OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race • Hacker News Board

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

#831

Post by deaux » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

curioussquirrel wrote: post #673

This is probably not a core concern for most HN readers, but at work we do multilingual testing for synthetic text data generation and natural language processing. Emphasis on multilingual. Gemini has made some serious leaps from 1.5 to 2.5 and now 3.0, and is actually proficient in languages that other models can only dream of. On the other hand, GPT-5 has a really mixed performance in a lot of categories.

This goes way back. Even back in the 1.5 days it was the best multilingual model, when HN still treated it as entirely uncompetitive all-around. Just because, exactly as you're saying, it's not a core concern of people here. The two fields Gemini models have been number one at for years now are A. multilinguality B. image understanding. At no point since the release of Gemini 1.5 Pro way back has any Anthropic or OpenAI model done performed better at either.

Even those who have zero experience with different (human) languages could've known this if they liked, from the fact that on the LMArena leaderboards, Gemini models have consistently ranked much higher in non-English languages than in English. This gap has actually shrunk a lot over time! In the 1.5 Pro days this advantage was huge, it would be like 10th in English and 2nd in many other languages.

Nevertheless, it still depends on the specific language you're targeting. Gemini isn't the winner on every single one of them. If you're only going to choose one model for use with many languages, it should be Gemini. But if the set of languages isn't too large, optimizing model selection per language is worth it.

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

#832

Post by hu3 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

deaux wrote: post #825

hodgehog11 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really fascinating. Every real world use case I've tried on Gemini (especially math-related) absolutely slaughtered the performance of ChatGPT in speed and quality, not even close. As an Android user, the Gemini app is also far superior, since the ChatGPT app still doesn't properly display math equations, among plenty of other bugs.

You're using paid ChatGPT, set to 5.1 with Thinking?

Not op but yes and yes.

I pay for Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT.

Gemini 3 replaced ChatGPT for me and if things don't change I'll cancel ChatGPT for lack of usefulness.

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

#833

Post by olalonde » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

They must be really glad to have so much competition then.

> If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.

I wonder if OpenAI will start assisting Google now?

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

#834

Post by OccamsMirror » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #802

qdotme wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially, yes, they haven’t done deep software. Netflix probably comes closest amongst FAANG. Google, Meta, Amazon do “shallow and broad” software. They are quite fast at capturing new markets swiftly, they frequently repackage OpenSource core and add the large amount of business logic to make it work, but essentially follow the market cycles - they hire and layoff on a few year cycle, and the people who work ther…

But the first example sigmoid10 gave of a company that can't do software was Microsoft .

Yeah I'm not convinced Microsoft can do software anymore. I think they're a shambling mess of a zombie software company with enough market entropy to keep going for a long time.

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

#835

Post by protimewaster » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

bgirard wrote: post #290

stack_framer wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can generate $20 billion in ARR this year too! I just need you to give me $100 billion and allow me to sell each of your dollars for 0.2 dollars.

It's a fun trope to repeat but that's not what OpenAI is doing. I get a ton of value from ChatGPT and Codex from my subscription. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. They're not paying me to use it. They are generating output that is very valuable to me. Much more than my subscription cost. I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my ho…

But why will this continue to be true in the future if OpenAI models aren't as good as alternative models?

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

#836

Post by throwaway31131 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

threeducks wrote: post #757

throwaway31131 wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

Interesting. Thanks for the suggestions.

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

#837

Post by ActionHank » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #833

> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. They must be really glad to have so much competition then. > If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. I wonder if OpenAI will start assisting Google now…

This will be the premise under which MS will acquire OAI talent after all the money has disappeared.

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

#838

Post by pllbnk » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #531

danielodievich wrote: post #469

Last week there we had a customer request that landed in our support on a feature that I partially wrote and wrote a pile of public documentation on. Support engineer ran customer query through Claude (trained on our public and internal docs) and it very, very confidently made a bunch of stuff up in the response. It was quite plausible sounding and it would have been great if it worked that way, but it didn't. While…

How is that comment relevant to this story about OpenAI's response to perceptions that Google has gained in market share?

It's relevant because it shows models haven't improved as much as the companies delivering them would like you to believe no matter what mode (or code) they work under. Developers are quickly transforming from code writers to code readers and the good ones feel demoralized knowing that they could do it better themselves but are instead forced to read gibberish produced by a machine in the volume of dozens of lines per second. Moreover, when they are reviewing that gibberish and it doesn't make sense, even if they provide arguments, that same gibberish-producing machine can, in a matter of seconds, write counter-arguments that look convincing but lack any kind of substance for those who understand and try to read it.

Edit: I am saying it as a developer who is using LLMs for coding, so I feel that I can constructively criticize them. Also, sometimes the code actually works when I put enough effort to describe what I expect; I guess I could just write the code myself but the problem is that I don't know which way it will result in a quicker delivery.

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

#839

Post by wahnfrieden » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

manmal wrote: post #691

wahnfrieden wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes these are horrible pain points. I can only hope Apple improves this stuff if it's true that they're adding MCP support throughout the OS which should require better multi-agent handling You can use worktrees to have multiple copies building or testing at once I'm a solo dev so I rarely use some git features like rebase. I work out of trunk only without branches (if I need a branch, I use a feature flag). So I can…

Yes, that makes sense to me. I cannot really put builds in a queue because I have very fine-grained updates that I tell my agents so they do need the direct feedback to check what they have just done actually works, or they will interfere with each other’s work. I do strive to use Mac OS targets because those are easier to deal with than a simulator, especially when you use Bluetooth stuff and you get direct access t…

I found Codex got much better (and with some AGENTS.md context about it) at ignoring unrelated changes from other agents in the same repo. But making worktrees easier to spin up and integrate back in might be a better approach for you.

When the build fails (rather than functional failure), most of the time I like to give the failure to a brand new agent to fix rather than waste context on the original agent resolving it, now that they're good at picking up on those changes. Wastes less precious context on the main task, and makes it easier to not worry about which agent addresses which build failures.

And then for individual agents checking their own work, I rely on them inspecting test or simulator/app results. This works best if agents don't break tests outside the area they're working in. I try to avoid having parallel agents working on similar things in the same tree.

I agree on the Mac target ease. Especially also if you have web views.

Orgs need to adapt to this new world too. The old way of forcing devs generally to work on only one task at a time to completion doesn't make as much sense anymore even from the perspective of the strictest of lean principles. That'll be my challenge to figure out and help educate that transformation if I want to productize this.

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

#840

Post by dieortin » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #615

p1necone wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every so often I try out a GPT model for coding again, and manage to get tricked by the very sparse conversation style into thinking it's great for a couple of days (when it says nothing and then finishes producing code with a 'I did x, y and z' with no stupid 'you're absolutely' right sucking up and it works, it feels very good). But I always realize it's just smoke and mirrors - the actual quality of the code and t…

At this point you are now forced to use the "AI"s as code search tools--and it annoys me to no end. The problem is that the "AI"s can cough up code examples based upon proprietary codebases that you, as an individual, have no access to. That creates a significant quality differential between coders who only use publicly available search (Google, Github, etc.) vs those who use "AI" systems.

How would the AIs have access to proprietary codebases?