Unless Google (or someone else) outright acquires GPT4 and future GPT research, it's unlikely that someone will suddenly overtake OpenAI. From what we've seen, no one is close to GPT4, sometimes not even GPT3.

Google didn't 'suddenly' beat out the search competition either. You don't need to. Decline takes time and there are always seeds and early signals.

Yes it did.

There was literally no one at the level of Google when it came out. I still remember Infoseek and Yahoo, both were garbage compared to Goog.

I know they aren't doing their best right now, but there is no need to rewrite history. Google was always superior to their search competitors, which is why it is so sad to see their current situation.

They might have been superior but it took a while for users to switch. Obviously some went across very quickly but AltaVista et al were still viable for a while.

Altavista was good. I loved Yahoo directory.

At that time, google was one big search bar and 10 links.

It was fast, had no ads. Until IPO, they didn’t want to do ads.

Now it’s just ads on the top links.

Google is absolutely vulnerable, if someone comes up with a better search engine.

I was talking about market, not technology but I guess that's what matters in this conversation.

for some, Google was superior to the current iteration of Google

Well, it doesn't have to be as good as GPT4. I've gotten a ton of use/power out of a local llama model. Even GPT3 was "good enough" for a lot of tasks. I mostly use ChatGPT because its the most convenient.

OpenAI has pretty much the "best" model and first mover advantage. They can lose the latter, and might struggle to keep the former.

I don't know if this is true at all but I read another comment as to mean that Microsoft basically has legal rights to fork ChatGPT. In that case if OpenAI dies maybe they'll just be relieved that the power dynamics got simpler.

Because the loopt guy got fired?