Comment by onion2k

What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure?

Google have never had a viable competitor. Their moat on Search and Ads has been so incredibly hard to beat that no one has even come close. That has given them an immense amount of money from search ads. That means they've appeared to be impossible to beat, but if you look at literally all their other products they aren't top in anything else despite essentially unlimited resources.

A company becoming a viable competitor to Google Search and/or Ads is not something we can easily predict the outcome of. Many companies in the past who have had a 'monopoly' have utterly fallen apart at the first sign of real competition. We even have a term for it that YC companies love to scatter around their pitch decks - 'disruption'. If OpenAI takes even just 5% of the market Google will need to either increase their revenue by $13bn (hard, or they'd have done that already) or they'll need to start cutting things. Or just make $13bn less profit I guess. I don't think that would go down well though.