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Google is winning on every AI front

thealgorithmicbridge.com

571–580 of 851 posts

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have loyalty, but one day there will be no one else to switch to. So, if you're a loyal user or not is a moot point.

History shows it's a self-defeating victory. If one provider were to "win" and stop innovating, they'll become ripe for disruption by the likes of Deepseek, and the second someone like that has a better model, I'll switch.

Eh, and if you're in the US the 'big guys' will have their favorite paid off politician put in a law that use of Chinese models is illegal or whatever.

Rent seeking behavior is always the end game.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke's on them, because I don't have any loyalty to an LLM provider. There's very close to zero switching costs, both on the consumer front and the API front; no real distinguishing features and no network effects; just whoever has the best model at this point in time.

There is a network effect: more user interaction = more training data. I don't know how important it is, though.

Yep, this is why android phones are now pointing out their gemini features every moment they can. They want to turn their spying device into an AI spying device.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#573
This article is the example of why google ai is not winning market share. All you have shown is bunch of graphs and numbers, two image and video examples are horrible. This would not want me even touch google ai. Meanwhile world is going crazy over ghibli images with openai. Users are not stupid!

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, but before a product can do all of those things well it will have to do one of those things well. And by “well” I mean reliably superhuman, not usually but sometimes embarrassingly poorly.

People used to (and still do) pay fortune tellers to make decisions for them. Doesn’t mean they’re good ones.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Right, but before a product can do all of those things well it will have to do one of those things well. And by “well” I mean reliably superhuman, not usually but sometimes embarrassingly poorly. People used to (and still do) pay fortune tellers to make decisions for them. Doesn’t mean they’re good ones.

fwiw I used it the other day to help me figure out where I stand on a particular issue, so it seems like it's already there.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#577
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? But that's not what anyone means when they describe a company as profitable or not. I was guessing they meant something like the net profit only came from a weird tax thing or something.

Seems like the difference between a profitable investment and a profitable company. They invested tens of billions of dollars in destroying the competition to be able to recently gain a return on that investment. One could either write off that previous spending or calculate it into the totality of "Uber". I don't know how Silicon Valley economics works but, presumably, a lot of that previous spending is now in the f…

To the extent that their past spending was debt, interest on that debt that should already be accounted for in calculating their net income.

But the way it usually works for Silicon Valley companies and other startups is that instead of taking on debt they raise money through selling equity. This is money that doesn't have to be paid back, but it means investors own a large portion of this now-profitable company.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be, if an AI actually wrote it.

Sounds like a generic AI response, though maybe I'm being too harsh, the AI response would probably be longer and more detailed. So, you want to tell us why it's so much better than Claude?

AI-or-not silliness aside (gets boring real fast): I find Gemini to be faster (it matters), more reliable, with quality of responses being at the same level as Claude's. Better integration with Google apps and devices is a plus.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't fewer searches indicate better answers? A search engine is productivity software. Productivity software is worse when it requires more user interaction. Also you don't need ads to answer what to do, just knowledge of the events. Even a poor ranking algorithm is better than "how much someone paid for me to say this" as the ranking. That is possibly the very worst possible ranking.

Google knows how to avoid mistakes like not bucketing by session. Holdback users just did fewer unique search sessions overall, because whilst for most people Google was a great way to book vacations, hotel stays, to find games to buy and so on, for holdback users it was limited to informational research only. That's an important use case but probably over-represented amongst HN users, some kinds of people use search…

The issue is precisely that "did the click lead to a purchase" is not a good target. That's a target for the advertiser, and is adversarial for the user. "Did the click find the best deal for the user (considering the tradeoffs they care about)" is a good target for the user. The winner in an auction in a competitive market is pretty much guaranteed to be the worst match under that ranking.

This is obvious when looking at something extremely competitive like securities. Having your broker set you up with the counterparty that bid the most to be put in front of you is obviously not going to get you the best trade. Responding to ads for financial instruments is how you get scammed (e.g. shitcoins and pump-and-dumps).

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#580

No it's not obvious at all Google is winning AI on every front. There is few stuff Google is systemically behind: 1) UX 2) product and use case innovation I just open Google Gemini Android app and asked to generate a JS script with Gemini 2 Flash and did the same with ChatGPT. Gemini did not highlighted with colors the code. ChatGPT did highlighted with colors the code. Colors in code are extremely useful to grok the…

>Gemini did not highlighted with colors the code. ChatGPT did highlighted with colors the code. I don't care if the code is highlighted nearly as much as I care if it's right. This kind of stuff is nice-to-have but the quality of the underlying LLM is what really matters.

Well, you don't care but other people care, and likely not one or two people, but enough. And enough of these "little things" added up, one chooses a product over another.
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