Google is winning on every AI front
651 comments
·April 12, 2025codelord
netcan
> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.
So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term.
Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.
Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses.
At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs.
The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.
kibibu
What happens when OpenAI introduces sponsored answers?
dcow
I don’t think “AI” as a market is “winner-takes-anything”. Seriously. AI is not a product, it’s a tool for building other products. The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products. Does OpenAI really make sense as a chatbot company?
nothercastle
I agree the market for 10% better AI isn’t that great but the cost to get there is. An 80% as good model at 10% or even 5% the cost will win every time in the current environment. Most businesses don’t even have a clear use case for AI they just use it because the competition is and there is a FOMO effect
TeMPOraL
There are two perspectives on this. What you said is definitely a good one if you're a business planning to add AI to whatever you're selling. But personally, as a user, I want the opposite to happen - I want AI to be the product that takes all the current products and turns them into tools it can use.
baby_souffle
> Does OpenAI really make sense as a chatbot company?
If the chat bot remains useful and can execute on instructions, yes.
If we see a plateau in integrations or abilities, it’ll stagnate.
ltadeut
> The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products.
agree with you on this.
you already see that playing out with Meta and a LOT of companies in China.
jnwatson
AI is a product when you slap an API on top and host it for other businesses to figure out a use case.
In a gold rush, the folks that sell pickaxes make a reliable living.
jart
Seriously, humans are not a product. You hire them for building products.
eximius
Is Amazon a product or a place to sell other products? Does that make Amazon not a winner?
zer00eyz
> AI is not a product, it’s a tool for building other products.
Its products like this (Wells Fargo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akmga7X9zyg
Great Wells Fargo has an "agent" ... and every one else is talking about how to make their products available for agent based AI.
People don't want 47 different agents to talk to, then want a single end point, they want a "personal assistant" in digital form, a virtual concierge...
And we can't have this, because the open web has been dead for more than a decade.
istjohn
> No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here...
I don't understand this sentiment at all. The business model writes itself (so to speak). This is the company that perfected the art of serving up micro-targeted ads to people at the moment they are seeking a solution to a problem. Just swap the search box for a chat bot.
For a while they'll keep the ads off to the side, but over time the ads will become harder and harder to distinguish from the chat bot content. One day, they'll dissapear altogether and companies will pay to subtly bias the AI towards their products and services. It will be subtle--undetectable by end users--but easily quantified and monetized by Google.
Companies will also pay to integrate their products and services into Google's agents. When you ask Gemini for a ride, does Uber or Lyft send a car? (Trick question. Waymo does, of course.) When you ask for a pasta bowl, does Grubhub or Doordash fill the order?
When Gemini writes a boutique CRM for your vegan catering service, what service does it use for seamless biometric authentication, for payment processing, for SMS and email marketing? What payroll service does it suggest could be added on in a couple seconds of auto-generated code?
AI allows Google to continue it's existing business model while opening up new, lucrative opportunities.
brookst
I don’t think it works. Search is the perfect place for ads for exactly the reasons you state: people have high intent.
But a majority of chatbot usage is not searching for the solution to a problem. And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product.
Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment. I don’t think ads work well in the latter , perhaps some subset, like the task is really complicated or the AI can tell the user is failing to achieve it. But I don’t think it’s nearly as could have a fit as search.
panarky
> chatbots ... provided for free ... ads
Just because the first LLM product people paid for was a chatbot does not mean that chat will be the dominant commercial use of AI.
And if the dominant use is agents that replace knowledge workers, then they'll cost closer to $2000 per month than $20 or free, and an ad-based business model won't work.
netcan
>Just swap the search box for a chat bot.
Perhaps... but perhaps not. A chatbot instead of a search box may not be how the future looks. Also... a chatbot prompt may not (probably won't) translate from search query smoothly... in a Way That keep ad markets intact.
That "perfected art" of search advertising is highly optimized. You (probably) loose all of that in transition. Any new advertising products will be intrepid territory.
You could not have predicted in advance that search advertising would dwarf video (yourube) advertising as a segment.
Meanwhile... they need to keep their market share at 90%.
Izikiel43
> micro-targeted ads to people at the moment they are seeking a solution to a problem
Personal/anecdotal experience, but I've bought more stuff out of instagram ads than google ads ever.
cgh
Perhaps ironically, I know a guy who uses ChatGPT to write ad copy. The snake eats its own tail.
UltraSane
LLM based advertising has amazing potential when you consider that you can train them to try to persuade people to buy the advertised products and services.
tonyedgecombe
>It's be a >$10bn business already.
But not profitable yet.
fpoling
Opera browser was not profitable for like 15 years and still became rather profitable eventually to make an attractive target to purchase by external investors. And even if not bough it would still made nice profit eventually for the original investors.
amelius
The demand is there. People are already becoming addicted to this stuff.
miohtama
For comparison, Uber is still not profitable after 15 years or so. Give it some time.
ximeng
Google aren’t interested in <1bn USD businesses, so it’s hard for them to build anything new as it’s pretty guaranteed to be smaller than that at first. The business equivalent of the danger of a comfortable salaried job.
fernandopj
Google is very good at recognizing existential threats. iOS were that to them and they built Android, including hardware, a novelty for them, even faster than mobile incumbents at the time.
They're more than willing to expand their moat around AI even if that means multiple unprofitable business for years.
anon84873628
If you are a business customer of Google or pay attention to things like Cloud Next that just happened, it is very clear that Google is building heavily in this area. Your statement has already been disproven.
selfhoster
"A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors."
I doubt the depiction implied by "surprising number". Marketing types and CEO's who would love 100% profit and only paying the electricity bill for an all AI workforce would believe that. Most people, especially most technical people would not believe that there is a "surprising number" of saps paying for so-called AI.
tom_m
Absolutely agree Microsoft is better there - maybe that's why Google hired someone from Microsoft for their AI stuff. A few people I think.
I also agree the business models aren't known. That's part of any hype cycle. I think those in the best position here are those with an existing product(s) and user base to capitalize on the auto complete on crack kinda feature. It will become so cheap to operate and so ubiquitous in the near future that it absolutely will be seen as a table stakes feature. Yes, commodities.
staticautomatic
Contextual advertising is a known ad business model that commands higher rates and is an ideal fit for LLMs. Plus ChatGPT has a lot of volume. If there’s anyone who should be worried about pulling that off it’s Perplexity and every other small to mid-sized player.
imiric
> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.
I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already.
The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.
jononor
I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".
JKCalhoun
I have yet to understand this obsession with agents.
Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce?
Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role.
As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!
imiric
Hey, we could save them all the busywork, and just wire all our money to corporations...
But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.
mike_hearn
You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendations anyway, they want to control the way their ad appears and what ad copy is used.
There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons.
So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this.
Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.
HarHarVeryFunny
There are lots of ways that advertising could be tied to personal interests gleaned by having access to someone's ChatBot history. You wouldn't necessarily need to integrate advertisements into the ChatBot itself - just use it as a data gathering mechanism to learn more about the user so that you can sell that data and/or use it to serve targetted advertisements elsewhere.
I think a big commercial opportunity for ChatBots (as was originally intended for Siri, when Apple acquired it from SRI) is business referral fees - people ask for restaurant, hotel etc recommendations and/or bookings and providers pay for business generated this way.
imiric
> You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way.
I highly doubt advertisers will settle for a solution that's less profitable. That would be like settling for plain-text ads without profiling data and microtargeting. Google tried that in the "don't be evil" days, and look how that turned out.
Besides, astroturfing and influencer-driven campaigns are very popular. The modern playbook is to make advertising blend in with the content as much as possible, so that the victim is not aware that they're being advertised to. This is what the majority of ads on social media look like. The natural extension of this is for ads to be subtly embedded in chatbot output.
"You don't sound well, Dave. How about a nice slice of Astroturf pizza to cheer you up?"
And political propaganda can be even more subtle than that...
wkat4242
Yeah me too and especially with Google as a leader because they corrupt everything.
I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.
pca006132
What if the models are somehow trained/tuned with Ads? Like businesses sponsor the training of some foundational models... Not the typical ads business model, but may be possible.
coliveira
Once again, our hope is for the Chinese to continue driving the open models. Because if it depends on American big companies the future will be one of dependency on closed AI models.
bookofjoe
If possible watch Episode 1 of Season 7 of "Black Mirror."
>... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.
What if people were the chatbots?
GolfPopper
Do they want a Butlerian Jihad? Because that's how you get a Butlerian Jihad.
vinceguidry
Just call it Skynet. Then at least we can think about pithy Arnold one-liners.
datavirtue
Right, but no one has been able to just download Google and run it locally. The tech comes with a built in adblocker.
tom_m
I believe it. This is what typically happens. I would go to AWS re:invent and just watch people in the audience either cheer or break down as they announced new offerings wash away their business. It's very difficult to compete in a war of attrition with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Not just small startups - even if you have ungodly amounts of funding.
Obviously the costs for AI will lower and everyone will more or less have the same quality in their models. They may already be approaching a maximum (or maximum required) here.
The bubble will burst and we'll start the next hype cycle. The winners, as always, the giants and anyone who managed to sell to them
I couldn't possibly see OpenAI as a winner in this space, not ever really. It has long since been apparent to me that Google would win this one. It would probably be more clear to others if their marketing and delivery of their AI products weren't such a sh-- show. Google is so incredibly uncoordinated here it's shocking...but they do have the resources, the right tech, the absolute position with existing user base, and the right ideas. As soon as they get better organized here it's game over.
tunaoftheland
The ads angle is an interesting one since that's what motivates most things that Google and Meta do. Their LLMs' context window size has been growing, and while this might the natural general progression with LLMs, for those 2 ads businesses there's pretty straight paths to using their LLMs for even more targeted ads. For example, with the recent Llama "herd" releases, the LLMs have surprisingly large context window and one can imagine why Meta might want that: For stuffing in it as much of the personal content that they already have of their users. Then their LLMs can generate ads in the tone and style of the users and emotionally manipulate them to click on the link. Google's LLMs also have large context windows and such capability might be too tempting to ignore. Thinking this, there were moments that made me think that I was being to cynical, but I don't think they'll leave that kind of money on the table, an opportunity to reduce human ad writers headcount while improving click stats for higher profit.
EDIT: Some typo fixes, tho many remain, I'm sure :)
JKCalhoun
When LLMs are essentially trying to sell me something, the shit is over.
I like LLMs (over search engines) because they are not salespeople. They're one of the few things I actually "trust". (Which I know is something that many people fall on the other side of — but no, I actually trust them more than SEO'd web sites and ad-driven search engines.)
I suppose my local-LLM hobby is for just such a scenario. While it is a struggle, there is some joy in trying to host locally as powerful an open LLM model as your hardware will allow. And if the time comes when the models can no longer be trusted, pop back to the last reliable model on the local setup.
That's what I keep telling myself anyway.
satisfice
LLMs have not earned your trust. Classic search has.
The only thing I really care about with classic web search is whether the resulting website is relevant to my needs. On this point I am satisfied nearly all the time. It’s easy to verify.
With LLMs I get a narrative. It is much harder to evaluate a narrative, and errors are more insidious. When I have carefully checked an LLM result, I usually discover errors.
Are you really looking closely at the results you get?
jcfrei
The real threat to Google, Meta is that LLMs become so cheap that its trivial for a company like Apple to make them available for free and include all the latest links to good products. No more search required if each M chip powered device can give you up-to-date recommendations for any product/service query.
JKCalhoun
That is my fantasy, actually.
varelse
[dead]
falcor84
> Google can't as easily burn money
I was actually surprised at Google's willingness to offer Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio for free; having this was a significant contributor to my decision to cancel my OpenAI subscription.
ff4
Google offering Gemini 2.5 Pro for free, enough to ditch OpenAI, reminds me of an old tactic.
Microsoft gained control in the '90s by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows for free, undercutting Netscape’s browser. This leveraged Windows’ dominance to make Explorer the default choice, sidelining competitors and capturing the browser market. By 1998, Netscape’s share plummeted, and Microsoft controlled access to the web.
Free isn’t generous—it’s strategic. Google’s hooking you into their ecosystem, betting you’ll build on their tools and stay. It feels like a deal, but it’s a moat. They’re not selling the model; they’re buying your loyalty.
falcor84
The joke's on them, because I don't have any loyalty to an LLM provider.
There's very close to zero switching costs, both on the consumer front and the API front; no real distinguishing features and no network effects; just whoever has the best model at this point in time.
ghurtado
> undercutting Netscape’s browser
It almost sounds like you're saying that Netscape wasn't free, and I'm pretty sure it was always free, before and after Microsoft Explorer
mikehotel
From the terms of use:
To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output. Google takes steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting this data from your Google Account, API key, and Cloud project before reviewers see or annotate it. Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services.
cheema33
I pay for ChatGPT, Anthropic and Copilot. After using Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio, I plan on canceling all other paid AI services. There is no point in keeping them.
relistan
This is 100% why they did it.
stellajager
What cards has google played over the past three years such that you are willing to trust them play the "cards at hand" that you alleged that they have? I could think of several things they did right, but I'm curious to hear which one of them are more significant than others from someone I think has better judgement than I do.
ksec
> (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)
Please do.
sundarurfriend
It's a rabbit hole with many layers (levels?), but this is a good starting point and gateway to related information:
Key Facts from "The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman's Firing from OpenAI": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-...
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throw1223323
Based on his interview with Joe Rogan, he has absolutely no imagination about what it means if humans actually manage to build general AI. Rogan basically ends up introducting him to some basic ideas about transhumanism.
To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.
JKCalhoun
> who lucked into his current position
Which can be said for most of the survivorship-biased "greats" we talk about. Right time, right place.
(Although to be fair — and we can think of the Two Steves, or Bill and Paul — there are often a number of people at the right time and right place — so somehow the few we still talk about knew to take advantage of that right time and right place.)
ramraj07
Coming up next: dumb and dumber schools Noam Chomsky on modern philosophy...
viraptor
There's weirdly many people who touch on the work around transhumanism but never heard the word before. There's a video of geohot basically talking about that idea, then someone from the audience mentions the name... and geohotz is confused. I'm honestly surprised.
isoprophlex
I would like to know how he manages to appear, in every single photo I see of him, to look slightly but unmistakenly... moist, or at least sweaty.
bryanrasmussen
People keep assassinating him, and clones always look a bit moist the first day out of the pod.
omnimus
Peter Thiel is the like that too. Hyperhidrosis is in some people common sideffect of drugs.
derwiki
It’s a side effect of Ibogaine, the same drug that it was rumored Ed Muskie was on in the ‘72 campaign.
hlynurd
I often look moist after I use a moisturizer.
mvdtnz
He's certainly a damp boy.
renewiltord
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awful_comment
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og_kalu
Open AI don't always have the best models (especially for programming) but they've consistently had the best product/user experience. And even in the model front, other companies seem to play catchup more than anything most of the time.
int_19h
The best user experience for what?
The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants, and if you look at that market, the best offerings are third-party IDEs that build on top of models they don't own. E.g. Cursor + Gemini 2.5.
On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios.
thunderbird120
This article doesn't mention TPUs anywhere. I don't think it's obvious for people outside of google's ecosystem just how extraordinarily good the JAX + TPU ecosystem is. Google several structural advantages over other major players, but the largest one is that they roll their own compute solution which is actually very mature and competitive. TPUs are extremely good at both training and inference[1] especially at scale. Google's ability to tailor their mature hardware to exactly what they need gives them a massive leg up on competition. AI companies fundamentally have to answer the question "what can you do that no one else can?". Google's hardware advantage provides an actual answer to that question which can't be erased the next time someone drops a new model onto huggingface.
[1]https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...
marcusb
From the article:
> I’m forgetting something. Oh, of course, Google is also a hardware company. With its left arm, Google is fighting Nvidia in the AI chip market (both to eliminate its former GPU dependence and to eventually sell its chips to other companies). How well are they doing? They just announced the 7th version of their TPU, Ironwood. The specifications are impressive. It’s a chip made for the AI era of inference, just like Nvidia Blackwell
thunderbird120
Nice to see that they added that, but that section wasn't in the article when I wrote that comment.
marcusb
Maybe they read your comment?
SubiculumCode
It was there.
krackers
Assuming that DeepSeek continues to open-source, then we can assume that in the future there won't be any "secret sauce" in model architecture. Only data and training/serving infrastructure, and Google is in a good position with regard to both.
jononor
Google is also in a great position wrt distribution - to get users at scale, and attach to pre-existing revenue streams. Via Android, Gmail, Docs, Search - they have a lot of reach. YouTube as well, though fit there is maybe less obvious. Combined with the two factors you mention, and the size of their warchest - they are really excellently positioned.
mark_l_watson
Over the last nine months, I have periodically tested Gemini’s access to and effective use of data from Gmail/Docs/Calendar/Keep-notes, etc.
The improvement has been steady and impressive. The entire integration is becoming a product that I want to use.
mattlondon
YouTube is very well positioned - all these video generating models etc. I am sure they'll be loads of AI editors too
fulafel
Making your own hardware would seem to yield freedoms in model architectures as well since performance is closely related to how the model architecture fits the hardware.
spwa4
... except that it still pretty much requires Nvidia hardware. Maybe not for edge inference, but even inference at scale (ie. say at companies, or governments) will still require it.
mike_hearn
TPUs aren't necessarily a pro. They go back 15 years and don't seem to have yielded any kind of durable advantage. Developing them is expensive but their architecture was often over-fit to yesterday's algorithms which is why they've been through so many redesigns. Their competitors have routinely moved much faster using CUDA.
Once the space settles down, the balance might tip towards specialized accelerators but NVIDIA has plenty of room to make specialized silicon and cut prices too. Google has still to prove that the TPU investment is worth it.
summerlight
Not sure how familiar you are with the internal situation... But from my experience think it's safe to say that TPU basically multiplies Google's computation capability by 10x, if not 20x. Also they don't need to compete with others to secure expensive nvidia chips. If this is not an advantage, I don't see there's anything considered to be an advantage. The entire point of vertical integration is to secure full control of your stack so your capability won't be limited by potential competitors, and TPU is one of the key component of its strategy.
Also worth noting that its Ads division is the largest, heaviest user of TPU. Thanks to it, it can flex running a bunch of different expensive models that you cannot realistically afford with GPU. The revenue delta from this is more than enough to pay off the entire investment history for TPU.
mike_hearn
They must very much compete with others. All these chips are being fabbed at the same facilities in Taiwan and capacity trades off against each other. Google has to compete for the same fab capacity alongside everyone else, as well as skilled chip designers etc.
> The revenue delta from this is more than enough to pay off the entire investment history for TPU.
Possibly; such statements were common when I was there too but digging in would often reveal that the numbers being used for what things cost, or how revenue was being allocated, were kind of ad hoc and semi-fictional. It doesn't matter as long as the company itself makes money, but I heard a lot of very odd accounting when I was there. Doubtful that changed in the years since.
Regardless the question is not whether some ads launches can pay for the TPUs, the question is whether it'd have worked out cheaper in the end to just buy lots of GPUs. Answering that would require a lot of data that's certainly considered very sensitive, and makes some assumptions about whether Google could have negotiated private deals etc.
alienthrowaway
> Developing them is expensive
So are the electric and cooling costs at Google's scale. Improving perf-per-watt efficiency can pay for itself. The fact that they keep iterating on it suggests it's not a negative-return exercise.
mike_hearn
TPUs probably can pay for themselves, especially given NVIDIA's huge margins. But it's not a given that it's so just because they fund it. When I worked there Google routinely funded all kinds of things without even the foggiest idea of whether it was profitable or not. There was just a really strong philosophical commitment to doing everything in house no matter what.
foota
Haven't Nvidia published roughly as many chip designs in the same period?
mike_hearn
The issue isn't number of designs but architectural stability. NVIDIA's chips have been general purpose for a long time. They get faster and more powerful but CUDA has always been able to run any kind of neural network. TPUs used to be over-specialised to specific NN types and couldn't handle even quite small evolutions in algorithm design whereas NVIDIA cards could. Google has used a lot of GPU hardware too, as a consequence.
dgacmu
They go back about 11 years.
phillypham
Depending how you count, parent comment is accurate. Hardware doesn't just appear. 4 years of planning and R&D for the first generation chip is probably right.
jxjnskkzxxhx
I've used Jax quite a bit and it's so much better than tf/pytorch.
Now for the life of me, I still haven't been able to understan what a TPU is. Is it Google's marketing term for a GPU? Or is it something different entirely?
mota7
There's basically a difference in philosophy. GPU chips have a bunch of cores, each of which is semi-capable, whereas TPU chips have (effectively) one enormous core.
So GPUs have ~120 small systolic arrays, one per SM (aka, a tensorcore), plus passable off-chip bandwidth (aka 16 lines of PCI).
Where has TPUs have one honking big systolic array, plus large amounts of off-chip bandwidth.
This roughly translates to GPUs being better if you're doing a bunch of different small-ish things in parallel, but TPUs are better if you're doing lots of large matrix multiplies.
317070
Way back when, most of a GPU was for graphics. Google decided to design a completely new chip, which focused on the operations for neural networks (mainly vectorized matmul). This is the TPU.
It's not a GPU, as there is no graphics hardware there anymore. Just memory and very efficient cores, capable of doing massively parallel matmuls on the memory. The instruction set is tiny, basically only capable of doing transformer operations fast.
Today, I'm not sure how much graphics an A100 GPU still can do. But I guess the answer is "too much"?
kcb
Less and less with each generation. The A100 has 160 ROPS, a 5090 has 176, the H100 and GB100 have just 24.
JLO64
TPUs (short for Tensor Processing Units) are Google’s custom AI accelerator hardware which are completely separate from GPUs. I remember that introduced them in 2015ish but I imagine that they’re really starting to pay off with Gemini.
jxjnskkzxxhx
Believe it or not, I'm also familiar with Wikipedia. It reads that they're optimized for low precisio high thruput. To me this sounds like a GPU with a specific optimization.
albert_e
Amazon also invests in own hardware and silicon -- the Inferentia and Trainium chips for example.
But I am not sure how AWS and Google Cloud match up in terms of making this verticial integration work for their competitive advantage.
Any insight there - would be curious to read up on.
I guess Microsoft for that matter also has been investing -- we heard about the latest quantum breakthrough that was reported as creating a fundamenatally new physical state of matter. Not sure if they also have some traction with GPUs and others with more immediate applications.
imtringued
Google is what everyone thinks OpenAI is.
Google has their own cloud with their data centers with their own custom designed hardware using their own machine learning software stack running their in-house designed neural networks.
The only thing Google is missing is designing a computer memory that is specifically tailored for machine learning. Something like processing in memory.
null
noosphr
And yet google's main structural disadvantage is being google.
Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search. I mean it as no exaggeration that _everything_ google does for search is now obsolete. The only reason why google search isn't dead yet is that it takes a while to index all web paged into a vector database.
And yet it wasn't google that released the architecture update, it was hugging face as a summer collaboration between a dozen people. Google's version came out in 2018 and languished for a decade because it would destroy their business model.
Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product. Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need. I don't see google being able to pull off an iPhone moment where they killed the iPod to win the next 20 years.
visarga
> Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search. I mean it as no exaggeration that _everything_ google does for search is now obsolete.
The web UI for people using search may be obsolete, but search is hot, all AIs need it, both web and local. It's because models don't have recent information in them and are unable to reliably quote from memory.
vidarh
The point is that the secret sauce in Google's search was better retrieval, and the assertion above is that the advantage there is gone. While crawling the web isn't a piece of cake, it's a much smaller moat than retrieval quality was.
nroets
And models often makes reasoning errors. Many users will want to check that the sources substantiate the conclusion.
danpalmer
This would be like claiming in 2010 that because Page Rank is out there, search is a solved problem and there’s no secret sauce, and the following decade proved that false.
jampekka
> Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search.
I doubt this. Embedding models are no panacea even with a lot simpler retrieval tasks like RAG.
podnami
Do we have insights on whether they knew that their business model was at risk? My understanding is that OpenAI’s credibility lies in seeing the potential of scaling up a transformer-based model and that Google was caught off guard.
dash2
They can just plug the google.com web page into their AI. They already do that.
fragmede
but because users are used to doing that for free, they can't charge money for that, but if they don't charge money for that, and no one's seeing ads, then where does they money come from?
petesergeant
> Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product.
Google's cash-cow product is relevant ads. You can display relevant ads in LLM output or natural language web-search. As long as people are interacting with a Google property, I really don't think it matters what that product is, as long as there are ad views. Also:
> Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need
This sounds like a gigantic competitive advantage if you're selling AI-based products. You don't have to give everyone access to the good search via API, just your inhouse AI generator.
michaelt
Kodak was well placed to profit from the rise of digital imaging - in the late 1970s and early 1980s Kodak labs pioneered colour image sensors, and was producing some of the highest resolution CCDs out there.
Bryce Bayer worked for Kodak when he invented and patented the Bayer pattern filter used in essentially every colour image sensor to this day.
But the problem was: Kodak had a big film business - with a lot of film factories, a lot of employees, a lot of executives, and a lot of recurring revenue. And jumping into digital with both feet would have threatened all that.
So they didn't capitalise on their early lead - and now they're bankrupt, reduced to licensing their brand to third-party battery makers.
> You can display relevant ads in LLM output or natural language web-search.
Maybe. But the LLM costs a lot more per response.
Making half a cent is very profitable if you only take 0.2s of CPU to do it. Making half a cent with 30 seconds multiple GPUs, consuming 1000W of power... isn't.
lonelyasacloud
> Google's cash-cow product is relevant ads.
As a business Google's interest is in showing ads that make it the most money - if they quickly show just the relevant information then Google loses advertising opportunities.
To an extent, it is the web equivalent of irl super markets intentionally moving stuff around and having checkout displays.
sva_
It is sort of funny to me how the sentiment about whoever seems to be leading in ML changes so frequently (in particular here on HN.) A couple months ago it felt like people were sure that Google completely fucked it up for themselves (especially due to the fact that they invented the transformer but didn't productize it themselves at first.)
For a short while, Claude was the best thing since sliced cheese, then Deepseek was the shit, and now seemingly OpenAI really falls out of favor. It kinda feels to me like people cast their judgement too early (perhaps again in this case.) I guess these are the hypecycles...
Google is killing it right now, I agree. But the world might appear completely different in three months.
int_19h
The sentiment changes this fast because SOTA changes this fast. E.g. Google models were objectively crappy compared to OpenAI, but Gemini 2.5 really turned the tables (and I'm not talking about synthetic benchmarks here but real world coding).
The state of affairs with local models is similarly very much in flux, by the way.
h2zizzle
You could also be seeing waves of various astroturf campaigns.
joenot443
Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN.
What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?
sva_
Yeah... I wish there were laws that would require disclosure of such behavior. Might be tricky to implement though, and probably contradicts the interests of politicians.
patrickhogan1
It’s not just sentiment though. It’s reality. Before December 2024 timeframe Google’s models were awful. Now with 2.5 they are awesome.
There is no clear winner. The pace is fast.
ZeroTalent
Claude was only ever good for coding, in my opinion. It had nothing on OpenAI pro models for multimodal use.
levocardia
Google is winning on every front except... marketing (Google has a chatbot?), trust (who knew the founding fathers were so diverse?), safety (where's the 2.5 Pro model card?), market share (fully one in ten internet users on the planet are weekly ChatGPT users), and, well, vibes (who's rooting for big G, exactly?).
But I will admit, Gemini Pro 2.5 is a legit good model. So, hats off for that.
a2128
My experience with their software has been horrible. A friend was messing around with Gemini on my phone and said my name is John, and it automatically saved that to my saved info list and always called me John from then on. But when I ask it to forget this, it says it can't do that automatically and links me to the Saved Info page, which is a menu they didn't implement in the app so it opens a URL in my browser and asks me to sign into my Google account again. Then a little toast says "Something went wrong" and the saved info list is empty and broken. I tried reporting this issue half a year ago and it's still unresolved. Actually the only way I was ever able to get it to stop calling me John is to say "remember to forget my name is John" in some way that it adds that to the list instead of linking me to that broken page
8f2ab37a-ed6c
Google is also terribly paranoid of the LLM saying anything controversial. If you want a summary of some hot topic article you might not have the time to read, Gemini will straight up refuse to answer. ChatGPT and Grok don't mind at all.
silisili
I noticed the same in Gemini. It would refuse to answer mundane questions that none but the most 'enlightened' could find an offensive twist to.
This makes it rather unusable as a catch all goto resource, sadly. People are curious by nature. Refusing to answer their questions doesn't squash that, it leads them to potentially less trustworthy sources.
rat87
Trying to answer complex questions by making up shit in a confident voice is the worst option. Redirecting to a more trustworthy human source or multiple if needed is much better
ranyume
> Refusing to answer their questions doesn't squash that, it leads them to potentially less trustworthy sources.
But that's good
yieldcrv
Deepseek to circumvent Western censorship
Claude to circumvent Eastern censorship
Grok Unhinged for a wild time
miohtama
I think that's the "trust" bit. In AI, trust generally means "let's not offend anyone and water it down to useless." Google is paranoid of being sued/getting attention if Gemini says something about Palestine or drawns images like Studio Ghibli. Meanwhile users love to these topics and memes are free marketing.
null
AznHisoka
The single reason I will never ever be an user of them. Its a hill I will die on
logicchains
Not a fan of Google, but if you use Gemini through AI studio with a custom prompt and filters disabled it's by far the least censored commercial model in my experience.
einsteinx2
Less censored than Grok?
jsemrau
>Google is also terribly paranoid of the LLM saying anything controversial.
When did this start? Serious question. Of all the model providers my experience with Google's LLMs and Chatproducts were the worst in that dimension. Black Nazis, Eating stones, pizza with glue, etc I suppose we've all been there.
rahidz
The ghost of Tay still haunts every AI company.
rat87
Seems like a feature. Last thing we need is a bunch of people willing to take AI at it's word making up shit about controversial topics. I'd say redirecting to good or prestigious source is probably the best you can do
StefanBatory
I remember when LLM first appeared - on a local social website of my country (think Digg), a lot of people were exctatic because they got ChatGPT to say that black people are dumb, claiming it as a victory over woke :P
sigmoid10
I wouldn't even say Gemini Pro 2.5 is the best model. Certainly not when you do multimodal or function calling, which is what actually matters in industry applications. Plain chatbots are nice, but I don't think they will decide who wins the race. Google is also no longer in the mindset to really innovate. You'll hear surprisingly similar POVs from ex-Googlers and ex-OpenAI guys. I'd actually say OpenAI still has an edge in terms of culture, even through it fell deep.
tgsovlerkhgsel
> Certainly not when you do multimodal or function calling
Who is? (Genuine question, it's hard to keep up given how quickly the field moves.)
stavros
If you want an LLM to interface with other systems, function calling is absolutely essential.
mjirv
Claude 3.7 Sonnet for function calling, and it’s not particularly close in my experience.
Not sure about multimodal as it’s not what I work on.
mark_l_watson
I have found function calling and ‘roll my own agents’ work much better now with Gemini than they did late last year, but I also do a lot of function calling experiments with small open models using Ollama - much more difficult to work with to get a robust system.
PunchTornado
really? all of my friends and everyone I know actually hates openai. they managed to be the bad guy in AI.
rzz3
You really hit the nail on the head with trust. Knowing the power of these AIs and how absolutely little I trust Google, I’d never tell trust Gemini with the things I’ll say to ChatGPT.
crazygringo
That's curious.
Large corporations wind up creating internal policies, controls, etc. If you know anyone who works in engineering at Google, you'll find out about the privacy and security reviews required in launching code.
Startups, on the other hand, are the wild west. One policy one day, another the next, engineers are doing things that don't follow either policy, the CEO is selling data, and then they run out of money and sell all the data to god knows who.
Google is pretty stable. OpenAI, on the other hand, has been mega-drama you could make a movie out of. Who knows what it's going to be doing with data two or four years from now?
ysofunny
cue the openAI movie
same pattern as Mark Zuckerberg's movie.
philsnow
> how absolutely little I trust Google, I’d never tell trust Gemini with the things I’ll say to ChatGPT.
Are you pretty sure that Google won't eventually buy OpenAI and thus learn everything you've said to ChatGPT?
dunefox
It's not about the information, but the connection to all Google services.
squigz
Why do you think OpenAI is more trustworthy than Google?
gessha
For me it’s less about trustworthiness and more about what they can do with the information. Google can potentially locate, profile and influence everyone around me and I don’t want that type of power however benevolent they are.
What can OpenAI do? They can sell my data, whatever, it’s a whole bunch of prompts of me asking for function and API syntax.
alternatex
Simply put Google has had more time to develop a terrible data hoarding reputation.
joshdavham
My hesitancy to adopt Gemini, despite being a heavy GCP and workspace user, is I kinda lost trust when trying to use their earlier models (I don't even remember those models' names). I just remember the models were just so consistently bad and obviously hallucinated more than 50% of the time.
Maybe Gemini is finally better, but I'm not exactly excited to give it a try.
bjackman
Well, Google is also very well placed to integrate with other products that have big market share.
So far this has been nothing but a PM wankfest but if Gemini-in-{Gmail,Meet,Docs,etc} actually gets useful, it could be a big deal.
I also don't think any of those concerns are as important for API users as direct consumers. I think that's gonna be a bugger part of my the market as time goes on.
rs186
Microsoft has been integrated Copilot in their Office products. In fact, they don't even call it Office any more. Guess what? If you ever had first hand experience with them, they are absolutely a dumpster fire. (Well, maybe except transcription in Teams meeting, but that's about it.) I used it for 5 minutes and never touch it again. I'll be very impressed if that's not the case with Google.
rs186
Exactly. Google may have a lead in their model, but saying they are "winning on every front" is a very questionable claim, from the perspective of everyday users, not influencers, devoted fans or anyone else who has a stake in hyping it.
torginus
Didn't GCP manage to lose from this position of strength? I'm not sure even if they're the third biggest
sidibe
They "lost from a position of strength" in that they had they had the most public-cloud like data centers and started thinking about selling that later than they should have. Bard/Gemini started later than chatgpt , but there's not really a moat for this LLM stuff, and Google started moving a lot earlier relative to GCP vs Amazon.
They've got the cash, the people, and the infrastructure to do things faster than the others going forward, which is a much bigger deal IMO than having millions more users right now. Most people still aren't using LLMs that often, switching is easy, and Google has the most obvious entry points with billion+ users with google.com, YouTube, gmail, chrome, android, etc.
donny2018
They were well positioned for cloud business long before AWS and Azure, but they still managed to lose this battle.
Google can be good on the technological side of things, but we saw time and time again that, other than ads, Google is just not good at business.
gcanyon
Several people have suggested that LLMs might end up ad-supported. I'll point out that "ad supported" might be incredibly subtle/insidious when applied to LLMs:
An LLM-based "adsense" could:
1. Maintain a list of sponsors looking to buy ads
2. Maintain a profile of users/ad targets
3. Monitor all inputs/outputs
4. Insert "recommendations" (ads) smoothly/imperceptibly in the course of normal conversation
"In order to increase hip flexibility, you might consider taking up yoga."
Was generated because it might lead to the question:
"What kind of yoga equipment could I use for that?"
Which could then lead to the output:
"You might want to get a yoga mat and foam blocks. I can describe some of the best moves for hips, or make some recommendations for foam blocks you need to do those moves?"
The above is ham-handed compared to what an LLM could do.
Lerc
LLMs should be legally required to act in the interest of their users (not their creators).
This is a standard that already applies to positions of advisors such as Medical professionals, lawyers and financial advisors.
I haven't seen this discussed much by regulators, but I have made a couple of submissions here and there expressing this opinion.
AIs will get better, and they will become more trusted. They cannot be allowed to sell the answer to the question "Who should I vote for?" To the highest bidder.
Sebguer
Who decides what's in the interest of the user?
ysofunny
> LLMs should be legally required to act in the interest of their users (not their creators).
lofty ideal... I don't see this ever happening; not anymore than I see humanity flat out abandoning the very concept of "money"
asadalt
but that would kill monetization no?
dimal
Of course not. You’d have to pay for the product, just like we do with every other product in existence, other than software.
Software is the only type of product where this is even an issue. And we’re stuck with this model because VCs need to see hockey stick growth, and that generally doesn’t happen to paid products.
sva_
Would be illegal in Germany ('Schleichwerbung') and perhaps the EU?
I think it is actually covered in EU AI act article 5 (a):
> [...] an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect of materially distorting the behaviour of a person or a group of persons by appreciably impairing their ability to make an informed decision, thereby causing them to take a decision that they would not have otherwise taken [...]
It is very broad but I'm pretty sure it would be used against such marketing strategies.
whiplash451
The trick is in the « materially ».
The inability to demonstrate incrementality in advertising is going to come in very handy to dodge this rule.
sva_
Hmm yeah I guess I wasn't completely aware of that term and its implications. That seems like a pretty weird qualifier for such a law. Now it kind of makes it sound like the law wants to prevent people using AI in a way that makes your grandma transfer her life savings to them.
Clearly, most LLMs would work in small increments with compounding effects.
vbezhenar
For me ads on web are acceptable as long as they are clearly distinguished from the content. As soon as ads gets merged into content, I'll be unhappy. If LLM would advertise something in a separate block, that's fine. if LLM augments its output to subtly nudge me to a specific brand which paid for placement, that's no-no.
wccrawford
Yeah, ad-supported LLMs would be incredibly bad.
But "free" is a magic word in our brains, and I'm 100% sure that many, many people will choose it over paying for it to be uncorrupted by ads.
torginus
Free might as well be a curse-word to me, and I'm not alone. I'm old enough to have experience in pre-internet era magazines, and the downgrade in quality from paid publications to free ones has been quite substatial.
Free-to-play is a thing in video games, and for most, it means they'll try to bully you into spending more money than you'd be otherwise comfortable with.
I think everyone at this point had enough bad experiences with 'free' stuff to be wary of it.
dragonwriter
> Free might as well be a curse-word to me, and I'm not alone. I'm old enough to have experience in pre-internet era magazines, and the downgrade in quality from paid publications to free ones has been quite substantial.
The cool thing is it is trivial for LLM vendors to leverage this bias as well the pro-free bias other people have to also sell a premium, for-pay offering that, like pre-internet magazines is, despite not being free to the user, still derives the overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising. Although one of the main reasons advertising-sponsored print media in the pre-internet era often wasn't free is that paid circulation numbers were a powerful selling point for advertisers who didn't have access to the kind of analytics available on the internet; what users were paying for often wasn't the product so much as a mechanism of proving their value to advertisers.
awongh
To put on my techno-optimist hat, some specific searches I make already thinking please, please sell me something and google's results are horribly corrupted by SEO.
If an LLM could help solve this problem it would be great.
I think you could make a reasonable technical argument for this- an LLM has more contextual understanding of your high-intent question. Serve me some ads that are more relevant than the current ads based on this deeper understanding.
JKCalhoun
You ask two different corporate LLMs and compare answers.
pzo
Apart from Gemini 2.5 Pro they have a decent Jack-of-all-trades master of none/price Gemini 2.0 Flash.
1) is dirty cheap ($0.1M/$0.4M),
2) is multimodal (image and audio),
3) reliable rate limit (comparing to OSS ml ai providers),
4) fast (200 tokens/s).
5) if need realtime API they provide as well for more expensive price (audio-to-audio)
It's my go to model for using as an API for some apps/products. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-2-0-flash/provid...
remoquete
I was a loyal Claude user until I decided to try Gemini 2.5. "After all", I thought, "I already use a Pixel phone, so it's integrated with Android. And with Google Drive. And I can get it through my Google One subscription."
And now that I'm on it, I don't think I'm going back. Google did it again.
firecall
Just to add, I am mainly an iPhone user. But I have a Google Pixel 6a for dev and testing reasons.
And Google Gemini for the voice assistant is excellent fun!
Just being able to ask it weird and wonderful whilst on a road trip with the kids is worth the cost of a cheap Pixel phone alone!
jofzar
I have to seriously disagree on it for the "assistant" part. It is so terrible vs Google assistant.
There have been two really bad experiences that I had which boggled my mind.
These are transcribed because these were so bad I took a screenshot.
Example 1: "set an alarm for 15 minutes"
> Gemini sets the alarm for 1:15pm
"I want that to be 50 minutes"
> "you can change the duration of alarms in the clock app"
Example 2:
"what the temperature today"
> It is currently 5 degrees Celsius
- It was October in Sydney, the temperature was 22c with a low of 12c.....
morsch
Gemini never sets alarms for me and always points me to the app. Trying to call people is a crap shoot. Presumably there are settings for this somewhere, but there are like fifty sharing settings in four different places and it's impossible to know which apply to the old assistant or Gemini or both or just on the lock screen or to connected devices or... It's a mess.
It's even worse, when I tell it to set a timer now, it'll happily tell me it's been set -- but it hasn't (nothing in the app and I waited, to be sure). This is all reproducible and on a Pixel 8.
arcanemachiner
Try setting a "timer" for 15 minutes instead of an "alarm".
Not sure if this is a regional dialect thing, but in North America, a timer has a duration, but an alarm is set for a specific time, which would possibly explain the confusion.
gundmc
> October in Sydney
These sound like fairly dated anecdotes. I don't doubt them at all - I had similar horror stories. I disabled Gemini on my phone in order to keep the old assistant for a long time, but it really has gotten a lot better in the last few months.
aprilthird2021
Yeah I find myself actually talking to the Gemini assistant like I never have to any other
acheron
Is this an example of how to integrate ads into an AI response?
remoquete
Could be, if an AI actually wrote it.
SkyMarshal
Sounds like a generic AI response, though maybe I'm being too harsh, the AI response would probably be longer and more detailed. So, you want to tell us why it's so much better than Claude?
singhrac
Can you choose a model via the Gemini app? I can on the webapp (finally), but on the mobile app it won’t let me choose.
Using Gemini via Google Workspace.
throwup238
2.5 Pro Experimental and Deep Research showed up in the Gemini app for me today days after it was available on web so it seems to be different roll outs for different platforms.
remoquete
You can. Then again, I'm paying.
akkad33
> Google did it again.
This is quite vague. What did they do
remoquete
Ensure I only use them. It happened with search first, then mobile (Pixel), now it's LLMs.
ksec
At this point something happened to Google, may be Open AI? And it seems everything is finally moving.
Unfortunately Pixel is still not available as widely as iPhone. They still need to work on its hardware as well as distribution.
The only thing I dislike is their AOM only or anti JPEG XL.
weinzierl
Out of interest: Using Gemini on your phone, integrated and all, obviously reduces friction, but would you say convenience is the only reason for you not going back or do you feel Gemini is a real improvement as well?
remoquete
The improvement in Gemini 2.5 is real, but I wouldn't say it's miles away from Claude 3.7. The fact that web browsing still isn't in Claude in Europe bothered me. It's many little things.
tkgally
> Gemini 2.5 Pro in Deep Research mode is twice as good as OpenAI’s Deep Research
That matches my impression. For the past month or two, I have been running informal side-by-side tests of the Deep Research products from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google. OpenAI was clearly winning—more complete and incisive, and no hallucinated sources that I noticed.
That changed a few days ago, when Google switched their Deep Research over to Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental. While OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s reports are still pretty good, Google’s usually seem deeper, more complete, and more incisive.
My prompting technique, by the way, is to first explain to a regular model the problem I’m interested in and ask it to write a full prompt that can be given to a reasoning LLM that can search the web. I check the suggested prompt, make a change or two, and then feed it to the Deep Research models.
One thing I’ve been playing with is asking for reports that discuss and connect three disparate topics. Below are the reports that the three Deep Research models gave me just now on surrealism, Freudian dream theory, and AI image prompt engineering. Deciding which is best is left as an exercise to the reader.
OpenAI:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67fa21eb-18a4-8011-9a97-9f8b051ad3...
Google:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10mF_qThVcoJ5ouPMW-xKg7Cy...
Perplexity:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/subject-analytical-report-i...
siva7
Matches also my experience that openai fell behind with their deep search product. And that deep search is basically the top tier benchmark for what professionals are willing to pay. So why should i shell out 200 dollar for an openai subscription when google gives me a better top-tier product for 1/10th of the price openai or anthropic are asking. Although i assume google is just more willing to burn cash in order to not let openai take more market share which would get them later on soo more expensive (e.g. iphone market share, also classic microsoft strategy).
SkyMarshal
It may actually be affordable for Google to charge $20 vs OAI's $200. Google already has an extensive datacenter operation and infrastructure that they're amortizing across many products and services. AI requires significant additions to it, of course, but their economy of scale may make a low monthly sub price viable.
stafferxrr
Great stuff. My prompts are falling behind after seeing what you are doing here.
I find OpenAI annoying at this point that it doesn't output a pdf easily like Perplexity. The best stuff I have found has been in the Perplexity references also.
Google outputting a whole doc is really great. I am just about to dig into Gemini 2.5 Pro in Deep Research for the first time.
tkgally
> My prompts are falling behind....
If you haven’t already, you might want to try metaprompting, that is, having a model write the prompt for you. These days, I usually dictate my metaprompts through a STT app, which saves me a lot of time. A metaprompt I gave to Claude earlier today is at [1]. It’s sloppy and has some transcription errors, but, as you can see, Claude wrote a complete, well-organized prompt that produced really good results from Gemini Deep Research [2]. (I notice now, though, that the report is truncated at the end.)
[1] https://claude.ai/share/94982d9d-b580-496f-b725-786f72b15956
[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1np5xdXuely7cxFMlkQm0lQ4j...
ViktorRay
Thanks for sharing your prompting technique. I will try to use that technique in the future as well.
jay_kyburz
> "produce a comprehensive analytical report exploring the conceptual and methodological intersections between Surrealist art techniques, Freudian dream analysis, and the practice of prompt engineering for AI image generation models (such as DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion)."
Haha, what a perfect project for AI.
antirez
Gemini 2.5 pro is as powerful as everybody says. I still also use Claude Sonnet 3.7 only because the Gemini web UI has issues... (Imagine creating the best AI and then not allowing to attach Python or C files if not renamed .txt) but the way the model is better than anyone else is a "that's another league" experience. They have the biggest search engine and YouTube to leverage the power of the AI they are developing. At this point I believe too that they are likely to win the race.
torginus
Will there be a winner at all? Perhaps it's going to be like cars where there are dozens of world class manufacturers, or like Linux, where there's just one thing, but its free and impossible to monetize directly.
gwd
Linux works because network effects pressure everyone to upstream their changes. There's no such upstreaming possible with the open-weight models, and new sets of base weights can only be generated with millions of dollars of compute. Companies could conceivably collaborate on architectures and data sets, but with the amount of compute and data involved, only a handful of organizations would ever have the resources to be able to contribute.
Unlike Linux, which was started by a cranky Finn on his home computer, and can still be built and improved by anyone who can afford a Raspberry Pi.
dtquad
>Linux, where there's just one thing, but its free and impossible to monetize directly
Redhat and SUSE are multi-billion dollar Linux distro companies.
emilsedgh
Not by selling Linux, but providing support.
RyanHamilton
I thought for cars it was because certain countries decided at state level that car making was strategically their thing? That combined with fashion, meaning some percentage of people want different looking cars.
discordance
Instead of renaming files to .txt, you should try Gemini 2.5 pro through OpenRouter with roo, Cline or using Github Copilot. I've been testing GH Copilot [0] and it's been working really well.
0: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-04-11-copilot-chat-users-...
jstummbillig
I am not even sure how to use Gemini 2.5 pro ergonomically right now. Cursor and Windsurf both obviously have issues, probably optimized too much around Claude, but what else is there?
Is everyone copy pasting into the Google AI studio or what?
mrshu
One option would be https://geminicodes.co/ -- a CLI tool with Claude Code-like aesthetics.
It is a hobbyist weekend project though, the experience with Aider or ra-aid might be much better.
jerrygenser
Try aider.chat - it is a cli you can add files for context and it will make edits to the code directly via a commit.
flaviolivolsi
Try Gemini 2.5 Pro in Roo Code and never look back
eru
> At this point I believe too that they are likely to win the race.
I'm not so sure.
In the mid 2010s they looked like they were ahead of everyone else in the AI race, too. Remember the (well-deserved!) spectacle around AlphaGo? Then they lost steam for a while.
So I wouldn't bet that any momentary lead will last.
paradite
You can bypass this problem by embedding relevant source code files directly in the prompt itself.
I built a desktop GUI tool called 16x Prompt that help you do it: https://prompt.16x.engineer/
BillyTheKing
apart from those weird file attach issues I actually think they've got a much better UI than anthropic as well - much much snappier even with extremely long chats (in addition to much higher limits obviously, totally different league). I love using it
eru
It's really annoying that in their Android app, Gemini doesn't automatically scroll to the bottom of a long chat when you re-open it.
Otherwise, I like their 2.5 model, too.
thorax
In AI Studio, it seemed to let me upload pretty much any file and tokenize it without renaming, FWIW
nolist_policy
On Chrome you can share your whole Project directory to Gemini. I think it uses the File System Access api which Firefox doesn't support.
porphyra
As long as Google continues to hamstring themselves with censorship for no reason, I can't use their products. The other day I asked gemini 2.5 pro "which british ceo said that his company's products were bad" and the response was
> I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.
https://g.co/gemini/share/cb3afc3e7f78
Chatgpt 4o correctly identified the guy as Ratner and provided the relevant quotes.
Tiktaalik
It seems more likely just a weird bug considering that I can't understand at all why this topic would be considered controversial or censure worthy.
(casually googling this same line just now does reveal an AI suggestion with the correct answer)
porphyra
I could even see Gemini 2.5 googling the right things and "thinking" about Gerald Ratner before it abruptly censored itself at the last moment.
uejfiweun
I wouldn't bother with the official Gemini app. I don't know why Google even bothers with it at this point. I only interact with 2.5 through AI studio and it's great through that interface.
flexie
Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?
Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Google, even if Google has more AI talents and scores better on tests.
And isn't it good? Who wants a world where the same handful of companies dominate all tech?
uncomplexity_
fair call but
1. unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds
2. unlike openai, google already has the distribution figured out on both software and hardware
google is like an aircraft carrier that takes so fucking long to steer, but once done steering its entire armada will wipe you the fuck out (at least on the top 20% features for 80% use case)
anthropic already especialized for coding, openai seems to be steering towards intimacy, i guess they both got the memo that they need to specialize
riku_iki
> unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds
this can quickly change in several quarters, if users decide to leave google search, then all google org/infra complexity will play very badly against them
uejfiweun
I really don't think this is a likely outcome in the 'several quarters' timeframe. The world just spent 2.5 decades going onto Google. There are so many small business owners out there who hate technology... so many old people who took years just to learn how to Google... so many ingrained behaviors of just Googling things... outside of the vocal tech crowd I think it's exceedingly unlikely that users stop using Google en masse.
danpalmer
> Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI … ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet
And Google is #1 and #2, with search and YouTube. Distribution is a huge part of the problem and they’ve got some great distribution options.
neuderrek
Regular people is not where the money is. For example, I get Gemini as part of my employer’s Google Workspace subscription, and as it is now decent enough, have no need to use anything else.
ruuda
I'm trying Imagen 3 to add pictures to a presentation in Google Slides, and it's making such basic mistakes that I thought image models weren't making any more by now. I tried for half an hour to prompt it into generating an illustration of a Thinkpad facing with the back to the viewer, so the keyboard is not visible. It couldn't do it, it would always make the keyboard face towards the viewer. Or you ask for an illustration of an animal pointing a finger, and it gives it an additional arm. Meanwhile you ask OpenAI to ghiblify a picture while changing the setting and adding 5 other things, and it absolutely nails it.
vunderba
From my comparison tests focusing on prompt adherence, I would agree 4o edges out Imagen3 as long as speed is not a concern.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net
If Imagen3 had the multimodal features that 4o had, it would certainly put it closer to 4o, but being able to instructively change an image (instruct pix2pix style) is incredibly powerful.
It's crazy how far GenAI for imagery has come. Just few short years ago, you would have struggled just to get three colored cubes stacked on top of each other in a specific order SHRDLU style. Now? You can prompt for a specific four-pane comic strip and have it reasonably follow your directives.
boznz
I thought it was just me. A few hours ago Gemini told me "As a language model, I'm not able to assist you with that." This was after generating an image a few minutes earlier. I think the copy/paste buffer pulled in some old source files I had attached a few days earlier (no idea how) because under the "sources and related content" it now showed two files Gemini is obviously calling its brother imagen for offloading the image generation, which is smart I guess if it works
Hikikomori
Can Gemini 2.5 pro generate images? It only describes them for me.
boznz
I'm using 2.0 Flash and if I ask it, it says yes it can, but it does seem hit and miss as above.
remoquete
Image generation is extremely good in GPT now. Claude's edge is UX. But I doubt Google won't catch up on both fronts. It has the technology and manpower.
As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. The whole time that I was at OpenAI until now GOOG has been the only individual stock that I've been holding. Despite the threat to their search business I think they'll bounce back because they have a lot of cards to play. OpenAI is an annoyance for Google, because they are willing to burn money to get users. Google can't as easily burn money, since they already have billions of users, but also they are a public company and have to answer to investors. But I doubt if OpenAI investors would sign up to give more money to be burned in a year. Google just needs to ease off on the red tape and make their innovations available to users as fast as they can. (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)