8 ms·

Big companies can be slow to pivot, and Google has been famously bad at getting people aligned and driving in one direction. But, once they do get moving in th

Big companies can be slow to pivot, and Google has been famously bad at getting people aligned and driving in one direction. But, once they do get moving in the right direction the can achieve things that smaller companies can't. Google has an insane amount of talent in this space, and seems to be getting the right results from that now. Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market, but hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though.

manishsharan 2y ago
>> hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though. The context window of Gemini 1.5 pro is incredibly large and it retains the memory of things in the middle of the window well. It is quite a game changer for RAG applications.
- KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
  It looks like long context degraded from 1.5 to 2.0 according to the 2.0 launch benchmarks.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    Those benchmarks are for the Flash 2.0 model, showing it improved over the 1.5 Pro model minus for that one benchmark
- caeril 2y ago
  Bear in mind that a "1 million token" context window isn't actually that. You're being sold a sparse attention model, which is guaranteed to drop critical context. Google TPUs aren't running inference on a TERABYTE of fp8 query-key inputs, let alone TWO of fp16. Google's marketing wins again, I guess.
pelorat 2y ago
Well, compared to github copilot (paid), I think Gemini Free is actually better at writing non-archaic code.
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  Using Claude 3.5 sonnet ?
- jacooper 2y ago
  Gemini is coming to copilot soon anyway.
talldayo 2y ago
BERT and Gemma 2B were both some of the highest-performing edge models of their time. Google does really well - in terms of pushing efficiency in the community they're second to none. They also don't need to rely on inordinate amounts of compute because Google's differentiating factor is the products they own and how they integrate it. OpenAI is API-minded, Google is laser-focused on the big-picture experience. For example; those little AI-generated YouTube summaries that have been rolling out are wonderful. They don't require heavyweight LLMs to generate, and can create pretty effective summaries using nothing but a transcript. It's not only more useful than the other AI "features" I interact with regularly, it doesn't demand AGI or chain-of-thought.
- closewith 2y ago
  > Google is laser-focused on the big-picture experience. This doesn't match my experience of any Google product.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    I disagree - another way you could phrase this is that Google is presbyopic. They're very capable of thinking long-term (eg. Google Deepmind and AI as a whole, cloud, video, Drive/GSuite, etc.), but as a result they struggle to respond to quick market changes. AdSense is the perfect example of Google "going long" on a product and reaping the rewards to monopolistic ends. They can corner a market when the set their sights on it. I don't think Google (or really any of FAANG) makes "good" products anymore. But I do think there are things to appreciate in each org, and compared to the way Apple and Microsoft are flailing helplessly I think Google has proven themselves in software here.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Google does software/features relatively well, but they are completely lost when it comes to marketing, shipping, and continuing to support products. Or how would you describe their handling of Stadia, or their weird obsession about shipping and cancelling about a dozen instant messengers?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
panabee 2y ago
With many research areas converging to comparable levels, the most critical piece is arguably vertical integration and forgoing the Nvidia tax. They haven't wielded this advantage as powerfully as possible, but changes here could signal how committed they are to slaying the search cash cow. Nadella deservedly earned acclaim for transitioning Microsoft from the Windows era to cloud and mobile. It will be far more impressive if Google can defy the odds and conquer the innovator's dilemma with search. Regardless, congratulations to Google on an amazing release and pushing the frontiers of innovation.
- crowcroft 2y ago
  They need an iPod to iPhone like transition. If they can pull it off it will be incredible for the business.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  They have to not get blind sided by Sora, while at the same time fighting the cloud war against MS/Amazon. Weirdly Google is THE AI play. If AI is not set to change everything and truly is a hype cycle, then Google stock withstands and grows. If AI is the real deal, then Google still withstands due to how much bigger the pie will get.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    sora is not a big factor in this
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - AH4oFVbPT4f8 2y ago
    Why is Google THE AI play as you put it? I don't agree or disagree, just wanting to understand your perspective.
    - Brotkrumen 2y ago
bushbaba 2y ago
Yet, google continues to show it'll deprecate it's APIs, Services, and Functionality at the detriment of your own business. I'm not sure enterprises will trust Google's LLM over the alternatives. Too many have been burned throughout the years, including GCP customers. The fact GCP needs to have this page, and these lists are not 100% comprehensive is telling enough. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/deprecations https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/deprecations https://cloud.google.com/chronicle/docs/deprecations https://cloud.google.com/chronicle/docs/deprecations https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations Steve Yegge rightfully called this out, and yet no change has been made. https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-depre...
- weatherlite 2y ago
  GCP grew 35% last quarter , just saying ...
  - Jabbles 2y ago
    "just saying" things that are false. Google Cloud grew 35% year over year, when comparing the 3 months ending September 30th 2024 with 2023. https://abc.xyz/assets/94/93/52071fba4229a93331939f9bc31c/goog-10-q-q3-2024.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/94/93/52071fba4229a93331939f9bc31c/go... page 12
    - surajrmal 2y ago
      Isn't that the typical interpretation of what the parent comment said? How is it false?
      - mattmerr 2y ago
        I read parent comment "grew 35% last quarter" as (income on 2024-09-30) is 1.35 * (income on 2024-07-01) The balance sheet shows (income on days from 2024-07-01 through 09-30) is 1.35 * (income on days from 2023-07-01 through 09-30) These are different because with heavily handwavey math the first is growing 35% in a single quarter and the second is growing 35% annually (by comparing like-for-like quarters)
StableAlkyne 2y ago
> Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market The challenge is trust. Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. It's hard to justify committing developers and money to a product when there's a good chance you'll just have to pivot again once they get bored. Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least I can rely on their obsession with supporting outdated products.
- egeozcan 2y ago
  > they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. I'm not saying this to defend Google, I'm still (perhaps unreasonably) angry because of Reader, it's just that there is a pattern and AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while.
  - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    I’m sad for reader but it was a somewhat niche product. Inbox I can’t forgive. It was insanely good and was killed because it was a threat to Gmail. My main issue with Google is that internal politic affects users all the time. See the debacle of anything built on top of Android and being treated as a second citizen. You can’t trust a company which can’t shield users from its internal politics. It means nothing is aligned correctly for users to be taken seriously.
    - kanzenryu2 2y ago
      Google reader was killed because there was only one guy who knew how to support it
      - troupo 2y ago
        And that is a problem for a company with 20k employees? No, Reader was killed because it: - was free - didn't contribute to revenue growth from ads
crazygringo 2y ago
> and Google has been famously bad at getting people aligned and driving in one direction. To be fair, it's not that they're bad at it -- it's that they generally have an explicit philosophy against it. It's a choice. Google management doesn't want to "pick winners". It prefers to let multiple products (like messaging apps, famously) compete and let the market decide. According to this way of thinking, you come out ahead in the long run because you increase your chances of having the winning product. Gemini is a great example of when they do choose to focus on a single strategy, however. Cloud was another great example.
- xnx 2y ago
  I definitely agree that multiple competing products is a deliberate choice, but it was foolish to pursue it for so long in a space like messaging apps that has network effects. As a user I always still wish that there were fewer apps with the best features of both. Google's 2(!) apps for AI podcasts being a recent example : https://notebooklm.google.com/ https://notebooklm.google.com/ and https://illuminate.google.com/home https://illuminate.google.com/home
- tbarbugli 2y ago
  Google is not winning on cloud, AWS is winning and MS gaining ground.
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    Parent didn't claim Google is winning. Only that there is a cohesive push and investment in a single product/platform.
  - rrdharan 2y ago
    That was 2023; more recently Microsoft is losing ground to Google (in 2024).
bwb 2y ago
So far, for my tests, it has performed terribly compared to ChatGPT and Claude. I hope this version is better.
aerhardt 2y ago
> seems to be getting the right results > hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though I'm so scarred by how much their first Gemini releases sucked that the thought of trying it again doesn't even cross my mind. Are you telling us you're buying this press release wholesale, or you've tried the tech they're talking about and love it, or you have some additional knowledge not immediately evident here? Because it's not clear from your comment where you are getting that their LLM models are really good.
- MaxDPS 2y ago
  I’ve been using Gemini 1.5 Pro for coding and it’s been great.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> but hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though Although I do still pay for ChatGPT, I find it dog slow. ChatGPT is simply way too slow to generate answers. It feels like --even though of course it's not doing the same thing-- I'm back to the 80s with my 8-bit computer printing thing line by line. Gemini OTOH doesn't feel like that: answers are super fast. To me low latency is going to be the killer feature. People won't keep paying for models that are dog slow to answer. I'll probably be cancelling my ChatGPT subscription soon.
sky2224 2y ago
Maybe I've just hit a streak of good outputs, but I've also been noticing the automatic gemini search when doing google searches to have been significantly more useful than it was previously. About a year ago, I was saying that Google was potentially walking toward its own grave due to not having any pivots that rivaled OpenAI. Now, I'm starting to think they've found the first few steps toward an incredible stride.

manishsharan 2y ago

>> hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though. The context window of Gemini 1.5 pro is incredibly large and it retains the memory of things in the middle of the window well. It is quite a game changer for RAG applications.

KaoruAoiShiho 2y ago
It looks like long context degraded from 1.5 to 2.0 according to the 2.0 launch benchmarks.
- verdverm 2y ago
  Those benchmarks are for the Flash 2.0 model, showing it improved over the 1.5 Pro model minus for that one benchmark
caeril 2y ago
Bear in mind that a "1 million token" context window isn't actually that. You're being sold a sparse attention model, which is guaranteed to drop critical context. Google TPUs aren't running inference on a TERABYTE of fp8 query-key inputs, let alone TWO of fp16. Google's marketing wins again, I guess.

pelorat 2y ago

Well, compared to github copilot (paid), I think Gemini Free is actually better at writing non-archaic code.

rafaelmn 2y ago
Using Claude 3.5 sonnet ?
jacooper 2y ago
Gemini is coming to copilot soon anyway.

talldayo 2y ago

BERT and Gemma 2B were both some of the highest-performing edge models of their time. Google does really well - in terms of pushing efficiency in the community they're second to none. They also don't need to rely on inordinate amounts of compute because Google's differentiating factor is the products they own and how they integrate it. OpenAI is API-minded, Google is laser-focused on the big-picture experience. For example; those little AI-generated YouTube summaries that have been rolling out are wonderful. They don't require heavyweight LLMs to generate, and can create pretty effective summaries using nothing but a transcript. It's not only more useful than the other AI "features" I interact with regularly, it doesn't demand AGI or chain-of-thought.

closewith 2y ago
> Google is laser-focused on the big-picture experience. This doesn't match my experience of any Google product.
- talldayo 2y ago
  I disagree - another way you could phrase this is that Google is presbyopic. They're very capable of thinking long-term (eg. Google Deepmind and AI as a whole, cloud, video, Drive/GSuite, etc.), but as a result they struggle to respond to quick market changes. AdSense is the perfect example of Google "going long" on a product and reaping the rewards to monopolistic ends. They can corner a market when the set their sights on it. I don't think Google (or really any of FAANG) makes "good" products anymore. But I do think there are things to appreciate in each org, and compared to the way Apple and Microsoft are flailing helplessly I think Google has proven themselves in software here.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Google does software/features relatively well, but they are completely lost when it comes to marketing, shipping, and continuing to support products. Or how would you describe their handling of Stadia, or their weird obsession about shipping and cancelling about a dozen instant messengers?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

panabee 2y ago

With many research areas converging to comparable levels, the most critical piece is arguably vertical integration and forgoing the Nvidia tax. They haven't wielded this advantage as powerfully as possible, but changes here could signal how committed they are to slaying the search cash cow. Nadella deservedly earned acclaim for transitioning Microsoft from the Windows era to cloud and mobile. It will be far more impressive if Google can defy the odds and conquer the innovator's dilemma with search. Regardless, congratulations to Google on an amazing release and pushing the frontiers of innovation.

crowcroft 2y ago
They need an iPod to iPhone like transition. If they can pull it off it will be incredible for the business.
bloomingkales 2y ago
They have to not get blind sided by Sora, while at the same time fighting the cloud war against MS/Amazon. Weirdly Google is THE AI play. If AI is not set to change everything and truly is a hype cycle, then Google stock withstands and grows. If AI is the real deal, then Google still withstands due to how much bigger the pie will get.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  sora is not a big factor in this
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 2y ago
  Why is Google THE AI play as you put it? I don't agree or disagree, just wanting to understand your perspective.
  - Brotkrumen 2y ago

bushbaba 2y ago

Yet, google continues to show it'll deprecate it's APIs, Services, and Functionality at the detriment of your own business. I'm not sure enterprises will trust Google's LLM over the alternatives. Too many have been burned throughout the years, including GCP customers. The fact GCP needs to have this page, and these lists are not 100% comprehensive is telling enough. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/deprecations https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/deprecations https://cloud.google.com/chronicle/docs/deprecations https://cloud.google.com/chronicle/docs/deprecations https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations https://developers.google.com/maps/deprecations Steve Yegge rightfully called this out, and yet no change has been made. https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-depre...

weatherlite 2y ago
GCP grew 35% last quarter , just saying ...
- Jabbles 2y ago
  "just saying" things that are false. Google Cloud grew 35% year over year, when comparing the 3 months ending September 30th 2024 with 2023. https://abc.xyz/assets/94/93/52071fba4229a93331939f9bc31c/goog-10-q-q3-2024.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/94/93/52071fba4229a93331939f9bc31c/go... page 12
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    Isn't that the typical interpretation of what the parent comment said? How is it false?
    - mattmerr 2y ago
      I read parent comment "grew 35% last quarter" as (income on 2024-09-30) is 1.35 * (income on 2024-07-01) The balance sheet shows (income on days from 2024-07-01 through 09-30) is 1.35 * (income on days from 2023-07-01 through 09-30) These are different because with heavily handwavey math the first is growing 35% in a single quarter and the second is growing 35% annually (by comparing like-for-like quarters)

StableAlkyne 2y ago

> Remains to be seen how well they will be able to productize and market The challenge is trust. Google is one of the leaders in AI and are home to incredibly talented developers. But they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products. It's hard to justify committing developers and money to a product when there's a good chance you'll just have to pivot again once they get bored. Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least I can rely on their obsession with supporting outdated products.

egeozcan 2y ago
> they also have an incredibly bad track record of supporting their products Incredibly bad track record of supporting products that don't grow. I'm not saying this to defend Google, I'm still (perhaps unreasonably) angry because of Reader, it's just that there is a pattern and AI isn't likely to fit that for a long while.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  I’m sad for reader but it was a somewhat niche product. Inbox I can’t forgive. It was insanely good and was killed because it was a threat to Gmail. My main issue with Google is that internal politic affects users all the time. See the debacle of anything built on top of Android and being treated as a second citizen. You can’t trust a company which can’t shield users from its internal politics. It means nothing is aligned correctly for users to be taken seriously.
  - kanzenryu2 2y ago
    Google reader was killed because there was only one guy who knew how to support it
    - troupo 2y ago
      And that is a problem for a company with 20k employees? No, Reader was killed because it: - was free - didn't contribute to revenue growth from ads

crazygringo 2y ago

> and Google has been famously bad at getting people aligned and driving in one direction. To be fair, it's not that they're bad at it -- it's that they generally have an explicit philosophy against it. It's a choice. Google management doesn't want to "pick winners". It prefers to let multiple products (like messaging apps, famously) compete and let the market decide. According to this way of thinking, you come out ahead in the long run because you increase your chances of having the winning product. Gemini is a great example of when they do choose to focus on a single strategy, however. Cloud was another great example.

xnx 2y ago
I definitely agree that multiple competing products is a deliberate choice, but it was foolish to pursue it for so long in a space like messaging apps that has network effects. As a user I always still wish that there were fewer apps with the best features of both. Google's 2(!) apps for AI podcasts being a recent example : https://notebooklm.google.com/ https://notebooklm.google.com/ and https://illuminate.google.com/home https://illuminate.google.com/home
tbarbugli 2y ago
Google is not winning on cloud, AWS is winning and MS gaining ground.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  Parent didn't claim Google is winning. Only that there is a cohesive push and investment in a single product/platform.
- rrdharan 2y ago
  That was 2023; more recently Microsoft is losing ground to Google (in 2024).

bwb 2y ago

So far, for my tests, it has performed terribly compared to ChatGPT and Claude. I hope this version is better.

aerhardt 2y ago

> seems to be getting the right results > hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though I'm so scarred by how much their first Gemini releases sucked that the thought of trying it again doesn't even cross my mind. Are you telling us you're buying this press release wholesale, or you've tried the tech they're talking about and love it, or you have some additional knowledge not immediately evident here? Because it's not clear from your comment where you are getting that their LLM models are really good.

MaxDPS 2y ago
I’ve been using Gemini 1.5 Pro for coding and it’s been great.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> but hard to deny that their LLM models aren't really, really good though Although I do still pay for ChatGPT, I find it dog slow. ChatGPT is simply way too slow to generate answers. It feels like --even though of course it's not doing the same thing-- I'm back to the 80s with my 8-bit computer printing thing line by line. Gemini OTOH doesn't feel like that: answers are super fast. To me low latency is going to be the killer feature. People won't keep paying for models that are dog slow to answer. I'll probably be cancelling my ChatGPT subscription soon.

sky2224 2y ago

Maybe I've just hit a streak of good outputs, but I've also been noticing the automatic gemini search when doing google searches to have been significantly more useful than it was previously. About a year ago, I was saying that Google was potentially walking toward its own grave due to not having any pivots that rivaled OpenAI. Now, I'm starting to think they've found the first few steps toward an incredible stride.