Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

theverge.com

751–760 of 960 posts

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this view. I think most people would be happy to use the best models for free in exchange for seeing ads. That's basically what google and many others successfully do for decades.

Because it will degrade experience entirely, and companies always go too far with it. Advertisement online these days is so intrusive it's a slog to browse without some form of adblocker. When the AI starts suggesting products or services without being straight up about it, it's not giving you 'knowledge' it's just feeding you whatever it's been paid to say. If that's what you want, power to you.

Yes I agree (and personally avoid ads where I can with blocking or using paid subscriptions) but many or most people will still accept that deal.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#752
post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about it having the edge, I thought Google video had a worse interface between them at the time. But that point feels eerily relevant anyway: a lot of normal people I see don't care if Claude/Gemini/etc are better models technically, they're comfortable with ChatGPT already. A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.

ChatGPT is losing their brand positioning to Google, Anthropic, and Chinese Open Source Altman knows this and why he called code red. If OpenAI hasn't produce a fully new model in 1.5 years, how much longer can they hang on before people will turn to alternatives that are technically better? How long before they could feasibly put out a new model if they are having issues in pre-training?

They're losing their benchmark lead to those companies. But no chance that your average user is even aware of Anthropic, much less OSS models. The brand is mostly fine IMO, it's the product that needs to catch up.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#753

OpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation. One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable produ…

> with no means of significant revenue generation. OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-...

No, they won't, fake numbers from his arse. The same way ChatGPT does not have 800million users.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#754
post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was more prepared and asked it to improve class by class, and for whatever reasons I got better answers There is a learning curve with all of the LLM tools. It's basically required for everyone to go through the trough of disillusionment when you realize that the vibecoding magic isn't quite real in the way the influencers talk about it. You still have to be involved in the process, steer it in the right directio…

It really depends on what you're building. As an experiment, I started having Claude Code build a real-time strategy game a bit over a week ago, and it's done an amazing job, with me writing no code whatsoever. It's an area with lots of tutorials for code structure etc., and I'm guessing that helps. And so while I've had to read the code and tell it to refactor things, it has managed to do a good job of it with just…

I suspect the meta architecture can also be done autonomously though no one has got there yet, figuring out the right fractal dimension for sub agents and the right prompt context can itself be thought of as a learning problem.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the hardware is actually the easy part. Everyone and their uncle who had some cash have tried by now: Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Huawei, Amazon, Intel - the list goes on and on. But Nvidia is not a chip company. Huang himself said they are mostly a software company. And that is how they were able to build a gigantic moat. Because noone else has even come close on the software side. Google is the only one who has…

Genuine question: given LLMs' inexorable commoditization of software, how soon before NVDA's CUDA moat is breached too? Is CUDA somehow fundamentally different from other kinds of software or firmware?

Current Gen LLMs are not breaching the moat yet.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#756
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-training is just training, it got the name because most models have a post-training stage so to differentiate people call it pre-training. Pre-training: You train on a vast amount of data, as varied and high quality as possible, this will determine the distribution the model can operate with, so LLMs are usually trained on a curated dataset of the whole internet, the output of the pre-training is usually called t…

If pre-training is just training, then how on earth can OpenAI not have "a successful pre-training run"? The word successful indicates that they tried, but failed. It might be me misunderstanding how this works, but I assumed that the training phase was fairly reproducible. You might get different results on each run, do to changes in the input, but not massively so. If OpenAI can't continuously and reliably train ne…

Because success for them doesn't mean it works, it means it works much better than what they currently have. If a 1% improvement comes at the cost of spending 10x more on training and 2x more on inference then you're failing at runs. (numbers out of ass)

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some concrete example of programming problem task GPT fails to solve? Interested, because I’ve been getting pretty good results with different tasks using the Codex.

I posted this example before but academic papers on algorithms often have pseudo code but no actual code. I thought it would be handy to use AI to make the code from the paper so a few months ago I tried to use Claude (not GPT, because I only have access to Claude) to recreate C++ code to implement the algorithms in this paper as practice for me in LLM use and it didn’t go well. https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/…

I just tried it with GPT-5.1-Codex. The compression ratio is not amazing, so not sure if it really worked, but at least it ran without errors.

A few ideas how to make it work for you:

1. You gave a link to a PDF, but you did not describe how you provided the content of the PDF to the model. It might only have read the text with something like pdftotext, which for this PDF results in a garbled mess. It is safer to convert the pages to PNG (e.g. with pdftoppm) and let the model read it from the pages. A prompt like "Transcribe these pages as markdown." should be sufficient. If you can not see what the model did, there is a chance it made things up.

2. You used C++, but Python is much easier to write. You can tell the model to translate the code to C++ once it works in Python.

3. Tell the model to write unit tests to verify that the individual components work as intended.

4. Use Agent Mode and tell the model to print something and to judge whether the output is sensible, so it can debug the code.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#758
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SemiAnalysis said it last week and AFAIK it wasn't denied. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...

That is.... actually a seriously meaty article from a blog I've never heard of. Thanks for the pointer.

This article about them got published just yesterday... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124883

There's a lot of misleading information in what they publish, plagiarism, and I believe some information that wouldn't be possible to get without breaking NDAs

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#759
post #651
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People did say the same thing about Youtube, which was unprofitable and extremely expensive to run in the early years. I remember thinking everyone would leave once ads were added. At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than…

I suspect some of the downvoters hate the idea of ads, which is understandable. But a lot of HN users use gmail, which has the same model. And there are plenty of paid email providers which seem far less popular (I use one). Ads didn't end up being a problem for most people provided they were kept independent of the content itself.

1. Gmail is free

2. I’ve never seen ads on the Gmail webapp (It sure does data collection)

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#760
post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about it having the edge, I thought Google video had a worse interface between them at the time. But that point feels eerily relevant anyway: a lot of normal people I see don't care if Claude/Gemini/etc are better models technically, they're comfortable with ChatGPT already. A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.

ChatGPT is losing their brand positioning to Google, Anthropic, and Chinese Open Source Altman knows this and why he called code red. If OpenAI hasn't produce a fully new model in 1.5 years, how much longer can they hang on before people will turn to alternatives that are technically better? How long before they could feasibly put out a new model if they are having issues in pre-training?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN