7 ms·

Also as time goes by, it'll get smoothly integrated into docs/gmail/maps/calendar/youtube/search/colab/sheets/android/assistant So Gemini could by your one-sto

Also as time goes by, it'll get smoothly integrated into docs/gmail/maps/calendar/youtube/search/colab/sheets/android/assistant So Gemini could by your one-stop AI shop for everything. Only Microsoft can match it (but Microsoft doesn't have a popular maps, youtube, mail, smartphone OS service). Apple is another strong player (but they don't have productivity tools like docs, sheets or youtube). It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. Going to chatGPT and copying and pasting results will become painful (not to mention it's painful bing integration). Also at this point, they seem to be focusing on scaling LLM (while Google Deepmind is exploring other avenues) Google can also bundle Youtube TV, YouTube Premium, Google Drive, Storage, Ad free Search, Gemini integrated Docs/Sheets/Gmail, Subsidized Pixel Phones / Watch for a monthly fee of say $99 and it'll be very compelling for a lot of people

daxfohl 3y ago
Sounds like this whole thing is an insane 30-year effort by some engineer who couldn't get over the discontinuation of Clippy.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Good comments. As much as I am personally engaged in small LLMs that I can run on my own computer, and integrate into software that I write for myself, I think the future of large scale adoption of AI belongs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple in western countries (and China is doing wonderful things in their markets). The old Bard/Gemini integration with Gmail, Google Docs, etc. is pretty good. I signed up for a minute for Microsoft’s $20/month AI Office integrations, but cancelled and will try again in 2 months. I am an Apple customer and I expect spectacular things from Apple. I expect Apple, Google, Samsung, etc., to offer fantastic on device AI. I would like to see a money saving Google bundling family plan. I find Apple’s super bundle family plan a pretty good deal.
- msoad 3y ago
  small LLM? Small Large Language Model lol
  - mark_l_watson 3y ago
    Good joke, thanks, but I will explain anyway: to me 30 billion parameters or smaller is small since I can run it using Ollama on my home computer. I managed a deep learning team at Capital One and our ‘large’ models were less than 20 million parameters. :-)
    - falcor84 3y ago
      I suppose we could call them Medium Language Models, but unfortunately that TLA is already taken
  - IanCal 3y ago
    A large language model the size of a small language model.
mvdtnz 3y ago
Did you just say Microsoft doesn't have a popular email service?
- zooq_ai 3y ago
  Yes. No where at the scale and reach of gmail. We are also talking about consumer emails (not enterprise / corporate)
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Outlook(+Hotmail) is the third most popular email service. Just 3x smaller than the Gmail. It's definitely the same kind of scale.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      If you count outlook.com and hotmail.com and live.com and all enterprise email you get someone who is probably pretty close or larger than all gmail and gmail-backed domains, especially by volume.
golol 3y ago
Well for LLM services that do what they currently do google may have an advantage, but all this stuff is still only experimentation with the goal being hopefully much more advanced things, like almost-agi agents. If this happens then no one will care about the way we currently use LLMs anymore.
jaimie 3y ago
Strange to say Apple doesn't have productivity tools when Pages, Sheets, and Keynote exist on every Mac. I get the scale arguments, but Handoff and iCloud integration are a sleeper IF you've bought into the ecosystem... Also hard to overstate just how much more valuable the enterprise market is over the consumer market when comparing Microsoft vs. Google as one-stop anything shops. I don't see Google as having the obvious dominant position to make the argument it's their race to lose, considering Microsoft has a stake in chatGPT and is actively integrating it into their browser and productivity suites.
- Terretta 3y ago
  There's a Google bubble on HN, as demonstrated by small-to-medium business facing SaaS launching here offering login with Google and not offering login with Microsoft. I've talked to many of HN's Google Docs jockey founders that genuinely didn't realize 85% of the US domestic business market is in M365. And they further don't realize that "Continue with Microsoft" is dirt simple and lets companies offer company-managed logins to your SaaS without all the AD/SCIM/SAML nonsense. "But everyone has Gmail." Well, no, that's not how companies work. And if you think everyone's in Google, that's fine, your login page should look like one of these: https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth https://id.atlassian.com/login https://id.atlassian.com/login You don't even need the "continue with SSO" if you do the Atlassian practice of letting a firm "claim" the domain part of an email and using that to redirect to an SSO flow. And to start, skip SSO, and just use the "Continue with" Oauth2.
  - zooq_ai 3y ago
    Unfortunately, You are in a US bubble. Globally, Google brand is 10x stronger than Microsoft for Small Businesses
    - Terretta 3y ago
      > bubble It's not a bubble when one specifically names the Venn diagram circle "85% of the US domestic business market". It's naming a market. > brand is stronger Presumably the founders' interest is wallet share, not market share. Are you saying Atlassian is in a US bubble?
Workaccount2 3y ago
Google still has too much internal fragmentation and power groups to offer a single google-subscriber package. I'd say it is one of the most compelling reasons to kick Sundar out and get in someone who can unify google into one consistent and interoperable ecosystem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fooker 3y ago
  I bet they'll eventually let Kurian try this, and he'll destroy what is remaining of Google in the process.
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Google is going to own AI like intel owns graphics cards - i.e. Not really, except at the absolute bottom of the barrel where its baked in advantage lets it offer an unbeatable price/performance proposition for people who only care about "value" and with limited real performance requirements. Google's baked in AIs will be free, and bad. Everyone else is going to let people "plug in" models via standardized APIs, because one size fits all models are just a bad idea, so that's the way google is going to have to go eventually as well, because it's what power users are going to demand.
- illiac786 3y ago
  But power users are a minuscule market, compared to non-power (weak?) users. That's the problem.
raisedbyninjas 3y ago
If they can get reliably useful AI through voice into maps/navigation, it will be a substantial improvement to the driving experience. It's really frustrating to manage destinations and waypoints while driving. I just checked the process to see if I'm not keeping up and 1. the help docs are out of date. 2. the waypoint search results provides tap points for destinations 10 miles off a route, but shows only 3 pixel red dots for otherwise equally weighted options that are literally on the existing route.
chrisweekly 3y ago
> "Apple is another strong player (but they don't have productivity tools like docs, sheets or youtube)." Can anyone help me understand how Apple allows Siri to remain so absurdly incompetent? Last night I watched the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David's Siri interactions devolve into an apoplectic rant -- and part of the reason it was so funny is that it's so relatable. I rarely even try Siri anymore, but when I do it's still just abysmal. Are they deliberately handicapping it, to boost the perceived relative benefits of a future successor?
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Apple has very little ML talent. They're basically resting on their laurels in the phone market.
  - chrisweekly 3y ago
    That's what I thought too; but all the upthread and peer commments keep asserting Apple is a (real, not just hypothetical/potential/future) player in the space.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Apple went too early to ML for Siri. Siri was "decently good" when it was basically a voice-activated command line, and you could figure out what you needed to run to get it to do what you wanted. When they added ML to it, it entirely went to shit, and it has never recovered. Perhaps Apple will be able to use an LLM to make it finally not shit.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      well yeah, people on this website opine a lot about things they know little about. they're starting to make moves, but they don't have a large talent base. Apple will start using this tech now that it has been commoditized and since it is a big consumer tech company they will put a nice polish. But it's not where big research is being done.
  - 3y ago
oakashes 3y ago
I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me as an Android and Google ecosystem user.
- earth_walker 3y ago
  Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has not improved one iota in that time and has introduced several more quirks and bugs. Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Yeah, for example just yesterday I was driving and an alarm went off for the phone in my pocket. I told Google Assistant to silence the alarm... and it refused, insisting no alarms were active. How the hell can such a simple use-case be failing so badly? I suppose it doesn't matter, because they're going to disable the functionality entirely, [0] and setting ephemeral alarms is the literally the most common thing I ever ask it to do! Part of what makes all the assistant-stuff so damn frustrating is that it's an opaque "try something random and hope for the best" box, and whenever it fails there's usually zero information about why and no resolution path. (In a way you can generalize that to a lot of "AI", which is depressing.) [0] https://www.androidauthority.com/removing-google-assistant-features-2024-3401964/ https://www.androidauthority.com/removing-google-assistant-f...
kccqzy 3y ago
All of the things you write are very good ideas. But at this point, I am quite skeptical of Google leadership to pull off these things.
6510 3y ago
right, google has maps, they should call the bot Uncle Traveling Matt.
dingclancy 3y ago
Gemini the chatbot will still need to compete with ChatGPT on raw performance/intelligence/SOTA. Gemini should first be considered the undisputed winner of AI chatbots. Right now ChatGPT 4 is the "winner" in mindshare and I am not sure what Google needs to do except for OpenAI to bungle their own releases. Gemini integration with Google's apps will compete with Microsoft's app on integration. And the condition for Gemini to win: Google has to go all-in. and that means creating an AI that will eventually phase out their cash-cow Google Search. Microsoft and OpenAI does not have that kind of internal conflict. It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. - We have heard this so many times and it seems like they are always getting behind by the day.
hackerlight 3y ago
> It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. Google took 11 months to catch up with the benefit of knowing the specifics behind how GPT-4 was built. While they have a moat with their products there's no sign that they're ever going to be ahead on the AI capabilities front. I hope to be wrong because we need more competition.
neuronexmachina 3y ago
> It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. I was curious and apparently Google/Deepmind had 184 papers at NeurIPS/NIPS 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/185pdax/d_neurips_2023_institutions_ranking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/185pdax/d_... For comparison, Stanford has 130, MIT has 130, and Carnegie-Mellon has 112. Microsoft had 68, and Facebook/Meta/FAIR had 56.
- int_19h 3y ago
  This is all well and good, but they've had a year now to respond to GPT-4, and so far they haven't delivered anything close.
bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
I'd very surprised if Apple doesn't have some sort of similar AI running on device within the next two years
jaxson999 3y ago
After spending 45 minutes with Gemini, I don't see this at all. The only thing I haven't decided yet with it being Google is if it is shockingly unimpressive or unshockingly unimpressive. chatGPT4 isn't really impressive to me either at this point. This is basically a joke though. This is going to be competing against chatGPT5 and chatGPT5 has to deliver a huge upgrade in "intelligence" or we are headed head first into the AI hype brick wall.

daxfohl 3y ago

Sounds like this whole thing is an insane 30-year effort by some engineer who couldn't get over the discontinuation of Clippy.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

Good comments. As much as I am personally engaged in small LLMs that I can run on my own computer, and integrate into software that I write for myself, I think the future of large scale adoption of AI belongs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple in western countries (and China is doing wonderful things in their markets). The old Bard/Gemini integration with Gmail, Google Docs, etc. is pretty good. I signed up for a minute for Microsoft’s $20/month AI Office integrations, but cancelled and will try again in 2 months. I am an Apple customer and I expect spectacular things from Apple. I expect Apple, Google, Samsung, etc., to offer fantastic on device AI. I would like to see a money saving Google bundling family plan. I find Apple’s super bundle family plan a pretty good deal.

msoad 3y ago
small LLM? Small Large Language Model lol
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  Good joke, thanks, but I will explain anyway: to me 30 billion parameters or smaller is small since I can run it using Ollama on my home computer. I managed a deep learning team at Capital One and our ‘large’ models were less than 20 million parameters. :-)
  - falcor84 3y ago
    I suppose we could call them Medium Language Models, but unfortunately that TLA is already taken
- IanCal 3y ago
  A large language model the size of a small language model.

mvdtnz 3y ago

Did you just say Microsoft doesn't have a popular email service?

zooq_ai 3y ago
Yes. No where at the scale and reach of gmail. We are also talking about consumer emails (not enterprise / corporate)
- viraptor 3y ago
  Outlook(+Hotmail) is the third most popular email service. Just 3x smaller than the Gmail. It's definitely the same kind of scale.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    If you count outlook.com and hotmail.com and live.com and all enterprise email you get someone who is probably pretty close or larger than all gmail and gmail-backed domains, especially by volume.

golol 3y ago

Well for LLM services that do what they currently do google may have an advantage, but all this stuff is still only experimentation with the goal being hopefully much more advanced things, like almost-agi agents. If this happens then no one will care about the way we currently use LLMs anymore.

jaimie 3y ago

Strange to say Apple doesn't have productivity tools when Pages, Sheets, and Keynote exist on every Mac. I get the scale arguments, but Handoff and iCloud integration are a sleeper IF you've bought into the ecosystem... Also hard to overstate just how much more valuable the enterprise market is over the consumer market when comparing Microsoft vs. Google as one-stop anything shops. I don't see Google as having the obvious dominant position to make the argument it's their race to lose, considering Microsoft has a stake in chatGPT and is actively integrating it into their browser and productivity suites.

Terretta 3y ago
There's a Google bubble on HN, as demonstrated by small-to-medium business facing SaaS launching here offering login with Google and not offering login with Microsoft. I've talked to many of HN's Google Docs jockey founders that genuinely didn't realize 85% of the US domestic business market is in M365. And they further don't realize that "Continue with Microsoft" is dirt simple and lets companies offer company-managed logins to your SaaS without all the AD/SCIM/SAML nonsense. "But everyone has Gmail." Well, no, that's not how companies work. And if you think everyone's in Google, that's fine, your login page should look like one of these: https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth https://id.atlassian.com/login https://id.atlassian.com/login You don't even need the "continue with SSO" if you do the Atlassian practice of letting a firm "claim" the domain part of an email and using that to redirect to an SSO flow. And to start, skip SSO, and just use the "Continue with" Oauth2.
- zooq_ai 3y ago
  Unfortunately, You are in a US bubble. Globally, Google brand is 10x stronger than Microsoft for Small Businesses
  - Terretta 3y ago
    > bubble It's not a bubble when one specifically names the Venn diagram circle "85% of the US domestic business market". It's naming a market. > brand is stronger Presumably the founders' interest is wallet share, not market share. Are you saying Atlassian is in a US bubble?

Workaccount2 3y ago

Google still has too much internal fragmentation and power groups to offer a single google-subscriber package. I'd say it is one of the most compelling reasons to kick Sundar out and get in someone who can unify google into one consistent and interoperable ecosystem.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fooker 3y ago
I bet they'll eventually let Kurian try this, and he'll destroy what is remaining of Google in the process.

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Google is going to own AI like intel owns graphics cards - i.e. Not really, except at the absolute bottom of the barrel where its baked in advantage lets it offer an unbeatable price/performance proposition for people who only care about "value" and with limited real performance requirements. Google's baked in AIs will be free, and bad. Everyone else is going to let people "plug in" models via standardized APIs, because one size fits all models are just a bad idea, so that's the way google is going to have to go eventually as well, because it's what power users are going to demand.

illiac786 3y ago
But power users are a minuscule market, compared to non-power (weak?) users. That's the problem.

raisedbyninjas 3y ago

If they can get reliably useful AI through voice into maps/navigation, it will be a substantial improvement to the driving experience. It's really frustrating to manage destinations and waypoints while driving. I just checked the process to see if I'm not keeping up and 1. the help docs are out of date. 2. the waypoint search results provides tap points for destinations 10 miles off a route, but shows only 3 pixel red dots for otherwise equally weighted options that are literally on the existing route.

chrisweekly 3y ago

> "Apple is another strong player (but they don't have productivity tools like docs, sheets or youtube)." Can anyone help me understand how Apple allows Siri to remain so absurdly incompetent? Last night I watched the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David's Siri interactions devolve into an apoplectic rant -- and part of the reason it was so funny is that it's so relatable. I rarely even try Siri anymore, but when I do it's still just abysmal. Are they deliberately handicapping it, to boost the perceived relative benefits of a future successor?

whimsicalism 3y ago
Apple has very little ML talent. They're basically resting on their laurels in the phone market.
- chrisweekly 3y ago
  That's what I thought too; but all the upthread and peer commments keep asserting Apple is a (real, not just hypothetical/potential/future) player in the space.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Apple went too early to ML for Siri. Siri was "decently good" when it was basically a voice-activated command line, and you could figure out what you needed to run to get it to do what you wanted. When they added ML to it, it entirely went to shit, and it has never recovered. Perhaps Apple will be able to use an LLM to make it finally not shit.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    well yeah, people on this website opine a lot about things they know little about. they're starting to make moves, but they don't have a large talent base. Apple will start using this tech now that it has been commoditized and since it is a big consumer tech company they will put a nice polish. But it's not where big research is being done.
- 3y ago

oakashes 3y ago

I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me as an Android and Google ecosystem user.

earth_walker 3y ago
Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has not improved one iota in that time and has introduced several more quirks and bugs. Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Yeah, for example just yesterday I was driving and an alarm went off for the phone in my pocket. I told Google Assistant to silence the alarm... and it refused, insisting no alarms were active. How the hell can such a simple use-case be failing so badly? I suppose it doesn't matter, because they're going to disable the functionality entirely, [0] and setting ephemeral alarms is the literally the most common thing I ever ask it to do! Part of what makes all the assistant-stuff so damn frustrating is that it's an opaque "try something random and hope for the best" box, and whenever it fails there's usually zero information about why and no resolution path. (In a way you can generalize that to a lot of "AI", which is depressing.) [0] https://www.androidauthority.com/removing-google-assistant-features-2024-3401964/ https://www.androidauthority.com/removing-google-assistant-f...

kccqzy 3y ago

All of the things you write are very good ideas. But at this point, I am quite skeptical of Google leadership to pull off these things.

6510 3y ago

right, google has maps, they should call the bot Uncle Traveling Matt.

dingclancy 3y ago

Gemini the chatbot will still need to compete with ChatGPT on raw performance/intelligence/SOTA. Gemini should first be considered the undisputed winner of AI chatbots. Right now ChatGPT 4 is the "winner" in mindshare and I am not sure what Google needs to do except for OpenAI to bungle their own releases. Gemini integration with Google's apps will compete with Microsoft's app on integration. And the condition for Gemini to win: Google has to go all-in. and that means creating an AI that will eventually phase out their cash-cow Google Search. Microsoft and OpenAI does not have that kind of internal conflict. It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. - We have heard this so many times and it seems like they are always getting behind by the day.

hackerlight 3y ago

> It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. Google took 11 months to catch up with the benefit of knowing the specifics behind how GPT-4 was built. While they have a moat with their products there's no sign that they're ever going to be ahead on the AI capabilities front. I hope to be wrong because we need more competition.

neuronexmachina 3y ago

> It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. I was curious and apparently Google/Deepmind had 184 papers at NeurIPS/NIPS 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/185pdax/d_neurips_2023_institutions_ranking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/185pdax/d_... For comparison, Stanford has 130, MIT has 130, and Carnegie-Mellon has 112. Microsoft had 68, and Facebook/Meta/FAIR had 56.

int_19h 3y ago
This is all well and good, but they've had a year now to respond to GPT-4, and so far they haven't delivered anything close.

bobbylarrybobby 3y ago

I'd very surprised if Apple doesn't have some sort of similar AI running on device within the next two years

jaxson999 3y ago

After spending 45 minutes with Gemini, I don't see this at all. The only thing I haven't decided yet with it being Google is if it is shockingly unimpressive or unshockingly unimpressive. chatGPT4 isn't really impressive to me either at this point. This is basically a joke though. This is going to be competing against chatGPT5 and chatGPT5 has to deliver a huge upgrade in "intelligence" or we are headed head first into the AI hype brick wall.