The author mentioned AlphaGo and Alpha Zero without mentioning OpenAI gym and OpenAI Five.
Those products show OpenAI was innovating and leading in RL at that stage around 2017 to 2019.
Google is winning on every AI front
121–130 of 851 posts
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#122Google 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.
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…
> 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.)
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#123Most analysts don't differentiate between: 1) AI research as science and 2) Productization and engineering that science into something to sell. While Google DeepMind focused on things that won Hassabis and Jumper Nobel prize in Chemistry, OpenAI took transformers architecture (Google researchers invented), built the first big model, and engineered it into a product. Google has the best researchers, and does most rese…
No, that's not at all obvious because building products for any given market is a radically different competency than research, and the kind of basic, fundamental research that tends to win Nobels is actually a competency a step further removed from product than normal corporate R&D; outside of Google-scale orgs, it's mostly (whether or not of Nobel quality) done at universities with both product-oriented research and actual productization done in industry, often based largely on published academic results, but generally with no strong direct connection between the people doing the basic research and the people winning the competition for successful commercial products.
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#124Gemini 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.…
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/
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#125Just a fun I had with Gemini 2.5 pro. I asked him to create a code for a toolchain that uses some ai at a point and it stubbornly used OpenAI api and refused to generate code using Gemini apis instead. Also it said it is model trained by google. Didn't knew its name and when asked to generate code for "youself" defaulted to openai.
Probably sending people to spend money at your competition is not the surefire way to market dominance.
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#126Google 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 Goog…
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.
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#127As 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 an…
> 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 trad…
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".
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#128I have been using all AI tools in my job working for ai startup and none of them are google products. May be I should give it a try, their product positioning is horrible
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 jew…
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.
Re: Google is winning on every AI front
#130May be it's my luck but I found a glaring issue with Gemini 2.5 Pro in AI Studio.
I asked it whether a language feature in Zig was available. It answered yes and proceeded to generate a whole working sample code. I compiled it and got an error. Reported the error and it said the error showed I typed it wrong and asked me to make sure it's typed correctly. Eh?! It's a copy-and-paste. I confirmed again it's wrong. It then said it must be my compiler version was too old. Nope, using the latest. It then said very convincingly that based on its extensively research into the language official documentation, official examples, and release notes, the feature must exist. I asked it to show me the reference materials it used to draw the conclusion. None of links it gave were valid. I told it they were wrong. It gave back another set of links and claimed it had checked the links to make sure they are alive. The links were alive but didn't contain any mention of the feature. I let it know again. It admitted couldn't find the mentioned feature. But it insisted the feature had been merged in a PR. The PR link it gave was unrelated. I let it know. It gave me another 3 PR's and said one mentioned something related so the feature must be in. At the point I gave up.
The issue was that it sounded very convincing and stated "facts" very confidently, with backings to documents and other resources even if they were wrong or irrelevant. Even when told it gave the wrong info, it would double down and made up some BS reference material to back up its claim.