Google may very well be the Google of this era. They have demonstrated the ability to maintain parity on the engineering side, they have a long running advantage on OpEx with TPU, they have the most data, and the most trusted brand.
AI collapses the value of IP across the board, because AI trends towards being the only IP, which means that the marketplace will be defined by operational efficiency, ability to build and run systems at massive global scale, access to capital, and government connections, so Microsoft, Amazon, and Google probably stay on top.
They barely caught up after leaking talent for the past 4-5 years. I am not drinking the koolaid. A lot of talented people are going back home to China. I am 99% the next Google will come out of Asia.
the real answer is that the applications for the military, surveillance, and population control are proven, and the pathways to scale those capacities are clear, so the money will pour in no matter what. the implication is that we had better come up with some more consumer/humanity friendly applications that create comparable value, or that is all we will get.
for ad networks and social media platforms that provide monetization the click fraud is direct.
there is also a massive industry of fake accounts and fake engagement for social media and SEO (google). bots are designed to create plausibly real engagement, which is used to trick ranking algorithms into boosting content. these bots have to be real enough to bypass platform detection. clicking through on ads is a way of incentivizing platforms not to shut them down and possibly improving the ranking results, working with the theory that platforms give stronger weight to engagement signals from clients that generate more revenue.
developing secure software is very difficult. you have to start from a foundation of immutable data storage. then you need reproducible compilation from source code, to all executables, to bootable images. then you need out-of-band hardware that can verify signatures on the images being booted. all access to the system must take place through accounts with hardware tokens where all data access (r/w) is digitally signed and logged. then you need all developer access to the system to take place through this system. then at the application layer all data must be encrypted with unique keys, and the ownership and assignment of access to these keys must all be logged. this isn't something you can "bolt on later." it has to be a part of the platform architecture before development even begins.
YouTube was built on piracy and then Google bought YouTube and got immunity from copyright infringement claims by selling its user data to LE/IC in exchange for legal immunity. YouTube is still powered by piracy world wide. They only enforce copyright controls in western markets where the potential consumer is expected to have the income to afford streaming services. This is on par for the entire Google empire, which is all built on piracy, whether it is putting their ads on other people's content, redistributing other peoples's content without licenses, or building AI built on unlicensed content. And the whole thing works because they give their users personal data to intel and law enforcement in exchange for back door immunity deals.
this is a lot like the debate over IQ. there is no single measure of intelligence. humans have a broad array of different capabilities with every individuals capabilities sitting somewhere on a spectrum compared to the overall population. some capabilities are highly valuable in particular contexts and so people who are entirely focused on making money over-focus on the capability set that they believe translates into making money.
the people doing the hiring want to hire someone with capabilities they lack (which is why they are hiring in the first place) but then also expect that they will be able to exploit the person they are hiring in order to gain an excess share of the profits they create. the idea that you can hire people for their logic and math skills and expect that they won't be able to calculate their own value is a bit of a paradox.
> design the best system for what your requirements actually look like right now
this is the key practical advice. when you start designing for hypothetical use cases that may never happen you are opening up an infinite scope of design complexity. setting hard specifications for what you actually need and building that simplifies the design process, at least, and if you start with that kind of mindset one can hope that it carries over to the implementation.
the simplest things always win because simple is repeatable. not every simple thing wins (many are not useful or have defects) but the winners are always simple.
IP exists in your head. You have knowledge that no one else has and it is your property.
IP law recognizes this ground truth and creates a legal framework that allows IP to be traded in the economy which creates an incentive for people to share their IP.
What do you mean by "in your head"? A book I have printed, a photograph I have printed, a trademark that can be printed, these are tangible artifacts and the original IP.
5% is pretty low but similar to what i have seen on low performing teams at 10K+ employee multinationals. this would also be why the vast majority of software today is bug ridden garbage that runs slower than the software we were using 20 years ago.
agentic coding will not fix these systemic issues caused by organizational dysfunction. agentic coding will allow the software created by these companies to be rewritten from scratch for 1/100th the cost with better reliability and performance though.
the resistance to AI adoption inside corporations that operate like this is intense and will probably intensify.
it takes a combination of external competitive pressure, investor pressure, attrition, PE takeovers, etc, to grind down internal resistance, which takes years or decades depending on the situation.
posting a plain text description of your experience on a personal blog isn't exactly screaming. in the noise of the modern internet this would be read by nobody if it wasn't coming from one of the most well known open source software creators of all time.
people who believe in open source don't believe that knowledge should be secret. i have released a lot of open source myself, but i wouldn't consider myself a "true believer." even so, i strongly believe that all information about AI must be as open as possible, and i devote a fair amount of time to reverse engineering various proprietary AI implementations so that i can publish the details of how they work.
why? a couple of reasons:
1) software development is my profession, and i am not going to let anybody steal it from me, so preventing any entity from establishing a monopoly on IP in the space is important to me personally.
2) AI has some very serious geopolitical implications. this technology is more dangerous than the atomic bomb. allowing any one country to gain a monopoly on this technology would be extremely destabilizing to the existing global order, and must be prevented at all costs.
LLMs are very powerful, they will get more powerful, and we have not even scratched the surface yet in terms of fully utilizing them in applications. staying at the cutting edge of this technology, and making sure that the knowledge remains free, and is shared as widely as possible, is a natural evolution for people who share the open source ethos.
If consumer "AI", and that includes programming tools, had real geopolitical implications it would be classified.
The "race against China" is a marketing trick to convince senators to pour billions into "AI". Here is who is financing the whole bubble to a large extent:
AI collapses the value of IP across the board, because AI trends towards being the only IP, which means that the marketplace will be defined by operational efficiency, ability to build and run systems at massive global scale, access to capital, and government connections, so Microsoft, Amazon, and Google probably stay on top.