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More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operatio

More great innovation from Google. OpenAI have two major problems. The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more growth. Second problem is data starvation and the unfair advantage that social media has when it comes to a source of continually refreshed knowledge. Now that the foundational model providers have churned through the common crawl and are competing to consume things like video and whatever is left, new data is becoming increasingly valuable as a differentiator, and more importantly, as a provider of sustained value for years to come. SamA has signaled both of these problems when he made noises about building a fab a while back and is more recently making noises about launching a social media platform off OpenAI. The smart money among his investors know these issues to be fundamental in deciding if OAI will succeed or not, and are asking the hard questions. If the only answer for both is "we'll build it from scratch", OpenAI is in very big trouble. And it seems that that is the best answer that SamA can come up with. I continue to believe that OpenAI will be the Netscape of the AI revolution. The win is Google's for the taking, if they can get out of their own way.

jbverschoor 2y ago
Except that they train their model even when you pay. So yeah.. I'd rather not use their "evil"
- dayvigo 2y ago
  Source?
  - throwaway314155 2y ago
    It's right there in the comment.
- mkl 2y ago
  This is false: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms
Keyframe 2y ago
Google has the data and has the hardware, not to mention software and infrastructure talent. Once this Bismarck turns around and it looks like it is, who can parry it for real? They have internet.zip and all the previous versions as well, they have youtube, email, search, books, traffic, maps and business on it, phones and habits around it, even the OG social network, the usenet. It's a sleeping giant starting to wake up and it's already causing commotion, let's see what it does when it drinks morning coffee.
- kriro 2y ago
  Agreed. One of Google's big advantages is the data access and integrations. They are also positioned really well for the "AI as entertainment" sector with youtube which will be huge (imo). They also have the knowledge in adtech and well injecting adds into AI is an obvious play. As is harvesting AI chat data. Meta and Google are the long term players to watch as Meta also has similar access (Insta, FB, WhatsApp).
  - whoisthemachine 2y ago
    On-demand GenAI could definitely change the meaning of "You" in "Youtube".
- eastbound 2y ago
  They have the Excel spreadsheets of all startups and businesses of the world (well 50/50 with Microsoft). And Atlassian has all the project data.
  - Keyframe 2y ago
    I still can't understand how google missed on github, especially since they were in the same space before with google code. I do understand how they couldn't make a github though.
  - jjani 2y ago
    More like 5/95 with Microsoft - and that's being generous, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 1/99. It's basicaly just hip tech companies and a couple of Fortune 500s that use Google Docs. And even their finance departments often use Excel. HN keeps underestimating how the whole physical world runs on Excel.
whyenot 2y ago
Another advantage that Google has is the deep integration of Gemini into Google Office products and Gmail. I was part of a pilot group and got to use a pre-release version and it's really powerful and not something that will be easy for OpenAI to match.
- mmaunder 2y ago
  Agreed. Once they dial in the training for sheets it's going to be incredible. I'm already using notebooklm to upload finance PDFs, then having it generate tabular data and copypasta into sheets, but it's a garage solution compared to just telling it to create or update a sheet with parsed data from other sheets, PDFs, docs, etc. And as far as gmail goes, I periodically try to ask it to unsubscribe from everything marketing related, and not from my own company, but it's not even close to being there. I think there will continue to be a gap in the market for more aggressive email integration with AI, given how useless email has become. I know A16Z has invested in a startup working on this. I doubt Gmail will integrate as deep as is possible, so the opportunity will remain.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I frankly am in doubt of future office products. In the last month I have ditched two separate excel productivity templates in favor of bespoke wrappers on sqlite databases, written by Claude and Gemini. Easier to use and probably 10x as fast. You don't need a 50 function swiss army knife when your pocket can just generate the exact tool you need.
- jdgoesmarching 2y ago
  You say deep integration, yet there is still no way to send a Gemini Canvas to Docs without a lot of tedious copy-pasting and formatting because Docs still doesn’t actually support markdown. Gemini in Google Office in general has been a massive disappointment for all but the most simplistic of writing tasks. They can have the most advanced infrastructure in the world, but it doesn’t mean much if Google continues its infamous floundering approach to product. But hey, 2.5 pro with Cline is pretty nice.
  - 2y ago
zoogeny 2y ago
If the battle was between Altman and Pichai I'd have my doubts. But the battle is between Altman and Hassabis. I recall some advice on investment from Buffett regarding how he invests in the management team.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Could you please expand, on both your points?
  - zoogeny 2y ago
    It is more gut feel than a rational or carefully reasoned argument. I think Pichai has been an exceptional revenue maximizer but he lacks vision. I think he is probably capable of squeezing tremendous revenue out of AI once it has been achieved. I like Hassabis in a "good vibe" way when I hear him speak. He reminds me of engineers that I have worked with personally and have gained my respect. He feels less like a product focused leader and more of a research focused leader (AlphaZero/AlphaFold) which I think will be critical to continue the advances necessary to push the envelope. I like his focus on games and his background in RL. Google's war chest of Ad money gives Hassabis the flexibility to invest in non-revenue generating directions in a way that Altman is unlikely to be able to do. Altman made a decision to pivot the company towards product which led to the exodus of early research talent.
    - sumedh 2y ago
      > Altman made a decision to pivot the company towards product which led to the exodus of early research talent. Who was going to fund the research though?
      - zoogeny 2y ago
        Fair point, and a good reminder not to pass judgement on the actions of others. It is totally possible that Altman made his own prediction of the future and theorized that the only hope he had of competing with the existing big tech companies to realistically achieve an AI for the masses was to show investors a path to profitability. I should also give Altman a bit more due in that I find his description of a world augmented by powerful AI to be more inspiring than any similar vision I've heard from Pichai. But I'm not trying to guess their intentions, I am just stating the situation as I see it. And that situation is one where whatever forces have caused it, OpenAI is clearly investing very heavily in product (e.g. windsurf acquisition, even suggesting building a social network). And that shift in focus seems highly correlated with a loss of significant research talent (as well as a healthy dose of boardroom drama).
throwup238 2y ago
Nobody has really talked about what I think is an advantage just as powerful as the custom chips: Google Books. They already won a landmark fair use lawsuit against book publishers, digitized more books than anyone on earth, and used their Captcha service to crowdsource its OCR. They've got the best* legal cover and all of the best sources of human knowledge already there. Then Youtube for video. The chips of course push them over the top. I don't know how much Deep Research is costing them but it's by far the best experience with AI I've had so far with a generous 20/day rate limit. At this point I must be using up at least 5-10 compute hours a day. Until about a week ago I had almost completely written off Google. * For what it's worth, I don't know. IANAL
- dynm 2y ago
  The amount of text in books is surprisingly finite. My best estimate was that there are ~10¹³ tokens available in all books (https://dynomight.net/scaling/#scaling-data https://dynomight.net/scaling/#scaling-data), which is less than frontier models are already being trained on. On the other hand, book tokens are probably much "better" than random internet tokens. Wikipedia for example seems to get much higher weight than other sources, and it's only ~3×10¹⁰ tokens.
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    We need more books! On it…
    - kupopuffs 2y ago
      opens up his favorite chat
    - elcritch 1y ago
      > And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Ecclesiastes 12:12 ;)
- paxys 2y ago
  LibGen already exists, and all the top LLM publishers use it. I don't know if Google's own book index provides a big technical or legal advantage.
peterjliu 2y ago
another advantage is people want the Google bot to crawl their pages, unlike most AI companies
- jiocrag 2y ago
  Excellent point. If they can figure out how to either remunerate or drive traffic to third parties in conjunction with this, it would be huge.
- mmaunder 2y ago
  This is an underrated comment. Yes it's a big advantage and probably a measurable pain point for Anthropic and OpenAI. In fact you could just do a 1% survey of robots.txt out there and get a reasonable picture. Maybe a fun project for an HN'er.
- newfocogi 2y ago
  This is right on. I work for a company with somewhat of a data moat and AI aspirations. We spend a lot of time blocking everyone's bots except for Google. We have people whose entire job is it to make it faster for Google to access our data. We exist because Google accesses our data. We can't not let them have it.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  Reddit was an interesting case here. They knew that they had particularly good AI training data, and they were able to hold it hostage from the Google crawler, which was an awfully high risk play given how important Google search results are to Reddit ads, but they likely knew that Reddit search results were also really important to Google. I would love to be able to watch those negotiations on each side; what a crazy high stakes negotiation that must've been.
  - mattlondon 2y ago
    Particularly good training data? You can't mean the bottom-of-the-barrel dross that people post on Reddit, so not sure what data you are referring to? Click-stream?
stefan_ 2y ago
I don't know man, for months now people keep telling me on HN how "Google is winning", yet no normal person I ever asked knows what the fuck "Gemini" is. I don't know what they are winning, it might be internet points for all I know. Actually, some of the people polled recalled the Google AI efforts by their expert system recommending glue on pizza and smoking in pregnancy. It's a big joke.
- mmaunder 2y ago
  Try uploading a bunch of PDF bank statements to notebooklm and ask it questions. Or the results of blood work. It's jaw dropping. e.g. uploaded 7 brokerage account statements as PDFs in a mess of formats and asked it to generate table summary data which it nailed, and then asked it to generate actual trades to go from current position to a new position in shortest path, and it nailed that too. Biggest issue we have when using notebooklm is a lack of ambition when it comes to the questions we're asking. And the pro version supports up to 300 documements. Hell, we uploaded the entire Euro Cyber Resilience Act and asked the same questions we were going to ask our big name legal firm, and it nailed every one. But you actually make a fair point, which I'm seeing too and I find quite exciting. And it's that even among my early adopter and technology minded friends, adoption of the most powerful AI tools is very low. e.g. many of them don't even know that notebookLM exists. My interpretation on this is that it's VERY early days, which is suuuuuper exciting for us builders and innovators here on HN.
- kube-system 2y ago
  While there are some first-party B2C applications like chat front-ends built using LLMs, once mature, the end game is almost certainly that these are going to be B2B products integrated into other things. The future here goes a lot further than ChatGPT.
- shmoogy 2y ago
  That was ages ago. Their new models excel at many things. Image editing, parsing PDFs, and coding are what I use it for. It's significantly cheaper than the closest competing models (Gemini 2.5 pro, and flash experimental with image generation). Highly recommend testing against openai and anthropic models - you'll likely be pleasantly surprised.
labrador 2y ago
> If the only answer for both is "we'll build it from scratch", OpenAI is in very big trouble They could buy Google+ code from Google and resurrect it with OpenAI branding. Alternately they could partner with Bluesky
- parsimo2010 2y ago
  I don't think the issue is solving the technical implementation of a new social media platform. The issue is whether a new social media platform from OpenAI will deliver the kind of value that existing platforms deliver. If they promise investors that they'll get TikTok/Meta/YouTube levels of content+interaction (and all the data that comes with it), but deliver Mastodon levels, then they are in trouble.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> The smart money among his investors know these issues to be fundamental in deciding if OAI will succeed or not, and are asking the hard questions. OpenAI has already succeeded. If it ends up being a $100B company instead of a $10T company, that is success. By a very large margin. It's hard to imagine a world in which OpenAI just goes bankrupt and ends up being worth nothing.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  it goes bankrupt when the cost of running the business outweights the earnings in the long run
- samuel 2y ago
  I can, and I would say it's a likely scenario, say 30%. If they don't have a significant edge over their competitors in the capabilities of their models, what's left? A money losing web app, and some API services that I'm sure aren't very profitable either. They can't compete with Google, Grok, Meta, MS, Amazon... They just can't. They can end being the Altavista of this era.
dyauspitr 2y ago
I haven’t heard this much positive sentiment about Google in a while. Making something freely available really turns public sentiment around.

jbverschoor 2y ago

Except that they train their model even when you pay. So yeah.. I'd rather not use their "evil"

dayvigo 2y ago
Source?
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  It's right there in the comment.
mkl 2y ago
This is false: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms

Keyframe 2y ago

Google has the data and has the hardware, not to mention software and infrastructure talent. Once this Bismarck turns around and it looks like it is, who can parry it for real? They have internet.zip and all the previous versions as well, they have youtube, email, search, books, traffic, maps and business on it, phones and habits around it, even the OG social network, the usenet. It's a sleeping giant starting to wake up and it's already causing commotion, let's see what it does when it drinks morning coffee.

kriro 2y ago
Agreed. One of Google's big advantages is the data access and integrations. They are also positioned really well for the "AI as entertainment" sector with youtube which will be huge (imo). They also have the knowledge in adtech and well injecting adds into AI is an obvious play. As is harvesting AI chat data. Meta and Google are the long term players to watch as Meta also has similar access (Insta, FB, WhatsApp).
- whoisthemachine 2y ago
  On-demand GenAI could definitely change the meaning of "You" in "Youtube".
eastbound 2y ago
They have the Excel spreadsheets of all startups and businesses of the world (well 50/50 with Microsoft). And Atlassian has all the project data.
- Keyframe 2y ago
  I still can't understand how google missed on github, especially since they were in the same space before with google code. I do understand how they couldn't make a github though.
- jjani 2y ago
  More like 5/95 with Microsoft - and that's being generous, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 1/99. It's basicaly just hip tech companies and a couple of Fortune 500s that use Google Docs. And even their finance departments often use Excel. HN keeps underestimating how the whole physical world runs on Excel.

whyenot 2y ago

Another advantage that Google has is the deep integration of Gemini into Google Office products and Gmail. I was part of a pilot group and got to use a pre-release version and it's really powerful and not something that will be easy for OpenAI to match.

mmaunder 2y ago
Agreed. Once they dial in the training for sheets it's going to be incredible. I'm already using notebooklm to upload finance PDFs, then having it generate tabular data and copypasta into sheets, but it's a garage solution compared to just telling it to create or update a sheet with parsed data from other sheets, PDFs, docs, etc. And as far as gmail goes, I periodically try to ask it to unsubscribe from everything marketing related, and not from my own company, but it's not even close to being there. I think there will continue to be a gap in the market for more aggressive email integration with AI, given how useless email has become. I know A16Z has invested in a startup working on this. I doubt Gmail will integrate as deep as is possible, so the opportunity will remain.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I frankly am in doubt of future office products. In the last month I have ditched two separate excel productivity templates in favor of bespoke wrappers on sqlite databases, written by Claude and Gemini. Easier to use and probably 10x as fast. You don't need a 50 function swiss army knife when your pocket can just generate the exact tool you need.
jdgoesmarching 2y ago
You say deep integration, yet there is still no way to send a Gemini Canvas to Docs without a lot of tedious copy-pasting and formatting because Docs still doesn’t actually support markdown. Gemini in Google Office in general has been a massive disappointment for all but the most simplistic of writing tasks. They can have the most advanced infrastructure in the world, but it doesn’t mean much if Google continues its infamous floundering approach to product. But hey, 2.5 pro with Cline is pretty nice.
- 2y ago

zoogeny 2y ago

If the battle was between Altman and Pichai I'd have my doubts. But the battle is between Altman and Hassabis. I recall some advice on investment from Buffett regarding how he invests in the management team.

mdp2021 2y ago
Could you please expand, on both your points?
- zoogeny 2y ago
  It is more gut feel than a rational or carefully reasoned argument. I think Pichai has been an exceptional revenue maximizer but he lacks vision. I think he is probably capable of squeezing tremendous revenue out of AI once it has been achieved. I like Hassabis in a "good vibe" way when I hear him speak. He reminds me of engineers that I have worked with personally and have gained my respect. He feels less like a product focused leader and more of a research focused leader (AlphaZero/AlphaFold) which I think will be critical to continue the advances necessary to push the envelope. I like his focus on games and his background in RL. Google's war chest of Ad money gives Hassabis the flexibility to invest in non-revenue generating directions in a way that Altman is unlikely to be able to do. Altman made a decision to pivot the company towards product which led to the exodus of early research talent.
  - sumedh 2y ago
    > Altman made a decision to pivot the company towards product which led to the exodus of early research talent. Who was going to fund the research though?
    - zoogeny 2y ago
      Fair point, and a good reminder not to pass judgement on the actions of others. It is totally possible that Altman made his own prediction of the future and theorized that the only hope he had of competing with the existing big tech companies to realistically achieve an AI for the masses was to show investors a path to profitability. I should also give Altman a bit more due in that I find his description of a world augmented by powerful AI to be more inspiring than any similar vision I've heard from Pichai. But I'm not trying to guess their intentions, I am just stating the situation as I see it. And that situation is one where whatever forces have caused it, OpenAI is clearly investing very heavily in product (e.g. windsurf acquisition, even suggesting building a social network). And that shift in focus seems highly correlated with a loss of significant research talent (as well as a healthy dose of boardroom drama).

throwup238 2y ago

Nobody has really talked about what I think is an advantage just as powerful as the custom chips: Google Books. They already won a landmark fair use lawsuit against book publishers, digitized more books than anyone on earth, and used their Captcha service to crowdsource its OCR. They've got the best* legal cover and all of the best sources of human knowledge already there. Then Youtube for video. The chips of course push them over the top. I don't know how much Deep Research is costing them but it's by far the best experience with AI I've had so far with a generous 20/day rate limit. At this point I must be using up at least 5-10 compute hours a day. Until about a week ago I had almost completely written off Google. * For what it's worth, I don't know. IANAL

dynm 2y ago
The amount of text in books is surprisingly finite. My best estimate was that there are ~10¹³ tokens available in all books (https://dynomight.net/scaling/#scaling-data https://dynomight.net/scaling/#scaling-data), which is less than frontier models are already being trained on. On the other hand, book tokens are probably much "better" than random internet tokens. Wikipedia for example seems to get much higher weight than other sources, and it's only ~3×10¹⁰ tokens.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  We need more books! On it…
  - kupopuffs 2y ago
    opens up his favorite chat
  - elcritch 1y ago
    > And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Ecclesiastes 12:12 ;)
paxys 2y ago
LibGen already exists, and all the top LLM publishers use it. I don't know if Google's own book index provides a big technical or legal advantage.

peterjliu 2y ago

another advantage is people want the Google bot to crawl their pages, unlike most AI companies

jiocrag 2y ago
Excellent point. If they can figure out how to either remunerate or drive traffic to third parties in conjunction with this, it would be huge.
mmaunder 2y ago
This is an underrated comment. Yes it's a big advantage and probably a measurable pain point for Anthropic and OpenAI. In fact you could just do a 1% survey of robots.txt out there and get a reasonable picture. Maybe a fun project for an HN'er.
newfocogi 2y ago
This is right on. I work for a company with somewhat of a data moat and AI aspirations. We spend a lot of time blocking everyone's bots except for Google. We have people whose entire job is it to make it faster for Google to access our data. We exist because Google accesses our data. We can't not let them have it.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
Reddit was an interesting case here. They knew that they had particularly good AI training data, and they were able to hold it hostage from the Google crawler, which was an awfully high risk play given how important Google search results are to Reddit ads, but they likely knew that Reddit search results were also really important to Google. I would love to be able to watch those negotiations on each side; what a crazy high stakes negotiation that must've been.
- mattlondon 2y ago
  Particularly good training data? You can't mean the bottom-of-the-barrel dross that people post on Reddit, so not sure what data you are referring to? Click-stream?

stefan_ 2y ago

I don't know man, for months now people keep telling me on HN how "Google is winning", yet no normal person I ever asked knows what the fuck "Gemini" is. I don't know what they are winning, it might be internet points for all I know. Actually, some of the people polled recalled the Google AI efforts by their expert system recommending glue on pizza and smoking in pregnancy. It's a big joke.

mmaunder 2y ago
Try uploading a bunch of PDF bank statements to notebooklm and ask it questions. Or the results of blood work. It's jaw dropping. e.g. uploaded 7 brokerage account statements as PDFs in a mess of formats and asked it to generate table summary data which it nailed, and then asked it to generate actual trades to go from current position to a new position in shortest path, and it nailed that too. Biggest issue we have when using notebooklm is a lack of ambition when it comes to the questions we're asking. And the pro version supports up to 300 documements. Hell, we uploaded the entire Euro Cyber Resilience Act and asked the same questions we were going to ask our big name legal firm, and it nailed every one. But you actually make a fair point, which I'm seeing too and I find quite exciting. And it's that even among my early adopter and technology minded friends, adoption of the most powerful AI tools is very low. e.g. many of them don't even know that notebookLM exists. My interpretation on this is that it's VERY early days, which is suuuuuper exciting for us builders and innovators here on HN.
kube-system 2y ago
While there are some first-party B2C applications like chat front-ends built using LLMs, once mature, the end game is almost certainly that these are going to be B2B products integrated into other things. The future here goes a lot further than ChatGPT.
shmoogy 2y ago
That was ages ago. Their new models excel at many things. Image editing, parsing PDFs, and coding are what I use it for. It's significantly cheaper than the closest competing models (Gemini 2.5 pro, and flash experimental with image generation). Highly recommend testing against openai and anthropic models - you'll likely be pleasantly surprised.

labrador 2y ago

> If the only answer for both is "we'll build it from scratch", OpenAI is in very big trouble They could buy Google+ code from Google and resurrect it with OpenAI branding. Alternately they could partner with Bluesky

parsimo2010 2y ago
I don't think the issue is solving the technical implementation of a new social media platform. The issue is whether a new social media platform from OpenAI will deliver the kind of value that existing platforms deliver. If they promise investors that they'll get TikTok/Meta/YouTube levels of content+interaction (and all the data that comes with it), but deliver Mastodon levels, then they are in trouble.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

> The smart money among his investors know these issues to be fundamental in deciding if OAI will succeed or not, and are asking the hard questions. OpenAI has already succeeded. If it ends up being a $100B company instead of a $10T company, that is success. By a very large margin. It's hard to imagine a world in which OpenAI just goes bankrupt and ends up being worth nothing.

bdangubic 2y ago
it goes bankrupt when the cost of running the business outweights the earnings in the long run
samuel 2y ago
I can, and I would say it's a likely scenario, say 30%. If they don't have a significant edge over their competitors in the capabilities of their models, what's left? A money losing web app, and some API services that I'm sure aren't very profitable either. They can't compete with Google, Grok, Meta, MS, Amazon... They just can't. They can end being the Altavista of this era.

dyauspitr 2y ago

I haven’t heard this much positive sentiment about Google in a while. Making something freely available really turns public sentiment around.