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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

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Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#561

Post by prewett »

kirubakaran wrote: post #492
jnwatson wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a product when you slap an API on top and host it for other businesses to figure out a use case. In a gold rush, the folks that sell pickaxes make a reliable living.

> In a gold rush, the folks that sell pickaxes make a reliable living. Not necessarily. Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan Sam of the current gold rush is selling pickaxes at a loss, telling the investors they'll make it up in volume.

According to the linked Wikipedia article, he did not go broke from the gold rush. He went broke because he invested the pickaxe windfall in land, and when his wife divorced him, the judge ruled he had to pay her 50%, but since he was 100% in land he had to sell it. (The article is not clear why he couldn't deed her 50% of it, or only sell 50%. Maybe it happened during a bad market, he had a deadline, etc.)

So maybe if the AI pickaxe sellers get divorced it could lead to poor financial results, but I'm not sure his story is applicable otherwise.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#562

Post by UncleEntity »

Aurornis wrote: post #381
wkat4242 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised. They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it. Also, for the customers it's usually more expensive and slower than a normal taxi at least here in Spain. The original idea of ride-sharing made sense but just like airbnb it became an industry and got enshittified.

> They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it. I keep hearing this online, but every time I’ve used an Uber recently it’s driven by someone who says they’ve been doing it for a very long time. Seems clear to me that it is worth it for some, but not worth it if you have other better job options or don’t need the marginal income.

> but not worth it if you have other better job options

Pretty much any service job, really...

When I had occasion to take a ride share in Phoenix I'd interrogate the driver about how much they were getting paid because I drove cabs for years and knew how much I would have gotten paid for the same trip.

Let's just say they were getting paid significantly less than I used to for the same work. If you calculated in the expenses of maintaining a car vs. leasing a cab I expect the difference is even greater.

There were a few times where I had just enough money to take public transportation down to get a cab and then snag a couple cash calls to be able to put gas in the car and eat. Then I could start working on paying off the lease and go home at the end of the day with some cash in my pocket -- there were times (not counting when the Super Bowl was in town) where I made my rent in a single day.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#563

Post by fragmede »

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…

> Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people?

Should I take this job or that one? Which college should I go to? Should I date this person or that one? Life has some really hard decisions you have to make, and that's just life. There are no wrong answers, but figuring out what to do and ruminating over it is comes to everyone at some point in their lives. You can ask ChatGPT to ask you the right questions you need asked in order to figure out what you really want to do. I don't know how to put a price on that, but that's worth way more than $20/month.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#564

Post by fragmede »

samtp wrote: post #455
dinfinity wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 vario…

A Cambrian explosion of half baked ideas, filled with hallucinations, unable to ever get past the first step. Sounds lovely.

They were already not getting past the first step before AI came along. If AI helps them get to step two, and then three and four, that seems like a good thing, no?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#565

Post by fragmede »

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.

Which is why we can't let Mark Zuckerberg co-opt the term open source. If we can't see the code and dataset on how you've aligned the model during training, I don't care that you're giving it away for free, it's not open source!

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#566

Post by yieldcrv »

silisili wrote: post #91
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is also terribly paranoid of the LLM saying anything controversial. If you want a summary of some hot topic article you might not have the time to read, Gemini will straight up refuse to answer. ChatGPT and Grok don't mind at all.

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.

Deepseek to circumvent Western censorship

Claude to circumvent Eastern censorship

Grok Unhinged for a wild time

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#567

Post by rs186 »

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.

Exactly. Google may have a lead in their model, but saying they are "winning on every front" is a very questionable claim, from the perspective of everyday users, not influencers, devoted fans or anyone else who has a stake in hyping it.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#568

Post by fragmede »

chuckadams wrote: post #320
coliveira wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, our hope is for the Chinese to continue driving the open models. Because if it depends on American big companies the future will be one of dependency on closed AI models.

Ask Deepseek what happened in Tianmen Square in 1989 and get back to me about that "open" thing.

How about we ask college students in America on visas about their opinions on Palestine instead?

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#569

Post by SkyMarshal »

siva7 wrote: post #398
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…

Matches also my experience that openai fell behind with their deep search product. And that deep search is basically the top tier benchmark for what professionals are willing to pay. So why should i shell out 200 dollar for an openai subscription when google gives me a better top-tier product for 1/10th of the price openai or anthropic are asking. Although i assume google is just more willing to burn cash in order to…

It may actually be affordable for Google to charge $20 vs OAI's $200. Google already has an extensive datacenter operation and infrastructure that they're amortizing across many products and services. AI requires significant additions to it, of course, but their economy of scale may make a low monthly sub price viable.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#570

Post by rs186 »

bjackman wrote: post #192
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.

Well, Google is also very well placed to integrate with other products that have big market share. So far this has been nothing but a PM wankfest but if Gemini-in-{Gmail,Meet,Docs,etc} actually gets useful, it could be a big deal. I also don't think any of those concerns are as important for API users as direct consumers. I think that's gonna be a bugger part of my the market as time goes on.

Microsoft has been integrated Copilot in their Office products. In fact, they don't even call it Office any more. Guess what? If you ever had first hand experience with them, they are absolutely a dumpster fire. (Well, maybe except transcription in Teams meeting, but that's about it.) I used it for 5 minutes and never touch it again. I'll be very impressed if that's not the case with Google.
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