6 ms·

Google are really firing on all cylinders recently. It's almost shocking to read all they've done in the last year. The fact they caught up with OpenAI you alm

Google are really firing on all cylinders recently. It's almost shocking to read all they've done in the last year. The fact they caught up with OpenAI you almost expect. But the Nobel winning contributions to quantum computing, the advances in healthcare and medicine, the cutting edge AI hardware, and the best in class weather models go way beyond what you might have expected. Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.

10xDev 10mo ago
Meanwhile the economy is tanking. But yeah what a fantastic year it is to be a company worth trillions.
- cpursley 10mo ago
  You don’t believe the recent economic numbers? I’m not disagreeing with you, just curious about other takes (and generally very skeptical of funny money printer go burrr economic things vs real economy meaning real output).
  - MrOrelliOReilly 10mo ago
    There has been a lot of discussion on this recently in the blog-o-sphere. All conclusions I've seen so far are that the economy is basically fine and maybe people's expectations have risen (I'm oversimplifying). I'm also quite eager to hear different conclusions, because there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the economy right now. - https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife - https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nominal https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nomi... - https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expectations https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expec... - https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-m...
    - hansvm 10mo ago
      There's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead). It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples: - A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone. - That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere. - Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay. - A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot). I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations. [0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.
  - 10xDev 10mo ago
    Truth be told, it is more complicated than a "tanking" economy so you will get headlines like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n9ynzrdpo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n9ynzrdpo but that's because it is a K-shaped economy: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/07/stock-prices-fuel-christmas-us-economy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/07/stock-price... thanks to the stock market and AI investment. The job market especially for entry level tech jobs is also essentially screwed whether that's due to AI or something else, who even knows anymore: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/12/16/us-unemployment-hits-highest-level-since-2021-as-labour-market-cools https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/12/16/us-unemployment...
  - inerte 10mo ago
    Vibecession so good I remember we’ve been a quarter away from recession for the last decade.
- fancyfredbot 10mo ago
  I'm not sure that the rest of the economy really is "tanking" but OK. Are you implying it's distasteful to discuss success from a big company in such dark times? Google could really easily be a purely rent seeking business but they are innovating, and if you are worried about the economy then this should seem like good news.
- andsoitis 10mo ago
  > Meanwhile the economy is tanking. NYT: US GDP Grew 4.3%, surging in 3rd Quarter 2025 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consumer-spending.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consu... WSJ: Consumers Power Strongest US Economic Growth in 2 years - https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e The Guardian: US economy grew strongly in third quarter - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-gdp-third-quarter https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-...
  - cj 10mo ago
    Meanwhile, consumer debt is at record highs. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc
    - andsoitis 10mo ago
      > consumer debt is at record highs. While consumer debt is at or near historical highs, it is in and of itself not a problem (broader economic risk). What you need to look at as well is debt burden ratios and repayment behavior, not just raw totals. Household debt service ratio (the share of disposable income spent on principal + interest payments) is well below historical crisis peaks (e.g., 2007–2008), suggesting households are currently spending a smaller share of income on debt payments than in past stress periods. While total household debt is at record levels (~$18 trillion+), debt as a share of income or GDP has not reached past crisis peaks like 2008. That means debt growth hasn’t outpaced income growth as dramatically as in previous crises. However, delinquency rates, especially for credit cards and student loans, are elevated, nearing or exceeding long-run highs outside recessions. Mortgage delinquency rates remain lower than unsecured debt categories, but have ticked up slightly. Because they're relatively stable, it mutes broader systemic risk for now.
      - jeffbee 10mo ago
        And you didn't even mention the population.
- vasco 10mo ago
  By which measure?
- stronglikedan 10mo ago
  > Meanwhile the economy is tanking. Seems you're operating off of a flawed premise.
aatd86 10mo ago
Caught up...??? I do use gemini pro regularly but never for code. chatGPT wins all the time. I even use chatGPT to review gemini suggestions... Seems that there has been a lot of hype because in many ways, they are still lagging behind.
- mpalmer 10mo ago
  Gemini 3 blows GPT 5.1 out of the water. Beats it on quality and price.
  - iamronaldo 10mo ago
    Sota is 5.2 pro or 5.2 codex or 5.2 extra high not 5.1 (I know I know it's confusing)
    - mpalmer 10mo ago
      Not least of all because I misread that as Sora at first, lol
  - cj 10mo ago
    And speed.
  - aatd86 10mo ago
    Not in my experience (I use them every day). GPT 5.1 (now 5.2) is absolutely much more accurate for coding tasks. I think that 5.1. might even be better than gemini 3. For PDF parsing and understanding, it's only anecdotal as it happened to me only once but Gemini was more accurate, that one time (a scientific paper). Claude, when I was still subscribed to it, was in between gemini and GPT for code tasks. But the UI was too buggy and it was a bit too limited with their capacity threshold.
- PunchTornado 10mo ago
  What are you smoking? Gemini and Claude beat chatgpt at every metric.
Rebuff5007 10mo ago
Hot take: they have always been firing on all cylinders. The marketing it just a bit different now. Everything you mention is the result of significant long-term investments.
- cjbgkagh 10mo ago
  They dropped the ball pretty hard with tensorflow.
  - jeffbee 10mo ago
    It is not very important to Google that people outside Google use tensorflow.
  - Rebuff5007 10mo ago
    Well, they picked it back up with Jax...
    - cjbgkagh 9mo ago
      I’m pretty sure they’re keeping that as ‘research’ to avoid other teams from getting involved and suffering the same fate. I think Jax is pretty neat but haven’t had the chance to use it in anger.
- tim333 10mo ago
  I remember in the distant days of 2024 people saying they'd lost it due to wokeness with the Gemini images of black nazis and the like.
torben-friis 10mo ago
>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. They kind of are though? Like, there is indeed amazing research supported by the company. The core user facing products are really declining in quality by being user hostile. A search right now results in a made up LLM output followed by 4 ads disguised as content, and then maybe followed by the wanted result. I’m not sure what happens inside the company for those two things to be true at once.
- ACCount37 10mo ago
  A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable. Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation. LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".
  - dasil003 10mo ago
    No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.
  - echelon 10mo ago
    A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel. Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person. They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world. Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front. Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business. They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web. To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us. Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed. Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads. Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this. Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too. Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics. This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
throw-12-16 10mo ago
>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. Ads are 75% of their revenue and search has been getting progressively worse.
elAhmo 10mo ago
> Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. They are effectively this. With huge margins that allow them to have side projects.
- surajrmal 10mo ago
  Google has been actively trying to diversify away from being dependent on just ads for a very long time. The other ventures are certainly not side projects in terms of investment, and pretending revenue sources are equivalent to the only source of motivation is over simplifying how large companies operate.
belter 10mo ago
>> Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. Please tell me this humor...

10xDev 10mo ago

Meanwhile the economy is tanking. But yeah what a fantastic year it is to be a company worth trillions.

cpursley 10mo ago
You don’t believe the recent economic numbers? I’m not disagreeing with you, just curious about other takes (and generally very skeptical of funny money printer go burrr economic things vs real economy meaning real output).
- MrOrelliOReilly 10mo ago
  There has been a lot of discussion on this recently in the blog-o-sphere. All conclusions I've seen so far are that the economy is basically fine and maybe people's expectations have risen (I'm oversimplifying). I'm also quite eager to hear different conclusions, because there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the economy right now. - https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife - https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nominal https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nomi... - https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expectations https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expec... - https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-m...
  - hansvm 10mo ago
    There's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead). It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples: - A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone. - That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere. - Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay. - A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot). I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations. [0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.
- 10xDev 10mo ago
  Truth be told, it is more complicated than a "tanking" economy so you will get headlines like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n9ynzrdpo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62n9ynzrdpo but that's because it is a K-shaped economy: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/07/stock-prices-fuel-christmas-us-economy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/07/stock-price... thanks to the stock market and AI investment. The job market especially for entry level tech jobs is also essentially screwed whether that's due to AI or something else, who even knows anymore: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/12/16/us-unemployment-hits-highest-level-since-2021-as-labour-market-cools https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/12/16/us-unemployment...
- inerte 10mo ago
  Vibecession so good I remember we’ve been a quarter away from recession for the last decade.
fancyfredbot 10mo ago
I'm not sure that the rest of the economy really is "tanking" but OK. Are you implying it's distasteful to discuss success from a big company in such dark times? Google could really easily be a purely rent seeking business but they are innovating, and if you are worried about the economy then this should seem like good news.
andsoitis 10mo ago
> Meanwhile the economy is tanking. NYT: US GDP Grew 4.3%, surging in 3rd Quarter 2025 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consumer-spending.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consu... WSJ: Consumers Power Strongest US Economic Growth in 2 years - https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e The Guardian: US economy grew strongly in third quarter - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-gdp-third-quarter https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-...
- cj 10mo ago
  Meanwhile, consumer debt is at record highs. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc
  - andsoitis 10mo ago
    > consumer debt is at record highs. While consumer debt is at or near historical highs, it is in and of itself not a problem (broader economic risk). What you need to look at as well is debt burden ratios and repayment behavior, not just raw totals. Household debt service ratio (the share of disposable income spent on principal + interest payments) is well below historical crisis peaks (e.g., 2007–2008), suggesting households are currently spending a smaller share of income on debt payments than in past stress periods. While total household debt is at record levels (~$18 trillion+), debt as a share of income or GDP has not reached past crisis peaks like 2008. That means debt growth hasn’t outpaced income growth as dramatically as in previous crises. However, delinquency rates, especially for credit cards and student loans, are elevated, nearing or exceeding long-run highs outside recessions. Mortgage delinquency rates remain lower than unsecured debt categories, but have ticked up slightly. Because they're relatively stable, it mutes broader systemic risk for now.
    - jeffbee 10mo ago
      And you didn't even mention the population.
vasco 10mo ago
By which measure?
stronglikedan 10mo ago
> Meanwhile the economy is tanking. Seems you're operating off of a flawed premise.

aatd86 10mo ago

Caught up...??? I do use gemini pro regularly but never for code. chatGPT wins all the time. I even use chatGPT to review gemini suggestions... Seems that there has been a lot of hype because in many ways, they are still lagging behind.

mpalmer 10mo ago
Gemini 3 blows GPT 5.1 out of the water. Beats it on quality and price.
- iamronaldo 10mo ago
  Sota is 5.2 pro or 5.2 codex or 5.2 extra high not 5.1 (I know I know it's confusing)
  - mpalmer 10mo ago
    Not least of all because I misread that as Sora at first, lol
- cj 10mo ago
  And speed.
- aatd86 10mo ago
  Not in my experience (I use them every day). GPT 5.1 (now 5.2) is absolutely much more accurate for coding tasks. I think that 5.1. might even be better than gemini 3. For PDF parsing and understanding, it's only anecdotal as it happened to me only once but Gemini was more accurate, that one time (a scientific paper). Claude, when I was still subscribed to it, was in between gemini and GPT for code tasks. But the UI was too buggy and it was a bit too limited with their capacity threshold.
PunchTornado 10mo ago
What are you smoking? Gemini and Claude beat chatgpt at every metric.

Rebuff5007 10mo ago

Hot take: they have always been firing on all cylinders. The marketing it just a bit different now. Everything you mention is the result of significant long-term investments.

cjbgkagh 10mo ago
They dropped the ball pretty hard with tensorflow.
- jeffbee 10mo ago
  It is not very important to Google that people outside Google use tensorflow.
- Rebuff5007 10mo ago
  Well, they picked it back up with Jax...
  - cjbgkagh 9mo ago
    I’m pretty sure they’re keeping that as ‘research’ to avoid other teams from getting involved and suffering the same fate. I think Jax is pretty neat but haven’t had the chance to use it in anger.
tim333 10mo ago
I remember in the distant days of 2024 people saying they'd lost it due to wokeness with the Gemini images of black nazis and the like.

torben-friis 10mo ago

>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. They kind of are though? Like, there is indeed amazing research supported by the company. The core user facing products are really declining in quality by being user hostile. A search right now results in a made up LLM output followed by 4 ads disguised as content, and then maybe followed by the wanted result. I’m not sure what happens inside the company for those two things to be true at once.

ACCount37 10mo ago
A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable. Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation. LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".
- dasil003 10mo ago
  No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.
- echelon 10mo ago
  A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel. Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person. They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world. Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front. Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business. They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web. To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us. Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed. Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads. Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this. Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too. Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics. This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.

throw-12-16 10mo ago

>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. Ads are 75% of their revenue and search has been getting progressively worse.

elAhmo 10mo ago

> Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. They are effectively this. With huge margins that allow them to have side projects.

surajrmal 10mo ago
Google has been actively trying to diversify away from being dependent on just ads for a very long time. The other ventures are certainly not side projects in terms of investment, and pretending revenue sources are equivalent to the only source of motivation is over simplifying how large companies operate.

belter 10mo ago

>> Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't. Please tell me this humor...