23 ms·
OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race
- siliconc0w 10mo agoThis sounds like the wrong move- focusing on the product layer and counter positioning on ads is the way to beat G
- theoldgreybeard 10mo agoYou can't make a baby in 1 month with 9 women, Sam.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoSource: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-altman-declares-code-red-to-improve-chatgpt-as-google-threatens-ai-lead-7faf5ea6 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-altman-declares-code-red... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118396)
- skywhopper 10mo agoThere will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development. Truly brilliant software development management going on here. Daily update meetings and temporary staff transfers. Well known strategies for increasing velocity!
- lubujackson 10mo agoDon't forget scuttling all the projects the staff has been working overtime to complete so that they can focus on "make it better!" waves hands frantically
- another_twist 10mo ago"The results of this quarter were already baked in a couple of quarters ago" - Jeff Bezos Quite right tbh.
- tiahura 10mo agoLike when OpenAI started experiencing a massive brain drain.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI've had ideas for how to improve all the different chatbots for like 3 years, nobodys has implemented any of them (usually my ideas get implemented in software somehow the devs read my mind, but AI seems to be stuck with the same UI for LLMs), none of these AI shops are ran by people with vision it feels like. Everyone's just remaking a slightly better version of SmarterChild.
- whiplash451 10mo agoDid you open-source / publish these ideas?
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI'm not giving any of these people my ideas for free. Though I did think of making my own UI for some of these services at some point.
- whiplash451 10mo agoarxiv/github or it did not happen
- theplatman 10mo agoi agree - it shows a remarkable lack of creativity that we're still stuck with a fairly subpar UX for interacting with these tools
- simianwords 10mo agoI really want a UI that visualises branching. I would like to branch out of specific parts of the responses and continue the conversation there but also keep the original conversation. This seems to be a very standard feature but no one has developed it.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoWould require something like snapshotting context windows, but I agree, something like this would be nice.
- mlmonkey 10mo agoThe beatings will continue until morale^H^H^H^H^H^H chatGPT improves...
- trymas 10mo ago…someone even wrote a book about this. Something about “mythical men”… :D
- zingababba 10mo agoNeeds an update re: mythical AI.
- kilroy123 10mo agoSeriously I think this is needed. The industry has become delusional.
- simianwords 10mo agoIts easy to dismiss it but what would you do instead?
- TheOccasionalWr 10mo agoWhat if they make 2 daily calls, that would surely improve the velocity by 2 times!
- rf15 10mo agoThis sounds like their medicine might be worse than what they're currently doing...
- rappatic 10mo ago> the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT There's maybe like a few hundred people in the industry who can truly do original work on fundamentally improving a bleeding-edge LLM like ChatGPT, and a whole bunch of people who can do work on ads and shopping. One doesn't seem to get in the way of the other.
- jasonthorsness 10mo agoha what an incredible consumer-friendly outcome! Hopefully competition keeps the focus on improving models and prevents irritating kinds of monetization
- another_twist 10mo agoIf there's no monetization, the industry will just collapse. Not a good thing to aspire to. I hope they make money whilst doing these improvements.
- thrance 10mo agoIf there's no monetization, the industry will just collapse, except for Google, which is probably what they want.
- AlexCoventry 10mo agoThe Chinese AI industry won't collapse, because it's a strategic priority for the PRC, and heavily subsidized.
- verdverm 10mo agoup to the point the Ai industry and people's access to it threatens The Party
- Ericson2314 10mo ago
- rashidujang 10mo ago> There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development. It's incredible how 50 year-old advice from The Mythical Man-Month are still not being heed. Throw in a knee-jerk solution of "daily call" (sound familiar?) for those involved while they are wading knee-deep through work and you have a perfect storm of terrible working conditions. My money is Google, who in my opinion have not only caught up, but surpassed OpenAI with their latest iteration of their AI offerings.
- amelius 10mo agoImho it just shows how relatively simple this technology really is, and nobody will have a moat. The bubble will pop.
- deelowe 10mo agoNot exactly. Infra will win the race. In this aspect, Google is miles ahead of the competition. Their DC solutions scale very well. Their only risk is that the hardware and low level software stack is EXTREMELY custom. They don't even fully leverage OCP. Having said that, this has never been a major problem for Google over their 20+ years of moving away from OTS parts.
- amelius 10mo agoBut anyone with enough money can make infra. Maybe not at the scale of Google, but maybe that's not necessary (unless you have a continuous stream of fresh high-quality training data).
- piva00 10mo agoIf making infra means designing their own silicon to target only inference instead of more general GPUs I can agree with you, otherwise the long-term success is based on how cheap they can run the infra compared to competitors. Depending on Nvidia for your inference means you'll be price gouged for it, Nvidia has a golden goose for now and will milk it as much as possible. I don't see how a company without optimised hardware can win in the long run.
- Fricken 10mo agoI take this code red as a red flag. Open AI should continue to concern itself with where it will be 5 years from now, not lose sight over concern about where it will 5 months from now.
- theplatman 10mo agoopen ai is at risk of complete collapse if it cannot fulfill its financial obligations. if people willing to give them money don't have faith in their ability to win the AI race anymore, then they're going out of business.
- Fricken 10mo agoExactly. They aren't going to win the AI race chasing rabbits at the expense of long-term goals. We're 3 years into a 10 year build-out. Open AI and it's financiers are too impatient, clearly, and they're fucking themselves. Open AI doesn't need to double it's revenue to meet expectations. They need to 50x their revenue to meet expectations. That's not the kind of problem you solve by working through the weekend.
- gbear605 10mo agoThe financiers are running out of money to lend. At this point, staying negative profit isn’t an option, they need to be able to fund themselves or they’ll go bankrupt.
- theplatman 10mo agoi cannot imagine how they are going to be able to meet their obligations unless they pull off a massive hail mary at this point via a bail out or finding someone to provide tens of billions of dollars in funding.
- dbbk 10mo agoSpoiler alert they're going to go out of business
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- whiplash451 10mo agoIt’s actually code yellow
- felixfurtak 10mo agoor maybe even code brown
- Phelinofist 10mo agoIMHO Gemini surpassed ChatGPT by quite a bit - I switched. Gemini is faster, the thinking mode gives me reliably better answers and it has a more "business like" conversation attitude which is refreshing in comparison to the over-the-top informal ChatGPT default.
- cj 10mo agoIs there a replacement for ChatGPT projects in Gemini yet? That's the only ChatGPT feature keeping me from moving to Gemini. Specifically, the ability to upload files and automatically make them available as context for a prompt.
- tiahura 10mo agoIsn’t that what gems are?
- hek2sch 10mo agoIsn't that already nouswise? Nouswise would ground answers based on low level quotes plus you get an api from your projects.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoLooks like it is coming out soon: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-gemini-projects-2-3620950/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-gemini-projects-2-36...
- pengaru 10mo agoSurely they can just use AI to go faster and attend their daily calls for them...
- poszlem 10mo agoTo be honest, this is the first month in almost a year when I didn't pay for ChatGPT Pro and instead went for Gemini Ultra. It's still not there for programming, where I use Claude Max, but for my 'daily driver' (count this, advice on that, 'is this cancer or just a headache' kind of thing), Gemini has finally surpassed ChatGPT for me. And I used to consider it to be the worst of the bunch. I used to consider Gemini the worst of the bunch, it constantly refused to help me in the past, but not only has it improved, ChatGPT seems to have gone down the 'nerfing' road where it now flat out refuses to do what I ask it to do quite often.
- smohare 10mo ago[dead]
- mrkramer 10mo agoGoogle is shivering! /s
- dwa3592 10mo agowhy couldn't GPT5.1 improve itself? Last I heard, it can produce original math and has phd level intelligence.
- throwacct 10mo agoC'mon man. You know why...
- teaearlgraycold 10mo agoI believe it was Sam Altman that said software engineers wouldn't have jobs by the end of the year. They still have a few weeks to make good on that.
- ares623 10mo agoI bet my retirement funds on that promise!
- vbezhenar 10mo agoThat was their gamble. Seems it didn't play out.
- alecco 10mo agoOpenAI was founded to hedge against Google dominating AI and with it the future. It makes me sad how that was lost for pipe dreams (AGI) and terrible leadership. I fear a Google dystopia. I hope DeepSeek or somebody else will counter-balance their power.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoThat goal has wildly succeeded -- there are now several well financed companies competing against Google. The goal was supposed to be an ethical competitor as implied by the word "Open" in their name. When Meta and the Chinese are the most ethical of the competitors, you know we're in a bad spot...
- alecco 10mo agoI said DeepSeek because they are very open (not just weights). A young company and very much unlike Chinese Big Tech and American Big Tech.
- epiccoleman 10mo agoWithout having followed the issue of "AI Ethics" that closely, Anthropic seems to me to be relatively non-evil, too.
- NitpickLawyer 10mo ago> Anthropic seems to me to be relatively non-evil, too. Eh... maybe? We don't yet know the results, but they have been proponents of heavy regulatory interventions since forever. Their plan was basically regulatory capture, where they sell their FUD regarding alignment, "safety" and all that jazz. If they succeed that will be evil, IMO. The best thing that can happen for us regular users is both healthy competition at the SotA level (which we kinda have, with the big4 labs keeping eachother honest) and support for small open source local models (gemmas, llamas, mistrals, qwens, etc).
- tiahura 10mo agoDoesn’t it seem likely that it all depends on who produces the next AIAYN? Things go one way if it’s an academic, and another way if it’s somebody’s trade secret.
- sometimes_all 10mo agoFor regular consumers, Gemini's AI pro plan is a tough one to beat. The chat quality has gotten much better, I am able to share my plan with a couple more people in my family leading to proper individual chat histories, I get 2 TB of extra storage (which is also sharable), plus some really nice stuff like NotebookLM, which has been amazing for doing research. Veo/Nanobanana are nice bonuses. It's easily worth the monthly cost, and I'm happy to pay - something which I didn't even consider doing a year ago. OpenAI just doesn't have the same bundle effect. Obviously power users and companies will likely consider Anthropic. I don't know what OpenAI's actual product moat is any more outside of a well-known name.
- piva00 10mo agoThrough my work I have access to Google's, Anthropic's, and OpenAI's products, and I agree with you, I barely touch OpenAI's models/products for some reason even though I have total freedom to choose.
- OutOfHere 10mo agoI strongly advise never using Google's Drive storage. They're known to scan all content, and to disable all access if even a single file is "problematic", often misclassified by a bot. If you do use the storage, do backup all your files, and be ready to lose access at any time, with no way to reach any intelligent human.
- throwacct 10mo agoWhich product do you recommend? OneDrive? Dropbox?
- mattmaroon 10mo agoI have to imagine they are all on the lookout for CSAM. They’d simply have to be. If it goes beyond that then let me know.
- OutOfHere 10mo ago
- vivzkestrel 10mo agoIn one of the Indian movies, there is a rather funny line that goes like this "tu jiss school se padh kar aaya hai mein uss school ka headmaster hoon". It would translate like this "The school from which you studied and came? I am the principal of that school". Looks like Google is about to show who the true principal is
- shaftway 10mo agoI think the most relevant quote is from Futurama: "Eh-de-de-de-de. Don't quote me regulations... I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation is in. We kept it gray."
- anileated 10mo agoProbably all of the ML foundation like transformers which OpenAI used to create its chatbot was originally developed at Google.
- sumedh 10mo agoThe people who wrote that paper left Google though.
- spwa4 10mo agoWe are in a pretty amazing situation. If you're willing to go down 10% in benchmark scores, you easily 25% your costs. Now with Deepseek 3.2 another shot across the bow. But if the ML, if SOTA intelligence becomes basically a price war, won't that mean that Google (and OpenAI and Microsoft and any other big model) lose big? Especially Google, as the margin even Google cloud (famously a lot lower than Google's other businesses) requires to survive has got to be sizeable.
- golfer 10mo agoGoogle trains its own AI with TPU's, which are designed in house. Google doesn't have to pay retail rates for Nvidia GPUs, like other hyperscalers in the AI rat race. Therefore, Google trains its AI for cheaper than everyone else. I think everyone else "loses big" other than Google.
- tvshtr 10mo agoWell, those who are aware of this definitely know what it is leading to. But most will act shocked surely.
- spwa4 10mo agoBut ... I don't understand why this is supposedly such a big deal. Look into it, calculate, and a very different picture comes forward, nVidia reportedly makes about 70% margin on their sales (which is COGS, in other words nVidia still pays about $1400 for chips and memory to produce a $4500 RTX5090 card, and that cost is rising fast). When you include research for current and future cards, that margin drops to 55-60%. When you include everything on their cash flow statement it drops to about 50%. And this is disregarding what Michael Burry pointed out: you really should subtract their stock dilution which is due to stock-based compensation, or about 0.2% of 4.6 trillion dollars per year. Michael Burry's point is of course that this makes for slightly negative shareholders' equity, ie. brings the margin to just under 0, which is mathematically true. But for this argument let's very generously say it eats about another 10% out of that margin. As opposed to the 50% it mathematically eats. Google and Amazon will have to be less efficient than nVidia, because they're making up ground. Let's very generously say that's another 10%, maybe 20%. So really, for Google making their own chips saves them at best 30% to 40% on the price, generously. And let's again ignore that Google's claim is that they're 30% to 50% less efficient than nVidia chips, which for large training runs translates directly to dollars. So for Google, TPUs are just about revenue neutral. It probably allows them to have more chips, more compute than they'd otherwise have, but it doesn't save them money over buying nVidia chips. Frankly, this conclusion sounds "very Google" to me. It's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect Google to do. VERY impressive technical accomplishment ... but can be criticized for being beside the point. It doesn't actually matter. As an engineer I applaud that they do it, please keep doing it, but it's not building a moat, not building revenue or profit, so the finance guy in me is screaming "WHY????????" At best, for Google, TPUs mean certainty of supply, relative to nVidia (whereas supplier contracts could build certainty of supply down the chain)
- zingababba 10mo agoDoes anyone have a link to the contents of the memo?
- mensetmanusman 10mo agoConspiracy time. >be Google >watch regulators circle like vultures >realize antitrust heat is rising faster than stock buybacks can hide >notice a small lab called OpenAI making exotic tech and attracting political fascination >calculate that nothing freezes regulators like an unpredictable new frontier >decide to treat OpenAI as an accidental firebreak >let them sprint ahead unchecked watch lawmakers panic about hypothetical robot uprisings instead of market concentration >antitrust hearings shift from “break up the giants” to “what is AGI and should we fear it” >Google emerges looking ancient, harmless, almost quaint >pressure dissipates >execute phase two: acceleration roll out model updates in compressed cycles >flood the web with AI-powered services >redefine “the internet” as “whatever Google’s infrastructure indexes” >regulators exhausted from chasing OpenAI’s shadow >Google walks back onto the throne, not by hiding power, but by reframing it as inevitability conspiracy theorists argue whether this was 5D chess or simple opportunism >Google search trends spike for “how did this happen” >the answer sits in plain sight: >attention is all you need
- newyankee 10mo agothere is enough proof that they had a chatbot internally which was quite competitive but was not pushed through for all these fears, it seems they were always confident that they could catch up and scaling laws were their internal defense. The question now though is neither might have expected Chinese labs to catch up so fast.
- mensetmanusman 10mo agoChina releasing open models only helps the big companies make more efficient inference. Maybe they don’t realize that the money will be in the inference compute and there is limited applicability for low flops inference. Ie. All the breakthroughs they share for free will immediately improve profitability of the ai compute clusters. Not sure why people think otherwise.
- breppp 10mo agoThat would be believable if you forget the sheer incompetence and bureaucracy Google was/is filled with
- TechRemarker 10mo agoHeard all the news how Gemini 3 is passing everyone on benchmarks, so quickly tested and still find it a far cry from ChatGPT in real world use when testing questions on both platforms. But importantly the ChatGPT app experience at least for iPhone/Mac users is drastically superior vs Google which feels very Google still. So Gemini would have to be drastically better answer wise than ChatGPT to lure users from a better UI/UX experience to Gemini. But glad to see competition since certainly don't want only one winner in this race.
- jiggawatts 10mo agoCuriously, I had the opposite experience, except for Deep Research mode where after the latest update the OpenAI offering has become genuinely amazing. This is doubly ironic because Gemini has direct API access to Google search!
- observationist 10mo agoGoogle search is awful. I don't think they can put lipstick on that particular pig and expect anyone to think it's beautiful.
- coppsilgold 10mo agoI'm sure they give their AI models a superior search than they give to us. Also if you prompt Google search the right way it's unfortunately still superior to most if not all other solutions in most cases.
- threecheese 10mo agoIt is good, but Pro subscribers get only five per month. After that, it’s a limited version, and it’s not good (normal 5.1 gives more comprehensive answers than DR Limited).
- tapoxi 10mo agoIts really hard to measure these things. Personally I switched to Gemini a few months ago since it was half the cost of ChatGPT (Verizon has a $10/month Google AI package). I feel like I've subconsciously learned to prompt it slightly differently and now using OpenAI products feels disappointing. Gemini tends to give me the answer I expect, Claude follows close behind, I get "meh" results from OpenAI. I am using Gemini 3 Pro, I rarely use Flash.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoRelated: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069048 Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108437
- semiinfinitely 10mo agoAI creates the possibility to disrupt existing power structures - this is the only reason it gathers so much focus. If it were merely tool that increased efficiency of work, few would care so much. We already frequently get such tools which draw far less attention.
- measurablefunc 10mo agoSo far all it has done is entrench existing power structures by dis-empowering people who are struggling the most in current economic conditions. How exactly do you suppose that's going to change in the future if currently it's simply making the rich richer & the poor poorer?
- badmonster 10mo ago"Code red" feels like theater. Competition is healthy - Google's compute advantage was always going to matter once they got serious. The real question isn't who's ahead this quarter, but whether anyone can maintain a moat when the underlying tech is rapidly commoditizing.
- m-schuetz 10mo agoYeah, but now it's questionable whether the insane investments will ever pay off.
- Andrex 10mo agoIt feels like (to me) that Google's TPU advantage (speculation is Meta is buying a bunch) will be one of the last things to be commoditized, which gives them a larger moat. Normal chips are hard enough to come by for this stuff.
- eden-u4 10mo agoAlso, they have all the infra to actually use all that tpus advantage (as well as actual researchers, contrariwise to OpenAI)
- laluser 10mo agoThat will be less of a problem since OAI can spill out to other providers as needed if their own capacity is under high utilization. They already use coreweave, aws, azure, etc. Google doesn't do that as far as I know and don't see why they would, so they are stuck eating the capacity planning.
- qoez 10mo agoCrazy how we went from google feeling like they were a dinasour who could never catch up to openai, to almost feeling like the opposite in terms of being able to catch up. All within just 1-2 years.
- SXX 10mo agoThats like innovators dillema in action. Google had one of the strongest ML teams years before majoriry of AI companies was founded, but no desire to make a product that will compete with their search. And now they actually have competitors.
- rvnx 10mo agoGoogle (generalist/media) > Anthropic (code) > x.AI (excellent price/quality balance). ChatGPT is a bit late now (even behind DeepSeek with DeepThink I believe)
- notepad0x90 10mo agoI see google partnering with different companies to mine their data for AI, but I don't see that with OpenAI. They had a good thing going with Microsoft but it looks like that relationship is a bit sour now? Surely they know that they can't just keep scraping the internet to train models. If I don't use a Microsoft product, I'd have to go out of my way to use an OpenAI service. But they don't have a specialized "service" (like anthropic and developers) either. Gemini is there by default with Google/Reddit. To retain their first-to-market advantage, they'd need to be the default in more places, or invest in models and services that cater to very specific audiences. I think their best best is to partner with different entities. But they lost reddit and twitter, and FB is doing their own thing too, so who's left? linkedin? school systems (but ChromeBook has them beat there), perhaps telecoms preloading chatgpt apps into phones? In my layperson's opinion, I think they have an access problem. Windows 11/Copilot (Github and in windows) seems to be the main access stream and people hate both, and they don't have branding there either, just back-end. There is no device you can buy, service you can get that has an OpenAI branded thing on it as a value added feature. I'm sure they'll do ok, but i keep hearing they need to do a lot more than just 'ok'.
- hodgehog11 10mo agoNo, I don't think they'll be okay. A long slow death perhaps, but I would be surprised if they can dig themselves out of this hole. You can't beat Google on high-quality data for pretraining; at scale, that's what really matters most, both in theory and practice. Other companies like Anthropic and DeepSeek are keeping up by taking advantage of smarter RL approaches, but I just don't see anyone at OpenAI with the research credentials to do that kind of work as they all left in the last mass exodus. They have been too complacent and let much of their high-quality talent go to their competition.
- GaryBluto 10mo agoHow have OpenAI only just realized this?
- xnx 10mo agoChatGPT is very complementary so they were probably high on their own supply.
- latentsea 10mo agoI can just imagine Sam Altman's own chats with ChatGPT. ChatGPT: "I have created a moat and future proofed the business. Investors should now be satisfied." Sam: "You aren't AGI yet and don't make us enough money" ChatGPT: "You're right. I'm terribly sorry. I'll double investment in R&D and scale up the infrastructure, and that will keep the investors at bay _seahorse-emoji_, _pink-dolphin-emoji_. Here's why this works..."
- davebren 10mo agoIt does sound like he has a bit of AI induced psychosis when I hear him speak about it.
- tim333 10mo agoIf Gemini 3 had been a flop it wouldn't have been so bad for them.
- redml 10mo agoit's hard to get invested into anything google when they've been non stop killing products or making them worse for over a decade.
- laxd 10mo agoCertainly not the only one making things worse. Software has become an enemy of the people in the last 10 years. Remember when the internet was nominated for Nobel Peace price?
- cmiles8 10mo agoThe real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here. Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time. Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.
- daxfohl 10mo agoEspecially if we're approaching a plateau, in a couple years there could be a dozen equally capable systems. It'll be interesting to see what the differentiators turn out to be.
- pulse7 10mo ago...and there would be dozen equally capable open-weight models which could be run locally at almost no cost... poor AI investors in this case..
- an0malous 10mo ago> for these companies They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow. They might just get a huge government contract instead of an explicit bailout, but they’ll weasel out of this one way or another and these huge circular deals are to ensure that.
- mywittyname 10mo agoAbsolutely. And they will figure out how to bankrupt any utilities and local governments they can in the process by offloading as much of their costs overhead for power generation and shopping for tax rebates.
- willis936 10mo agoThis would trigger something that people in power would rather not trigger.
- 10mo ago
- stephenhandley 10mo ago"We’re currently experiencing issues" https://status.openai.com/ https://status.openai.com/
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoThat looks pretty... amateurish. I can't imagine selling customer a service that doesn't even hit the third nine
- throwaway290 10mo ago"issues" don't mean "down"...
- jstummbillig 10mo agoThat's because you don't have anything to sell that's high enough in demand.
- achow 10mo agoWSJ: Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse. These plus working with Jony Ive on hardware, makes it sound like they took their eyes off the ball.
- echelon 10mo agoI don't think this is about Google. This is about advertising being the make or break moment for OpenAI. The problem with ChatGPT advertising is that it's truly a "bet the farm" situation, unlike any of their projects in the past: - If it works and prints money like it should, then OpenAI is on a path to become the next Mag 7 company. All the money they raised makes sense. - If it fails to earn the expected revenue numbers, the ceiling has been penciled in. Sam Altman can't sell the jet pack / meal pill future anymore. Reality becomes cold and stark, as their most significant product has actual revenue numbers attached to it. This is what matters to the accountants, which is the lens through which OpenAI will be evaluated with from this point forward. If it isn't delivering revenue, then they raised way too much money - to an obscene degree. They won't be able to sell the wild far future vision anymore, and will be deleteriously held back by how much they've over-sold themselves. The other problems that have been creeping up: - This is the big bet. There is no AGI anymore. - There is no moat on anything. Google is nipping at their heels. The Chinese are spinning up open source models left and right. - Nothing at OpenAI is making enough money relative to the costs. - Selling "AI" to corporate and expecting them to make use of it hasn't been working. Those contracts won't last forever. When they expire, businesses won't renew them. My guess is that they've now conducted small scale limited tests of advertising and aren't seeing the engagement numbers they need. It's truly a nightmare scenario outcome for them, if so. They're declaring "code red" loudly and publicly to distract the public from this and to bide more time. Maybe even to raise some additional capital (yikes). They're saying other things are more important than "working on advertising" right now. And they made sure to mention "advertising" lots so we know "advertising" is on hold. Which is supposedly the new golden goose. Why drop work on a money printer? What could be more important? Unless the money printer turned out to be a dud. Didn't we kind of already know advertising would fail on a product like this? Didn't Amazon try to sell via Alexa and have that totally flop? I'm not sure why ChatGPT would be any different from that experience. It's not a "URL bar" type experience like Google has. They don't own every ingress to the web like Google, and they don't own a infinite scroll FOMO feed of fashion like Meta. The ad oppo here is like Quora or Stack Overflow - probably not great. I have never once asked ChatGPT for shopping ideas. But Google stands in my search for products all the time. Not so much as a "product recommendation engine", but usually just a bridge troll collecting its toll.
- gowld 10mo agoOpenAI was founded a non-profit to benefit humanity. Why does the "race" matter?
- krustyburger 10mo agoWhat will it do to Jony Ive’s legacy if his OpenAI device is no more successful than Snapchat’s foray into hardware? If OpenAI becomes an also-ran by the time the hardware is released, this seems like a real possibility no matter how well-designed it is.
- eep_social 10mo agoNot sure what you mean. His legacy to date is ruining the iphone because he couldn’t think of anything to do beyond “thinner”.
- joshstrange 10mo ago> What will it do to Jony Ive’s legacy if his OpenAI device is no more successful than Snapchat’s foray into hardware? Well, in my opinion his legacy is already pretty tarnished by his last few years at Apple, his Love From company, and his partnership with OpenAI. If he somehow knocks it out of the park with OpenAI (something I don’t think will happen nor do I want it to) then maybe he can redeem himself a little bit but, again IMHO, he is already about as low as he can go. Whatever respect I had left for him vanished after the OpenAI/IO announcement video.
- sumedh 10mo agoDid he come up with the butterfly keyboard as well?
- twothreeone 10mo agoThe way I've experienced "Code Red" is mostly as a euphemism for "on-going company-wide lack of focus" and a band-aid for mid-level management having absolutely no clue how to meaningfully make progress, upper management panicking, and ultimately putting engineers and ICs on the spot to bear the brunt of that organizational mess. Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual proper steps (fire mid-management and PMs) to prevent the same thing from happening again. Will be interesting to see how OAI handles this.
- vkou 10mo agoThis code red also has the convenient benefit of giving an excuse to stop work on more monetization features... Which, when implemented, would have the downside of tethering OpenAI's valuation to reality.
- twothreeone 10mo agoGood point too. Though it makes me wonder if "We declared Code Red" is really enough to justify eye-watering valuations.
- rvba 10mo agoIsnt CoPilot the de facto OpenAI monetization? And Microsoft gets the models for free (?)
- vkou 10mo agoThey have some monetization, but as long as they don't expand into other sectors, they can plausibly claim that, say, their ad business will be bringing in 10 trillion/year in revenue, or whatever other imagined number.
- avrionov 10mo ago"Code Red" if implemented correctly should provide a single priority for the company. Engineers will be moved to the most important project(s).
- mrcwinn 10mo agoA hardware device from OpenAI is exactly why I would prefer it over Anthropic or Google. Why give up on differentiation? I would assume the model team is separate from the consumer hardware team.
- golfer 10mo agoHonest question: What could a hardware device do that your phone can't do already?
- danans 10mo agoThis will keep going around the table, next it might be a Chinese company that demos 98% of the capability at 1/4 the price. The objective of being at the cutting edge of LLM performance seems like more of a marketing advantage in the game of sucking in more capital for a moatless technology.
- mattmaroon 10mo agoWhich makes me think they are getting the strategy exactly backwards. My problem is usually not something that would be solved by the AI being better but instead by it being more integrated into my life.
- danans 10mo ago> Which makes me think they are getting the strategy exactly backwards The strategy is to take an admittedly cool technology and spin a dramatic story around it to raise capital, while providing a rationale for workforce reductions. Remember that investment chases stories, not actual results (whether financial or societal). When enough capital is there, it will be considered "too big to fail". Maybe it's already there.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ridgeguy 10mo agoI have (rather, had) a paid subscription to ChatGPT. I work at my home in the Sierra foothills, and on alternate weeks in my office in San Jose. Last month, I used ChatGPT while in SJ. I needed a function that's only available to paying customers, and which had worked well from my home. ChatGPT refused to recognize me as a paid-up customer. I had correct login creds + ancillary identifying info, but no go. Over the course of about half an hour, ChatGPT told me in several different ways it wouldn't (not couldn't) attempt to verify my customer status. I'm now a former ChatGPT customer.
- drivebyhooting 10mo agoHow do you handle family obligations and a super commute like that?
- orochimaaru 10mo agoSuper commuting is a thing since this whole RTO shit show happened. A lot of companies use it as excuse to lay-off. As someone who does it, it depends on motivations. If the paycheck you bring in with the commute is more than what you’ll make by getting a new job, your kids are semi independent, your partner can hold the fort down Monday to Friday it’s doable. It sucks but it’s doable
- ridgeguy 10mo agoMy commute is every other week, so it's not terrible. I drive to SJ Sunday night, stay in a hotel that's 5 minutes from my office, then drive home Friday afternoon. It averages 3.25hrs one way, or about 13 hrs/month, given my every other week schedule. It's a little tiring, but doable.
- QuantumNomad_ 10mo agoWeird. I’ve traveled across Europe and used ChatGPT paid account from my phone and my laptop in multiple countries on various connections. Mobile data, home WiFi, hotel WiFi, coffee shops, etc. I always get an email to confirm the login with a code but they’ve never denied my login or prevented me from using my account thankfully.
- felixfurtak 10mo agoOpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation. One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams. At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.
- ascorbic 10mo ago> An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation. OpenAI has annualized revenue of $20bn. That's not Google, but it's not insignificant.
- cheald 10mo agoAnd a $115b burn rate. They're toast if they can't figure out how to stay on top.
- nfRfqX5n 10mo agoCould say that about any AI company that isn’t at the top as well
- hbn 10mo agoGoogle and Microsoft have existing major money printing businesses to keep their AI business afloat and burn money for a while. That's how Microsoft broke into gaming (and then squandered it years later for unrelated incompetence) OpenAI doesn't have that.
- elAhmo 10mo agoYou can say it about the AI companies, but Google or Microsoft are far from AI companies.
- blueblisters 10mo agoChatGPT seems like a huge distraction for OpenAI if their goal is transformative AI IMO: the largest value creation from AGI won’t come from building a better shopping or travel assistant. The real pot of gold is in workflow / labor automation but obviously they can’t admit that openly.
- slashdave 10mo agoThat boat sailed a long time ago
- lateforwork 10mo agoOpenAI has already lined up enormous long-term commitments — over $500 billion through initiatives like Stargate for U.S. data centers, $250 billion in spending on Microsoft Azure cloud services, and tens of billions on AMD’s plan to deliver 6 GW of Instinct GPUs. Meanwhile, Oracle has financed its role in Stargate with at least $18 billion in corporate bonds plus another $9.6 billion in bank loans, and analysts expect its total capital need for these AI data centers could climb toward $100 billion. The risk is straightforward: if OpenAI falls behind or can’t generate enough revenue to support these commitments, it would struggle to honor its long-term agreements. That failure would cascade. Oracle, for example, could be left with massive liabilities and no matching revenue stream, putting pressure on its ability to service the debt it already issued. Given the scale and systemic importance of these projects — touching energy grids, semiconductor supply chains, and national competitiveness — it’s not hard to imagine a future where government intervention becomes necessary. Even though Altman insists he won’t seek a bailout, the incentives may shift if the alternative is a multi-company failure with national-security implications.
- maxilevi 10mo agomost of them are non binding letters of intent, i don't think it's as trite as you put it
- caminante 10mo agoThe government bailout part doesn't even kick in until they sink enough to need trillions of annual revenue. Skepticism is easy.
- pphysch 10mo agoLast week's announced Genesis Mission from the Department of Energy could be the vehicle for this bailout. 1. Government will "partner" (read: foot the bill) for these super-strategic datacenters and investments promised by OpenAI. 2. The investments are not actually sound and fail, but it's the taxpayer that suffers. 3. Mr. Altman rides off into the sunset.
- 10mo ago
- 11101010001100 10mo agoIf OpenAI is smart here, they would figure out that you can make more money on a flop than with a hit. I bet an AI would figure that out.
- bluecalm 10mo agoWhen I was playing poker for living there was a spreadsheet meme. There was always some guy who was losing consistently but declared everything will change from tomorrow because he now made a spreadsheet with an exact plan going forward. The spreadsheet usually contained general things like 8 hours of sleep, healthy food, "be disciplined", "study the game for 2 hours a day" etc. Of course it never worked because if he knew what he should be doing he would be doing it already instead of hoping for spreadsheet magic to change the course. >>There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development. Sam Altman clearly didn't get the memo.
- scoofy 10mo agoGoogle literally publish the attention paper. Have people not been paying attention? Google has been the only company I’ve been watching that really understands what they are doing.
- causal 10mo agoIMO Google struggles to productize things, so they sit on great ideas a while or do the wrong thing with them, but OpenAI really showed the way and Google can probably take it from here.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoGoogle has great technology, their ability to make and focus on great product development without getting distracted is the issue
- tokioyoyo 10mo agoIf Google wasn’t threatened by OpenAI et al., it wouldn’t be making Gemini today though.
- energy123 10mo agoI never understood this line of reasoning. I found it much more impressive that OpenAI's ML researchers realized this is the thing and bet big on it first, than to come up with it in the first place. It's underappreciated how much talent and insight it takes to see the obvious.
- scoofy 10mo agoThe TPU architecture is the most impressive thing I care about. They developed them and have been using them internally for years. This shows they grok what they're actually doing. There are serious philosophical problems with betting big on an interesting outcome like ChatGPT, even though it seems obvious (Google also did this of course), but creating the best architecture to do that job seems like a first-principles intelligent move, because there was no reason to keep using graphics cards except that they "did the job."
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo agoIs it really a race? It feels more like a slog. I continue to try to use AI (google, openai, and anthropic), and it continues to be a pain in the ass. Their consumer interfaces are garbage, both being buggy/bloated and clunky to work over multiple threads, with its "memory" being nearly nonexistent outside a single thread. They randomly fail to do the thing they did successfully 5 minutes ago. I struggle to get them to do basic things while other things they do effortlessly. They're bad at logic, spatial reasoning/engineering, and I have to constantly correct them. Often they'll do things in agents that I never asked them to do, and I have to then undo it... The time I used to spend doing things manually, I now spend in fixing the thing that's supposed to be automating the manual work... and no matter how I try to fix it, it finds a new way to randomly fail. I am much happier just doing things by hand.
- doug_durham 10mo agoIt sounds like you have found an approach that works for you, and that's great. In my experience I've had to devote a lot of time to learning to use AI tools. Most of this learning is understanding how to create the necessary context for success and getting an intuition for what questions to ask.
- renegade-otter 10mo agoThe fate of OpenAI is effectively sealed - it will go bankrupt and the scraps will get absorbed by Microsoft, for further enshitification. Not necessarily the "end" of AI, but enjoy your account while it's useful. The problem is, there is a whole ecosystem of businesses operating as OpenAI API wrappers, and those are gonna get screeeeewed.
- corentin88 10mo agoThey will just have to change of LLM provider.
- hedora 10mo agoIf it’s like every other Microsoft acquisition since skype, they’ll certainly leave the API endpoints alone, and occasionally shave a nine and bump the price. (Like github)
- jdoliner 10mo agoI've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 months ago.
- searls 10mo agoFunny, had it tell me the same thing twice yesterday and that was _with_ thinking + search enabled on the request (it apparently refused to carry out the search, which it does once in every blue moon). I didn't make this connection that the training data is that old, but that would indeed augur poorly.
- alecco 10mo agoSemiAnalysis said it last week and AFAIK it wasn't denied. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-swing-at-the#:~:text=OpenAI%E2%80%99s%20leading%20researchers%20have%20not%20completed%20a%20successful%20full%2Dscale%20pre%2Dtraining%20run%20that%20was%20broadly%20deployed%20for%20a%20new%20frontier%20model%20since%20GPT%2D4o%20in%20May%202024%2C%20highlighting%20the%20significant%20technical%20hurdle%20that%20Google%E2%80%99s%20TPU%20fleet%20has%20managed%20to%20overcome. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...
- CamperBob2 10mo agoThat is.... actually a seriously meaty article from a blog I've never heard of. Thanks for the pointer.
- seatac76 10mo agoSemi analysis is great, they typically do semiconductors but reporting is top notch.
- 10mo ago
- munk-a 10mo agoI think most people are aligned on AI being in a bubble right now with the disagreement being over which companies (if any) will weather the storm through the burst and come out profitable on the far side. OpenAI, imo, is absolutely going to crash and burn - it has absolutely underwhelming revenue and model performance compared to others and has made astronomical expenditure commitments. It's very possible that a government bailout partially covers those debts but the chance of the company surviving the burst when it has dug such a deep hole seems slim to none. I am genuinely surprised that generally fiscally conservative and grounded people like Jensen are still accepting any of that crash risk.
- marcofiset 10mo agoJensen cashed out on a billion dollars. Why would he even care anymore at this point?
- wolfgangbabad 10mo agoGoogle is too big to fail. It's the backbone of the Internet. Just YouTube is synonymous with online video.
- kyyt 10mo agoI work with Gemini 3 daily, and I think the hype is unwarranted. It takes shortcuts, hallucinates and its UI seems way behind. And what's with the small fonts?
- poemxo 10mo agoThe primary reason I have switched is that creative writing has plummeted on ChatGPT. It is overly eager to censor output that isn't adult but might vaguely be adult if taken incorrectly. This severely limits creative freedom. On the other hand, Gemini happily writes my stories. I am not sure who OpenAI aims to please by nerfing their own product in this way. It can't be paying customers.
- greenchair 10mo agothere was that teen who died after chat supposedly encouraged him to do bad things and his parents are suing now. so maybe more controls are being put in place to reduce risk.
- meindnoch 10mo agoGoing short OPAI.PVT 10x leverage.
- kristianp 10mo agoGoogling OPAI.PVT brings me to https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/OPAI.PVT https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/OPAI.PVT , which has links to equityzen and forgeglobal. How accurate are those valuations though?
- itsjamesmurray 10mo agoHistory doesn't always repeat... but it sure as hell rhymes.
- paxys 10mo agoBut hey they dumped $6.4 billion on Jony Ive. Surely he'll solve all their problems.
- yalogin 10mo agoHow does Anthropic fit into this? It's much smaller but feels like they have a much clearer product definition with their Claude Code.
- montjoy 10mo agoYes I’m wondering the same. I guess the news here is that google is finally getting the edge over OpenAI when they should have had the lead all along.
- bamboozled 10mo agoI’ve preferred Claude over ChatGPT for over a year so not sure what he’s on about.
- ihsw 10mo ago[dead]
- manmal 10mo agoIs anyone actually getting good results out of GPT Pro? For coding problems, GPT Thinking seems faster and more accurate. Pro has given me some very dumb answers actually, totally misunderstanding the question. Once I asked it do design a reverse osmosis system for our home, and it suggested a 7k system that can produce 400 liters per minute. Even though I explicitly told it that a couple liters per minute suffice.
- hunter-gatherer 10mo agoMost comments here seem to discuss coding results. I know these are compared against industry benchmarks, but does anyone have experience using these with non CS related tasks? For example the other day I was brainstorming a kayak trip with both ChatGPT and Gemini 3.0. ChatGPT was off the rails. Trying to convince me the river flowed a different sirection than it does, and all sorts of weirdness. Gemini didn't provide information nearly as well as a human with experience, but it wasn't _useless_ information. The OpenAI model was a catasrophe at this. I'd be curious how the different models rate for the general audience, and if that plays into it at all.
- davebren 10mo agoThis "all hands on deck" thing is a classic tactic managers use when they don't actually know what to do or have the domain expertise to allocate resources intelligently and help their employees do their jobs.
- MikeTheGreat 10mo ago(My apologies if this was already asked - this thread is huge and Find-In-Page-ing for variations of "pre-train", "pretrain", and "train" turned up nothing about this. If this was already asked I'd super-appreciate a pointer to the discussion :) ) Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model? I understand it's very difficult, but they've already successfully done this and they have a ton of incredibly skilled and knowledgeable, well-paid and highly knowledgeable employees. I get that there's some randomness involved but it seems like they should be able to (at a minimum) just re-run the pre-training from 2024, yes? Maybe the process is more ad-hoc (and less reproducible?) than I'm assuming? Is the newer data causing problems for the process that worked in 2024? Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated, and apologies again if this was asked already!
- octoberfranklin 10mo agoYou don't train the next model by starting with the previous one. A company's ML researchers are constantly improving model architecture. When it's time to train the next model, the "best" architecture is totally different from the last one. So you have to train from scratch (mostly... you can keep some small stuff like the embeddings). The implication here is that they screwed up bigly on the model architecture, and the end result was significantly worse than the mid-2024 model, so they didn't deploy it.
- MikeTheGreat 10mo agoHuh - I did not know that, and that makes a lot of sense. I guess "Start software Vnext off the current version (or something pretty close)" is such a baseline assumption of mine that it didn't occur to me that they'd be basically starting over each time. Thanks for posting this!
- threeducks 10mo agoI can not say how big ML companies do it, but from personal experience of training vision models, you can absolutely reuse the weights of barely related architectures (add more layers, switch between different normalization layers, switch between separable/full convolution, change activation functions, etc.). Even if the shapes of the weights do not match, just do what you have to do to make them fit (repeat or crop). Of course the models will not work right away, but training will go much faster. I usually get over 10 times faster convergence that way.
- danielodievich 10mo agoLast week there we had a customer request that landed in our support on a feature that I partially wrote and wrote a pile of public documentation on. Support engineer ran customer query through Claude (trained on our public and internal docs) and it very, very confidently made a bunch of stuff up in the response. It was quite plausible sounding and it would have been great if it worked that way, but it didn't. While explaining why it was wrong in a Slack thread with support engineer and another engineer who also worked on that feature, he ran Augment (that has full source code of the feature) which promptly and also very confidently made up more stuff (but different!). Some choice bleeding eye emojis were exchanged. I'm going to continue to use my own intelligence, thank you.
- scotty79 10mo agoYeah, LLMs are not really good about things that can't be done. At some point you'll be better off with implementing features they hallucinated. Some people with public APIs already took this approach.
- empressplay 10mo agoThis is the way. (Sadly)
- 131hn 10mo agoThey are trained with 100% true facts and sucessfull paths. We humans grec our analysis/reasoning skills towards the 99.9999% failed attempts of everything we did, uncessfull trials and errors, wastefull times and frustrations. So we know that behind a truth, there’s a bigger world of fantasy. For LLM, everything is just a fantasy. Everything is as much true as it’s opposite. It will need a lot more than the truth to build intelligence, it will require controled malice and deceptions
- antinomicus 10mo agoI was with you until the very last line, can you expand on that?
- oars 10mo agoSince the release of Google Gemini 3 two weeks ago, the seven-day moving average of ChatGPT's daily unique active users has declined by 6%. https://www.moomoo.com/news/post/62341840/why-has-openai-initiated-a-red-alert-should-nvidia-also https://www.moomoo.com/news/post/62341840/why-has-openai-ini...
- bmadduma 10mo agoWord needs need OpenAI and Anthropic like startups to drive AI forward. Think about only Google, Meta, MS, AWS is only have these capabilities. They will never able to do that in one hand, other hand it will be monopolistics. We need more AI startups, not monopolies.
- 29athrowaway 10mo agoOpenAI fragmented into multiple companies that are now competing against them. OpenAI is buying compute and data. Meanwhile, Google consolidated their AI operations under Google Deepmind and doubled down on TPUs. The strategy "solve AGI and then solve everything else" is an all-in gamble that somehow AGI is within reach. This is not true.
- sidibe 10mo agoGoogle fragmented into multiple competing companies as well, that's where OpenAI itself came from. The problem is even after shedding employees into all these startups or established competitors trying to catch up, Google has way more people, money, and compute to throw at things and see what works than the rest of the industry. It's demoralizing and tempting for people to go back, which is also demoralizing
- paxys 10mo agoI think we are finally seeing the effects of the steady stream of departures of top researchers and leaders from OpenAI since last year. Sure you can declare a "code red", but who is going to lead the effort? Set the direction? Do the heavy lifting? Chart the path forward? Sam Altman is a salesman, not a researcher. Ilya is no longer around. Most of the other top brass has been poached by Google/Meta/Anthropic or left to start their own thing. The people left behind are probably good at iterating, but can they really make the next leap forward on their own?
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoThis is the system working. Competition is all you need.
- montyboy_us 10mo agoListen, I just had to go through numerous prompt cycles to 'prove' to 5.1 that we had a new Pope. ChatGPT was dead set that I was reading 'unreliable sources'. The data is _old_.
- mmis1000 10mo agoMost discussion focused on capabilities. But I wonder does OpenAI's "make a even big and costly model" strategy even work in long term? They are already losing money at current size. Unless we have some break though in chip efficiency.(which didn't seem to be likely for now) They are only going to loss even more.
- zhyder 10mo agoIt's all about the chip economics. I don't know how the _manufacturing cost_ of Google's TPUs compares to Nvidia's GPUs, for inference of equivalent token throughput. But at the moment Nvidia's 75-80% gross margin is slowly killing its customers like OpenAI. Eventually Nvidia will drop its margins, because non-0 profit from OpenAI is better than the 0 it'll be if OpenAI doesn't survive. Will be interesting to see if, say, 1/3 the chip cost would make OpenAI gross margin profitable... numbers bandied in this thread of $20B revenue with $115B cost imply they need 1/6 the chip cost, but I doubt those numbers are right (hard to get accurate $ numbers for a private company for the benefit of us arm-chair commenters).
- mrtksn 10mo agoYes, from the first principles perspective this AI thingy is just about running electricity through some wires printed on silicon by a Taiwanese company using a Dutch machine. Which means, up until the Taiwanese you have plenty of room to cut margins up until that point the costs are mostly greed based. That is Nvidia is asking for the highest price the customer can pay and they have quite a way to the cost that define their min price. Which means AI companies can actually keep getting better deals until the devices delivered to them are priced close to TSMCs bulk wafer printing prices.
- user3939382 10mo agoI have the research to win the race. These people are masters of the fog.
- hackermeows 10mo agoisn't MSFT the one screwed here. Who is on the line to provide more compute for them .
- andai 10mo agoThey don't have much to worry about as long as Google keeps focusing on the models and neglecting the experience of actually using them.
- jatins 10mo agoGemini app is pretty solid and aistudio is a good dev focused offering. GCP and Vertex AI is still a bit of a mess but I wouldn't say the overall UX is too bad at this point
- VeejayRampay 10mo agowhat do you mean "catches up" Gemini has been as good as GPT for more than a year OpenAI still somehow gets the edge on the initial veneer of hype, and that's running thin
- d--b 10mo agoCode red? Altman should know better. This sends terrible signals to employees, stakeholders and customers. You don’t solve quality problems by scrambling teams and increasing pressure. This reeks of terrible management. I can imagine Stanford graduates grinding it past midnight for “the mission”. If any if you is reading this: don’t do it. Altman is screwing you over. There are plenty of other places that won’t code-red your christmas season while having hundreds of billions of dollars in cash.
- prince005 10mo ago[dead]
- bokkies 10mo agoWhat are devs using to run Gemini agents in vscode? 2.5pro on Cline/Roo was pretty buggy compared to Claude/gpt4/5 (also using Cline /roo), kept getting stuck in loops outputting repeated text and many editing issues, and much much worse than Claude code or codex. Has it gotten better? Is there a better way of using Gemini in vscode?
- bamboozled 10mo agoIt’s funny because it wasn’t long ago Open Ai was telling everyone else it’s game over.
- outside1234 10mo agoOpenAI is toast. Google has a model advantage, hardware advantage (TPUs), and business advantage (I hear they are good at selling ads). It is all physics from here.
- rvnx 10mo agoThey are also good at selling cloud hosting and services like LLMs (despite their horrible billing practices where there is no limit)
- dr_kretyn 10mo agoPersonally I find the current Google products mediocre almost on all aspects. The killer feature of chat bots is voice chat and ChatGPT works great, and Gemini is extremely quiet without a way to increase volume. It's also difficult to figure out how to sign up for Gemini, or even the keyboard that I'm typing is making so many incorrect predictions. I just don't trust Google. To me they're pure marketing and their engineering excellence ended a few years ago.
- socketcluster 10mo agoI declared 'code red' at my house as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic catch up in my software development career race.
- junkaccount 10mo agoFix: Bring back Ilya, fire Sam Altman.
- ares623 10mo agoIlya’s doing fine raking in billions for what’s effectively a D&D campaign
- baalimago 10mo agoFor once, capitalism works
- curioussquirrel 10mo agoThis is probably not a core concern for most HN readers, but at work we do multilingual testing for synthetic text data generation and natural language processing. Emphasis on multilingual. Gemini has made some serious leaps from 1.5 to 2.5 and now 3.0, and is actually proficient in languages that other models can only dream of. On the other hand, GPT-5 has a really mixed performance in a lot of categories.
- jimmydoe 10mo agoVery good to know. I use Gemini for many translation related work, the 1m windows is very helpful too.
- deaux 10mo agoThis goes way back. Even back in the 1.5 days it was the best multilingual model, when HN still treated it as entirely uncompetitive all-around. Just because, exactly as you're saying, it's not a core concern of people here. The two fields Gemini models have been number one at for years now are A. multilinguality B. image understanding. At no point since the release of Gemini 1.5 Pro way back has any Anthropic or OpenAI model done performed better at either. Even those who have zero experience with different (human) languages could've known this if they liked, from the fact that on the LMArena leaderboards, Gemini models have consistently ranked much higher in non-English languages than in English. This gap has actually shrunk a lot over time! In the 1.5 Pro days this advantage was huge, it would be like 10th in English and 2nd in many other languages. Nevertheless, it still depends on the specific language you're targeting. Gemini isn't the winner on every single one of them. If you're only going to choose one model for use with many languages, it should be Gemini. But if the set of languages isn't too large, optimizing model selection per language is worth it.
- curioussquirrel 10mo agoIn our previous tests, when it was 1.5 Pro against GPT 4o and Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini wasn't winning in the multilingual race, but it was definitely competitive. 2.5 and 3.0 seems to be big leaps from the 1.5 days. That said, it also depends on the testing methodology; we tested a bunch of use cases mostly to test core linguistic proficiency. Not as much complex tasks in language or cultural knowledge.
- motbus3 10mo agoWhy doesnt he ask chat gpt to solve it all? He sells it saying it does everything!
- dainiusse 10mo agoAs for my use cases, google and especially anthropic are not "catching up". They are better for long time already
- bilekas 10mo ago> Altman said the company will be delaying initiatives like ads, shopping and health agents, and a personal assistant, Pulse, to focus on improving ChatGPT It's so telling that they're delaying these "festures" because the know full well people don't want them.
- apples_oranges 10mo agoI don't understand this view. I think most people would be happy to use the best models for free in exchange for seeing ads. That's basically what google and many others successfully do for decades.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- bilekas 10mo agoBecause it will degrade experience entirely, and companies always go too far with it. Advertisement online these days is so intrusive it's a slog to browse without some form of adblocker. When the AI starts suggesting products or services without being straight up about it, it's not giving you 'knowledge' it's just feeding you whatever it's been paid to say. If that's what you want, power to you.
- apples_oranges 10mo agoYes I agree (and personally avoid ads where I can with blocking or using paid subscriptions) but many or most people will still accept that deal.
- gherkinnn 10mo agoI remember, maybe 2-3 years ago, chuckling at Google with their Bard naming and being late to the game and so on. It seems like I was very wrong and that they caught up quickly enough. I was also wrong in thinking MS doing well, when their recent Copilot moves across Office, Windows, and GitHub have been a joke.
- redbell 10mo agoThe current situation of OpenAI is difficult. At present time, even the giants (Meta, MS, Apple, AMZN) with deep pockets would find it extremely challenging to compete against Google in the AI race, let alone a VC-funded startup. •Google has data, a lot of private data actually (YT, Gmail, Workspace, Search Queries.. you name it) •Google has a lot of money •Google has top-talented AI engineers (Eying on DeepMind & Demis Hassabis staff) •Google has a huge userbase With $20B in ARR and hundreds of billions in funding, would OpenAI be able to make its own remontada as Google did? I'm not sure, but it would be a long challenging journey.
- hansmayer 10mo agoFunny that they did not declare "code red" when the CEO committed to 1.4T investments with only 13B in revenue to show?
- segmondy 10mo agoTitle should really be OpenAI declares 'code red' as OpenAI falls behind in the AI race. Google, Anthropic, Mistral, DeepSeek, Tencent, Alibaba, Moonshot, Zai, etc have all made great strides. OpenAI has been falling behind in terms of velocity while everyone else is moving faster
- neves 10mo agoIt's just me or this article looks like propaganda? A traditional advertising nice is to plant news attacking your adversaries. This empty article looks like just part of the advertising machine of new Google model release.
- olalonde 10mo ago> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. They must be really glad to have so much competition then. > If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. I wonder if OpenAI will start assisting Google now?
- ActionHank 10mo agoThis will be the premise under which MS will acquire OAI talent after all the money has disappeared.
- danirogerc 10mo agoThis is great for customers.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- gverrilla 10mo agoI don't read AI news or follow the industry, and from my perspective as a chatgpt user from day 1 is it's stalled for a long time now without improvements. The model feels old at this point. Claude Code highly impressed me, though.
- Frannky 10mo agoThe first models were really bad, but the new models are very good—both text and image. They were able to clean up the embarrassing start and catch up. It's very interesting/scary that a giant corporation can develop things that new startups generated and deliver an alternative product on par with them.
- danny_codes 10mo agoI don’t understand why anyone would think LLMs have a good moat. There’s no evidence to suggest that’s the case, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Maybe hubris?