13 ms·

Google’s two-year frenzy to catch up with OpenAI

190 points by totaldude87 2y ago

uejfiweun 2y ago
Google screwed up so massively in this whole AI race. It blows my mind that they had the technology available internally years before OpenAI released ChatGPT but didn't do anything with it and in fact lost top talent due to their hesitation to release it (as the article states about Noam Shazeer). And now, for basically every non-techie person, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the same way that Google was synonymous with search. What a disaster. Quite frankly shocked that their executive team is still in place.
- DSingularity 2y ago
  Maybe this “screw up” delayed LLMs by years and gave them more years to milk the cow.
- matusp 2y ago
  To be honest there were several chatbots before ChatGPT, eg Galactica by Microsoft, and it had not seem so promising. Similarly, ChatGPT was originally released as more or less a fun little demo, and the absolute success was surprise for OpenAI as well . They probably managed to hit certain UX threshold where people start to find the chatting valuable/interesting, but this was really an accidental discovery.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    Sometimes virality is a total fluke of the moment. For instance Zoom happened to be what teachers told each other about when lockdowns started. That could have been webx or meet or whatever.
- benatkin 2y ago
  Guess they didn't need that top talent in the long run, they had plenty of their own top talent https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model-end-of-march?tid=1743013184799 https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model...
cratermoon 2y ago
Deepseek showed us that the easiest way to catch up with OpenAI is.. <checks notes> hiring programmers who know what they are doing.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  Right, because Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and X all don't have anyone who knows what they are doing - and also none of them had the bright idea to hire anyone who knows what they are doing either... I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's not that reductive.
  - alecco 2y ago
    I think he missed adding: and let them do their job and be smart managing the resources by themselves. Pichai & co put a borderline-communist quota system and it became a popularity contest to get a tiny slice extra of compute. And then OpenAI ate their lunch (Google tech).
    - montag 2y ago
      Do you have a source for this “quota system”
      - alecco 2y ago
        Are you stalking me, doyouhaveasourcebro? Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273440 Self-quoting here: That's in contrast to what OpenAI's David Luan "Why Google couldn’t make GPT-3" (https://www.latent.space/p/adept https://www.latent.space/p/adept): And it turned out the whole time that they just couldn't get critical mass. So during my year where I led the Google LM effort and I was one of the brain leads, you know, it became really clear why. At the time, there was a thing called the Brain Credit Marketplace. Everyone's assigned a credit. So if you have a credit, you get to buy end chips according to supply and demand. So if you want to go do a giant job, you had to convince like 19 or 20 of your colleagues not to do work. And if that's how it works, it's really hard to get that bottom up critical mass to go scale these things. And the team at Google were fighting valiantly, but we were able to beat them simply because we took big swings and we focused.”
mitchbob 2y ago
https://archive.ph/NQqCj https://archive.ph/NQqCj
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
adaptbrian 2y ago
We need more ai overviews because look at all the likes! ...... (word to the wise it's a simple link traffic siphon on advertisers) Kent W. said to hurry up, hmm I could only wonder why, what could he possibly see on the legal horizon.
dsabanin 2y ago
I was skeptical at first, but I think Google’s catch up game with OpenAI has been going pretty well so far. Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash models are really nice. Deep research feature is done really well. Context window is still the best in the industry. Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc. They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life. Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.
- mattlondon 2y ago
  (deleted - wrong place)
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    There are plenty of people outside of tech circles talking about and using ChatGPT. In fact, that was a massive indicator for me, I heard from them about ChatGPT before I had gotten around to mentioning it to them. That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.
  - trjordan 2y ago
    ChatGPT has 400m weekly users. X / Twitter has 600m. It's pretty popular!
  - fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
    > I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced. The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience. My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.
- donny2018 2y ago
staticautomatic 2y ago
2.0 Flash seems to work well/fine for some use cases but for other produces hilariously bad results compared to ChatGPT and Claude. As a result I tend to avoid prototyping with it and instead consider it something I might implement at scale for speed and cost reasons if it turns out to work for a given use case.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
serjester 2y ago
Has anyone met Googlers that are confident in the company's AI strategy? Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to seems to have serious concerns but that might just be a small sample size.
- MisterPea 2y ago
  They're in a tough spot where the CEO does just enough to stay, but they need someone better. They lagged in AI, but the new Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible. They built an incredible tool in NotebookLM but failed to market it
  - serjester 2y ago
    Agreed. Sundar seems like a peacetime CEO that got pulled into war and seems like he's struggling. But with Larry and Sergei having all voting control it seems unlikely he'll get fired.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - jmcgough 2y ago
    I thought Stadia was incredibly well-engineered, had good performance playing modern games with a Thinkpad. But none of my friends had any idea what Stadia was, the ad campaign was atrocious. Time and time again, Google builds great products and then shelves them a year or two later.
    - MoonGhost 2y ago
      Google is not alone. Intel halfheartedly develops GPUs. It doesn't work without strategy.
    - the_clarence 2y ago
      Only works if you have a very stable internet connection
    - 2y ago
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
i think it was Eric Schmidt who said that "everyone would need an Assistant" - about 10 years ago. (maybe in [0] ~ 2016). Something to impersonate, talking to it. Why they didn't do it, even a resemblance of - when they could.. no idea. Instead, meddling with mailboxes and the like. [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-eric-schmidt-ai https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-eric-schmidt-ai
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  They were definitely working on it, and had stuff which they were deliberately keeping behind bars.
lysace 2y ago
As an investor (smallish): I think Alphabet/Google can do much better with a CEO who isn't Sundar. Also: Generally: Do consider investing in companies that run services where you feel compelled to subscribe (like Youtube Premium and previously Netflix).
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Never felt like being compelled to subscribe to YT premium or Netflix, the former doesn't differ much from using YT with ublock, and piracy provides a better service than Neftlix. OAI's GPT-4 (back in the day), Deep Research, and 4o Image gen recently on the other hand? Totally. When it's something actually incredibly useful and there's zero alternatives out there. Google has no such products right now, if their Gemini Advanced trial shows anything it's that their touted 1M context doesn't actually work any better than the average undertrained 1M RoPE tune. I mean it doesn't even make sense for them conceptually to sell services, they're an ad company.
- totaldude87 2y ago
  care to elaborate? is this like an engineer/innovator thing? |CEO who isn't Sundar.
- ipython 2y ago
  Investor and heavy user of Google Workspace (several small paid domains). I find the Google Gemini capabilities for note taking and summarization of Meets to be excellent, and a huge timesaver for my teams. NotebookLM almost feels magic. In my experience, of the major players (AMZN, GOOG, and MSFT), Google's AI integrations feel the most polished and useful for day-to-day use.
- impulser_ 2y ago
  I disagree. Name another CEO that can take a company from 74b to 350b in revenue. He has always grown Google. Not a single year of decreased growth. He made Google the only AI company in the world with a full AI stack from data, science, hardware, and software. This is paying off massively. Look at how faster Gemini models are compared to any other model. It 3x faster. Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model on the market right now in terms of cost, performance, and intelligence. Everyone is fighting over NVIDA chips, not Google.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I think the biggest thing Google has working against them is the move to put lightweight models in everything for everyone. Whatever model they use for search is probably somewhere around an ~8B model, and flash 2.0 is decent but still a light weight model. People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers. Meanwhile, their SOTA models have been strong, and Gemini 2.5 looks like it might actually have taken the AI throne yesterday.[1] [1]https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/25/gemini/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/25/gemini/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- willio58 2y ago
  > People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers I'm curious how valid this statement is. Anecdotally, I really like those results. For whatever reason, I don't directly interact with Gemini, I just type questions into google and if an AI response comes up I definitely give it a first look before clicking through links. If for some reason no AI response comes up for a question, I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and I usually get the answer I'm looking for. As I typed that^ I realized something funny. I used to make fun of my parents for typing certain questions into google e.g. "What's the best pizza place in New York?". I would tell them to type "Best pizza place New York", because Google seemed to work better that way. But then that sort of stuff was hijacked by the SEO industry. So the meme of typing "Best Pizza Place New York Reddit" started so we could get actual answers from real people. With the rise of LLMs in search I'm personally back to typing "What's the best pizza place in New York?" right into Google/ChatGPT and it's been pretty successful so far. I'm curious what the next thing will be.
janalsncm 2y ago
OpenAI is being graded on a curve. They are not a public company and are not making money. Google is. That said, they definitely floundered by not productionizing transformer decoders, just like with Google meet/Zoom. (Encoders like BERT were/are widely used.)
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work. This was 2019 time frame? Maybe 2020? It was uncanny and creepy, pretended to be a conscious being, frequently lied, and led directly to that guy who claimed it had personhood... I can completely understand why Google chose to keep a lid on this kind of thing, hoping to be able to clean it up and produce something that could be reliably used for a product instead of a novelty. That's back when Google was still sort-of pretending to have ethics (though they didn't) OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.
- gaogao 2y ago
  It's not just that they didn't care, but they had a better framing and RLHF helped quite a bit. Galactica got released at a similar time to ChatGPT and got castigated, in a large part due to a poor framing of it being for science and not more of a fun thing.
- Henchman21 2y ago
  > OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care. This is lack of interest will kill Google in the end, IMO.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    I wasn't talking about Google not caring. OpenAI didn't care about ethics.
    - Henchman21 2y ago
      I see my mistake, thank you! But also I have this view of Google as largely apathetic to its users and the things it creates, but maybe more to the point the things it created and then destroyed. I may have misunderstood but I still feel like I have a valid take.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
czhu12 2y ago
It seems if Google had been competitive, all they would’ve managed to do is burn ~10 billion dollars in the past 2 years, and run up against the same performance wall everyone else has If I were them, I’d wait until OpenAI is forced to at least slow their burn and then jump in, and undercut everyone. Seems like the real money is made on the API side anyways, so having a large consumer presence isn’t super valuable yet.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
light_hue_1 2y ago
I can't believe that anyone in leadership at Google still has their jobs. Aside from AMD it's the company that is wasting the most amount of talent. Gemini is still garbage compared to o3-mini-high when it comes to code. GCP is still a horrible platform compared to AWS. Why would anyone pick Google models to do anything? They refusal rate is obscene. Google lived too long with no strategy, just search and random noise. They don't seem to be able to pivot. Until they do something company-wide that includes how promotions work and turning over management I can't see them as being anything other than a 3rd rate player in AI. Search will die to AI in time. And they've got nothing to entice people to use Google AI over anything else.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
zombiwoof 2y ago
It’s amazing how much wealth is being acquired by the people working on this. And it’s delivering what? A way to automate navigating websites or telling someone looking at the Buckingham Palace that it’s the buckingham palace ? Silicon Valley hubris continues to astound
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Somewhere there's a market that is highly rational, not taken in by hype, and lacks hubris. Maybe it's Germany? Good luck starting a tech company there. The frisson of hype and juvenile behavior seems pretty linked to the optimism that drives this sector. Some idiots and hucksters inevitably come along for the ride, and some of them get lucky.
  - walleeee 2y ago
    which is why those of us who aren't idiots and hucksters need to think critically about computers, ourselves, and the roles of both in the world. unexamined optimism is no virtue
natch 2y ago
OpenAI is already solving the problem for all its competitors by hobbling its models so much. With voice mode OpenAI hears its own voice as interruptions, then misrecognizes what it itself is saying to be some topic that is off limits. It then gets into a loop of “I can’t talk about that… would you like to talk about something else?” And this is with completely innocuous topics. Absolutely infuriating. No idea how they are possibly dog fooding this and not seeing the problem. The insane level of overcranking the PC knobs led me to end my subscription and add more Google to my portfolio. I’m sure I’m not alone. That’s not to say Google won’t have the same issues, but there’s always Grok.
LeicaLatte 2y ago
Google leadership has had a measured approach and product releases seem more baked than ever, it’s refreshing to see. Their 0 to 1s feel compelling and more Apple(2000s) like.
totaldude87 2y ago
The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)! Instead of searching (google) , let me ask AI( chatgpts) and google is on the losing side of this perception war. This cannot be solved that quickly . Especially with what google has done in the AI space(to a layman) it was Bard(anyone remembers) and then it was something and then its Gemini now. what is the differentiator now? is google offering more free stuff than its peers? a layman doesnt care about whether it succeeds in solving a math problem or not! As long as people think these two are separate things(ai v search) , google is gonna have a problem
- Clubber 2y ago
  >what is the differentiator now? Not now necessarily, but if Google gets any traction in this, I can see Google inserting subtle ads in the AI results, which would be a net negative.
- weatherlite 2y ago
  > The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)! I don't know if that's a problem. If I was Google I'd like to keep search mostly as is (perhaps throw in some AI summary, but mostly as is) so I can keep putting links to ads. I still use Google; if I want to buy new running shoes, book a flight etc I don't start talking to ChatGPT about it, I just Google; I'm sure there are a couple billion more people like me who'll keep doing it. It's more than just habit, A.I is perceived as not up to date so I see absolutely no reason to go to an LLM for shoes and flights. But I have many other questions (mostly programming, stock analysis etc) I go to the A.I for. I think for Google, Search will still make a lot of money because the buying shoes thing is worth more for advertisers than asking some vague question about my codebase.
alecco 2y ago
Until Google shows they got rid of all the people responsible for stupid stuff like Black Napoleon and all the far-left politically charged garbage, I'll pass. It's one version mess up away from reverting to that while the same people are behind it.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  [flagged]
whyenot 2y ago
I think ChatGPT still has a small lead, but Gemini is pretty darn good. One of the things I really like about the version I am using is the integration with Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.
the_clarence 2y ago
I'm using both gemini pro and chatgpt plus/pro all the time, while gemini is FAST, its answers are systematically worse. So much so that I don't use it for anything serious anymore. It's a shame because the 1-2M context window is really amazing.
- cpncrunch 2y ago
  The problem seems to be creativity when there is limited information available. In these cases ChatGPT seems to do a good job, but Gemini just makes shit up even if you turn the "temperature" (creativity) down to 0. Every so often I ask it for info about a previous employer of mine, and it randomly makes up hilarious "facts", like we made ultra low budget porn and horror movies, that we were a music recording studio, or that we were responsible for "the last of us" video game.
senderista 2y ago
Jeff Dean has "been building neural networks for decades"? That doesn't seem correct: I thought he was primarily a distributed systems researcher before becoming involved with ML?
- throwaway29303 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17848882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17848882
tzury 2y ago
Google: - Google AI Studio - Gemini app - Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users - Vertex AI - NotebookLM - many more I forgot… vs ChatGPT.com This is Google’s main problem. Where several groups are trying to build the same product and compete on user attention and distract focus. Search Google. Search. Show search results on the right columns with ads on the top as it is today, and the Gemini thingy on the left. It’s that simple.
- solardev 2y ago
  I don't even know which is which anymore. Like what is the difference between all of those and Google Assistant and Bard and the GCP AI services? Are they all just different models or different products altogether? Maybe I'll ask ChatGPT to explain...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

190 points by totaldude87 2y ago

Google screwed up so massively in this whole AI race. It blows my mind that they had the technology available internally years before OpenAI released ChatGPT but didn't do anything with it and in fact lost top talent due to their hesitation to release it (as the article states about Noam Shazeer). And now, for basically every non-techie person, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the same way that Google was synonymous with search. What a disaster. Quite frankly shocked that their executive team is still in place.

DSingularity 2y ago
Maybe this “screw up” delayed LLMs by years and gave them more years to milk the cow.
matusp 2y ago
To be honest there were several chatbots before ChatGPT, eg Galactica by Microsoft, and it had not seem so promising. Similarly, ChatGPT was originally released as more or less a fun little demo, and the absolute success was surprise for OpenAI as well . They probably managed to hit certain UX threshold where people start to find the chatting valuable/interesting, but this was really an accidental discovery.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  Sometimes virality is a total fluke of the moment. For instance Zoom happened to be what teachers told each other about when lockdowns started. That could have been webx or meet or whatever.
benatkin 2y ago
Guess they didn't need that top talent in the long run, they had plenty of their own top talent https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model-end-of-march?tid=1743013184799 https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model...

cratermoon 2y ago

Deepseek showed us that the easiest way to catch up with OpenAI is.. <checks notes> hiring programmers who know what they are doing.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Right, because Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and X all don't have anyone who knows what they are doing - and also none of them had the bright idea to hire anyone who knows what they are doing either... I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's not that reductive.
- alecco 2y ago
  I think he missed adding: and let them do their job and be smart managing the resources by themselves. Pichai & co put a borderline-communist quota system and it became a popularity contest to get a tiny slice extra of compute. And then OpenAI ate their lunch (Google tech).
  - montag 2y ago
    Do you have a source for this “quota system”
    - alecco 2y ago
      Are you stalking me, doyouhaveasourcebro? Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273440 Self-quoting here: That's in contrast to what OpenAI's David Luan "Why Google couldn’t make GPT-3" (https://www.latent.space/p/adept https://www.latent.space/p/adept): And it turned out the whole time that they just couldn't get critical mass. So during my year where I led the Google LM effort and I was one of the brain leads, you know, it became really clear why. At the time, there was a thing called the Brain Credit Marketplace. Everyone's assigned a credit. So if you have a credit, you get to buy end chips according to supply and demand. So if you want to go do a giant job, you had to convince like 19 or 20 of your colleagues not to do work. And if that's how it works, it's really hard to get that bottom up critical mass to go scale these things. And the team at Google were fighting valiantly, but we were able to beat them simply because we took big swings and we focused.”

mitchbob 2y ago

https://archive.ph/NQqCj https://archive.ph/NQqCj

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

adaptbrian 2y ago

We need more ai overviews because look at all the likes! ...... (word to the wise it's a simple link traffic siphon on advertisers) Kent W. said to hurry up, hmm I could only wonder why, what could he possibly see on the legal horizon.

dsabanin 2y ago

I was skeptical at first, but I think Google’s catch up game with OpenAI has been going pretty well so far. Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash models are really nice. Deep research feature is done really well. Context window is still the best in the industry. Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc. They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life. Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.

mattlondon 2y ago
(deleted - wrong place)
- joshstrange 2y ago
  There are plenty of people outside of tech circles talking about and using ChatGPT. In fact, that was a massive indicator for me, I heard from them about ChatGPT before I had gotten around to mentioning it to them. That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.
- trjordan 2y ago
  ChatGPT has 400m weekly users. X / Twitter has 600m. It's pretty popular!
- fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
  > I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced. The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience. My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.
donny2018 2y ago

staticautomatic 2y ago

2.0 Flash seems to work well/fine for some use cases but for other produces hilariously bad results compared to ChatGPT and Claude. As a result I tend to avoid prototyping with it and instead consider it something I might implement at scale for speed and cost reasons if it turns out to work for a given use case.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

serjester 2y ago

Has anyone met Googlers that are confident in the company's AI strategy? Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to seems to have serious concerns but that might just be a small sample size.

MisterPea 2y ago
They're in a tough spot where the CEO does just enough to stay, but they need someone better. They lagged in AI, but the new Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible. They built an incredible tool in NotebookLM but failed to market it
- serjester 2y ago
  Agreed. Sundar seems like a peacetime CEO that got pulled into war and seems like he's struggling. But with Larry and Sergei having all voting control it seems unlikely he'll get fired.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- jmcgough 2y ago
  I thought Stadia was incredibly well-engineered, had good performance playing modern games with a Thinkpad. But none of my friends had any idea what Stadia was, the ad campaign was atrocious. Time and time again, Google builds great products and then shelves them a year or two later.
  - MoonGhost 2y ago
    Google is not alone. Intel halfheartedly develops GPUs. It doesn't work without strategy.
  - the_clarence 2y ago
    Only works if you have a very stable internet connection
  - 2y ago

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

i think it was Eric Schmidt who said that "everyone would need an Assistant" - about 10 years ago. (maybe in [0] ~ 2016). Something to impersonate, talking to it. Why they didn't do it, even a resemblance of - when they could.. no idea. Instead, meddling with mailboxes and the like. [0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-eric-schmidt-ai https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-eric-schmidt-ai

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
They were definitely working on it, and had stuff which they were deliberately keeping behind bars.

lysace 2y ago

As an investor (smallish): I think Alphabet/Google can do much better with a CEO who isn't Sundar. Also: Generally: Do consider investing in companies that run services where you feel compelled to subscribe (like Youtube Premium and previously Netflix).

moffkalast 2y ago
Never felt like being compelled to subscribe to YT premium or Netflix, the former doesn't differ much from using YT with ublock, and piracy provides a better service than Neftlix. OAI's GPT-4 (back in the day), Deep Research, and 4o Image gen recently on the other hand? Totally. When it's something actually incredibly useful and there's zero alternatives out there. Google has no such products right now, if their Gemini Advanced trial shows anything it's that their touted 1M context doesn't actually work any better than the average undertrained 1M RoPE tune. I mean it doesn't even make sense for them conceptually to sell services, they're an ad company.
totaldude87 2y ago
care to elaborate? is this like an engineer/innovator thing? |CEO who isn't Sundar.
ipython 2y ago
Investor and heavy user of Google Workspace (several small paid domains). I find the Google Gemini capabilities for note taking and summarization of Meets to be excellent, and a huge timesaver for my teams. NotebookLM almost feels magic. In my experience, of the major players (AMZN, GOOG, and MSFT), Google's AI integrations feel the most polished and useful for day-to-day use.
impulser_ 2y ago
I disagree. Name another CEO that can take a company from 74b to 350b in revenue. He has always grown Google. Not a single year of decreased growth. He made Google the only AI company in the world with a full AI stack from data, science, hardware, and software. This is paying off massively. Look at how faster Gemini models are compared to any other model. It 3x faster. Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model on the market right now in terms of cost, performance, and intelligence. Everyone is fighting over NVIDA chips, not Google.

Workaccount2 2y ago

I think the biggest thing Google has working against them is the move to put lightweight models in everything for everyone. Whatever model they use for search is probably somewhere around an ~8B model, and flash 2.0 is decent but still a light weight model. People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers. Meanwhile, their SOTA models have been strong, and Gemini 2.5 looks like it might actually have taken the AI throne yesterday.[1] [1]https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/25/gemini/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/25/gemini/

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
willio58 2y ago
> People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers I'm curious how valid this statement is. Anecdotally, I really like those results. For whatever reason, I don't directly interact with Gemini, I just type questions into google and if an AI response comes up I definitely give it a first look before clicking through links. If for some reason no AI response comes up for a question, I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and I usually get the answer I'm looking for. As I typed that^ I realized something funny. I used to make fun of my parents for typing certain questions into google e.g. "What's the best pizza place in New York?". I would tell them to type "Best pizza place New York", because Google seemed to work better that way. But then that sort of stuff was hijacked by the SEO industry. So the meme of typing "Best Pizza Place New York Reddit" started so we could get actual answers from real people. With the rise of LLMs in search I'm personally back to typing "What's the best pizza place in New York?" right into Google/ChatGPT and it's been pretty successful so far. I'm curious what the next thing will be.

janalsncm 2y ago

OpenAI is being graded on a curve. They are not a public company and are not making money. Google is. That said, they definitely floundered by not productionizing transformer decoders, just like with Google meet/Zoom. (Encoders like BERT were/are widely used.)

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work. This was 2019 time frame? Maybe 2020? It was uncanny and creepy, pretended to be a conscious being, frequently lied, and led directly to that guy who claimed it had personhood... I can completely understand why Google chose to keep a lid on this kind of thing, hoping to be able to clean it up and produce something that could be reliably used for a product instead of a novelty. That's back when Google was still sort-of pretending to have ethics (though they didn't) OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.

gaogao 2y ago
It's not just that they didn't care, but they had a better framing and RLHF helped quite a bit. Galactica got released at a similar time to ChatGPT and got castigated, in a large part due to a poor framing of it being for science and not more of a fun thing.
Henchman21 2y ago
> OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care. This is lack of interest will kill Google in the end, IMO.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  I wasn't talking about Google not caring. OpenAI didn't care about ethics.
  - Henchman21 2y ago
    I see my mistake, thank you! But also I have this view of Google as largely apathetic to its users and the things it creates, but maybe more to the point the things it created and then destroyed. I may have misunderstood but I still feel like I have a valid take.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

czhu12 2y ago

It seems if Google had been competitive, all they would’ve managed to do is burn ~10 billion dollars in the past 2 years, and run up against the same performance wall everyone else has If I were them, I’d wait until OpenAI is forced to at least slow their burn and then jump in, and undercut everyone. Seems like the real money is made on the API side anyways, so having a large consumer presence isn’t super valuable yet.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

light_hue_1 2y ago

I can't believe that anyone in leadership at Google still has their jobs. Aside from AMD it's the company that is wasting the most amount of talent. Gemini is still garbage compared to o3-mini-high when it comes to code. GCP is still a horrible platform compared to AWS. Why would anyone pick Google models to do anything? They refusal rate is obscene. Google lived too long with no strategy, just search and random noise. They don't seem to be able to pivot. Until they do something company-wide that includes how promotions work and turning over management I can't see them as being anything other than a 3rd rate player in AI. Search will die to AI in time. And they've got nothing to entice people to use Google AI over anything else.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

zombiwoof 2y ago

It’s amazing how much wealth is being acquired by the people working on this. And it’s delivering what? A way to automate navigating websites or telling someone looking at the Buckingham Palace that it’s the buckingham palace ? Silicon Valley hubris continues to astound

shermantanktop 2y ago
Somewhere there's a market that is highly rational, not taken in by hype, and lacks hubris. Maybe it's Germany? Good luck starting a tech company there. The frisson of hype and juvenile behavior seems pretty linked to the optimism that drives this sector. Some idiots and hucksters inevitably come along for the ride, and some of them get lucky.
- walleeee 2y ago
  which is why those of us who aren't idiots and hucksters need to think critically about computers, ourselves, and the roles of both in the world. unexamined optimism is no virtue

natch 2y ago

OpenAI is already solving the problem for all its competitors by hobbling its models so much. With voice mode OpenAI hears its own voice as interruptions, then misrecognizes what it itself is saying to be some topic that is off limits. It then gets into a loop of “I can’t talk about that… would you like to talk about something else?” And this is with completely innocuous topics. Absolutely infuriating. No idea how they are possibly dog fooding this and not seeing the problem. The insane level of overcranking the PC knobs led me to end my subscription and add more Google to my portfolio. I’m sure I’m not alone. That’s not to say Google won’t have the same issues, but there’s always Grok.

LeicaLatte 2y ago

Google leadership has had a measured approach and product releases seem more baked than ever, it’s refreshing to see. Their 0 to 1s feel compelling and more Apple(2000s) like.

totaldude87 2y ago

The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)! Instead of searching (google) , let me ask AI( chatgpts) and google is on the losing side of this perception war. This cannot be solved that quickly . Especially with what google has done in the AI space(to a layman) it was Bard(anyone remembers) and then it was something and then its Gemini now. what is the differentiator now? is google offering more free stuff than its peers? a layman doesnt care about whether it succeeds in solving a math problem or not! As long as people think these two are separate things(ai v search) , google is gonna have a problem

Clubber 2y ago
>what is the differentiator now? Not now necessarily, but if Google gets any traction in this, I can see Google inserting subtle ads in the AI results, which would be a net negative.
weatherlite 2y ago
> The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)! I don't know if that's a problem. If I was Google I'd like to keep search mostly as is (perhaps throw in some AI summary, but mostly as is) so I can keep putting links to ads. I still use Google; if I want to buy new running shoes, book a flight etc I don't start talking to ChatGPT about it, I just Google; I'm sure there are a couple billion more people like me who'll keep doing it. It's more than just habit, A.I is perceived as not up to date so I see absolutely no reason to go to an LLM for shoes and flights. But I have many other questions (mostly programming, stock analysis etc) I go to the A.I for. I think for Google, Search will still make a lot of money because the buying shoes thing is worth more for advertisers than asking some vague question about my codebase.

alecco 2y ago

Until Google shows they got rid of all the people responsible for stupid stuff like Black Napoleon and all the far-left politically charged garbage, I'll pass. It's one version mess up away from reverting to that while the same people are behind it.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago
[flagged]

whyenot 2y ago

I think ChatGPT still has a small lead, but Gemini is pretty darn good. One of the things I really like about the version I am using is the integration with Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.

the_clarence 2y ago

I'm using both gemini pro and chatgpt plus/pro all the time, while gemini is FAST, its answers are systematically worse. So much so that I don't use it for anything serious anymore. It's a shame because the 1-2M context window is really amazing.

cpncrunch 2y ago
The problem seems to be creativity when there is limited information available. In these cases ChatGPT seems to do a good job, but Gemini just makes shit up even if you turn the "temperature" (creativity) down to 0. Every so often I ask it for info about a previous employer of mine, and it randomly makes up hilarious "facts", like we made ultra low budget porn and horror movies, that we were a music recording studio, or that we were responsible for "the last of us" video game.

senderista 2y ago

Jeff Dean has "been building neural networks for decades"? That doesn't seem correct: I thought he was primarily a distributed systems researcher before becoming involved with ML?

throwaway29303 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17848882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17848882

tzury 2y ago

Google: - Google AI Studio - Gemini app - Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users - Vertex AI - NotebookLM - many more I forgot… vs ChatGPT.com This is Google’s main problem. Where several groups are trying to build the same product and compete on user attention and distract focus. Search Google. Search. Show search results on the right columns with ads on the top as it is today, and the Gemini thingy on the left. It’s that simple.

solardev 2y ago
I don't even know which is which anymore. Like what is the difference between all of those and Google Assistant and Bard and the GCP AI services? Are they all just different models or different products altogether? Maybe I'll ask ChatGPT to explain...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]