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> Overall, the former employees paint a picture of a company desperately behind its Big Tech rivals Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to launch AI chatbot

> Overall, the former employees paint a picture of a company desperately behind its Big Tech rivals Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to launch AI chatbots and agents, and floundering in its efforts to catch up. I obviously don't have any inside information, but this is a weird take to me from the outside. Google has butchered Assistant since the advent of LLMs. My Google Home devices have lost basically all of their functionality, but in the meantime the new Gemini "replacement" is still by all accounts a disaster. Microsoft has gone through all the right motions to satisfy investors—they've pushed their Copilot button onto new keyboards, pushed their Copilot tech into all their cloud products, and started selling "AI-ready" stickers on laptops. But from the consumer perspective, the reception has been not just mixed but overwhelmingly terrible! No one asked for these features, and no one wants them. Meta, meanwhile, has released Llama, for which we're all grateful, but in terms of products what do they really have to offer? A much-maligned AI-powered fake social media feed? None of the pre-existing giants are performing particularly well at actually "winning" the AI assistant space. Out of the three named, only Microsoft has any claim to serious mindshare, and that only through their relationship with OpenAI.

jarsin 2y ago
Don't forget Apple. They just forced an update on my laptop and now I have a text to image playground that it feels the need to keep telling me about. All these years how did I live without a text to crappy image generator?
- b112 2y ago
  This is what baffles most. When sales goons and marketing nitwits get control over software, it smacks of utter desperation, a lack of confidence in product, and for things such as an OS? Insanity. My (seemingly) core OS has no business nagging me. You know I bought a car, and it nags me about, literally 4 or 5 things every time I use it? Some of which can never be deactivated? Sheer stupid.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Nitpick: it wasn’t a forced update, and I got exactly one notification about the Playground stuff that I remember.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > keep telling me about You may have something misconfigured. I have gotten exactly one feature notice that I forgot about until this moment.
ViktorRay 2y ago
I have a 20 dollar per month subscription to Perplexity Pro. I can ask it about various topics and it provides me accurate and well sourced information with citations. I have access to hundreds of these searches per day. To me Perplexity Pro is clearly winning in terms of quality when I use it for this purpose. I have tried the 20 dollars Chatgpt and the 20 dollars google gemini as well. Chatgpt is pretty good and Google Gemini is pretty bad even with the 20 dollars a month but Perplexity Pro is by far the best AI for me. It's gotten even better with the recent Deepseek integration that they have done. Anyway when I compare Perplexity and Chatgpt with the things coming out of the Big Tech companies I can't help but shake my head. Hasn't Amazon spent billions and billions on Alexa? Even then Amazon is clearly behind...
- nu2ycombinator 2y ago
  offtopic question from main thread. is Perplexity Pro subscription better than chatGPT one for queries mainly around daily programming questions?
  - disqard 2y ago
    I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet for coding assistance (and pay $20/month for the "professional" plan). I recommend it!
jader201 2y ago
> Google has butchered Assistant since the advent of LLMs. My Google Home devices have lost basically all of their functionality I’ve seen this said a few times lately, yet I’ve not really seen much of an explanation of exactly how it’s regressed. Maybe it’s just a difference in how we use ours, but it still has worked the same as it always has. Out uses are fairly basic, but I’m not sure how much more complex it needs to be: - tell us the current/forecasted weather - pick random numbers/flip a coin (playing board games) - ask it for information about X - play music on Spotify - carry out actions in our home devices All of these have always worked, and continue to work just fine. For from “lost all of their functionality” (this feels exaggerated). Can you/others go into more details on how Google Home has become broken lately?
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  I had mine setup to turn the lights off when I said 'lights out'. Now when I say 'lights out' it tells me that 'Lights Out' is a 2016 movie.
  - jader201 2y ago
    Yeah, I have noticed that some commands are now interpreted differently/incorrectly. But I’ve just started being less ambiguous with commands now. E.g. simply “turn lights out” has worked for me. So I guess I wouldn’t call that “broken” or “butchered”.
- markedathome 2y ago
  The current favourite frustration of reddit seems to be that in the past you could cancel requests, by saying "Never mind". Apparently now saying "Never mind" gets you an in-depth speech about Nirvana's album, or it playing.
  - stephenitis 2y ago
    i am plagued by this and interpretations of my regular speech. i must rename some devices more uniquely now.
- 2y ago
JoeCortopassi 2y ago
> ...the new Gemini "replacement" is still by all accounts a disaster Small nit: the initial rollout of Gemini was a dumpster fire. It is now quite good. For my use cases, I can't get any other current LLM to give me better results than Gemini 2.0 Flash. It's also free But even that kind of proves your point, right? Pretend you 100% believe me without verifying. That means in a year or two the winner has transferred between ~3 companies. This is not a cheap mantle to keep passing around. The AI wars are going to get heated over the next year or two
- jug 2y ago
  I'm happy to see this because it's my experience with Gemini too. Google did terribly with Bard (clearly an emergency launch to say "Hey, we're here too!"), Gemini 1.0 and even Gemini 1.5 was only decent in the top 'Pro' tier. Gemini 2.0 has been a huge step forward and I'm using Flash daily at work for coding. Very liberal limits and much cheaper than OpenAI too. I'm easily in the $0 tier as I don't exceed 15 requests per minute or 1500 per day. I use it with Chatbox AI and my Google Gemini API key. They've been a bit late to the party though. But the fumbling from Amazon and Apple has opened an opportunity to STILL be ahead and launch the first powerful AI assistant this year. It's no doubt one of the reasons they developed Gemini 2.0 as an agentic AI and I'm only waiting for hardware refreshes now.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Just to be clear, are we talking about the Gemini based Assistant replacement? The last time I checked that version couldn't even set reminders or timers, so if that's improved since then I may actually try switching. And yes, agreed that this space is very fragile right now for all the companies.

jarsin 2y ago

Don't forget Apple. They just forced an update on my laptop and now I have a text to image playground that it feels the need to keep telling me about. All these years how did I live without a text to crappy image generator?

b112 2y ago
This is what baffles most. When sales goons and marketing nitwits get control over software, it smacks of utter desperation, a lack of confidence in product, and for things such as an OS? Insanity. My (seemingly) core OS has no business nagging me. You know I bought a car, and it nags me about, literally 4 or 5 things every time I use it? Some of which can never be deactivated? Sheer stupid.
kstrauser 2y ago
Nitpick: it wasn’t a forced update, and I got exactly one notification about the Playground stuff that I remember.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> keep telling me about You may have something misconfigured. I have gotten exactly one feature notice that I forgot about until this moment.

ViktorRay 2y ago

I have a 20 dollar per month subscription to Perplexity Pro. I can ask it about various topics and it provides me accurate and well sourced information with citations. I have access to hundreds of these searches per day. To me Perplexity Pro is clearly winning in terms of quality when I use it for this purpose. I have tried the 20 dollars Chatgpt and the 20 dollars google gemini as well. Chatgpt is pretty good and Google Gemini is pretty bad even with the 20 dollars a month but Perplexity Pro is by far the best AI for me. It's gotten even better with the recent Deepseek integration that they have done. Anyway when I compare Perplexity and Chatgpt with the things coming out of the Big Tech companies I can't help but shake my head. Hasn't Amazon spent billions and billions on Alexa? Even then Amazon is clearly behind...

nu2ycombinator 2y ago
offtopic question from main thread. is Perplexity Pro subscription better than chatGPT one for queries mainly around daily programming questions?
- disqard 2y ago
  I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet for coding assistance (and pay $20/month for the "professional" plan). I recommend it!

jader201 2y ago

> Google has butchered Assistant since the advent of LLMs. My Google Home devices have lost basically all of their functionality I’ve seen this said a few times lately, yet I’ve not really seen much of an explanation of exactly how it’s regressed. Maybe it’s just a difference in how we use ours, but it still has worked the same as it always has. Out uses are fairly basic, but I’m not sure how much more complex it needs to be: - tell us the current/forecasted weather - pick random numbers/flip a coin (playing board games) - ask it for information about X - play music on Spotify - carry out actions in our home devices All of these have always worked, and continue to work just fine. For from “lost all of their functionality” (this feels exaggerated). Can you/others go into more details on how Google Home has become broken lately?

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
I had mine setup to turn the lights off when I said 'lights out'. Now when I say 'lights out' it tells me that 'Lights Out' is a 2016 movie.
- jader201 2y ago
  Yeah, I have noticed that some commands are now interpreted differently/incorrectly. But I’ve just started being less ambiguous with commands now. E.g. simply “turn lights out” has worked for me. So I guess I wouldn’t call that “broken” or “butchered”.
markedathome 2y ago
The current favourite frustration of reddit seems to be that in the past you could cancel requests, by saying "Never mind". Apparently now saying "Never mind" gets you an in-depth speech about Nirvana's album, or it playing.
- stephenitis 2y ago
  i am plagued by this and interpretations of my regular speech. i must rename some devices more uniquely now.
2y ago

JoeCortopassi 2y ago

> ...the new Gemini "replacement" is still by all accounts a disaster Small nit: the initial rollout of Gemini was a dumpster fire. It is now quite good. For my use cases, I can't get any other current LLM to give me better results than Gemini 2.0 Flash. It's also free But even that kind of proves your point, right? Pretend you 100% believe me without verifying. That means in a year or two the winner has transferred between ~3 companies. This is not a cheap mantle to keep passing around. The AI wars are going to get heated over the next year or two

jug 2y ago
I'm happy to see this because it's my experience with Gemini too. Google did terribly with Bard (clearly an emergency launch to say "Hey, we're here too!"), Gemini 1.0 and even Gemini 1.5 was only decent in the top 'Pro' tier. Gemini 2.0 has been a huge step forward and I'm using Flash daily at work for coding. Very liberal limits and much cheaper than OpenAI too. I'm easily in the $0 tier as I don't exceed 15 requests per minute or 1500 per day. I use it with Chatbox AI and my Google Gemini API key. They've been a bit late to the party though. But the fumbling from Amazon and Apple has opened an opportunity to STILL be ahead and launch the first powerful AI assistant this year. It's no doubt one of the reasons they developed Gemini 2.0 as an agentic AI and I'm only waiting for hardware refreshes now.
lolinder 2y ago
Just to be clear, are we talking about the Gemini based Assistant replacement? The last time I checked that version couldn't even set reminders or timers, so if that's improved since then I may actually try switching. And yes, agreed that this space is very fragile right now for all the companies.