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Google is winning on every AI front

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Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#371

Post by mark_l_watson »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #102
levocardia wrote: post #51

Google is winning on every front except... marketing (Google has a chatbot?), trust (who knew the founding fathers were so diverse?), safety (where's the 2.5 Pro model card?), market share (fully one in ten internet users on the planet are weekly ChatGPT users), and, well, vibes (who's rooting for big G, exactly?). But I will admit, Gemini Pro 2.5 is a legit good model. So, hats off for that.

I wouldn't even say Gemini Pro 2.5 is the best model. Certainly not when you do multimodal or function calling, which is what actually matters in industry applications. Plain chatbots are nice, but I don't think they will decide who wins the race. Google is also no longer in the mindset to really innovate. You'll hear surprisingly similar POVs from ex-Googlers and ex-OpenAI guys. I'd actually say OpenAI still has an…

I have found function calling and ‘roll my own agents’ work much better now with Gemini than they did late last year, but I also do a lot of function calling experiments with small open models using Ollama - much more difficult to work with to get a robust system.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#372

Post by vel0city »

decimalenough wrote: post #295
djtango wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good anecdote and it reminds me of how Sony had cloud architecture/digital distribution, a music label, movie studio, mobile phones, music players, speakers, tvs, laptops, mobile apps... and totally missed out on building Spotify or Netflix. I do think Google is a little different to Kodak however; their scale and influence is on another level. GSuite, Cloud, YouTube and Android are pretty huge diversificat…

Sony's Achilles heel was and remains software. You can't build a Spotify or Netflix if you can't build a proper website.

That, and while Sony had all these big groups they often didn't play nice with each other. Look at how they failed to make Minidisc into any useful data platforms with PCs, largely because MD's were consumer devices and not personal computers so they were pretty much only seen as music hardware.

Even on the few Vaios that had MD drives on them, they're pretty much just an external MD player permanently glued to the device instead of being a full and deeply integrated PC component.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#373

Post by DisjointedHunt »

Philpax wrote: post #366
DisjointedHunt wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As with everything related to Tesla FSD/Autopilot, I'll believe it when I see it. They have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Waymo works as a robotaxi today, Tesla doesn't. I'll grant you Chinese developments; I'm not across what's happening there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was on par, yes. My bet is that they can reduce the cost of their working solution more reliably and safely than Tesla can get their…

So have you sat in a Tesla with the latest hardware or . . .

I don't understand this attitude in the technology industry. If you want to hold such a strong opinion on something, at least take the initiative to research what you're talking about.

Teslas __today__ are at or better than Waymo at autonomy. They are launching tests in June. There are popular accounts who have experienced this alpha at the "We, Robot" autonomy event earlier last year and follow on interviews with Lars and Franz, (Head of Vehicle Engineering and Head of Design)

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#374

Post by jxjnskkzxxhx »

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…

I've used Jax quite a bit and it's so much better than tf/pytorch.

Now for the life of me, I still haven't been able to understan what a TPU is. Is it Google's marketing term for a GPU? Or is it something different entirely?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#375

Post by wkat4242 »

pca006132 wrote: post #300
wkat4242 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah me too and especially with Google as a leader because they corrupt everything. I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.

What if the models are somehow trained/tuned with Ads? Like businesses sponsor the training of some foundational models... Not the typical ads business model, but may be possible.

Yeah this would definitely be something that Google would do and it would be terrible for society.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#377

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#378

Post by wslh »

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 get your perspective, but what we're seeing looks more like complex systems theory, emergent behavior, optimization, new winners. If models become commoditized, the real value shifts to last-mile delivery: mobile, desktop, and server integration across regions like China, Korea, the U.S., and Europe.

This is where differentiated UX and speed matter. It's also a classic Innovator's Dilemma situation like Google are slower to move, while new players can take risks and redefine the game. It's not just about burning money or model size, it's about who delivers value where it actually gets used.

I also think the influx of new scientists and engineers into AI raises the odds of shifting its economics: whether through new hardware (TPUs/GPUs) and/or more efficient methods.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#379

Post by datavirtue »

ghaff wrote: post #297
amelius wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand is there. People are already becoming addicted to this stuff.

I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.

My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#380

Post by dinfinity »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #313
jononor wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. There is also a move toward "agents", where the AI can make decisions and take actions for you. It is very early days for that, but it looks ike it might come sooner than I had though. That opens up even more potential for influence on financial decisions (which is what adtech wants) - it could choose which things to buy for a given "need".

I have yet to understand this obsession with agents. Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce? Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the c…

> I have yet to understand this obsession with agents.

1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs.

2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in various heads to prototypes/MVPs is causing/will cause somewhat of a Cambrian explosion of such things.

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