In the mid 90s, the Netscape browser introduced most of the world to the web and brought on the Internet era. Microsoft, which was the dominant tech company at the time, famously reacted by bunding its Internet Explorer browser into the Windows operating system and started taking share from Netscape.
Eventually, Internet Explorer became the dominant web browser and Netscape was sold to AOL.
Ironically, that battle for Internet dominance missed that the most important piece of software was the search engine, not the browser. And so the winnner ended up being an entirely different company - Google.
As Mark Twain famously told us:
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme
Google's purchase of DeepMind back in 2014 was the first shot fired in the foundation model battle. Google went on to develop the transformer architecture and it shared that idea with the world in a paper written in 2017. OpenAI took that architecture and started training large language models and introduced GPT1 in 2018.
What OpenAI was willing to do, that Google was not at that time, was to train its large language models on the entire Internet, regardless of who owned the content. I believe Google's lawyers and top executives, under massive scrutiny from DC and around the world, were not willing to go that far.
And so OpenAI developed a significant lead in large language models, leading to the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. That moment was the equivalent of the Netscape browser and ChatGPT introduced usable artificial intelligence to the world.
And, like Microsoft thirty years before, Google "woke up" and eventually caught up. With the recent introduction of Gemini 3, most observers believe that Google has erased OpenAI's lead, at least for now.
And just like Microsoft, Google is also bunding Gemini in every consumer surface area it owns. This browser that I am typing into has the Gemini Icon in the upper right corner and I use it to draw the header images to my posts.
Is there a better AI tool to draw these images? Maybe. But it isn't in the upper right of my browser and so I use the one that is.
I am not saying that Google will dominate large language models and OpenAI will be forced to sell itself to the modern day equivalent of AOL, whatever that might be.
History doesn't repeat itself.
But it does rhyme.
I've long thought that eventually LLMs would turn into a two company battle, just as operating systems and phones have. And I have long thought that it was just a matter of time until Google emerged as that second company.
And so it has.
But the thing I haven't yet figured out is what is the search engine in the AI story. Is there an application in artificial intelligence that matters more than LLMs? And if so, what is it?
AVC
11 comments
Hi Casters. Pattern recognition is what you get from observing something for 40+ years. And so I wrote something this morning comparing the LLM wars of today to the browser wars of the late 90s. https://avc.xyz/netscape-and-microsoft-redux
Enjoying these essays a lot. My dad does not have chat gpt but told me “the ai answers at the top of google are better than the links. I’m just using those now”. Your final question is provocative. Search liberated us from the box alphabetical curated lists. I wonder if The Thing in AI will be some form of AR — whatever liberates us from the box of our screens. By making the world around us whatever we want it to be.
Nice Read. I‘m thinking about it this way: You needed a Browser to give people Access to the Internet and that search was the logical next step, that added the most value. Now we can argue if LLM are simply the Next Evolution of search or if it is actually giving x (people & ai agents) better access to the internet and the logical next step is for Internet commerce to become a lot faster. A Platform Handling all the Value Transfers could be very valuable. Will OpenAi or Google be able to take a cut (like Apple with their appstore) or is another, permissionless Tech solution 100x more usable & scalable for agents?
great framing. very helpful.
i think you have figured it out. its what you mentioned at the end of your chat w dan at farcon, izho
thanks for the reminder. the personal data store?
i was trying to be cryptic 😅 yes. launching soon
how far do you zoom out when analyzing/observing events/situation?
as far as i need to
What's the scale like? If it's describable at all
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