On one corner: IBM Deep Blue winning vs Kasparov. A world class giant with huge research experience.

On the other corner, Google, a feisty newcomer, 2 years in their life, leveraging the tech to actually make something practical.

Is Google the new IBM?

This statement is for the mass market MBA-types. More specifically, middle managers and dinosaur executives who barely comprehend what generative AI is, and value perceived stability and brand recognition over bleeding edge, for better or worse.

I think the sad truth is an enormous chunk of paying customers, at least for the "enterprise" accounts, will be generating marketing copy and similar "biz dev" use cases.

Nokia and Blackberry had far more phone-making experience than Apple when the iPhone launched.

But if you can't bring that experience to bear, allowing you to make a better product - then you don't have a better product.

I'm not dumb enough to bet against Google. They appear to be losing the race, but they can easily catch up to the lead pack.

There's a secondary issue that I don't like Google, and I want them to lose the race. So that will color my commentary and slow my early adoption of their new products, but unless everyone feels the same, it shouldn't have a meaningful effect on the outcome. Although I suppose they do need to clear a higher bar than some unknown AI startup. Expectations are understandably high - as Sundar says, they basically invented this stuff... so where's the payoff?

It makes Google look like old fart that wasted his life and didn't get anywhere and now he's bitter about kids running on his lawn.

https://www.hathitrust.org/ has that corpus, and its evolution, and you can propose to get access to it via collaborating supercomputer access. It grows very rapidly. InternetArchive would also like to chat I expect. I've also asked, and prompt manipulated chatGPT to estimate the total books it is trained with, it's a tiny fraction of the corpus, I wonder if it's the same with Google?