51–60 of 851 posts
But I will admit, Gemini Pro 2.5 is a legit good model. So, hats off for that.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
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…
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.
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.
F500/government are conservative and tend to stick with the vendors they know, which is why Azure has gained so much traction despite being worse than AWS & GCP pretty much across the board. Trust in handling data doesn't really come into this; if anything Google has a very strong reputation for security.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
I wonder if your utilities is disconnected, because it's the same for the alarm
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?
If anything I think their revenue is still growing by double figures (?) which is insane considering we're decades and billions of users into the business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Then there is data that I put into a Google service like drive or cloud which genuinely is probably the single safest consumer option I know of in 2025.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.) Please do.
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.