Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude is ridiculously expensive and often subject to rate limiting.
lol, and you think Google is going to be less subject limiting? I will pay more to not feed Google.
I said rate limiting, not subject.
Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
351–360 of 512 posts
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Previous Gemini models worked really well for video, and this one can even handle steaming video: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/11/gemini-2/#the-streamin...
Wow this is amazing. It just gave me critique on my bodyweight squat form. But I also found it hard to prompt to tutor in French or Portuguese; the accents were gruesomely bad.
For some reason, the realtime api is using TTS for speech output. Not sure if that's temporary
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#353Did anyone get to play with the native image generation part? In my experience, Imagen 3 was much better than the competition so I'm curious to hear people's take on this one.
Hrm, when I tried to get it to generate an image it said it was using Imagen 3. Not sure what “native” image generation means then.
native audio and image generation won't be in general availability till early next year
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#354Is it better than GPT4o? Does it have an API?
API is accessible via Vertex AI on Google Cloud in preview. I think it's also available in the consumer Gemini Chat.
Also FYI for anyone else, I can't actually see the gemini-2.0-flash-exp list in the model directory for Vertex AI in GCP Console, but passing in google/gemini-2.0-flash-exp to the vertexai Python SDK does actually work.
(you'll probably also need to increase your quotas right away, the default is only 10 requests per minute).
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
With many research areas converging to comparable levels, the most critical piece is arguably vertical integration and forgoing the Nvidia tax. They haven't wielded this advantage as powerfully as possible, but changes here could signal how committed they are to slaying the search cash cow. Nadella deservedly earned acclaim for transitioning Microsoft from the Windows era to cloud and mobile. It will be far more impr…
They have to not get blind sided by Sora, while at the same time fighting the cloud war against MS/Amazon. Weirdly Google is THE AI play. If AI is not set to change everything and truly is a hype cycle, then Google stock withstands and grows. If AI is the real deal, then Google still withstands due to how much bigger the pie will get.
Why is Google THE AI play as you put it? I don't agree or disagree, just wanting to understand your perspective.
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> i don’t think they need to win the on device market. The second Apple comes out with strong on-device AI - and it very much looks like they will - Google will have to respond on Android. They can't just sit and pray that e.g. Samsung makes a competitive chip for this purpose.
I think Apple is uniquely disadvantaged in the AI race to a point people dont realize. They have less training data to use, having famously been focused on privacy for its users and thus having no particular advantage in this space due to not having customer data to train on. They have little to no cloud business, and while they operate a couple of services for their users, they do not have the infrastructure scale t…
For clarity, I was only talking about the hardware side, not the software one. I don't think the models matter too much, by the time the hardware is ready there will be open models that Apple can take and modify to their liking.
Besides, did Anthropic and e.g. Mistral inherently have such troves of data to train on that Apple doesn't? For the last 6 months, Anthropic has had the SOTA model for the average production usecase.
> Google also already has competitive silicon in this space with the Tensor series processors, which are being fabbed at Samsung plants today. There is no sitting and praying necessary on their part as they already compete.
Intel had a much bigger advantage with x86, and look where we are now. I find it hard to believe that creating a good AI chip isn't a much smaller challenge than it was to do Apple Silicon. The upcoming SE uses their in-house 5G modem, another huge hardware achievement that no one else has been able to do.
With that in mind, how can you bet against Apple when it comes to designing chips at this point? It's not like Amazon et al aren't producing their own AI chips too. Let alone all of the startups like Cerebras. That indicates the moat and barriers are likely much lower than Apple Slicion or the 5G modem.
If I'm talking nonsense, do correct me.
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree - another way you could phrase this is that Google is presbyopic. They're very capable of thinking long-term (eg. Google Deepmind and AI as a whole, cloud, video, Drive/GSuite, etc.), but as a result they struggle to respond to quick market changes. AdSense is the perfect example of Google "going long" on a product and reaping the rewards to monopolistic ends. They can corner a market when the set their si…
Google does software/features relatively well, but they are completely lost when it comes to marketing, shipping, and continuing to support products. Or how would you describe their handling of Stadia, or their weird obsession about shipping and cancelling about a dozen instant messengers?
Stadia was a failure from the start. Microsoft and Nvidia are also laser-focused on this game streaming business, but I seriously doubt it will pan out ever. At least not in a profitable sense. In that regard, I think Google planned to be first-to-market, failed early, and killed their darling before anyone got a chance to love it.
The IMs post-Hangouts are less explainable, but I do empathize with Google for wanting to find some form of SMS replacement standard. The RCS we have today is flawed and was rushed out of the door just to have a serious option for the DOJ to endorse. This is an area where I believe the United States government has been negligent in allowing competing OEMs to refuse cooperation in creating an SMS successor. I agree it's silly, and it needs to stop eventually.
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> i don’t think they need to win the on device market. The second Apple comes out with strong on-device AI - and it very much looks like they will - Google will have to respond on Android. They can't just sit and pray that e.g. Samsung makes a competitive chip for this purpose.
I think Apple is uniquely disadvantaged in the AI race to a point people dont realize. They have less training data to use, having famously been focused on privacy for its users and thus having no particular advantage in this space due to not having customer data to train on. They have little to no cloud business, and while they operate a couple of services for their users, they do not have the infrastructure scale t…
There’s an easy solution here: Apple isn’t trying to compete with the big models everyone else is running. They’re betting in the opposite direction that many small models is a better value ad for their customers. And they can call out to other services as needed for the larger stuff.
I’m in the camp that this is the right call for consumers, instead of trying to compete on the large model side. They’ve yet to deliver on their full promise, but if they can, it’s the place where I think more of the industry will go (for consumers)
And regarding Google’s mobile tensor chips, they are infamously behind all other players in the market space for the same generation of processor. They don’t share the same advantages they do in the server space.
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah i’ve never understood the outsized optimism for apple’s ai strategy, especially on hn. they’re a little bit less of a nobody than they used to be, but they’re basically a nobody when it comes to frontier research/scaling. and the best model matters way more than on-device which can always just be distilled later and find some random startup/chipco to do inference
Theory: Apple's lifestyle branding is quite important to the identity of many in the community here. I mean, look at the buy-in at launch for Apple Vision Pro by so many people on HN--it made actual Apple communities and publications look like jaded skeptics.
Oh please, this is the classic “everyone who chooses differently than myself is ” argument that a lot of people use when it comes to tech nerd identity politics.
Is it really that hard to imagine people have different viewpoints, and decisions than yourself without being painted as vapid, airheads?
Re: Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet, google continues to show it'll deprecate it's APIs, Services, and Functionality at the detriment of your own business. I'm not sure enterprises will trust Google's LLM over the alternatives. Too many have been burned throughout the years, including GCP customers. The fact GCP needs to have this page, and these lists are not 100% comprehensive is telling enough. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/deprecations…
GCP grew 35% last quarter , just saying ...
And AWS + Azure are 4.5x the size of GCP. AWS alone is 2.6x the size of GCP. So your point?