Google is winning on every AI front • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#441

Post by nothercastle » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #367

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…

I don’t think “AI” as a market is “winner-takes-anything”. Seriously. AI is not a product, it’s a tool for building other products. The winners will be other businesses that use AI tooling to make better products. Does OpenAI really make sense as a chatbot company?

I agree the market for 10% better AI isn’t that great but the cost to get there is. An 80% as good model at 10% or even 5% the cost will win every time in the current environment. Most businesses don’t even have a clear use case for AI they just use it because the competition is and there is a FOMO effect

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#442

Post by bigyabai » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #275

fpoling wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera browser was not profitable for like 15 years and still became rather profitable eventually to make an attractive target to purchase by external investors. And even if not bough it would still made nice profit eventually for the original investors.

You can't burn money in AI for 15 years on the off chance that it’ll pay off.

I dunno, Nvidia worked on machine learning for 11+ years and it worked out great for them: https://research.nvidia.com/research-area/machine-learning-a...

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#443

Post by phemartin » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

Except the metric that really matters... USAGE.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

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Post by signatoremo » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:32 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #307

imiric wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't be serious... You think models built by companies from an autocracy are somehow better? I suppose their biases and censorship are easier to spot, but I wouldn't trade one form of influence over another. Besides, Meta is currently the leader in open-source/weight models. There's no reason that US companies can't continue to innovate in this space.

To play devil's advocate, I have a sense that a state LLM would be untrustworthy when the query is ideological but if it is ad-focused, a capitalist LLM may well corrupt every chat.

The thing is Chinese LLMs aren't foreign to ad focused either, like those from Alibaba, Tencent or Bytedance. Now a North Korea's model may be what you want.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

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Post by _blk » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

User friendliness wise nothing beats Grok3 because it warns that a pro should be consulted but usually still gives you an answer, mostly even a good one. OpenAi and bigG are strongly biased and refuse to go into anything remotely controversial and take strong don't sue me stance over advocating the user's responsibility.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

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Post by nostrebored » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

phreeza wrote: post #407

commandersaki wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google were pioneers to cloud computing How so? Amazon were the first with S3 and EC2 including API driven control.

AWS was the first to sell it, but Google had something that could be called cloud computing (Borg) before that.

What do you think AWS decided to sell? Both companies had a significant interest in making infrastructure easy to create and scale.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

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Post by flebron » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #426

JLO64 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TPUs (short for Tensor Processing Units) are Google’s custom AI accelerator hardware which are completely separate from GPUs. I remember that introduced them in 2015ish but I imagine that they’re really starting to pay off with Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit

Believe it or not, I'm also familiar with Wikipedia. It reads that they're optimized for low precisio high thruput. To me this sounds like a GPU with a specific optimization.

Perhaps this chapter can help? https://jax-ml.github.io/scaling-book/tpus/

It's a chip (and associated hardware) that can do linear algebra operations really fast. XLA and TPUs were co-designed, so as long as what you are doing is expressible in XLA's HLO language (https://openxla.org/xla/operation_semantics), the TPU can run it, and in many cases run it very efficiently. TPUs have different scaling properties than GPUs (think sparser but much larger communication), no graphics hardware inside them (no shader hardware, no raytracing hardware, etc), and a different control flow regime ("single-threaded" with very-wide SIMD primitives, as opposed to massively-multithreaded GPUs).

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

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Post by remoquete » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

singhrac wrote: post #422

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.

Can you choose a model via the Gemini app? I can on the webapp (finally), but on the mobile app it won’t let me choose. Using Gemini via Google Workspace.

You can. Then again, I'm paying.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

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Post by AIPedant » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:40 PM UTC

twism wrote: post #352

Feed th deep research result into notebookLM and download the audio overview .. game changing

I don't use Deep Research or NotebookLM myself (or any other generative AI product). But every example of a NotebookLM audio overview I've seen was actively misleading and ignored critical context. However the voices were very personable and entertaining! Likewise Deep Research uses terrible sources and often gets things wrong, I have yet to see a single example that holds up to scrutiny...but it sure goes down smooth compared to reading a bunch of disparate papers!

I suspect Deep Research and NotebookLM aren't used to get information so much as to provide extremely low-quality infotainment. I read Wikipedia recreationally and I can definitely see the appeal of having a Wikipedia-like article/podcast for anything you can think of. But they seem miserably bad for actually learning stuff (especially the stupid podcasts).

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

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Post by donny2018 » Sat, Apr 12, 2025, 3:41 PM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #412

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…

People left, to do what kind of startups? Can't think of any business idea that won't get outdated, or overrun in months.

AI startups were easy cash grabs until very recently. But I think the wave is settling down - doing real AI startup turned out to be VERY hard, and the rest of the "startups" are mostly just wrappers for OpenAI/Anthropic APIs.