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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

331–340 of 851 posts

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time for my next round of Evals then. I had a 40 PR coding streak last weekend with mostly o3-mini-pro, will test the latest 2.5 now.

PR = pull request? So every bit of garbage from the LLM, over and over, resulted in an individual pull request? Why not just do one when your branch is finally right?

I would assume they don't like that style, like if they needed to see a specific diff and make changes or remove a commit outright.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#332
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

The same was true for Web browsers in 2002, yet MS controlled 95% of the access to the web thanks to that bundling and no other "good enough" competitors until Firefox came along a few years later and took 30% from them giving Google an in to take the whole game with Chrome a few years later.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#333

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…

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 NVID…

They go back about 11 years.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The strategy worked, Netscape is no more. Eventually Google did the same to Microsoft though. I wonder if any lessons can be taken from the browser wars to how things will play out with AI models.

Remember Google tried to play this trick with ChromeOS?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#335
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.

Well, they said it is a $10B industry. Not sure how they measure it, but it counts for something, I suppose.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#336
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.

I think you may be underestimating it.

At this point in college, LLMs are everywhere. It's completely dominating history/english/mass comm fields with respect to writing papers.

Anecdotally all of my working non-tech friends use chatgpt daily.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#337
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> F500/government are conservative and tend to stick with the vendors they know, which is why Azure has gained so much traction Outcome is the same, but being "conservative" isn't the real reason. Adding a vendor requires compliance work, process, finance etc that it's just effort. 99% of medium-large companies use Microsoft in some form so Azure can skip all of that to some extent.

That is what he meant with conservative, ie trying to not do new things because it takes more work to change.

> ie trying to not do new things because it takes more work to change

That's not what the word conservative means, not by the dictionary or even politically.

Conservative is the averse to change or to hold traditional values without logic. It's more like a type of fear. Even if the change was easy or have 0 cost, a conservative entity won't do it.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#338
post #111

I feel the article presents the data selectively in some places. Two examples: * The article compares Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental to DeepSeek-R1 in accuracy benchmarks. Then, when the comparison becomes about cost, it compares Gemini 2.0 Flash to DeepSeek-R1. * In throughput numbers, DeepSeek-R1 is quoted at 24 tok/s. There are half a dozen providers, who give you easily 100+ tok/s and at scale. There's no doubt that…

Orthogonal — the remarkable thing about DeepSeek-R1 seems to me is that it shows how easy it in fact is to create an LLM. A quantitative hedge fund was able to throw money and develop a competitive LLM. Maybe that somewhat reveals that it's just a "man behind the curtain."

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#339

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…

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.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

1/2 kW/minute costs about $0.001 so you technically could make a profit at that rate. The real problem is the GPU cost - a $20k GPU amortized over five years costs $0.046 per second. :)
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