[woopwoop]

Maybe? But you could have written this same thing in 1999 with OpenAI and Google replaced by Google and Yahoo, respectively.

[raw_anon_1111]

And Google had profits - not just revenue - early on and wasn’t setting $10 on fire to have a $1 in revenue.

[dmoy]

Well maybe not in 1999. Adwords didn't launch until 2000? Google's 1999 revenue was...... I forget, but it was incredibly small. Costs were also incredibly small too though, so this isn't a good analogy given the stated year of 1999.

[wat10000]

Google in 1999 was already far superior to Yahoo and other competitors. I don't think OpenAI is in a similar position there. It seems debatable as to whether they're even the best, let alone a massive leap ahead of everyone else the way Google was.

[Libidinalecon]

Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember.

Yahoo was always more a directory of websites.

AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either.

I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.

[ur-whale]

Agree.

And GOOG is not a one trick poney any more, by far, especially when it comes to revenue.

Can't say the same of OpenAI

[TulliusCicero]

Google was immediately better than Yahoo, that's why people switched en masse.

Same thing happen with Internet Explorer and Chrome, or going from Yahoo mail/Hotmail to Gmail.