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Google is winning on every AI front

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Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#731

Post by ezst »

theshackleford wrote: post #724
ezst wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many, this stuff is mostly about copilot being shoved down everyone's throats via ms office obnoxious ads and distractions, and I haven't yet heard of anyone liking it or perceiving it as an improvement. We are now years into this, so my bets are on the thing fading away slowly and becoming a taboo at Microsoft.

> I haven't yet heard of anyone liking it or perceiving it as an improvement. Well I mean if you say it, then of course it MUST be true I’m sure.

As much as you may make fun of my anecdotal observation, your comment doesn't add anything of value, in particular to substantiate that "people [are] becoming addicted to LLMs". I stand behind my comment that the vast majority of non-tech worker are exposed to them via Copilot in MS Office, and if you want to come to its rescue and pretend it's not a disaster, by all means :-)

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#732

Post by ezst »

anon84873628 wrote: post #544
ezst wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many, this stuff is mostly about copilot being shoved down everyone's throats via ms office obnoxious ads and distractions, and I haven't yet heard of anyone liking it or perceiving it as an improvement. We are now years into this, so my bets are on the thing fading away slowly and becoming a taboo at Microsoft.

Many recent HN articles about how middle managers are already becoming addicted and forcing it on their peons. One was about the game dev industry in particular. In my work I see semi-technical people (like basic python ability) wiring together some workflows and doing fairly interesting analytical things that do solve real problems. They are things that could have been done with regular code already but weren't wort…

I'm sure this is a thing,

what I'm not so sure about is how much that generalises beyond the HN/tech-workers bubble (I don't think "people" in OP's comment is as broad and numerous as they think it is).

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#733

Post by marsten »

mike_hearn wrote: post #535
alienthrowaway wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developing them is expensive So are the electric and cooling costs at Google's scale. Improving perf-per-watt efficiency can pay for itself. The fact that they keep iterating on it suggests it's not a negative-return exercise.

TPUs probably can pay for themselves, especially given NVIDIA's huge margins. But it's not a given that it's so just because they fund it. When I worked there Google routinely funded all kinds of things without even the foggiest idea of whether it was profitable or not. There was just a really strong philosophical commitment to doing everything in house no matter what.

> When I worked there Google routinely funded all kinds of things without even the foggiest idea of whether it was profitable or not.

You're talking about small-money bets. The technical infrastructure group at Google makes a lot of them, to explore options or hedge risks, but they only scale the things that make financial sense. They aren't dumb people after all.

The TPU was a small-money bet for quite a few years until this latest AI boom.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#734

Post by marsten »

noosphr wrote: post #20
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…

And yet google's main structural disadvantage is being google. Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search. I mean it as no exaggeration that _everything_ google does for search is now obsolete. The only reason why google search isn't dead yet is that it takes a while to index all web paged into a vector database. And yet it wasn't google that released the architecture update, it was…

I think what may save Google from an Innovator's Dilemma extinction is that none of the AI would-be Google killers (OpenAI etc.) have figured out how to achieve any degree of lock-in. We're in a phase right now where everybody gets excited by the latest model and the switching cost is next to zero. This is very different from the dynamics of, say, Intel missing the boat on mobile CPUs.

I've been wondering for some time what sustainable advantage will end up looking like in AI. The only obvious thing is that whoever invents an AI that can remember who you are and every conversation it's had with you -- that will be a sticky product.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#735

Post by tored »

ww520 wrote: post #144
harvey9 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative AI makes things up so I'm surprised that you seem surprised. For some situations checking the documentation is still the best option.

I know LLM’s hallucinate. I’m surprised how convincing and how stubborn it insisted it’s right. Other LLM’s would have given up and admit they don’t know.

Gemini told someone I know that golang have manual memory management and was very adamant about it.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#736

Post by ENGNR »

imtringued wrote: post #280
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…

Google is what everyone thinks OpenAI is. Google has their own cloud with their data centers with their own custom designed hardware using their own machine learning software stack running their in-house designed neural networks. The only thing Google is missing is designing a computer memory that is specifically tailored for machine learning. Something like processing in memory.

The one thing they lack that OpenAI has is… product focus. There’s some kind of management issue that makes Google all over the shop, cancelling products for no reason. Whereas Sam Altmans team is right on the money.

Google is catching up fast on product though.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#737

Post by literalAardvark »

pixl97 wrote: post #616
vidarh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the secret sauce in Google's search was better retrieval, and the assertion above is that the advantage there is gone. While crawling the web isn't a piece of cake, it's a much smaller moat than retrieval quality was.

Eh, I don't really see that. Crawling the web has a huge moat because a huge number of sites have blocked 'abusive' crawlers except Google and possibly Bing. For example just try to crawl sites like Reddit and see how long before you're blocked and get a "please pay us for our data" message.

My experience running a few hundred very successful shops (hundreds of thousands of orders per month) is that there's no need for quotes around 'abusive'.

95% of our load is from crawlers, so we have to pick who to serve.

If they want our data all they need to do is offer a way for us to send it, we're happy to increase exposure and shopping aggregation site updates are our second highest priority task after price and availability updates.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#738

Post by siva7 »

tkgally wrote: post #349
stafferxrr wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great stuff. My prompts are falling behind after seeing what you are doing here. I find OpenAI annoying at this point that it doesn't output a pdf easily like Perplexity. The best stuff I have found has been in the Perplexity references also. Google outputting a whole doc is really great. I am just about to dig into Gemini 2.5 Pro in Deep Research for the first time.

> My prompts are falling behind.... If you haven’t already, you might want to try metaprompting, that is, having a model write the prompt for you. These days, I usually dictate my metaprompts through a STT app, which saves me a lot of time. A metaprompt I gave to Claude earlier today is at [1]. It’s sloppy and has some transcription errors, but, as you can see, Claude wrote a complete, well-organized prompt that prod…

Metaprompting is the way to go. Also avoid projects attachments as it uses inferior techniques like rag

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#739

Post by snackernews »

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.

It worked for Uber’s investors.

Re: Google is winning on every AI front

#740

Post by wkat4242 »

fragmede wrote: post #560
wkat4242 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're usually a bit more expensive here than a taxi. It can be beneficial because sometimes they have deals, and I sometimes take one when I have to book it in advance or when I'm afraid there will be delays with a corrsponding high cost. Though Uber tend to hit me with congestion charges then too. At least with a taxi I can ask them to take a different route. The problem with the uber drivers is that they don't kn…

> they sometimes fleece tourists yeah thanks no, I'm paying for an Uber. For all the complaints over Ubers business practices, it's hard not to forget how bad taxis were. Regulatory capture is a clear failure mode of capitalism and the free market and that is no more shown than by the taxis cab industry.

Taxis aren't so bad in most countries. Here in Spain they are plentiful and fine. The same in most other countries I've been to. Only in the Netherlands they are horrible, they are ridiculously expensive because they all drive Mercedeses. As a result nobody uses them because they can't afford them. They're more like a limousine service, not like real taxis.

One time I told one of my Dutch friends I often take a cab to work here in Spain when I'm running late. He thought i was being pompous and showy. But here it's super normal.

Uber (Or cabify which is a local clone and much more popular) here on the other hand is terrible if you don't book it in advance. When I'm standing here on the street it takes 7-10 minutes for them to arrive while I see several taxis passing every minute. So there is just no point. Probably a factor of being unpopular too so the density is low.

I also prefer my money to end up with local people instead of a huge American corporation.

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