As a "business strategy" this and the social network spinoff make perfect sense given everything sneerclub has pointed out about LLMs. LLMs are plateauing and are barely usable in niche use cases that don't need reliability, much less everything OpenAI claimed about them, but, OpenAI has built up a user base they can squeeze for money with a browser or social network or whatever other gimmick (that is only tangentially related to LLMs) Sam can come up with and they can probably manage one last big milking of VC funds. Sam just needs to keep the hype train for LLMs going a little bit longer the VC funds then he can make the transition happen.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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A lot of court documents are sealed or redacted, so I can't quite get at all the details. Nonetheless here's what I've got so far:
- Chrome is just the browser, including Chromium, but not ChromiumOS (a Gentoo fork, basically) or ChromeOS (the branded OS on Chromebooks)
- Chrome is unaffordable because it was quite expensive to build and continues to be a maintenance burden
- The government is vaguely aware that forcing a sale of Chrome could be adverse for the market but the court hasn't said anything on the topic yet
- Via filing from Apple, the court is aware that Firefox materially depends on Google, although they haven't done much beyond allow Apple to file as amicus
The court hasn't cracked open AMD v Intel yet, where it was found that a cash remedy would be better than punishing the ongoing business concerns of a duopoly, but it would be one possible solution: instead of selling Chrome, Google would have to pay its competitors a lump sum and change their business practices somewhat.
I am genuinely not sure what happens to "the browser market", as it were. The Brave and Safari teams are relatively small because they make tweaks on top of an existing browser core; the extreme propagation of Electron suggests that once a browser is written, it does not need to be written again. The court may find browsers to be a sort of capital which is worth a lot of money on its own but not expensive to maintain. This would destroy Mozilla along with Google!
yeah. Chrome exists solely to protect and enable Google's ad business. Does OpenAI think it gets three billion phones for free?
The courts found against google in the huge search engine and online add cases, https://www.theverge.com/23869483/us-v-google-search-antitrust-case-updates finding that Google is a monopolist.
They may force Google to divest Chrome. That probably had some impact on this offer.
https://www.theverge.com/news/626502/trump-doj-recommends-google-breakup-antitrust-search-chrome
Of course, chrome is Google's primary ~~user~~useage tracking tool, so that would be a big blow for them. They'd have to buy the data they now generate themselves.
Open AI is the baby bird hoping the government will feed it Chrome.
Sounds about right, it feels like the codebase is AI slop to begin with.
Spoken like somebody who has zero commits in Chrome or Chromium, to be honest.
What gave it away? Could it have been that I wrote “it feels like?” 🥴
Idk mate v8's code is actually pretty damn solid, not sure about chrome itself but if the engine is any indication it's probably rock solid