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Selling user data, selling ad placement, subscriptions for paid services, enterprise-grade support contracts, and the like.

They could also take an approach similar to Google, branching back out from being just a browser into a suite of related tools that Chrome can then convince users to switch to (similar to how Chrome gets users to not just use Google search, but also services like Gmail too.)

This is an order to sell, not break up.

Currently, it’s still recommended actions to the court. Nothing has actually been finalized in terms of what they’re going to actually end up trying to make Google do.

Google must not remain in control of Chrome.

While divestiture is likely, they could also spin-off, split-off, or carve-out, which carry completely different implications for Google, but are still an option if they are unable to convince the court to make Google do their original preferred choice.

A split-off could prevent Google from retaining shares in the new company without sacrificing shares in Google itself, and a carve-out could still allow them to “sell” it, but via shares sold in an IPO instead of having to get any actual buyout from another corporation.

By “sell,” they could also mean ending up having Chrome just split off from Google, as a new, independent entity that is its own company, without anybody needing to buy it in the first place.

They definitely will, since they don’t even support any of Google’s standard restore features by default.

They use Seedvault instead, which doesn’t have the capability to restore app logins. I have a feeling Seedvault may end up adding that as a feature in the future, though.

I’m excited for the future, but not as excited for the transition period.

I have similar feelings.

I discovered LLMs before the hype ever began (used GPT-2 well before ChatGPT even existed) and the same with image generation models barely before the hype really took off. (I was an early closed beta tester of DALL-E)

And as my initial fascination grew, along with the interest of my peers, the hype began to take off, and suddenly, instead of being an interesting technology with some novel use cases, it became yet another technology for companies to show to investors (after slapping it in a product in a way no user would ever enjoy) to increase stock prices.

Just as you mentioned with the dotcom bubble, I think this will definitely do a lot of good. LLMs have been great for asking specialized questions about things where I need a better explanation, or rewording/reformatting my notes, but I’ve never once felt the need to have my email client generate every email for me, as Google seems to think I’d want.

If we can just get all the over-hyped corporate garbage out, and replace it with more common-sense development, maybe we’ll actually see it being used in a way that’s beneficial for us.