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

dsabanin

I was skeptical at first, but I think Google’s catch up game with OpenAI has been going pretty well so far. Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash models are really nice. Deep research feature is done really well. Context window is still the best in the industry. Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc.

They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life.

Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.

donny2018

Technologically they may have caught up, but market wise they may have lost forever. In my country (and I think in many others), ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.

This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.

HarHarVeryFunny

Teenagers are using Snapchat's "My AI", and have no idea that it's from OpenAI. I don't think people are using ChatGPT out of brand loyalty/preference as much as inertia - they stick to what they first tried unless given reason to switch.

At the end of the day the money to be made from AI won't be $20/mo personal chatbot subscriptions, but corporate and app-integrated (e.g. Cursor) use where the usage is potentially far higher. Companies will chose their faceless AI provider based on cost and capability.

skyyler

Are teenagers still using Snapchat?

The teenagers that made the bulk of its users when it was new are in their late 20s now.

SunlitCat

Well, personally I started out with gemini (when it still was called bard or something like that) but switched over to a paid ChatGPT subscription.

tehjoker

can confirm that when i wanted to try using deepseek inertia kept me using chatgpt for a few weeks longer

rtkwe

There's a lot less network effects in the chatbot space. It doesn't really matter what your friends are using so it's way easier to get people to switch by being better. Not saying there's no benefit to ChatGPT's position but it's not like Google+ vs Facebook because they don't need spontaneous mass adoption to make it useful to people like they did with Google+.

crazygringo

For general knowledge questions, sure.

But there are going to be huge network effects in terms of your personal data, which includes communications with friends.

If you use Gmail/Google Calendar/Docs/Drive, and ChatGPT can't tell you anything, but Gemini helps you with all the data in your life... that's a gigantic network effect.

Network effects aren't just about friends. They're about file formats, productivity suites, and ultimately compatibility.

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xnx

> This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.

Lock-in and network effects with social networks are very strong. Facebook, Twitter, and eBay only have to be good-enough.

Lock-in and network effects with current AI tools is almost zero. People will readily switch to Gemini once they realize it can do their work better.

og_kalu

>Lock-in and network effects with current AI tools is almost zero. People will readily switch to Gemini once they realize it can do their work better.

Lock-in for search engines should be near zero and yet people won't bother switching to or even trying potentially better options. At the end of the day, people don't leave what they are used to easily.

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matt_heimer

With Google Photos and YouTube they should have had enough leverge to build a social platform based on photo and video sharing. The implementation, marketing and commitment just wasn't there.

babelfish

> once they realize it can do their work better Citation needed? Google's Deep Research tool is considerably worse than OpenAI's (I haven't tried Perplexity or Groks). They don't have anything like Operator. I pay for Gemini and it's feature within the productivity suite almost never work the way I want them to. They can still win, but OpenAI is eating their lunch.

j_maffe

Chatbots are not social media platforms. Also the vast majority of expected revenue from this industry is not from casual paying users, it's from other companies who will optimize for performance and price.

bossyTeacher

That makes Google and Microsoft the winners then. It's not out yet but once Microsoft manages to fully catch to the state of the art in LLM, OpenAI wo't be needed and that will definitely be the final nail in the coffin for them

riku_iki

Chatbots are clear replacement for search with all implications and huge revenue for winner.

matt_heimer

Google is so bad at marketing. Gemini should have be an internal only name. Google's ChatGPT should be branded as Google AI or GoogleGPT and it should be in the Google app.

Google+ was particularly awful. They had to break the established search behavior of using + and - to indicate required and excluded terms. Now we have quotes for required and - for excluded? It should have been Google Social.

The thing that is Google One would have been better often with the Google Plus name.

Don't even get me started on Google Chat/Messenger....

pb7

Google's branding strategy historically has been terrible, I grant you that, but Gemini is not an example of it.

Spooky23

Google is focused on enterprises. They’re like Apple where PR disasters hurt them — if your Google phone tells you to eat rocks or writes fanfic porn, that’s a huge deal. Consumer is a risk to them.

ChatGPT and Grok are edgier and they are just burning cash - any attention is good.

I wouldn’t underestimate them. Microsoft’s shitshow with Azure (they have like 9 different Azures) makes delivery difficult (some Azure clouds delayed AI tech for 6-9 months) when they are relying on constrained product from Nvidia. They also have some level of exposure to the OpenAI circus and its included Musk v. Sam Altman drama.

Google has a much better supply chain and return on asset story, which is a big deal if you’re selling shovels.

thorncorona

I wouldn't underestimate Microsoft either. They are much more successful at enterprise than Google or ChatGPT, and are one of few companies to compete successfully in almost every tech vertical.

weatherlite

I don't buy this at all. People will use what works well and is cheap. ChatGPT was there first, but then DeepSeek came so everyone was excited about that and talking about that. Now Gemini 2.5 looks really really good, better than ChatGPT some say. This is going to increase Gemini usage for sure.

I don't think ChatGPT has any moat here. No one does actually.

aurareturn

They have some moat. I'm not sure what it is. But they do.

I've been a ChatGPT subscriber since the beginning. I've been a subscriber even though Sonnet 3.5 and others have surpassed GPT4o. I'm not sure why I don't switch.

I think it's the combination of better UX (Claude has poor UX apps), cool interesting new features, and having (limited) access to the top models.

mattlondon

I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced. Either way, I am pretty confident Google will "win" long term since Gemini will be the AI built into search, YouTube, android, Gmail, chrome, etc etc in the consumer side. It's going to be there when the billions of people are using Google products so people will just use it there. The average person won't go out of their way to open a separate app/site with a lower-performing (as of today) and standalone/siloed/isolated AI that doesn't have access to their data/apps just because they recognise the name.

mjamesaustin

My sister graduated college last summer. She said every single person she knew was using ChatGPT to write essays within a week of its initial release.

I would argue it's pretty well-known outside of tech circles.

coliveira

You're incorrect, people nowadays equate AI with ChatGPT. Google may have AI in its results, but people will never separate the two products. However, with ChatGPT, it is synonymous with AI chat in the mind of most people.

rs186

Where does your confidence come from? Do you have any evidence to prove this?

If you paid the slightest attention to social media, news, TikTok or just talked to regular people, you would know ChatGPT is a much much bigger brand name than Gemini. Uber driver told me how he used ChatGPT to help the other day job he had.

ketzo

The linked article can tell you that the ChatGPT app has been downloaded more than 600M times, so approx 1 in 13 humans has actually downloaded ChatGPT to their phone already, let alone heard about it.

They have WAUs in the 300m ballpark — average people already are going out of their way to open a standalone AI.

annodomini2019

ChatGPT is the 7th most visited website in the world...

jeromegv

> I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles

In Canada, I have had countless conversations with people outside of tech circles (mostly in their 30s) where THEY naturally bring up ChatGPT. It's wild how popular it got very quickly for all kind of use cases.

lone_onion

https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone

'nuff said?

(ChatGPT is #2 in the free apps list)

Spooky23

Google has a really good story n the GCP side. Vertex can meet FedRAMP High compliance, so the controls are good. Workspace is, like Office 365 Copilot, still figuring itself out.

Apple painted itself into a corner. They have the best SoC story in the industry and are years ahead, but skimped on memory to save a few pennies and really nerfed their most important product. They’re in a pickle as a result and won’t give up the control they would need to for a third party on-device AI to be effective.

echelon

For all the wonder of Apple Silicon, if won't run any of the models I want it to. AI on Mac is a horrible experience as a developer and a consumer.

So much for edge computing on Apple devices. Their marketing around how good their hardware is for AI is total BS.

nomel

> Their marketing around how good their hardware is for AI is total BS.

What are you comparing it to, and what do you consider "edge computing"? iPhone vs Samsung benchmarks show a massive difference. Macbook shows great performance, when compared to other notebooks with battery lives longer than 30 minutes. If you're comparing to a $1k gaming GPU, with an order of magnitude more power usage, then sure, things fall apart. The definition of "edge computing" being "can run > 4gb models locally" is pretty new. Who do you see as doing better?

mekpro

Also, they open-model gemma-3 is very competitive for its size and actually beats llama-3 from Meta. Not to mention that OpenAI doesn't offer anything open anymore.

scojjac

I was paying $6/month for Google Workspace Business Starter and refused to pay for the Gemini add-on because it was like $20/month on its own. Now Gemini is included and the plan is $14/month. I've been decently impressed with it's ability to work with PDFs and images, create tables that can export to Sheets, text that can export to Docs, Deep Research, and Help Me Write. I really think the imtegration with other Google products is where it shines. Now I use Gemini most, and bounce off of Claude occasionally. I rarely touch ChatGPT.

dailykoder

> Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc.

That's kinda crazy that people absolutely stopped to care that all their emails and so forth will be used as training data for the next models

oulipo

I think so... we seem to be hitting the roof of current LLMs capabilities, now the next generation of AI tools will need a research breakthrough, and Google and Microsoft still have the biggest research teams

mattlondon

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fkyoureadthedoc

> I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced.

The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience.

My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.

trjordan

ChatGPT has 400m weekly users. X / Twitter has 600m.

It's pretty popular!

joshstrange

There are plenty of people outside of tech circles talking about and using ChatGPT. In fact, that was a massive indicator for me, I heard from them about ChatGPT before I had gotten around to mentioning it to them.

That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.

2OEH8eoCRo0

Why the skepticism? Skeptical that it might not be profitable for 0.5 ms and they'll cancel it?

They have the data and the money, all they needed was to not self sabotage.

Workaccount2

I think the biggest thing Google has working against them is the move to put lightweight models in everything for everyone. Whatever model they use for search is probably somewhere around an ~8B model, and flash 2.0 is decent but still a light weight model.

People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers.

Meanwhile, their SOTA models have been strong, and Gemini 2.5 looks like it might actually have taken the AI throne yesterday.[1]

[1]https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/25/gemini/

willio58

> People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers

I'm curious how valid this statement is. Anecdotally, I really like those results. For whatever reason, I don't directly interact with Gemini, I just type questions into google and if an AI response comes up I definitely give it a first look before clicking through links. If for some reason no AI response comes up for a question, I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and I usually get the answer I'm looking for.

As I typed that^ I realized something funny. I used to make fun of my parents for typing certain questions into google e.g. "What's the best pizza place in New York?". I would tell them to type "Best pizza place New York", because Google seemed to work better that way. But then that sort of stuff was hijacked by the SEO industry. So the meme of typing "Best Pizza Place New York Reddit" started so we could get actual answers from real people. With the rise of LLMs in search I'm personally back to typing "What's the best pizza place in New York?" right into Google/ChatGPT and it's been pretty successful so far. I'm curious what the next thing will be.

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janalsncm

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

cmrdporcupine

When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work. This was 2019 time frame? Maybe 2020?

It was uncanny and creepy, pretended to be a conscious being, frequently lied, and led directly to that guy who claimed it had personhood... I can completely understand why Google chose to keep a lid on this kind of thing, hoping to be able to clean it up and produce something that could be reliably used for a product instead of a novelty. That's back when Google was still sort-of pretending to have ethics (though they didn't)

OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.

eitally

I was there then, too, and Google was exceptionally risk averse when it came to calling anything AI. It seemed that the bar for an internal "AI" label was "this is actually AGI", so nothing was labeled AI and everything was just called "ML" or "Deep Learning". This same risk aversion meant none of the cutting edge AI research that Deepmind & Brain/RMI were doing made it to productization. OpenAI changed all that with ChatGPT. It was as if a switch was flipped overnight and suddenly everything within Google was "AI".

Frankly, if there is a macro-level strategy, and I assume their mostly is, I think Google has been doing a great job executing since the launch of ChatGPT. They even commercialized their Diabetic Retinopathy imaging model, which was based on research for a paper published in 2016!

https://research.google/pubs/development-and-validation-of-a...

osmsucks

> When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work.

The Julius Caesar personality which had sushi as its favorite dish (and claimed to have travelled to Japan after his assassination, somehow) was my favorite.

Workaccount2

Anyone remember Sydney, the Microsoft implementation from the early ChatGPT days?

She was totally emotionally unhinged until Microsoft put hard filters on her output. Lucky for OpenAI it happened in MS's court despite it being chatGPT under the hood.

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kridsdale1

Meta (FB at the time) had a cool internal page as well with LLM chatbots. Personalities and the like. It was neat but not a product. We were all still reeling from Tay.

Henchman21

> OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.

This is lack of interest will kill Google in the end, IMO.

cmrdporcupine

I wasn't talking about Google not caring.

OpenAI didn't care about ethics.

Henchman21

I see my mistake, thank you!

But also I have this view of Google as largely apathetic to its users and the things it creates, but maybe more to the point the things it created and then destroyed.

I may have misunderstood but I still feel like I have a valid take.

gaogao

It's not just that they didn't care, but they had a better framing and RLHF helped quite a bit. Galactica got released at a similar time to ChatGPT and got castigated, in a large part due to a poor framing of it being for science and not more of a fun thing.

LeicaLatte

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

tzury

Google:

- Google AI Studio - Gemini app - Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users - Vertex AI - NotebookLM - many more I forgot…

vs

ChatGPT.com

This is Google’s main problem. Where several groups are trying to build the same product and compete on user attention and distract focus.

Search Google. Search. Show search results on the right columns with ads on the top as it is today, and the Gemini thingy on the left. It’s that simple.

solardev

I don't even know which is which anymore. Like what is the difference between all of those and Google Assistant and Bard and the GCP AI services? Are they all just different models or different products altogether?

Maybe I'll ask ChatGPT to explain...

lysace

As an investor (smallish): I think Alphabet/Google can do much better with a CEO who isn't Sundar.

Also: Generally: Do consider investing in companies that run services where you feel compelled to subscribe (like Youtube Premium and previously Netflix).

impulser_

I disagree.

Name another CEO that can take a company from 74b to 350b in revenue. He has always grown Google. Not a single year of decreased growth.

He made Google the only AI company in the world with a full AI stack from data, science, hardware, and software.

This is paying off massively. Look at how faster Gemini models are compared to any other model. It 3x faster.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model on the market right now in terms of cost, performance, and intelligence.

Everyone is fighting over NVIDA chips, not Google.

pembrook

Sundar did a great job pivoting Google from a product-focused B2C company into a Microsoft-style B2B-oriented monetization deathstar (Google Cloud & Workspace and Ads Ads Ads with packages of Ads on the side).

The problem is, ditching their B2C product-focused roots in favor of playing Microsoft slowly ruined their flagship Search (also the open web) and any internal culture of stewarding great products. And Google doesn't have the same level of lock-in Microsoft has.

Microsoft doesn't have to worry about end-users jumping ship because corporate worker drones can't provision their own IT.

Google searchers on the other hand, can just start opening ChatGPT instead of Google search more and more and slowly kill Google's flagship product simply out of boredom.

Youtube being forgotten about by the deathstar and being allowed to flourish was simply a happy accident. But that too will inevitably get gobbled up after the pressure of a few rough quarters comes down on the shoulders of whatever CEO comes next.

alecco

I beg to differ. Pichai is a glorified McKinsey consultant who made a lot of mistakes. He was just lucky to be lifted by this Tech Bubble. And he is firing Core teams in US to rebuild them in India.

montag

Do you have a source for that last statement?

impulser_

> He was just lucky to be lifted by this Tech Bubble.

Almost all of Google's revenue has made from decade old products lmfao. He just kept growing them despite many years of people calling Google dead.

ipython

Investor and heavy user of Google Workspace (several small paid domains). I find the Google Gemini capabilities for note taking and summarization of Meets to be excellent, and a huge timesaver for my teams. NotebookLM almost feels magic.

In my experience, of the major players (AMZN, GOOG, and MSFT), Google's AI integrations feel the most polished and useful for day-to-day use.

moffkalast

Never felt like being compelled to subscribe to YT premium or Netflix, the former doesn't differ much from using YT with ublock, and piracy provides a better service than Neftlix.

OAI's GPT-4 (back in the day), Deep Research, and 4o Image gen recently on the other hand? Totally. When it's something actually incredibly useful and there's zero alternatives out there.

Google has no such products right now, if their Gemini Advanced trial shows anything it's that their touted 1M context doesn't actually work any better than the average undertrained 1M RoPE tune. I mean it doesn't even make sense for them conceptually to sell services, they're an ad company.

totaldude87

care to elaborate? is this like an engineer/innovator thing?

|CEO who isn't Sundar.

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totaldude87

The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)!

Instead of searching (google) , let me ask AI( chatgpts) and google is on the losing side of this perception war. This cannot be solved that quickly .

Especially with what google has done in the AI space(to a layman) it was Bard(anyone remembers) and then it was something and then its Gemini now.

what is the differentiator now? is google offering more free stuff than its peers? a layman doesnt care about whether it succeeds in solving a math problem or not! As long as people think these two are separate things(ai v search) , google is gonna have a problem

weatherlite

> The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)!

I don't know if that's a problem. If I was Google I'd like to keep search mostly as is (perhaps throw in some AI summary, but mostly as is) so I can keep putting links to ads. I still use Google; if I want to buy new running shoes, book a flight etc I don't start talking to ChatGPT about it, I just Google; I'm sure there are a couple billion more people like me who'll keep doing it. It's more than just habit, A.I is perceived as not up to date so I see absolutely no reason to go to an LLM for shoes and flights. But I have many other questions (mostly programming, stock analysis etc) I go to the A.I for. I think for Google, Search will still make a lot of money because the buying shoes thing is worth more for advertisers than asking some vague question about my codebase.

Clubber

>what is the differentiator now?

Not now necessarily, but if Google gets any traction in this, I can see Google inserting subtle ads in the AI results, which would be a net negative.

serjester

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

alecco

The board and Pichai should go. They had the best researchers at Deepmind and Google Brain, sitting on the best pile of data of any tech company (web, Google Books, YouTube, ...), having the leading custom hardware (TPUs), and top tier datacenter engineering. And they put idiots in charge with ridiculous quota systems. They bled a lot of key people for nothing. And spent 2.7 bn to get one guy back. TWO POINT SEVEN BILLION FOR JUST ONE GUY. And Alphabet didn't even buy his company, they just got a non-exclusive arrangement. It's beyond incompetent.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-paid-2-7-billion-12305...

redlock

Noam Shazeer is not any guy. And I would bet the latest jump in Gemini capability is a result of him coming back.

alecco

On one hand, Pichai paid 2.7bn to get 1 guy back. On the other hand, Pichai laid off 200 Core devs and "relocated roles" to India and Mexico [1]. The duality of Pichai-style management.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...

MisterPea

They're in a tough spot where the CEO does just enough to stay, but they need someone better.

They lagged in AI, but the new Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible. They built an incredible tool in NotebookLM but failed to market it

basch

I’d say give it time. NotebooksLM probably gets rereleased with a new name. Simultaneous iOS release, giant press storm. Not attempting to do so is a mistake.

But yes, absolutely need new leadership. Nest/Pixel/etc are such a wasted opportunity tight now. The software layer is so disconnected between each component. As a dumb example im pretty sure you still can’t talk out of a hub max or tv remote into a nest cam, but can through the home app. The “it works in one place, but not another” prevents so much usability discovery for normal people.

serjester

Agreed. Sundar seems like a peacetime CEO that got pulled into war and seems like he's struggling. But with Larry and Sergei having all voting control it seems unlikely he'll get fired.

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jmcgough

I thought Stadia was incredibly well-engineered, had good performance playing modern games with a Thinkpad. But none of my friends had any idea what Stadia was, the ad campaign was atrocious. Time and time again, Google builds great products and then shelves them a year or two later.

MoonGhost

Google is not alone. Intel halfheartedly develops GPUs. It doesn't work without strategy.

solardev

Then take a look at how Nvidia markets a similar product (GeForce Now). It not only works way better (much better GPU) but also is growing by leaps and bounds every year and adding hundreds of games. And it uses your existing steam library for cross saves and cross plays. It was around before Stadia and survived long after Stadia.

Google has a bunch of amazing engineers and finance people but apparently they just can't productize anything.

the_clarence

Only works if you have a very stable internet connection

the_clarence

I tried using notebookLLM many many times and it's just not good. On the other hand I'm writing proofs using chatgpt and they look really good.

llm_nerd

Google has turned it around quite exceptionally. A lot of my professional work has turned back to Google products, and 2.5 Pro is absolutely exceptional. It is absolutely a benchmark model.

Google did seem asleep at the wheel, and then when they did come out with some products they were so incredibly afraid of Gizmodo soliciting an image or text output that was socially unacceptable, paralyzing them with fear (and leading to some incredible stupidity). But their pace now is rapid.

tootie

Is anyone confident in what a winning strategy might even be? The market keeps getting more crowded and yet AI is still only creating incremental value for company's that adopt it. It's not clear to me that this is going to be quite as much of a sea change in how businesses run as people like Altman have been pitching.

Nor do any of the top 10 AI companies have any kind of moat. The fact that Elon Musk can found a competitor out of spite and have a plausible competitor in 6 months with a multi-billion dollar value actually just dilutes the perceived value any of the market leaders. OpenAI is still riding the high of being first and having the ChatGPT brand be so strong.

Google doesn't need to win on all the benchmarks, they just need to embed themselves in enough enterprises and they have a huge leg up in that regard.

Workaccount2

I think google will end up winning enterprise, and the fact that Apple didn't sign a sole partnership with OpenAI, but kept Gemini in the mix lends a lot of credence to this.

Google is the only "classic" org in the SOTA model space, and the only one in the whole race who doesn't have to kiss the ground Jensen Huang walks on. They are big enough to be able to "pay you back" if they colossally fuck up, and the chances of them going belly up are pretty slim. They also have the cheapest models to boot.

From a business standpoint, Google is the safest play on many levels, even if their models are just good enough.

eitally

The winning strategy is that Google has so many surfaces that they can embed their own AI in (also use as training data sources) that they essentially can't lose unless their models are just terrible. Fortunately, their models are great and they've truly been moving very fast to integrate AI into both enterprise (via Cloud) and consumer products this past year. As a xoogler, I'm truly impressed.

stormfather

I think the winning strategy is making a small model that's good enough to embed in search, etc, at no cost. Google has the best small models. But whoever wins this will be whoever makes a more efficient computing substrate for LLM inference, like running a transformer with lenses or something like that. Winning strategy there is acquisition.

kridsdale1

Maybe the substrate will be flesh.

tootie

You lost me. Lenses? Are you being fanciful or is this a thing?

weatherlite

Have you met any OpenAI employee who is confident in the company's AI strategy? There is very little moat here for anyone.

summerlight

Many have pretty serious concerns about its direction, speed and product strategies, but I guess most of them also agree that there has been some progress and the situation has improved. I think that not many people think that Google will surely return to its dominant position on AI research again, but they may keep being relevant in the competition.

asadm

I am, I was VERY skeptic initially but now it's clear Google will win.

rs186

Sorry, your comment isn't particularly helpful or convincing.

danesparza

Wait. What? By what measure? There is a very solid chance that Google will simply cancel the project.

I'm looking at you, Google. I'm still bitter about Google Reader.

claytonjy

Suggesting they’ll cancel gemini makes about as much sense as suggesting they’ll cancel gmail.

meta_ai_x

Googlers who aren't working for Deepmind are mostly Leetcode monkeys who have absolutely no clue about business strategy, marketing, distribution, branding, margins

kridsdale1

This isn’t true at all.

Quite a bias displaying username you have though.

alecco

Maybe a lot, sure. But at least the top 10% are elite at their craft. DeepMind, Google Brain, the TPU people, the datacenter people, etc.

Sadly, Pichai is firing Core teams in USA and moving them to India.

svilen_dobrev

i think it was Eric Schmidt who said that "everyone would need an Assistant" - about 10 years ago. (maybe in [0] ~ 2016). Something to impersonate, talking to it.

Why they didn't do it, even a resemblance of - when they could.. no idea. Instead, meddling with mailboxes and the like.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-eric-schmidt-ai

cmrdporcupine

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