[rappatic]

> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT

There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.

[whiplash451]

The bottleneck isn’t the people doing the work but the leadership’s bandwidth for strategic thinking

[kokanee]

I think it's a matter of public perception and user sentiment. You don't want to shove ads into a product that people are already complaining about. And you don't want the media asking questions like why you rolled out a "health assistant" at the same time you were scrambling to address major safety, reliability, and legal challenges.

[tiahura]

How is strategic thinking going to produce novel ideas about neural networks?

[sien]

If only they had a tool that they claim could help with things like that....

[techblueberry]

Far be it from me to backseat drive for Sam Altman, but is the problem really that the core product needs improvement, or that it needs a better ecosystem? I can't imagine people are choosing they're chatbots based on providing the perfect answers, it's what you can do with it. I would assume google has the advantage because it's built into a tool people already use every day, not because it's nominally "better" at generating text. Didn't people prefer chatgpt 4 to 5 anyways?

[tim333]

ChatGPT's thing always seems to have been to be the best LLM, hence the most users without much advertising and the most investment money to support their dominance. If they drop to second or third best it may cause them problems because they rely on investor money to pay the rather large bills.

Currently they are not #1 in any of the categories on LLM arena, and even on user numbers where they have dominated, Google is catching up, 650m monthly for Gemini, 800m for ChatGPT.

Also Google/Hassabis don't show much sign of slacking off (https://youtu.be/rq-2i1blAlU?t=860)

Funnily enough Google had a "Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business" thing back in 2022 but seem to have got it together https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/ai-chatgpt-goo...

[jinushaun]

If that was the case, MS would be on top given how entrenched Windows, Office and Outlook are.

[logsr]

There are two layers here: 1) low level LLM architecture 2) applying low level LLM architecture in novel ways. It is true that there are maybe a couple hundred people who can make significant advances on layer 1, but layer 2 constantly drives progress on whatever level of capability layer 1 is at, and it depends mostly on broad and diverse subject matter expertise, and doesn't require any low level ability to implement or improve on LLM architectures, only understanding how to apply them more effectively in new fields. The real key thing is finding ways to create automated validation systems, similar to what is possible for coding, that can be used to create synthetic datasets for reinforcement learning. Layer 2 capabilities do feed back into improved core models, even if you have the same core architecture, because you are generating more and improved data for retraining.

[ma2rten]

Delaying doesn't necessarily mean they stop working on it. Also it might be a question of compute resource allocation as well.

[jasonthorsness]

ha what an incredible consumer-friendly outcome! Hopefully competition keeps the focus on improving models and prevents irritating kinds of monetization

[another_twist]

If there's no monetization, the industry will just collapse. Not a good thing to aspire to. I hope they make money whilst doing these improvements.

[apparent]

Just like uber rides funded by VC cash was great...until the VC money ran out and prices jumped to fill the gap.

[crazygringo]

If they don't start on ads and shopping, they're going to go out of business.

I'd rather a product that exists with ads, over one that's disappeared.

The fact is, personal subscriptions don't cover the bills if you're going to keep a free tier. Ads do. I don't like it any more than you do, but I'm a realist about it.

[rob74]

I for one would say, the later they add the "ads" feature, the better...

[saintfire]

Eh, get the enshittification done sooner than later so people aren't fooled into thinking it's actually worth anyone's time.

[ronnier]

>There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry

My guess is that it's smaller than that. Only a few people in the world are capable of pushing into the unknown and breaking new ground and discoveries