Google is winning on every AI front • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#11

Post by glacier5674 » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:14 AM UTC

If you search for Shockmaster, the AI Overview you get is as follows:

> Fred Alex Ottman, a retired American professional wrestler, is known for his WWF personas "Tugboat" and "Typhoon". He also wrestled as "Big Steel Man" and "Big Bubba" before joining the WWF in 1989. Ottman wrestled for the WWF from 1989–1993, where he was a key ally of Hulk Hogan. He later wrestled in World Championship Wrestling as "The Shockmaster", a character known for raising his fist and making a "toot-toot" sound.

Which is obviously false. The "toot-toot" was part of his gimmick as Tugboat, while the Shockmaster gimmick is known for its notoriously botched reveal.

Point being, Google is losing on the "telling one early 90s wrestling gimmick from another" AI front.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#12

Post by ruuda » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:15 AM UTC

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.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#13

Post by remoquete » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:17 AM UTC

ruuda wrote: post #12

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 illu…

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.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#14

Post by GeneralMayhem » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:18 AM UTC

suddenexample wrote: post #8

throwaway519 wrote: post #2

It isn't when considering Google's brand has (long) lost trust in how it hanles data. This is especially true with larger companies, F500 type brands, who tend to avoid Google for infra as do governments.

Weird - it's hard to beat widespread online narratives, but as someone who worked at Google there's no company I'd trust more with the "handling" part of my data. There's no doubt that on device is always a more private option, but if you've decided to keep data in the cloud, then Google is probably one of the most secure options you could choose.

Same, as another former Googler. I worked on a team that had a relatively large amount of data access, and the amount of protection in place - technical and procedural, preventative and remedial - made me extremely comfortable giving Google basically all of my personal data, knowing that only the bare minimum would ever be looked at, and even then securely and in an anonymized or (usually) aggregated format.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#15

Post by torginus » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:23 AM UTC

This reads like sports commentary.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#16

Post by adgjlsfhk1 » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #14

suddenexample wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird - it's hard to beat widespread online narratives, but as someone who worked at Google there's no company I'd trust more with the "handling" part of my data. There's no doubt that on device is always a more private option, but if you've decided to keep data in the cloud, then Google is probably one of the most secure options you could choose.

Same, as another former Googler. I worked on a team that had a relatively large amount of data access, and the amount of protection in place - technical and procedural, preventative and remedial - made me extremely comfortable giving Google basically all of my personal data, knowing that only the bare minimum would ever be looked at, and even then securely and in an anonymized or (usually) aggregated format.

as an outsider, Google is one of the companies I trust the most to prevent unintended leaks of my data, but also one of the ones I trust with my data least.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#17

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:26 AM UTC

oezi wrote: post #7

Their technical progress is indeed impressive. And their price dumping of 2.5 Pro for free will have moved a lot of technical users. The key question is if the can stop the decline in search or pivot their revenue streams to Gemini.

Is there really a decline in web searches or in Google's usage vs competitors? Seems like one of those greatly exaggerated rumors?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#18

Post by boznz » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:27 AM UTC

ruuda wrote: post #12

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 illu…

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

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#19

Post by glimshe » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:28 AM UTC

Gemini Pro 2.5 is fantastic. I'm anti Google and a long time ChatGPT user. I use it for text review and research and it's well ahead the competition. Let's see how long they last giving it for free.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#20

Post by noosphr » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 6:29 AM UTC

thunderbird120 wrote: post #10

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 sca…

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.