Google is winning on every AI front • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#341

Post by asadotzler » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #162

ghurtado wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undercutting Netscape’s browser It almost sounds like you're saying that Netscape wasn't free, and I'm pretty sure it was always free, before and after Microsoft Explorer

> Netscape, in contrast, sells the consumer version of Navigator for a suggested price of $49. Users can download a free evaluation copy from the Internet, but it expires in 90 days and does not include technical support. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/19/business/netscape-moves-t...

90% of Netscape users were free users and by late 1997, less than two years after the IPO and massive user growth, it was free to all because of MS's bundling threat. That didn't help. By 2002, MS owned 95% of access to the web. No one has ever reached even close to first mover Netscape or cheater bundled IE since, with the far superior non-profit Firefox managing almost 30% and Chrome from the biggest web player in history sitting "only" at about 65%.

Bundling a "good enough" products can do a lot, including take you from near zero to overwhelmingly dominant in 5 years, as MS did.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#342

Post by bookofjoe » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 12:58 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #107

codelord wrote: post #31

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free an…

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than trad…

If possible watch Episode 1 of Season 7 of "Black Mirror."

>... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.

What if people were the chatbots?

https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#343

Post by remoquete » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:02 PM UTC

acheron wrote: post #325

remoquete wrote: post #5

I was a loyal Claude user until I decided to try Gemini 2.5. "After all", I thought, "I already use a Pixel phone, so it's integrated with Android. And with Google Drive. And I can get it through my Google One subscription." And now that I'm on it, I don't think I'm going back. Google did it again.

Is this an example of how to integrate ads into an AI response?

Could be, if an AI actually wrote it.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#344

Post by foota » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:03 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #294

thunderbird120 wrote: post #10

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…

Haven't Nvidia published roughly as many chip designs in the same period?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#345

Post by DisjointedHunt » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

Philpax wrote: post #234

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #169

Not on cars, not in robotics, not in commercially deployed AI, not in enterprise investments in their cloud business. They've got immense potential, sure. But to say that they're winning is a bit far from reality. Right now, their Cloud AI offerings to the enterprise are technologically superior to anything else out there from AWS, but guess what? AWS seems to have significantly more %age sales growth in this space w…

I would say they're winning with Waymo: I took a fully autonomous taxi ride in the backseat in SF, and it just worked. No other company can currently do that, despite their promises and hype.

Each Waymo is > $140,000 of customized hardware and is limited to specific cities. Autonomy in commercial vehicles is arguably led by Tesla on coverage, miles driven, ready hardware, cost per mile etc. They’re going to start pushing tests on their consumer fleet, converting them to optionally commercial taxi rides soon with the fleet owner model versus the central provider model. This is scheduled for June in Austin and confirmed to be on schedule.

You can also take fully autonomous bus rides in China right now, even there, for, early reviews, the latest Tesla Autopilot blows everything else out of the water.

I’m not trying to push Tesla alone, but I’m trying to highlight the gap in adoption goals. What is Waymos ambition this year? How much can they ramp their fleet at $140k per unit versus Teslas consumer fleet and upcoming low cost robotaxi with the mass manufacturing improvements further lowering cost per unit?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#346

Post by epolanski » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

retinaros wrote: post #203

epolanski wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know your experience doesn't match mine. NotebookLM by Google is in a class of its own in the use case of "provide documents and ask a chat or questions about them" for personal use. ChatGPT and Claude are nowhere near. ChatGPT uses RAG so it "understands" less about the topic and sometimes hallucinate. When it comes to coding Claude 3.5/3.7 embedded in Cursor or stand alone kept giving better results in real…

in what world notebookLM isnt rag as well?

I thought it leveraged a much larger context over classical rag.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#347

Post by fernandopj » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

ximeng wrote: post #308

netcan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term. Meanwhile... making mo…

Google aren’t interested in <1bn USD businesses, so it’s hard for them to build anything new as it’s pretty guaranteed to be smaller than that at first. The business equivalent of the danger of a comfortable salaried job.

Google is very good at recognizing existential threats. iOS were that to them and they built Android, including hardware, a novelty for them, even faster than mobile incumbents at the time.

They're more than willing to expand their moat around AI even if that means multiple unprofitable business for years.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#348

Post by Mistletoe » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #137

codelord wrote: post #31

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free an…

> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term. Meanwhile... making mo…

Keep in mind you are talking to someone that worked at OpenAI and surely knows more of how the sausage is made and how the books look than you do?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#349

Post by tkgally » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

stafferxrr wrote: post #288

tkgally wrote: post #99

> Gemini 2.5 Pro in Deep Research mode is twice as good as OpenAI’s Deep Research That matches my impression. For the past month or two, I have been running informal side-by-side tests of the Deep Research products from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google. OpenAI was clearly winning—more complete and incisive, and no hallucinated sources that I noticed. That changed a few days ago, when Google switched their Deep Research…

Great stuff. My prompts are falling behind after seeing what you are doing here. I find OpenAI annoying at this point that it doesn't output a pdf easily like Perplexity. The best stuff I have found has been in the Perplexity references also. Google outputting a whole doc is really great. I am just about to dig into Gemini 2.5 Pro in Deep Research for the first time.

> My prompts are falling behind....

If you haven’t already, you might want to try metaprompting, that is, having a model write the prompt for you. These days, I usually dictate my metaprompts through a STT app, which saves me a lot of time. A metaprompt I gave to Claude earlier today is at [1]. It’s sloppy and has some transcription errors, but, as you can see, Claude wrote a complete, well-organized prompt that produced really good results from Gemini Deep Research [2]. (I notice now, though, that the report is truncated at the end.)

[1] https://claude.ai/share/94982d9d-b580-496f-b725-786f72b15956

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1np5xdXuely7cxFMlkQm0lQ4j...

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#350

Post by aeonik » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

rat87 wrote: post #249

silisili wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the same in Gemini. It would refuse to answer mundane questions that none but the most 'enlightened' could find an offensive twist to. This makes it rather unusable as a catch all goto resource, sadly. People are curious by nature. Refusing to answer their questions doesn't squash that, it leads them to potentially less trustworthy sources.

Trying to answer complex questions by making up shit in a confident voice is the worst option. Redirecting to a more trustworthy human source or multiple if needed is much better

I talk to ChatGPT about some controversial things, and it's pretty good at nuance and devils advocate if you ask for it. It's more echo chamber, if you don't, or rather extreme principle of charity, which might be a good thing.