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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

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Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#281

Post by amelius »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #166
netcan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mo…

>It's be a >$10bn business already. But not profitable yet.

The demand is there. People are already becoming addicted to this stuff.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#282

Post by fragmede »

dash2 wrote: post #52
noosphr wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

They can just plug the google.com web page into their AI. They already do that.

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?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#283

Post by neuroelectron »

giorgioz wrote: post #45

No it's not obvious at all Google is winning AI on every front. There is few stuff Google is systemically behind: 1) UX 2) product and use case innovation I just open Google Gemini Android app and asked to generate a JS script with Gemini 2 Flash and did the same with ChatGPT. Gemini did not highlighted with colors the code. ChatGPT did highlighted with colors the code. Colors in code are extremely useful to grok the…

This is very simply a bunch of minor stuff Googlites feel like they're above implementing. They would rather let you implement that and you both get a cut.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#284

Post by naijaboiler »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #207
netcan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mo…

> a >$10bn business 'Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."' ¹ Until something makes a profit it's a charity or predatory monopoly-in-waiting.² ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

Or a hobby

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#285

Post by fragmede »

djtango wrote: post #222
michaelt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

This is a good anecdote and it reminds me of how Sony had cloud architecture/digital distribution, a music label, movie studio, mobile phones, music players, speakers, tvs, laptops, mobile apps... and totally missed out on building Spotify or Netflix. I do think Google is a little different to Kodak however; their scale and influence is on another level. GSuite, Cloud, YouTube and Android are pretty huge diversificat…

It goes to internal corporate culture, and what happens to you when you point out an uncomfortable truth. Do we shoot the messenger, or heed her warnings and pivot the hopefully not Titanic? RIM/Blackberry didn't manage to avoid it either.

People like to believe CEOs aren't worth their pay package, and sometimes they're not. But a look at a couple of their failures and a different CEO of Kodak wouldn't have had what happened happen, makes me think that sometimes, some of them do deserve that.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#287

Post by spwa4 »

krackers wrote: post #33
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…

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.

... 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.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#288

Post by stafferxrr »

tkgally wrote: post #99

> 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…

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.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#290

Post by mike_hearn »

imiric wrote: post #255
mike_hearn wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recommendation…

> 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 pop…

There's no reason why having an LLM be sly or misleading would be more profitable. Too many people try to make advertising a moral issue when it's not, and it sounds like you're falling into that trap.

An ideal answer for a query like "Where can I take my wife for a date this weekend?" would be something like,

> Here are some events I found ... . Based on our prior conversations, sounds like the third might be the best fit, want me to book it for you?

To get that you need ads. If you ask ChatGPT such a question currently it'll either search the web (and thus see ads anyway) or it'll give boring generic text that's found in its training set. You really want to see images, prices, locations and so on for such a query not, "maybe she'd like the movies". And there are no good ranking signals for many kinds of commercial query: LLM training will give a long-since stale or hallucinated answer at worst, some semi-random answer at best, and algorithms like PageRank hardly work for most commercial queries.

HN has always been very naive about this topic but briefly: people like advertising done well and targeted ads are even better. One of Google's longest running experiments was a holdback where some small percentage of users never saw ads, and they used Google less than users who did. The ad-free search gave worse answers overall.

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