopt Yoda’s manner of speaking: begun, the AI race has.
Google and antitrust
Something I’ll never understand about lawyers is their unparalleled ability to fight the last war. They did this when the Department of Justice sued Microsoft, and they’ve done it again when they went after Google. Google faces an enormous threat from the rise of large language models. I’ve written before about their challenges with the Innovator’s Dilemma. Nonetheless, the Department of Justice saw fit to sue Google for anti-competitive behaviors in the search business—the very business which large language models like ChatGPT (or Gemini) threatens to disrupt. Here’s one article explaining this:
Over time, as the quality of AI-generated answers improve, users will have less incentive to browse through search result listings. They can save time and effort by reading the AI-generated response to their query.
In other words, it would allow you to bypass all those paid links and costly efforts by websites to improve their SEO scores, rendering them useless.
When users start ignoring the sponsored and editorial result listings, this will have an adverse impact on the revenues of SEO consultants, search engine marketers consultants and, ultimately, the bottom line of search engines themselves.
Further in the article, we note some of the financial implications of disrupting ad-based search, and its ancillar industry of search engine optimization:
For example, the SEO industry generated $68.1 billion globally in 2022. It had been expected to reach $129.6 billion by 2030, but these projections were made before the emergence of generative AI put the industry at risk of obsolescence.
As for search engines, monetizing online search services is a major source of their revenue. They get a cut of the money that websites spend on improving their online visibility through paid placements, ads, affiliate marketing, and the like, collectively known as search engine marketing. For example, approximately 58% of Google’s 2022 revenues—or almost $162.5 billion—came from Google Ads, which provides some of these services.
Search engines run by massive companies with many revenue streams, like Google and Microsoft, will likely find ways to offset the losses by coming up with strategies to make money off generative AI answers. But the SEO marketers and consultants who depend on search engines—mostly small- and medium-sized companies—will no longer be needed as they are today, and so the industry is unlikely to survive much longer.
This is bad news for Ahrefs and all the marketing agencies, SEO consultants, and other service providers which aim to optimize companies’ web sites for Google’s algorithms. But it also suggests that worrying about illegal manipulations of the search engine market is like the proverbial general who is always fighting the last war.
AI & Hollywood: where’s the disruption?
A common, and somewhat overhyped, claim that I see bruited about is that Hollywood’s disruption at the hands of AI is imminent. While it is true that Hollywood faces a significant existential threat from AI technology more advanced than what we have today, I am not as certain that this advanced AI technology will be available to the public any time in the next few years. Beyond that, forecasts seem murky.
Let’s try to be more specific here. The claim is commonly made that soon you will be able to sit in front of your computer, type a few prompts into some AI software, and have the AI software return to you, some time later, a fully made, personally customized, Hollywood-caliber movie.
We’re not there yet. A few days ago I shared this impressive, albeit flawed, short movie:
To quote from my earlier post:
If you watch the video, what you will see is a poorly-edited pastiche of steampunk and fantasy. It looks, well, artificial. The short film provides no coherent narrative, no reliable exposition. The description on YouTube suggests that it is “inspired” by the video game Frostpunk, though I couldn’t tell you whether this is accurate. It uses a combination of technologies from Midjourney, Pika, and Stable Diffusion.
Hollywood, in other words, has not yet been disrupted. It is true that we can infer the directional arrows of progress, and see a future version of AI technology in which it is indeed possible to sit in front of your computer, type in a few prompts, and generate a Hollywood-style thriller. But if you take a look at tutorials for RunwayML and Pika, you will see that the software presently requires a lot of manual interventions to get anything resembling a movie. It is true that manual work processes will eventually be instantiated in software, but, again, it takes time to build all this capability.
Anyway, Pika Labs recently released version 1.0 of their software. You can read more about their release here.
Here’s a video discussing their latest tech:
The bottom line is that I think Hollywood ought to be scared. I’m sure that some people in Hollywood are scared. But I don’t think that Hollywood has any great play book to forestall the inevitable. At some point before the end of this decade, we will have a massive supply of new movies to watch. Many of them will be crappy but almost all of them will be Hollywood-style or -caliber as we understand those terms today.
I expect Disney and similar companies to make maneuver to try to catch the cool new thing, but these moves will be inept, inflexible, inappropriate, and woefully insubstanital. True innovation, whether in terms of new businesses or new cultural output, will come from outside of Hollywood. The consumer is in for a wild ride.