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

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

#921

Post by immibis »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #879
immibis wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we think it won't be worse? If you exclude the circular trading of AI companies from metrics, we're already in a pretty big recession, and that will only get worse if the AI companies collapse.

I’m circumspect that anyone knows how it’ll play out. I think there’s strong evidence a correction is coming, but some talking head is predicting it’s going to be this week every week, and have been for a while. Nobody has convinced me it’s likely to look like the Great Depression yet. I also think the circular dealing fears in particular are overstated. Debt financing that looks like this is common in semicon, and I…

Anything that can't continue forever must eventually stop, but the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent. I don't think there's a problem saying that there will be a crash but it's impossible to know when.

The longer a bubble grows, though, the worse it gets when it pops. According to Fed stats, we might still be postponing most of the crash that was going to happen in 2008.

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

#922

Post by lenkite »

Eggpants wrote: post #870
OccamsMirror wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah the fact they had to resort to forking Chrome because they couldn’t engineer a browser folks wanted to use is pretty telling.

They did engineer a good browser: original Edge with the Chakra JavaScript Engine. It was faster than Google Chrome and had some unique features: a world-best, butter-smooth and customizable epub reader. I loved it for reading - it beat commercial epub readers - and then Nadella took over and said Microsoft is getting rid of it and Edge will move to Chromium and Microsoft will also get rid of Windows phone. Modern Microsoft will be Cloud/AI and Ads. That was so depressing.

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

#923

Post by qdotme »

SR2Z wrote: post #911
qdotme wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I just realize these for what they are - reasonable projects at the exploitation (rather than exploration) stage of any industry. I’d say I have an average CV in the EECS world, but also relatively humble perspective of what is and isn’t bleeding edge. And as the industry expands, the volume „inside” the bleeding edge is exploitation, while the surface is the exploration. Waymo? Maybe; but that’s acquisition and…

> No, I just realize these for what they are - reasonable projects at the exploitation (rather than exploration) stage of any industry. I get that bashing on Google is fun, but TensorFlow was the FIRST modern end-user ML library. JAX, an optimizing backend for it, is in its own league even today. The damn thing is almost ten years old already! Waymo is literally the only truly publicly available robotaxi company. I d…

True, for some definition of first and some definition of modern. I’d say it builds extremely heavily on the works inside XTX (and prior to that, XFactor etc) on general purpose linear algebra tooling, and still doesn’t change the fact that it remains shallow, even including JAX. Google TPUs change this equation a bit, as they are starting to come to fruition; but for them to reach the level of depth of NVDA, or even DEC to SUN, they’d have to actually own it from silicon to apps… and they eventually might. But the bulk of work at Google is narrow end-user projects, and they don’t have (at large) a deep engineering excellence focus.

Waymo is an acquihire from ‘05 DARPA challenges, and I’d say Tesla got there too (but with a much stricter hardware to user stack, which ought to bear fruits)

I’d say Kubernetes would be impressive compared to 1970s mainframes ;) Jokes aside, it’s a neat tool to use crappy PCs as server farms, which was sort of Google’s big insight in 2000s when everyone was buying Sun and dying with it, but that makes it not deep, at least not within Google itself.

But this may change. I think Brin recognizes this during the Code Red, and they start very heavily on building a technical moat since OpenAI was the first credible threat to the user behavior moat.

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

#924

Post by curioussquirrel »

deaux wrote: post #831
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 Ope…

In our previous tests, when it was 1.5 Pro against GPT 4o and Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini wasn't winning in the multilingual race, but it was definitely competitive. 2.5 and 3.0 seems to be big leaps from the 1.5 days. That said, it also depends on the testing methodology; we tested a bunch of use cases mostly to test core linguistic proficiency. Not as much complex tasks in language or cultural knowledge.

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

#925

Post by curioussquirrel »

deaux wrote: post #831
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 Ope…

And regarding specific models - we obviously only tested a few languages, and there are thousands of them in the world. But Gemini seems to lead the pack basically regardless of the language your throw at it. YMMV.

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

#926

Post by sota_pop »

threeducks wrote: post #827
octoberfranklin wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't train the next model by starting with the previous one. A company's ML researchers are constantly improving model architecture. When it's time to train the next model, the "best" architecture is totally different from the last one. So you have to train from scratch (mostly... you can keep some small stuff like the embeddings). The implication here is that they screwed up bigly on the model architecture, and…

I can not say how big ML companies do it, but from personal experience of training vision models, you can absolutely reuse the weights of barely related architectures (add more layers, switch between different normalization layers, switch between separable/full convolution, change activation functions, etc.). Even if the shapes of the weights do not match, just do what you have to do to make them fit (repeat or crop)…

It’s possible the model architecture influences the effectiveness of utilizing pretrained weights. i.e. cnns might be a good fit for this since the first portion is the feature extractor, but you might scrap the decoder and simply retrain that.

Can’t say whether the same would work with Transformer architecture, but I would guess there are some portions that could potentially be reused? (there still exists an encoder/feature extraction portion)

If you’re reusing weights from an existing model, then it seems it becomes more of a “fine-tuning” exercise as opposed to training a novel foundational model.

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

#927

Post by sota_pop »

an0malous wrote: post #176
cmiles8 wrote: post #136

The real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here. Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time. Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.

> for these companies They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow. They might just get a huge government contract instead of an explicit bailout, but they’ll weasel out of this one way or another and these huge circular deals are to ensure that.

I haven’t read in detail, but based on sheer speculation, this may be relevant:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/demo...

Many retirement accounts/managers may already be channeling investment such that 401k accounts are broadly set up to absorb any losses… Could also just be this large piece of tin foil on my head.

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

#928

Post by staticman2 »

curioussquirrel wrote: post #925
deaux wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ope…

And regarding specific models - we obviously only tested a few languages, and there are thousands of them in the world. But Gemini seems to lead the pack basically regardless of the language your throw at it. YMMV.

For translating webnovels My preference is Opus, followed By Gemini, followed by GPT 5.

This is based on informally comparing samples and counting annoyingly big enough to distract the reader mistakes rather than the error rate overall.

GPT 5 seems to be worse at webnovel translation than 4o or 4.1 was, oddly enough.

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

#929

Post by lunias »

twothreeone wrote: post #174

The way I've experienced "Code Red" is mostly as a euphemism for "on-going company-wide lack of focus" and a band-aid for mid-level management having absolutely no clue how to meaningfully make progress, upper management panicking, and ultimately putting engineers and ICs on the spot to bear the brunt of that organizational mess. Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual…

People sure are quick to say, "I hope you get to work with better management". Man, me too, but I find that dismissive of a legitimate concern: There is A LOT of incompetent management, especially in enterprise. The sad truth is that it is often the blind leading the sighted. When I was growing up I thought that the manager was someone with experience doing the job of those they managed, but across jobs I've had, this is the case about 20% of the time.

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

#930

Post by array_key_first »

littlestymaar wrote: post #919
array_key_first wrote: post #906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, again, even if you take every advertiser in the world and shove them in a dungeon and then point a cannon at them and say "give me all the money you have", you won't even have 1/10th the money you need. Everyone is vastly, vastly overestimating advertising. Advertising is a side hustle, because the product is the main hustle.

Yet Google built an empire on advertising money alone, and Facebook became one of the biggest company in the world on that business as well. I think your are the one vastly underestimate advertising.

Yes, and if you take all that money, it's not even 1/10 enough.

Consumers can spend what they can spend. Not even 1 quadrillion dollars in advertising can change that. There is a hard, hard cap to the value of advertisement because of that. It's just how the thing works.

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