691–700 of 989 posts
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Well at least HN hasn't (yet?) spawned a murderous death cult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
“Reason is the slave of the passions” - Hume
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I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it. Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their…
I hardly use Google search anymore in favor of ChatGPT. It's surely an existential threat. Google has a lot of layers of defense in Android, Chrome, Gmail/Accounts, and a stranglehold on internet ads. But at the center of that is search and search is being replaced by LLMs.
Same here, and I'm generally very skeptical when it comes to AI. It's just that ChatGPT can provide better/more accurate answers, Google seems to have lost the plot. I still use google search when it comes to appending "wiki/wikipedia" to it, i.e. when I use google search just as a redirect to a wikipedia page.
I think there's one weirdly simple reason DeepMind isn't doing as well as OpenAI and Anthropic. I may be wrong on this. OpenAI and Anthropic went from tiny startups to huge companies. As a consequence the stock options/RSU's offered to the employees paid off a far higher percentage ROI than any stock options a DeepMind (and thus Google) employee would get (since Google is already huge). This disincentivizes people wh…
One theory I've been entertaining is that whenever GPT-3.5 came out a lot of people were talking about the "bitter lesson" and how scale was all we really needed to get to AGI. No need for any fancy tricks, just release a larger model trained on more data, by the time we released a hypothetical "GPT-5 sized" model we'd have AGI. Anyway, the actual theory is that Google and Meta have fallen behind because they've been…
Google Gemma disproves this
It's funny seeing the doom and gloom cycles over Google's AI future on HN. Google was basically considered dead business not even a year ago on here. If there is one thing true it's that HN has always had a habit of conflating engineering sentiment with business reality.
Google’s cloud business looks great. I’ve always thought they should have completely focused on cloud - a company full of excellent engineers would always win there.
But its main income stream is advertising, and AI is an existential threat. Google is far behind Anthropic and OpenAI, so right now their advertising business is “default dead”, so to speak.
The company won’t die, but without a radical change in velocity it will be a shadow of its former self.
can anyone with corporate background decipher if that is good for demis or not?
It is good for Demis and Google overall. This is a promotion for Demis and this could be a path for Demis to be CEO of Alphabet in the future in the AI era. Google already invested in Discovery Loop (Jeff Dean, Orol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat's company), so what is happening is still a win in investment terms. The question is about Sundar's future at Google, he is a mobile era CEO at Alphabet and I would ha…
I’d guess Google’s execs are unhappy with the way they’ve been left behind in LLMs.
The position at Anthropic seemed to be that LLMs were not the way forward.
They may prove to be correct over the long term, but commercially that view is “wrong”.
It’s a divide between a research oriented and commercial point of view.
For DeepMind, this is what happens when you take the money. Very rational to do so at the time, but it does have inevitable long term consequences.
For Google, it’s repeating the same mistake they made before: they should be taking the long view and looking beyond the tech we have today to leapfrog their competitors. But tbh I’m not sure such a behemoth can do that (I have no idea how Steve Jobs managed to do that). They’d have been better to reallocate some of the capex to letting Demis do his thing.
Another way of putting it: this is the opposite of “founder mode.”
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It seems Google has to play both offense and defense: competing against frontier labs' models while protecting search and ads. They also have to be mindful of not doing anything that could hurt their own search or ads. That seems harder than a frontier lab just doing offense on both models and search/ads. Having said that, I think Google's moat is still strong with Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome, etc.
> Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome Cloud and gmail, I agree. I don't think YouTube can survive if GenAI keeps going like this. Android, same, but on a different timescale and for different reasons. The Play Store (and all other app stores including Apple's) will also face problems from GenAI making apps (it already replaces my need to buy, but I'm weird and a software dev ("but I repeat myself")). Not sure how…
So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL Combined with no gemini frontier GA relea…
Gemini 3 Pro was legitimately frontier and released 8 1/2 months ago, not 14.