Google is winning on every AI front

https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/google-is-winning-on-every-ai-front

by vinhnx • 1 year ago

1005 815 1 year ago

It isn't when considering Google's brand has (long) lost trust in how it hanles data. This is especially true with larger companies, F500 type brands, who tend to avoid Google for infra as do governments.

rusk3• 1 year ago

Tell that to the bank I work for that just switched to GCP

decimalenough3• 1 year ago

F500/government are conservative and tend to stick with the vendors they know, which is why Azure has gained so much traction despite being worse than AWS & GCP pretty much across the board.

Trust in handling data doesn't really come into this; if anything Google has a very strong reputation for security.

js4ever• 1 year ago

Tell that to UniSuper: https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/google-cloud-ac...

re-thc2• 1 year ago

F500/government are conservative and tend to stick with the vendors they know, which is why Azure has gained so much traction

Outcome is the same, but being "conservative" isn't the real reason.

Adding a vendor requires compliance work, process, finance etc that it's just effort.

99% of medium-large companies use Microsoft in some form so Azure can skip all of that to some extent.

mdhb2• 1 year ago

Agreed, they are literal generations ahead of Microsoft in real life.

suddenexample• 1 year ago

Weird - it's hard to beat widespread online narratives, but as someone who worked at Google there's no company I'd trust more with the "handling" part of my data. There's no doubt that on device is always a more private option, but if you've decided to keep data in the cloud, then Google is probably one of the most secure options you could choose.

GeneralMayhem• 1 year ago

Same, as another former Googler. I worked on a team that had a relatively large amount of data access, and the amount of protection in place - technical and procedural, preventative and remedial - made me extremely comfortable giving Google basically all of my personal data, knowing that only the bare minimum would ever be looked at, and even then securely and in an anonymized or (usually) aggregated format.

VirusNewbie• 1 year ago

What F500 brands do you think avoid google? Most of the biggest ones are on GCP for ML at least.

remoquete6• 1 year ago

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.

firecall• 1 year ago

Just to add, I am mainly an iPhone user. But I have a Google Pixel 6a for dev and testing reasons.

And Google Gemini for the voice assistant is excellent fun!

Just being able to ask it weird and wonderful whilst on a road trip with the kids is worth the cost of a cheap Pixel phone alone!

aprilthird20212• 1 year ago

Yeah I find myself actually talking to the Gemini assistant like I never have to any other

jofzar4• 1 year ago

I have to seriously disagree on it for the "assistant" part. It is so terrible vs Google assistant.

There have been two really bad experiences that I had which boggled my mind.

These are transcribed because these were so bad I took a screenshot.

Example 1: "set an alarm for 15 minutes"

Gemini sets the alarm for 1:15pm

"I want that to be 50 minutes"

"you can change the duration of alarms in the clock app"

Example 2:

"what the temperature today"

It is currently 5 degrees Celsius

- It was October in Sydney, the temperature was 22c with a low of 12c.....

ksec3• 1 year ago

At this point something happened to Google, may be Open AI? And it seems everything is finally moving.

Unfortunately Pixel is still not available as widely as iPhone. They still need to work on its hardware as well as distribution.

The only thing I dislike is their AOM only or anti JPEG XL.

weinzierl• 1 year ago

Out of interest: Using Gemini on your phone, integrated and all, obviously reduces friction, but would you say convenience is the only reason for you not going back or do you feel Gemini is a real improvement as well?

remoquete6• 1 year ago

The improvement in Gemini 2.5 is real, but I wouldn't say it's miles away from Claude 3.7. The fact that web browsing still isn't in Claude in Europe bothered me. It's many little things.

akkad33• 1 year ago

Google did it again.

This is quite vague. What did they do

theletterf• 1 year ago

Ensure I only use them. It happened with search first, then mobile (Pixel), now it's LLMs.

acheron• 1 year ago

Is this an example of how to integrate ads into an AI response?

remoquete6• 1 year ago

Could be, if an AI actually wrote it.

singhrac• 1 year ago

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.

remoquete6• 1 year ago

You can. Then again, I'm paying.

throwup2382• 1 year ago

2.5 Pro Experimental and Deep Research showed up in the Gemini app for me today days after it was available on web so it seems to be different roll outs for different platforms.

antirez2• 1 year ago

Gemini 2.5 pro is as powerful as everybody says. I still also use Claude Sonnet 3.7 only because the Gemini web UI has issues... (Imagine creating the best AI and then not allowing to attach Python or C files if not renamed .txt) but the way the model is better than anyone else is a "that's another league" experience. They have the biggest search engine and YouTube to leverage the power of the AI they are developing. At this point I believe too that they are likely to win the race.

discordance2• 1 year ago

Instead of renaming files to .txt, you should try Gemini 2.5 pro through OpenRouter with roo, Cline or using Github Copilot. I've been testing GH Copilot [0] and it's been working really well.

0: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-04-11-copilot-chat-users-...

antirez2• 1 year ago

I know perfectly I can use the API with any wrapper. I don't do that for choice, my human+AI development style is in the form of the chat, and since I discovered that many models behave differently (especially Gemini 2.5) based on where you invoke them (I don't know what Google is doing internally, if they change temperature / context size / ...) I stick with using the default way a model is provided to the public by a given provider. Besides, while I write a lot of code with the assistance of AI, my use case is mainly code reviews, design verification / brainstorming, and so forth, not much "write this code for me" (not that I believe there is anything wrong with it, just a matter of preferences -- I do it for things like tests, or to have a template when the coding task is just library calls that are boring to put together: typical use case, "generate the boilerplate to load a JPEG file with libjpeg"). So I keep using the web chat :)

BillyTheKing• 1 year ago

apart from those weird file attach issues I actually think they've got a much better UI than anthropic as well - much much snappier even with extremely long chats (in addition to much higher limits obviously, totally different league). I love using it

eru4• 1 year ago

It's really annoying that in their Android app, Gemini doesn't automatically scroll to the bottom of a long chat when you re-open it.

Otherwise, I like their 2.5 model, too.

eru4• 1 year ago

At this point I believe too that they are likely to win the race.

I'm not so sure.

In the mid 2010s they looked like they were ahead of everyone else in the AI race, too. Remember the (well-deserved!) spectacle around AlphaGo? Then they lost steam for a while.

So I wouldn't bet that any momentary lead will last.

nolist_policy3• 1 year ago

On Chrome you can share your whole Project directory to Gemini. I think it uses the File System Access api which Firefox doesn't support.

benhurmarcel• 1 year ago

You can share the entire folder directly in the web UI? How? I can only see how to upload a file.

torginus4• 1 year ago

Will there be a winner at all? Perhaps it's going to be like cars where there are dozens of world class manufacturers, or like Linux, where there's just one thing, but its free and impossible to monetize directly.

gwd2• 1 year ago

Linux works because network effects pressure everyone to upstream their changes. There's no such upstreaming possible with the open-weight models, and new sets of base weights can only be generated with millions of dollars of compute. Companies could conceivably collaborate on architectures and data sets, but with the amount of compute and data involved, only a handful of organizations would ever have the resources to be able to contribute.

Unlike Linux, which was started by a cranky Finn on his home computer, and can still be built and improved by anyone who can afford a Raspberry Pi.

RyanHamilton• 1 year ago

I thought for cars it was because certain countries decided at state level that car making was strategically their thing? That combined with fashion, meaning some percentage of people want different looking cars.

dtquad2• 1 year ago

Linux, where there's just one thing, but its free and impossible to monetize directly

Redhat and SUSE are multi-billion dollar Linux distro companies.

paradite3• 1 year ago

You can bypass this problem by embedding relevant source code files directly in the prompt itself.

I built a desktop GUI tool called 16x Prompt that help you do it: https://prompt.16x.engineer/

jstummbillig• 1 year ago

I am not even sure how to use Gemini 2.5 pro ergonomically right now. Cursor and Windsurf both obviously have issues, probably optimized too much around Claude, but what else is there?

Is everyone copy pasting into the Google AI studio or what?

jerrygenser• 1 year ago

Try aider.chat - it is a cli you can add files for context and it will make edits to the code directly via a commit.

flaviolivolsi• 1 year ago

Try Gemini 2.5 Pro in Roo Code and never look back

mrshu• 1 year ago

One option would be https://geminicodes.co/ -- a CLI tool with Claude Code-like aesthetics.

It is a hobbyist weekend project though, the experience with Aider or ra-aid might be much better.

thorax• 1 year ago

In AI Studio, it seemed to let me upload pretty much any file and tokenize it without renaming, FWIW

oezi• 1 year ago

Their technical progress is indeed impressive. And their price dumping of 2.5 Pro for free will have moved a lot of technical users.

The key question is if the can stop the decline in search or pivot their revenue streams to Gemini.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7• 1 year ago

Is there really a decline in web searches or in Google's usage vs competitors? Seems like one of those greatly exaggerated rumors?

mattlondon2• 1 year ago

If anything I think their revenue is still growing by double figures (?) which is insane considering we're decades and billions of users into the business.

Bewelge• 1 year ago

From a personal website, that's been pretty constantly getting 2k hits from Google each week:

Bing 150-200 / week

Yandex ~100 / week

DDG ~50 / week

ChatGPT is now at ~50 hits a week.

So from that data it looks like Google still has their comfortable 80%+ market share. But I think it's interesting if you think about the kind of users that use these products. In my mind, the alternative search engines are used mostly by techies and people that care about their privacy (also often techies), but ChatGPT is used by a much broader slice of the population.

But maybe I'm projecting because my own search behaviour has changed so dramatically with ChatGPT & Claude having replaced a substantial part of my Google searches.

thunderbird1202• 1 year ago

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 scale. Google's ability to tailor their mature hardware to exactly what they need gives them a massive leg up on competition. AI companies fundamentally have to answer the question "what can you do that no one else can?". Google's hardware advantage provides an actual answer to that question which can't be erased the next time someone drops a new model onto huggingface.

[1]https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...

noosphr4• 1 year ago

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 hugging face as a summer collaboration between a dozen people. Google's version came out in 2018 and languished for a decade because it would destroy their business model.

Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product. Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need. I don't see google being able to pull off an iPhone moment where they killed the iPod to win the next 20 years.

visarga• 1 year ago

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 web UI for people using search may be obsolete, but search is hot, all AIs need it, both web and local. It's because models don't have recent information in them and are unable to reliably quote from memory.

podnami• 1 year ago

Do we have insights on whether they knew that their business model was at risk? My understanding is that OpenAI’s credibility lies in seeing the potential of scaling up a transformer-based model and that Google was caught off guard.

dash2• 1 year ago

They can just plug the google.com web page into their AI. They already do that.

petesergeant• 1 year ago

Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product.

Google's cash-cow product is relevant ads. You can display relevant ads in LLM output or natural language web-search. As long as people are interacting with a Google property, I really don't think it matters what that product is, as long as there are ad views. Also:

Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need

This sounds like a gigantic competitive advantage if you're selling AI-based products. You don't have to give everyone access to the good search via API, just your inhouse AI generator.

danpalmer2• 1 year ago

This would be like claiming in 2010 that because Page Rank is out there, search is a solved problem and there’s no secret sauce, and the following decade proved that false.

jampekka• 1 year ago

Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search.

I doubt this. Embedding models are no panacea even with a lot simpler retrieval tasks like RAG.

marsten2• 1 year ago

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.

krackers2• 1 year ago

Assuming that DeepSeek continues to open-source, then we can assume that in the future there won't be any "secret sauce" in model architecture. Only data and training/serving infrastructure, and Google is in a good position with regard to both.

fulafel• 1 year ago

Making your own hardware would seem to yield freedoms in model architectures as well since performance is closely related to how the model architecture fits the hardware.

jononor2• 1 year ago

Google is also in a great position wrt distribution - to get users at scale, and attach to pre-existing revenue streams. Via Android, Gmail, Docs, Search - they have a lot of reach. YouTube as well, though fit there is maybe less obvious. Combined with the two factors you mention, and the size of their warchest - they are really excellently positioned.

spwa4• 1 year ago

... except that it still pretty much requires Nvidia hardware. Maybe not for edge inference, but even inference at scale (ie. say at companies, or governments) will still require it.

chermi• 1 year ago

Huh? I don't think it's that simple. As far as we know, everyone has some secret sauce. You're assuming deepseek will find all of that.

retinaros2• 1 year ago

they re not alone to do that tho.. aws also does and I believe microsoft is into it too

marcusb6• 1 year ago

From the article:

I’m forgetting something. Oh, of course, Google is also a hardware company. With its left arm, Google is fighting Nvidia in the AI chip market (both to eliminate its former GPU dependence and to eventually sell its chips to other companies). How well are they doing? They just announced the 7th version of their TPU, Ironwood. The specifications are impressive. It’s a chip made for the AI era of inference, just like Nvidia Blackwell

thunderbird1202• 1 year ago

Nice to see that they added that, but that section wasn't in the article when I wrote that comment.

imtringued• 1 year ago

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.

ENGNR• 1 year ago

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.

mike_hearn12• 1 year ago

TPUs aren't necessarily a pro. They go back 15 years and don't seem to have yielded any kind of durable advantage. Developing them is expensive but their architecture was often over-fit to yesterday's algorithms which is why they've been through so many redesigns. Their competitors have routinely moved much faster using CUDA.

Once the space settles down, the balance might tip towards specialized accelerators but NVIDIA has plenty of room to make specialized silicon and cut prices too. Google has still to prove that the TPU investment is worth it.

dgacmu5• 1 year ago

They go back about 11 years.

foota• 1 year ago

Haven't Nvidia published roughly as many chip designs in the same period?

alienthrowaway2• 1 year ago

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.

summerlight2• 1 year ago

Not sure how familiar you are with the internal situation... But from my experience think it's safe to say that TPU basically multiplies Google's computation capability by 10x, if not 20x. Also they don't need to compete with others to secure expensive nvidia chips. If this is not an advantage, I don't see there's anything considered to be an advantage. The entire point of vertical integration is to secure full control of your stack so your capability won't be limited by potential competitors, and TPU is one of the key component of its strategy.

Also worth noting that its Ads division is the largest, heaviest user of TPU. Thanks to it, it can flex running a bunch of different expensive models that you cannot realistically afford with GPU. The revenue delta from this is more than enough to pay off the entire investment history for TPU.

albert_e• 1 year ago

Amazon also invests in own hardware and silicon -- the Inferentia and Trainium chips for example.

But I am not sure how AWS and Google Cloud match up in terms of making this verticial integration work for their competitive advantage.

Any insight there - would be curious to read up on.

I guess Microsoft for that matter also has been investing -- we heard about the latest quantum breakthrough that was reported as creating a fundamenatally new physical state of matter. Not sure if they also have some traction with GPUs and others with more immediate applications.

chazeon• 1 year ago

I think Amazon, Meta have been trying on inference hardware, they throw their hands up on training; but TPUs can actually be used in training, based on what I saw in Google’s colab.

jxjnskkzxxhx3• 1 year ago

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?

JLO64• 1 year ago

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

317070• 1 year ago

Way back when, most of a GPU was for graphics. Google decided to design a completely new chip, which focused on the operations for neural networks (mainly vectorized matmul). This is the TPU.

It's not a GPU, as there is no graphics hardware there anymore. Just memory and very efficient cores, capable of doing massively parallel matmuls on the memory. The instruction set is tiny, basically only capable of doing transformer operations fast.

Today, I'm not sure how much graphics an A100 GPU still can do. But I guess the answer is "too much"?

mota7• 1 year ago

There's basically a difference in philosophy. GPU chips have a bunch of cores, each of which is semi-capable, whereas TPU chips have (effectively) one enormous core.

So GPUs have ~120 small systolic arrays, one per SM (aka, a tensorcore), plus passable off-chip bandwidth (aka 16 lines of PCI).

Where has TPUs have one honking big systolic array, plus large amounts of off-chip bandwidth.

This roughly translates to GPUs being better if you're doing a bunch of different small-ish things in parallel, but TPUs are better if you're doing lots of large matrix multiplies.

acstorage• 1 year ago

Unclear if they can actually beat GPUs in training throughout with 4D parallelism

6510• 1 year ago

The problem is always their company never the product. They had countless great products. You cant depend on a product if the company is reliably unreliable enough. If they don't simply delete it for being expensive and "unprofitable" they might initially win, eventually, like search and youtube, it will be so watered down you cant taste the wine.

AlbertoRomGar• 1 year ago

I am the author of the article. It was there since the beginning, just behind the paywall, which I removed due to the amount of interest the topic was receiving.

glacier5674• 1 year ago

If you search for Shockmaster, the AI Overview you get is as follows:

Fred Alex Ottman, a retired American professional wrestler, is known for his WWF personas "Tugboat" and "Typhoon". He also wrestled as "Big Steel Man" and "Big Bubba" before joining the WWF in 1989. Ottman wrestled for the WWF from 1989–1993, where he was a key ally of Hulk Hogan. He later wrestled in World Championship Wrestling as "The Shockmaster", a character known for raising his fist and making a "toot-toot" sound.

Which is obviously false. The "toot-toot" was part of his gimmick as Tugboat, while the Shockmaster gimmick is known for its notoriously botched reveal.

Point being, Google is losing on the "telling one early 90s wrestling gimmick from another" AI front.

krackers2• 1 year ago

Gemini 2.5 pro is not the same that powers web search (or any of the dozen other Gemini related things).

esperent3• 1 year ago

This post is claiming Google is winning on every AI front. Search summary is a front on which, as far as I can tell, no one is winning. But Google is one of the worst.

ruuda• 1 year ago

I'm trying Imagen 3 to add pictures to a presentation in Google Slides, and it's making such basic mistakes that I thought image models weren't making any more by now. I tried for half an hour to prompt it into generating an illustration of a Thinkpad facing with the back to the viewer, so the keyboard is not visible. It couldn't do it, it would always make the keyboard face towards the viewer. Or you ask for an illustration of an animal pointing a finger, and it gives it an additional arm. Meanwhile you ask OpenAI to ghiblify a picture while changing the setting and adding 5 other things, and it absolutely nails it.

remoquete6• 1 year ago

Image generation is extremely good in GPT now. Claude's edge is UX. But I doubt Google won't catch up on both fronts. It has the technology and manpower.

boznz2• 1 year ago

I thought it was just me. A few hours ago Gemini told me "As a language model, I'm not able to assist you with that." This was after generating an image a few minutes earlier. I think the copy/paste buffer pulled in some old source files I had attached a few days earlier (no idea how) because under the "sources and related content" it now showed two files Gemini is obviously calling its brother imagen for offloading the image generation, which is smart I guess if it works

Hikikomori• 1 year ago

Can Gemini 2.5 pro generate images? It only describes them for me.

vunderba• 1 year ago

From my comparison tests focusing on prompt adherence, I would agree 4o edges out Imagen3 as long as speed is not a concern.

https://genai-showdown.specr.net

If Imagen3 had the multimodal features that 4o had, it would certainly put it closer to 4o, but being able to instructively change an image (instruct pix2pix style) is incredibly powerful.

It's crazy how far GenAI for imagery has come. Just few short years ago, you would have struggled just to get three colored cubes stacked on top of each other in a specific order SHRDLU style. Now? You can prompt for a specific four-pane comic strip and have it reasonably follow your directives.

torginus4• 1 year ago

This reads like sports commentary.

nailer2• 1 year ago

It also reads like someone thinking benchmarks make good products.

glimshe• 1 year ago

Gemini Pro 2.5 is fantastic. I'm anti Google and a long time ChatGPT user. I use it for text review and research and it's well ahead the competition. Let's see how long they last giving it for free.

Turfie• 1 year ago

Why are you anti Google?

thomassmith652• 1 year ago

Google collects and stores grotesque amounts of data about the public https://takeout.google.com

retskrad• 1 year ago

Gemini 2.5 Pro might be one of the best for coding but for creative tasks like writing and sharing ideas, I vastly prefer GPT 4o and GPT 4.5 to an even larger extent.

CuriouslyC• 1 year ago

Gemini 2.5 Pro's prose isn't quite as tight as GPT4.5s, but being able to have long form writing where your entire manuscript is in the context, along with all your source/background material, and it all gets used _well_ is pretty stellar. That lets Gemini update scenes in a really thoughtful, intelligent way, and frankly it's a better beta reader than ~85% of the people I've hired on Fiverr.

int_19h8• 1 year ago

For creative writing, Claude runs circles around both IMO.

Lukman• 1 year ago

In my experience Claude 3.7 is far superior for coding than Gemini 2.5. I tried it in Cursor and I wanted it to work, as a recent ex-Googler. I repeatedly found it inferior. I think it’s still behind Claud 3.5 for coding.

It would decide arbitrarily not to finish tasks and suggest that I do them. It made simple errors and failed to catch them.

jinay• 1 year ago

Cursor is likely very tuned for Claude (prompts-wise and all) due to its dominance with 3.5 and now 3.7. Still, Gemini 2.5's tool calling has been pretty poor in my experience which Cursor heavily relies on.

mjirv2• 1 year ago

Yep. Tool calling is terrible across all Gemini models. I’m not sure why, when the model itself is so good.

SparkyMcUnicorn2• 1 year ago

It depends on the task, and prompting feels different.

I've found that sonnet is possibly better at starting things from scratch and frontend code, while Gemini has been able to one-shot difficult problems and fix bugs that sonnet has struggled with.

Switching between them is a frequent occurrence for me.

It might be relevant that I've completely stopped using Cursor in favor of other tools/agents.

pzo3• 1 year ago

It might be relevant that I've completely stopped using Cursor in favor of other tools/agents.

Can you share what you use these days? I switched from cursor to windsurf but also want to play more with Trae and Cline/RooCode

thawab2• 1 year ago

Your issue is because:

1- the cursor agent doesn’t work with gemini. Some times the diff edit even doesn’t work.

2- Cursor does semantic search to lower the token they sent to models.

The big advantage for Gemini is the context window, use it with aider, clien or roo code.

esperent3• 1 year ago

clien or roo code

What's the difference between Cline and Roo Code now? Originally Roo was a fork of Cline that added a couple of extra settings. But now it seems like an entirely different app, with it's own website even.

https://roocode.com/

cootsnuck2• 1 year ago

I literally was just using Cursor agent mode with Gemini 2.5 pro two days ago...and it worked wonderfully. One-shots simple app redactors first try.

entropyneur• 1 year ago

Same. I went back from Gemini to Claude yesterday, because Gemini was writing decidedly worse code, at times not even able to stick to Python syntax. Using Aider.

Kholin• 1 year ago

Same here. I've seen some articles and LLM benchmarks that Gemini 2.5 Pro is better than Claude 3.7 on coding, but base on my recent experience of solving code problems with two products, Claude still gave me better answer, Gemini response are more detail and well structured, but less accurate.

ddalex• 1 year ago

Use Roo Code, Cursor is terrible

aprilthird20212• 1 year ago

Back when all the articles talked about how OpenAI swiped Google's crown while Google sat on transformers and never productized them, I saw this future coming. Google had back then, and still has, the best research on this topic, and ultimately that was going to win the day.

Sure, hindsight is 20/20, and who knows if any of these products will be big money makers vs commodities, and they may still fail at the productization of these things. Sure.

But insofar as productization follows great technology, Google was always going to have the upper hand here. It took many years but they did finally start coming out ahead

codelord• 1 year ago

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 and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. The whole time that I was at OpenAI until now GOOG has been the only individual stock that I've been holding. Despite the threat to their search business I think they'll bounce back because they have a lot of cards to play. OpenAI is an annoyance for Google, because they are willing to burn money to get users. Google can't as easily burn money, since they already have billions of users, but also they are a public company and have to answer to investors. But I doubt if OpenAI investors would sign up to give more money to be burned in a year. Google just needs to ease off on the red tape and make their innovations available to users as fast as they can. (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)

ksec3• 1 year ago

(And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)

Please do.

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

I would like to know how he manages to appear, in every single photo I see of him, to look slightly but unmistakenly... moist, or at least sweaty.

throw1223323• 1 year ago

Based on his interview with Joe Rogan, he has absolutely no imagination about what it means if humans actually manage to build general AI. Rogan basically ends up introducting him to some basic ideas about transhumanism.

To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.

sundarurfriend• 1 year ago

It's a rabbit hole with many layers (levels?), but this is a good starting point and gateway to related information:

Key Facts from "The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman's Firing from OpenAI": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-...

falcor844• 1 year ago

Google can't as easily burn money

I was actually surprised at Google's willingness to offer Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio for free; having this was a significant contributor to my decision to cancel my OpenAI subscription.

relistan• 1 year ago

This is 100% why they did it.

ff4• 1 year ago

Google offering Gemini 2.5 Pro for free, enough to ditch OpenAI, reminds me of an old tactic.

Microsoft gained control in the '90s by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows for free, undercutting Netscape’s browser. This leveraged Windows’ dominance to make Explorer the default choice, sidelining competitors and capturing the browser market. By 1998, Netscape’s share plummeted, and Microsoft controlled access to the web.

Free isn’t generous—it’s strategic. Google’s hooking you into their ecosystem, betting you’ll build on their tools and stay. It feels like a deal, but it’s a moat. They’re not selling the model; they’re buying your loyalty.

cheema33• 1 year ago

I pay for ChatGPT, Anthropic and Copilot. After using Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio, I plan on canceling all other paid AI services. There is no point in keeping them.

mikehotel• 1 year ago

From the terms of use:

To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output. Google takes steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting this data from your Google Account, API key, and Cloud project before reviewers see or annotate it. Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#data-use-unpaid

imiric4• 1 year ago

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.

I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already.

The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

jononor2• 1 year ago

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".

mike_hearn12• 1 year ago

You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendations anyway, they want to control the way their ad appears and what ad copy is used.

There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons.

So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this.

Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.

wkat424210• 1 year ago

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.

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

If possible watch Episode 1 of Season 7 of "Black Mirror."

... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.

What if people were the chatbots?

https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO

datavirtue4• 1 year ago

Right, but no one has been able to just download Google and run it locally. The tech comes with a built in adblocker.

GolfPopper• 1 year ago

Do they want a Butlerian Jihad? Because that's how you get a Butlerian Jihad.

codelion• 1 year ago

It's interesting to hear your perspective as a former OpenAI employee. The point about the sustainability of subscription fees for chatbots is definitely something worth considering. Many developers mention the challenge of balancing user expectations for free services with the costs of maintaining sophisticated AI models. I think the ad-supported model might become more prevalent, but it also comes with its own set of challenges regarding user privacy and experience. And I agree that Google's situation is complex – they have the resources, but also the expectations that come with being a public company.

netcan3• 1 year ago

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 money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.

Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses.

At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs.

The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.

tonyedgecombe• 1 year ago

It's be a >$10bn business already.

But not profitable yet.

rrr_oh_man• 1 year ago

a >$10bn business

'Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."' ¹

Until something makes a profit it's a charity or predatory monopoly-in-waiting.²

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

coldtea• 1 year ago

Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial.

Especially when post-tarrifs consumption is going to take a huge nosedive

ximeng• 1 year ago

Google aren’t interested in <1bn USD businesses, so it’s hard for them to build anything new as it’s pretty guaranteed to be smaller than that at first. The business equivalent of the danger of a comfortable salaried job.

Mistletoe• 1 year ago

Keep in mind you are talking to someone that worked at OpenAI and surely knows more of how the sausage is made and how the books look than you do?

dcow3• 1 year ago

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?

commandersaki2• 1 year ago

Google were pioneers to cloud computing

How so? Amazon were the first with S3 and EC2 including API driven control.

istjohn• 1 year ago

No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here...

I don't understand this sentiment at all. The business model writes itself (so to speak). This is the company that perfected the art of serving up micro-targeted ads to people at the moment they are seeking a solution to a problem. Just swap the search box for a chat bot.

For a while they'll keep the ads off to the side, but over time the ads will become harder and harder to distinguish from the chat bot content. One day, they'll dissapear altogether and companies will pay to subtly bias the AI towards their products and services. It will be subtle--undetectable by end users--but easily quantified and monetized by Google.

Companies will also pay to integrate their products and services into Google's agents. When you ask Gemini for a ride, does Uber or Lyft send a car? (Trick question. Waymo does, of course.) When you ask for a pasta bowl, does Grubhub or Doordash fill the order?

When Gemini writes a boutique CRM for your vegan catering service, what service does it use for seamless biometric authentication, for payment processing, for SMS and email marketing? What payroll service does it suggest could be added on in a couple seconds of auto-generated code?

AI allows Google to continue it's existing business model while opening up new, lucrative opportunities.

selfhoster• 1 year ago

"A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors."

I doubt the depiction implied by "surprising number". Marketing types and CEO's who would love 100% profit and only paying the electricity bill for an all AI workforce would believe that. Most people, especially most technical people would not believe that there is a "surprising number" of saps paying for so-called AI.

tom_m4• 1 year ago

Absolutely agree Microsoft is better there - maybe that's why Google hired someone from Microsoft for their AI stuff. A few people I think.

I also agree the business models aren't known. That's part of any hype cycle. I think those in the best position here are those with an existing product(s) and user base to capitalize on the auto complete on crack kinda feature. It will become so cheap to operate and so ubiquitous in the near future that it absolutely will be seen as a table stakes feature. Yes, commodities.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

"The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known."

"AI" sounds like a great investment. Why waste time investing in businesses when one can invest in something that might become a business. CEOs and employees can accumulate personal weath without any need for the company to be become profitable and succeed.

staticautomatic• 1 year ago

Contextual advertising is a known ad business model that commands higher rates and is an ideal fit for LLMs. Plus ChatGPT has a lot of volume. If there’s anyone who should be worried about pulling that off it’s Perplexity and every other small to mid-sized player.

ForHackernews• 1 year ago

At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such

I don't understand why people believe this: by settling on "unstructured chat" as the API, it means the switching costs are essentially zero. The models may give different results, but as far a plugging a different one in to your app, it's frictionless. I can switch everything to DeepSeek this afternoon.

kibibu• 1 year ago

What happens when OpenAI introduces sponsored answers?

Eridrus• 1 year ago

The business model question applies to all of these companies, not just Google.

A lack of workable business model is probably good for Google (bad for the rest of the world) since it means AI has not done anything economically useful and Google's Search product remains a huge cash cow.

ksec3• 1 year ago

Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.

It's funny how the vibe of HN along with real world 's political spectrum have shifted together.

We can now discuss Ads on HN while still being number 1 and number 2 post. Extremism still exists, but it is retreating.

ramraj076• 1 year ago

I don't know what you did there, but clearly being ex OpenAI isn't the intellectual or product flex it is: I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best at what it does and we keep trying Google and Claude and keep coming back.

They got and as of now continue to get things right for the most part. If you still aren'ĥt seeing it maybe you should introspect what you're missing.

epolanski2• 1 year ago

I don't know your experience doesn't match mine.

NotebookLM by Google is in a class of its own in the use case of "provide documents and ask a chat or questions about them" for personal use. ChatGPT and Claude are nowhere near. ChatGPT uses RAG so it "understands" less about the topic and sometimes hallucinate.

When it comes to coding Claude 3.5/3.7 embedded in Cursor or stand alone kept giving better results in real world coding, and even there Gemini 2.5 blew it away in my experience.

Antirez, hping and Redis creator among many others releases a video on AI pretty much every day (albeit in Italian) and his tests where Gemini reviews his PRs for Redis are by far the better out of all the models available.

palata• 1 year ago

I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid)

Not at all my experience, but maybe I'm not part of a smart group :)

because even now it's the best at what it does

Actually I don't see a difference with Mistral or DeepSeek.

daveed• 1 year ago

Don't think it's a flex, I think it's useful context for the rest of their comment.

I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best

My smart friends use a mixture of models, including chatgpt, claude, gemini, grok. Maybe different people, it's ok, but I really don't think chatgpt is head and shoulders above the others.

scrollop• 1 year ago

I use a service where users can choose any frontier model, and OpenAI models haven't been the most used model for over half a year - it was sonnet until gemini 2.5 pro came out, recently.

Not sure whether you have your perspective because you're invested os much into OpenAI, however the general consensus is that gemini 2.5 pro is the top model at the moment, including all the AI reviews and OpenAI is barely mentioned when comparing models. O4 will be interesting, but currently? You are not using the best models. Best to read the room.

greggsy• 1 year ago

‘think soon people expect this service to be provided for free’

I have been using the free version for the past year or so and it’s totally serviceable for the odd question or script. The kids get three free fun images, which is great because that’s about as much as I want them to do.

apwell23• 1 year ago

And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.

would love to hear more about this.

I made a post asking more about sam altman last year after hearing paul graham quote call him 'micheal jordan of listening'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829

tunaoftheland• 1 year ago

The ads angle is an interesting one since that's what motivates most things that Google and Meta do. Their LLMs' context window size has been growing, and while this might the natural general progression with LLMs, for those 2 ads businesses there's pretty straight paths to using their LLMs for even more targeted ads. For example, with the recent Llama "herd" releases, the LLMs have surprisingly large context window and one can imagine why Meta might want that: For stuffing in it as much of the personal content that they already have of their users. Then their LLMs can generate ads in the tone and style of the users and emotionally manipulate them to click on the link. Google's LLMs also have large context windows and such capability might be too tempting to ignore. Thinking this, there were moments that made me think that I was being to cynical, but I don't think they'll leave that kind of money on the table, an opportunity to reduce human ad writers headcount while improving click stats for higher profit.

EDIT: Some typo fixes, tho many remain, I'm sure :)

jcfrei• 1 year ago

The real threat to Google, Meta is that LLMs become so cheap that its trivial for a company like Apple to make them available for free and include all the latest links to good products. No more search required if each M chip powered device can give you up-to-date recommendations for any product/service query.

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

When LLMs are essentially trying to sell me something, the shit is over.

I like LLMs (over search engines) because they are not salespeople. They're one of the few things I actually "trust". (Which I know is something that many people fall on the other side of — but no, I actually trust them more than SEO'd web sites and ad-driven search engines.)

I suppose my local-LLM hobby is for just such a scenario. While it is a struggle, there is some joy in trying to host locally as powerful an open LLM model as your hardware will allow. And if the time comes when the models can no longer be trusted, pop back to the last reliable model on the local setup.

That's what I keep telling myself anyway.

mnky9800n• 1 year ago

Feel free to get started on Sam Altman.

knallfrosch• 1 year ago

Microsoft CoPilot (which I equate with OpenAI ChatGPT, because MS basically owns OpenAI) already shows ads in it's chat mode. It's just a matter of time. Netflix, music streamers, individual podcasters, YouTubers, TV manufacturers – they all converge on an ad-based business model.

thidr0• 1 year ago

People consistently like free stuff more than they dislike ads.

Another instantiation: people like cheap goods more than they dislike buying foreign made goods

hdjjhhvvhga• 1 year ago

And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.

Why not? That's one of the reasons I visit HN instead of some random forum after all.

somenameforme• 1 year ago

"[Google is] a public company and have to answer to investors"

As is an increasing trend, they're a "public" company, like Facebook. They have tiered shares with Larry Page and Sergey Brin owning the majority of the voting power by themselves. GOOG shares in particular are class C and have no voting power whatsoever.

wslh• 1 year ago

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.

olalonde• 1 year ago

Do you think Sam will follow through with this?

Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”

tim3333• 1 year ago

That feels like it came from a past era. (I looked it up - it was 2019).

zkmon2• 1 year ago

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

donny20182• 1 year ago

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.

riku_iki5• 1 year ago

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

other significant revenue surfaces:

- providing LLM APIs to enterprises

- ChatBot Ads market: once people will switch from google search, there will be Ads $200B market at stake for a winner

tom_m4• 1 year ago

I believe it. This is what typically happens. I would go to AWS re:invent and just watch people in the audience either cheer or break down as they announced new offerings wash away their business. It's very difficult to compete in a war of attrition with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Not just small startups - even if you have ungodly amounts of funding.

Obviously the costs for AI will lower and everyone will more or less have the same quality in their models. They may already be approaching a maximum (or maximum required) here.

The bubble will burst and we'll start the next hype cycle. The winners, as always, the giants and anyone who managed to sell to them

I couldn't possibly see OpenAI as a winner in this space, not ever really. It has long since been apparent to me that Google would win this one. It would probably be more clear to others if their marketing and delivery of their AI products weren't such a sh-- show. Google is so incredibly uncoordinated here it's shocking...but they do have the resources, the right tech, the absolute position with existing user base, and the right ideas. As soon as they get better organized here it's game over.

famouswaffles6• 1 year ago

Open AI don't always have the best models (especially for programming) but they've consistently had the best product/user experience. And even in the model front, other companies seem to play catchup more than anything most of the time.

int_19h8• 1 year ago

The best user experience for what?

The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants, and if you look at that market, the best offerings are third-party IDEs that build on top of models they don't own. E.g. Cursor + Gemini 2.5.

On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios.

stellajager• 1 year ago

What cards has google played over the past three years such that you are willing to trust them play the "cards at hand" that you alleged that they have? I could think of several things they did right, but I'm curious to hear which one of them are more significant than others from someone I think has better judgement than I do.

sumedh6• 1 year ago

OpenAI is an annoyance for Google

Remember Google is the same company which could not deliver a simple Chat App.

Open AI has the potential to become a bigger Ad company and make more money.

bitpush5• 1 year ago

Google has so many channels for ad delivery. ChatGPT is only competing against Google Search, which is arguably the biggest. But dont forget, Google has YouTube, Google Maps, Google Play, Google TV and this is before you start to consider Google's Ad Network (the thing where publishers embed something to get ads from Google network).

So nope, ChatGPT is not in even in the same league as Google. You could argue Meta has similar reach (facebook.com, instagram) but that's just two.

reportgenix• 1 year ago

valuable information

adrianN• 1 year ago

I think paying to bias AI answers in your favor is much more attractive than plain ads.

ohgr• 1 year ago

Winning as in least bad in arbitrary ranking.

Waterluvian• 1 year ago

I felt Demis Hassabis was trustworthy in a way Sam Altman couldn't be—a true scientist, not a businessman

Not that I think Demis is or is not trustworthy, but I think it’s a bit foolish to believe it would be allowed to matter.

eru4• 1 year ago

I also don't see why scientists should be more trustworthy than business people.

procaryote• 1 year ago

In theory, one seeks knowledge, the other money.

In practice, people are people and there are probably variance in both camps, but it's easy to see why one would by default trust a business person less

blitzar• 1 year ago

I also don't see why doctors should be more trustworthy than used car sales people.

tim3333• 1 year ago

It's already made some difference to how the companies are behaving - Deepmind doing quite a lot of work on protein folding and now protein drug interactions, OpenAI under Altman tying to do the startup max the money raised and user count thing.

giorgioz• 1 year ago

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 code and have a nice DX.

I'm sure if I dig into Gemini's product I'll find dozens of UX/DX ways in which ChatGPT is better.

Google is still playing catch-up with LLM products. ChatGPT is still the one making the announcements and then Gemini doing the same UX/use case enhancements weeks/months later.

Legend2440• 1 year ago

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.

rs1863• 1 year ago

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.

neuroelectron2• 1 year ago

This is very simply a bunch of minor stuff Googlites feel like they're above implementing. They would rather let you implement that and you both get a cut.

gessha4• 1 year ago

Not like Apple’s quality is any better nowadays but Google’s unwillingness to finish their design work and provide a functional product is one of the many reasons I avoid their products like the plague.

nikolayasdf123• 1 year ago

+1 gemini flash is very good models. very cheap, very fast, pretty smart. API integration (if you are inside GCP) is convenient. API is good (gRPC, encoding, OpenAI API style). newest AI notebook studio UI thing also works as you would expect it. well done.

levocardia• 1 year ago

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.

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 1 year ago

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.

AznHisoka• 1 year ago

The single reason I will never ever be an user of them. Its a hill I will die on

silisili• 1 year ago

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.

logicchains2• 1 year ago

Not a fan of Google, but if you use Gemini through AI studio with a custom prompt and filters disabled it's by far the least censored commercial model in my experience.

jsemrau• 1 year ago

Google is also terribly paranoid of the LLM saying anything controversial.

When did this start? Serious question. Of all the model providers my experience with Google's LLMs and Chatproducts were the worst in that dimension. Black Nazis, Eating stones, pizza with glue, etc I suppose we've all been there.

miohtama2• 1 year ago

I think that's the "trust" bit. In AI, trust generally means "let's not offend anyone and water it down to useless." Google is paranoid of being sued/getting attention if Gemini says something about Palestine or drawns images like Studio Ghibli. Meanwhile users love to these topics and memes are free marketing.

rat873• 1 year ago

Seems like a feature. Last thing we need is a bunch of people willing to take AI at it's word making up shit about controversial topics. I'd say redirecting to good or prestigious source is probably the best you can do

dorgo• 1 year ago

Try asking ChatGPT to solve a captcha for you ( character recognition in a foreign language ). AI studio doesn't refuse.

Breza• 1 year ago

I have the same experience in the web UI. Asking for that famous Obama chili recipe gets a refusal. But when I use the API, I can dial back the safety settings to the point where things work much more smoothly.

torginus4• 1 year ago

Didn't GCP manage to lose from this position of strength? I'm not sure even if they're the third biggest

sidibe• 1 year ago

They "lost from a position of strength" in that they had they had the most public-cloud like data centers and started thinking about selling that later than they should have. Bard/Gemini started later than chatgpt , but there's not really a moat for this LLM stuff, and Google started moving a lot earlier relative to GCP vs Amazon.

They've got the cash, the people, and the infrastructure to do things faster than the others going forward, which is a much bigger deal IMO than having millions more users right now. Most people still aren't using LLMs that often, switching is easy, and Google has the most obvious entry points with billion+ users with google.com, YouTube, gmail, chrome, android, etc.

sigmoid10• 1 year ago

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 edge in terms of culture, even through it fell deep.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 1 year ago

Certainly not when you do multimodal or function calling

Who is? (Genuine question, it's hard to keep up given how quickly the field moves.)

mark_l_watson3• 1 year ago

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.

PunchTornado• 1 year ago

really? all of my friends and everyone I know actually hates openai. they managed to be the bad guy in AI.

int_19h8• 1 year ago

I did some experiments with Gemini Pro 2.5 vs Sonnet 3.7 for coding assistants, and, at least as far as code quality and ability to understand complexities in existing codebase goes, Gemini is noticeably stronger.

sublimefire• 1 year ago

It might be worth throwing in an analogy to windows PCs vs Mac vs Linux. G appeals to a subset of the market at the end of the day, being “best” does not mean everyone will use it.

rzz33• 1 year ago

You really hit the nail on the head with trust. Knowing the power of these AIs and how absolutely little I trust Google, I’d never tell trust Gemini with the things I’ll say to ChatGPT.

philsnow• 1 year ago

how absolutely little I trust Google, I’d never tell trust Gemini with the things I’ll say to ChatGPT.

Are you pretty sure that Google won't eventually buy OpenAI and thus learn everything you've said to ChatGPT?

squigz2• 1 year ago

Why do you think OpenAI is more trustworthy than Google?

crazygringo3• 1 year ago

That's curious.

Large corporations wind up creating internal policies, controls, etc. If you know anyone who works in engineering at Google, you'll find out about the privacy and security reviews required in launching code.

Startups, on the other hand, are the wild west. One policy one day, another the next, engineers are doing things that don't follow either policy, the CEO is selling data, and then they run out of money and sell all the data to god knows who.

Google is pretty stable. OpenAI, on the other hand, has been mega-drama you could make a movie out of. Who knows what it's going to be doing with data two or four years from now?

bjackman• 1 year ago

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.

rs1863• 1 year ago

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.

killerstorm• 1 year ago

Winning =/= won. The point is that they are improving on many fronts. If they were already recognized as THE leader there would be no point in making a HN post about it.

tbolt• 1 year ago

Add to this list apps. As in ChatGPT and Anthropic have nice desktop software applications for Mac and Windows.

a2128• 1 year ago

My experience with their software has been horrible. A friend was messing around with Gemini on my phone and said my name is John, and it automatically saved that to my saved info list and always called me John from then on. But when I ask it to forget this, it says it can't do that automatically and links me to the Saved Info page, which is a menu they didn't implement in the app so it opens a URL in my browser and asks me to sign into my Google account again. Then a little toast says "Something went wrong" and the saved info list is empty and broken. I tried reporting this issue half a year ago and it's still unresolved. Actually the only way I was ever able to get it to stop calling me John is to say "remember to forget my name is John" in some way that it adds that to the list instead of linking me to that broken page

wayeq• 1 year ago

how's your day going, John?

poutrathor• 1 year ago

"Hello John, I notice your username on HN has not been updated. I will make that change for you in 2 hours, from a2128 to john2128. If you want to keep your current username, please follow steps in our help me discord channel"

sukit• 1 year ago

Thank you, John.

mark_l_watson3• 1 year ago

I look more to Google for efficient and inexpensive LLM APIs, and in a similar way to Groq Cloud for inexpensive and fast inferencing for open models.

ChatGPT has a nice consumer product, and I also like it.

Google gets a bad rap on privacy, etc., but if you read the documentation and set privacy settings, etc. then I find them reasonable. (I read OpenAI’s privacy docs for a long while before experimenting with their integration of Mac terminal, VSCode, and IntelliJ products.)

We live in a cornucopia of AI tools. Occasionally I will just for the hell of it do all my research work for several days just using open models running on my Mac using Ollama - I notice a slight hit in productivity, but still a good setup.

Something for everyone!

ACCount36• 1 year ago

Trust is important, and Google has a big rep for killing its projects. As well as making the most moronic braindead decisions in handling what they don't kill off.

No one is going to build on top of anything "Google" without having a way out thought out in advance.

Not that important for LLMs, where drop-in replacements are usually available. But a lot of people just hear "by Google" now and think "thanks I'll pass" - and who can blame them?

culopatin• 1 year ago

I had to stop using Gemini 2.5 because the UI peaks my MPB cpu at max and I can’t type my prompt at more than a character every 2 seconds. I can’t even delete my chats lol. Anyone else?

jsk2600• 1 year ago

On deleting chats, I accidentally discovered that AI Studio creates a 'Google AI Studio' folder on your Google Drive with all the links to chats. If you delete the 'link' from there, it will disappear in AI Studio...interesting UX :-)

hermitShell• 1 year ago

I would like to think they just let other companies have the first mover advantage on chatbots because it only disrupts Google in their search business, which was already pretty far gone and on the way out. Where is AI actually going to change the world? Protein folding, robotics, stuff that the public doesn’t hype about. And they looked at the gold rush and decided “let’s design shovels”. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit but very bullish on Google.

joshdavham• 1 year ago

My hesitancy to adopt Gemini, despite being a heavy GCP and workspace user, is I kinda lost trust when trying to use their earlier models (I don't even remember those models' names). I just remember the models were just so consistently bad and obviously hallucinated more than 50% of the time.

Maybe Gemini is finally better, but I'm not exactly excited to give it a try.

khimaros• 1 year ago

it is a completely different product these days

rs1863• 1 year ago

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.

jimbob45• 1 year ago

I’m scared they’re going to kill it off. Every good idea they’ve had in the last 20 years has been killed off. Even Fuchsia/Zircon, which should have supplanted Android a full decade ago.

karunamurti• 1 year ago

Also not OSS. That's not a win for me.

GaggiX• 1 year ago

The only thing I think ChatGPT is better is native image generation, their model is able to work in the joint-space much better than any other model I have seen, but I'm sure Google will try to catch up rapidly.

admiralrohan• 1 year ago

What about Grok and Chinese counterparts?

X data is private now which would give advantage it real-time scenarios. And Chinese have made it state-level priority.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

It is very quick to abort conversations and if the safety stuff kicks in, it loses all context. But I will keep giving it a crack since everyone seems to think it’s great. Maybe I just need to learn the tricks.

tkgally2• 1 year ago

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 over to Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental. While OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s reports are still pretty good, Google’s usually seem deeper, more complete, and more incisive.

My prompting technique, by the way, is to first explain to a regular model the problem I’m interested in and ask it to write a full prompt that can be given to a reasoning LLM that can search the web. I check the suggested prompt, make a change or two, and then feed it to the Deep Research models.

One thing I’ve been playing with is asking for reports that discuss and connect three disparate topics. Below are the reports that the three Deep Research models gave me just now on surrealism, Freudian dream theory, and AI image prompt engineering. Deciding which is best is left as an exercise to the reader.

OpenAI:

https://chatgpt.com/share/67fa21eb-18a4-8011-9a97-9f8b051ad3...

Google:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10mF_qThVcoJ5ouPMW-xKg7Cy...

Perplexity:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/subject-analytical-report-i...

jay_kyburz• 1 year ago

"produce a comprehensive analytical report exploring the conceptual and methodological intersections between Surrealist art techniques, Freudian dream analysis, and the practice of prompt engineering for AI image generation models (such as DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion)."

Haha, what a perfect project for AI.

stafferxrr• 1 year ago

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.

tkgally2• 1 year ago

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 produced really good results from Gemini Deep Research [2]. (I notice now, though, that the report is truncated at the end.)

[1] https://claude.ai/share/94982d9d-b580-496f-b725-786f72b15956

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1np5xdXuely7cxFMlkQm0lQ4j...

siva72• 1 year ago

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 not let openai take more market share which would get them later on soo more expensive (e.g. iphone market share, also classic microsoft strategy).

SkyMarshal3• 1 year ago

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.

beering• 1 year ago

The $20/month Chatgpt subscription has deep research so the comparison should be $20 vs $20, not $20 vs $200.

ViktorRay• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing your prompting technique. I will try to use that technique in the future as well.

gwd2• 1 year ago

Add to the above that Gemini 2.5, compared to models of its category, is fast and cheap—I mean, they're giving away free access!

A large player with massive existing streams giving away a product in a new market to undercut new entrants? Looks an awful lot like abuse of monopoly position...

rvba• 1 year ago

If google's AI is doing so great why are the "questions and answers" near thr lle search so bad?

Also the search quality itself went downhill. There was a great article about that on HN some time ago.

qwertox• 1 year ago

Is it just my computer or do others also have huge performance problems in somewhat large chats in AI Studio?

They really need to fix this.

It gets to a point where on each submit Google Chrome pops up a "wait | close tab" dialog.

I then have to use AI Studio for the "big picture" in one tab and ChatGPT in the smaller subtasks which help with the big picture.

wiradikusuma• 1 year ago

I chat with Gemini Pro 2.5 Exp in Continue.dev IntelliJ plugin. I told it to "implement this method" and it even suggested improvements in other files (that were included in context). I feel like talking to a person.

BUT more often than not, it stopped halfway (the code, so it's unusable). I'm not sure if it's the plugin that cannot handle the response, but it never happens with Claude.

ozgune• 1 year ago

I feel the article presents the data selectively in some places. Two examples:

* The article compares Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental to DeepSeek-R1 in accuracy benchmarks. Then, when the comparison becomes about cost, it compares Gemini 2.0 Flash to DeepSeek-R1.

* In throughput numbers, DeepSeek-R1 is quoted at 24 tok/s. There are half a dozen providers, who give you easily 100+ tok/s and at scale.

There's no doubt that Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is a state of the art model. I just think it's very hard to win on every AI front these days.

yalok• 1 year ago

but also they compare reasoning and non-reasoning models - e.g. Meta's Llama 4

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

Orthogonal — the remarkable thing about DeepSeek-R1 seems to me is that it shows how easy it in fact is to create an LLM. A quantitative hedge fund was able to throw money and develop a competitive LLM. Maybe that somewhat reveals that it's just a "man behind the curtain."

nabla9• 1 year ago

Most analysts don't differentiate between:

1) AI research as science and

2) Productization and engineering that science into something to sell.

While Google DeepMind focused on things that won Hassabis and Jumper Nobel prize in Chemistry, OpenAI took transformers architecture (Google researchers invented), built the first big model, and engineered it into a product.

Google has the best researchers, and does most research. When they finally chose to jump into the business and pull Hassabis and others from doing more important stuff to moneymaking, obviously they win.

dragonwriter2• 1 year ago

No, that's not at all obvious because building products for any given market is a radically different competency than research, and the kind of basic, fundamental research that tends to win Nobels is actually a competency a step further removed from product than normal corporate R&D; outside of Google-scale orgs, it's mostly (whether or not of Nobel quality) done at universities with both product-oriented research and actual productization done in industry, often based largely on published academic results, but generally with no strong direct connection between the people doing the basic research and the people winning the competition for successful commercial products.

flexie• 1 year ago

Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?

Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Google, even if Google has more AI talents and scores better on tests.

And isn't it good? Who wants a world where the same handful of companies dominate all tech?

neuderrek• 1 year ago

Regular people is not where the money is. For example, I get Gemini as part of my employer’s Google Workspace subscription, and as it is now decent enough, have no need to use anything else.

danpalmer2• 1 year ago

Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI … ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet

And Google is #1 and #2, with search and YouTube. Distribution is a huge part of the problem and they’ve got some great distribution options.

uncomplexity_3• 1 year ago

fair call but

1. unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds

2. unlike openai, google already has the distribution figured out on both software and hardware

google is like an aircraft carrier that takes so fucking long to steer, but once done steering its entire armada will wipe you the fuck out (at least on the top 20% features for 80% use case)

anthropic already especialized for coding, openai seems to be steering towards intimacy, i guess they both got the memo that they need to specialize

riku_iki5• 1 year ago

unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds

this can quickly change in several quarters, if users decide to leave google search, then all google org/infra complexity will play very badly against them

ramesh31• 1 year ago

ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?

This isn't about consumer facing chatbots anymore. Industry adoption is what matters. And GCP is a far far easier sell than Anthropic or OpenAI. If they both can't respond in a significant way (capability or price) very shortly, 2.5 is going to start eating their lunch.

paradite3• 1 year ago

The author mentioned AlphaGo and Alpha Zero without mentioning OpenAI gym and OpenAI Five.

Those products show OpenAI was innovating and leading in RL at that stage around 2017 to 2019.

https://github.com/openai/gym

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five

bitpush5• 1 year ago

This is the first I'm hearing about it.

paradite3• 1 year ago

I forgot to mention that OpenAI also invented PPO, which is the default algorithm that everyone uses for RL since 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximal_policy_optimization

DeepSeek's GRPO is also just a minor variant of PPO.

ReptileMan• 1 year ago

Just a fun I had with Gemini 2.5 pro. I asked him to create a code for a toolchain that uses some ai at a point and it stubbornly used OpenAI api and refused to generate code using Gemini apis instead. Also it said it is model trained by google. Didn't knew its name and when asked to generate code for "youself" defaulted to openai.

Probably sending people to spend money at your competition is not the surefire way to market dominance.

cryptozeus2• 1 year ago

I have been using all AI tools in my job working for ai startup and none of them are google products. May be I should give it a try, their product positioning is horrible

ww5202• 1 year ago

May be it's my luck but I found a glaring issue with Gemini 2.5 Pro in AI Studio.

I asked it whether a language feature in Zig was available. It answered yes and proceeded to generate a whole working sample code. I compiled it and got an error. Reported the error and it said the error showed I typed it wrong and asked me to make sure it's typed correctly. Eh?! It's a copy-and-paste. I confirmed again it's wrong. It then said it must be my compiler version was too old. Nope, using the latest. It then said very convincingly that based on its extensively research into the language official documentation, official examples, and release notes, the feature must exist. I asked it to show me the reference materials it used to draw the conclusion. None of links it gave were valid. I told it they were wrong. It gave back another set of links and claimed it had checked the links to make sure they are alive. The links were alive but didn't contain any mention of the feature. I let it know again. It admitted couldn't find the mentioned feature. But it insisted the feature had been merged in a PR. The PR link it gave was unrelated. I let it know. It gave me another 3 PR's and said one mentioned something related so the feature must be in. At the point I gave up.

The issue was that it sounded very convincing and stated "facts" very confidently, with backings to documents and other resources even if they were wrong or irrelevant. Even when told it gave the wrong info, it would double down and made up some BS reference material to back up its claim.

harvey92• 1 year ago

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

ww5202• 1 year ago

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.

Giorgi• 1 year ago

Google AI is a crap. Moment they start "winning" you will see it everywhere.

lofaszvanitt2• 1 year ago

Now watch the dance to protect their adsnitch ecosystem.

lofaszvanitt2• 1 year ago

Now is the time to wrestle away chrome or the AI things. Company is too big. Time to butcher.

dtquad2• 1 year ago

Google is the primary target for current US anti-big-tech sentiments that are getting political traction with Lina Khan and Steve Bannon teaming up at a recent conference against US Big Tech companies. J.D. Vance has also expressed that he agrees with Lina Khan and Steve Bannon and would like to see US Big Tech companies like Google be forcibly split up.

What will happen with Google's AI wing when Google inevitably gets split up in the next 4-8 years?

fancyfredbot• 1 year ago

Are the administration really going to risk messing with one of their leading AI companies while they are also terrified of China catching up or overtaking them in leading edge AI?

I wouldn't put it past them but I don't think it's a given either.

gessha4• 1 year ago

In my opinion they should because the US doesn’t have any GPU restrictions and VCs are hungry for disruption. The US also has the tech talent pool to throw at the problem unlike in manufacturing.

After breaking up Google, there will be a lot more moats to be had vs being stifled by the Google behemoth.

a1371• 1 year ago

I think my experience has been different from everyone else. As an owner of a pixel phone and multiple Google accounts, I wanted this to be true. But Gemini has been super inconsistent with tasks that are trivial for Google Assistant. I even bought the $26 AI plan for my account to help with some proofreading and it's been awful compared to ChatGPT. I'm about to cancel it.

flux293m• 1 year ago

Something I've noticed is that Gemini through gemini.google.com or through the mobile apps is vastly inferior to Gemini through aistudio.google.com. Much worse handling of long contexts amongst other things. Very odd that a product that is free (AI Studio use is free), is much worse than the product I am paying 20 quid a month for.

I find this to be especially true for the newer models like "gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25", so if you haven't tried AI Studio yet, I'd give that a go.

SubiculumCode5• 1 year ago

Every time I think, maybe I'll get a subscription, I read something like this and ask why?

SkyMarshal3• 1 year ago

Why does Google even have these two different interfaces?

keepamovin• 1 year ago

I still find OpenAI Whisper transcription the absolute best there is. Grok is the best reasoning/code model right now IMO, but it's audio transcription (and Apple's audio transcription) still totally sucks.

zmmmmm• 1 year ago

I haven't seen anyone else integrate LLMs properly with email and calendar other than Google.

I had an interesting experience: I was taking out a loan for some solar panels and there were some complicated instructions across multiple emails. I asked Gemini to summarise exactly what I had to do. It looked through my emails and told me I had to go to the web site for local rebate scheme and apply there. It even emphasised that it was important that I do that. I scoffed at it because I thought my installer was going to do that and wrote it off. A few weeks later, guess what: the installer calls me because they can't see the rebate application in their portal and want me to go check that I applied for it (!). Sure enough, I missed the language in the email telling me to do that and had to do exactly what Gemini had said weeks ago.

I do think Google has a real shot here because they have such an integrated email and calendaring solution where everyone already assumes it's online, fully indexed etc.

CSMastermind• 1 year ago

I run every query I do through all the major models, up to 10 of them at this point.

Benchmarks aside Gemini 2.5 Pro is a great model and now often produces the best code for me but it's not notably better than any of the other frontier models in my testing each of which tends to have their own strengths and weaknesses.

And Google's wrapper around Gemini is easily the most frustrating of any of the major AI companies. It's content guardrails are annoying and I just learned yesterday it won't let you upload json files for whatever reason (change the extension to txt without modifying the contents in any way and it works just fine).

enlyth• 1 year ago

Gemini 2.5 Pro does this annoying thing where it decides to refactor every part of your code even if you didn't ask, and also it outputs way too many damn comments on almost every line in the style of:

// Increment variable by 1

I find Claude 3.7 better at following instructions, even though the solutions it comes up with may not be the best at times

ZeroTalent4• 1 year ago

This is why we use Gemini and its context window as the architect and Sonnet 3.7 Max for implementation.

SubiculumCode5• 1 year ago

How does that work exactly? Gemini outlines it in pseudo code?, Sonnet writes it?

mekpro• 1 year ago

Google is also the only company that has had their own AI hardware that's worked (TPU). This could lead to more cost-effective training + inference and hence better AI.

p0w3n3d2• 1 year ago

I recently had to check some legal thing - I gave the pdf with law to both - chatgpt and Gemini, and I was able to convince the Gemini that my interpretation is right, but chatgpt was constantly opposing me. Later I checked and found out that my interpretation was wrong, so I'd say that chatgpt was better and moreover it spared me some problems with "Polish IRS"

ZeroTalent4• 1 year ago

"Polish IRS" — I never heard that term before. Do you mean the gov revenue service of Poland or something else?

Philpax4• 1 year ago

Yes, they'd be referring to the IRS equivalent for Poland.

p0w3n3d2• 1 year ago

Urząd Skarbowy. An office that takes care about income tax (among others)

DisjointedHunt3• 1 year ago

Not on cars, not in robotics, not in commercially deployed AI, not in enterprise investments in their cloud business.

They've got immense potential, sure. But to say that they're winning is a bit far from reality. Right now, their Cloud AI offerings to the enterprise are technologically superior to anything else out there from AWS, but guess what? AWS seems to have significantly more %age sales growth in this space with their larger base compared to GCP with their smaller market share.

The same can be said across turn based chat and physical AI. OpenAI continues to be the growth leader in the consumer space and a collection of Claude + self hosted + Gemini now in the enterprise / API space.

They need to be measuring themselves on moving the needle in adoption now. I'd hate for such amazing progress to stall out in a niche.

Philpax4• 1 year ago

I would say they're winning with Waymo: I took a fully autonomous taxi ride in the backseat in SF, and it just worked. No other company can currently do that, despite their promises and hype.

DisjointedHunt3• 1 year ago

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 and confirmed to be on schedule.

You can also take fully autonomous bus rides in China right now, even there, for, early reviews, the latest Tesla Autopilot blows everything else out of the water.

I’m not trying to push Tesla alone, but I’m trying to highlight the gap in adoption goals. What is Waymos ambition this year? How much can they ramp their fleet at $140k per unit versus Teslas consumer fleet and upcoming low cost robotaxi with the mass manufacturing improvements further lowering cost per unit?

stefan_• 1 year ago

Winning going on what, 10 15 years now? Surely at some point they must start scaling?

At this point all I can imagine is that every year they run the numbers and arrive at "yup, still makes no sense whatsoever". And so its eternally doomed to tech demo status.

labrador2• 1 year ago

I only AI for one reason since I'm retired and live alone: Life-like chats with a reasonable approximation of a knowledgeable friend. With the new memory features ChatGPT excels at that. I'm not even sure Google cares about that; that goes to show how little of it I've noticed with Google.

unknown_user_842• 1 year ago

While I'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for I've found success with a variety of Gemini models getting them to take to a specific persona when given initial prompts to take on a specific persona. Gemini 2.5 is specifically interesting because the <thinking> block shows how much the notebook is playing a persona/role vs. becoming that role. In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro likes to revert to 'maintaining a persona' in the <thinking> block. I questioned it about this at one point and it pointed out that humans also maintain a certain persona in their responses, and that you can't see their thinking. Still not entirely sure what I think about that.

I have experimented with telling the notebook to change the <thinking> block to a more narrative style. It seems to like to revert to ordered lists and bullet points if not continuously prompted to think in narrative.

Regarding maintaining consistency throughout the chat I have noticed Gemini 2.5 seems able to do this for quite a while but falls victim to the needle in a haystack problem that all LLMs seem to suffer from with an extremely long context and no external tooling.

I have a substack post on creating the initial prompt, which I call a bootstrap, using AI Studio and a set of system instructions if you are curious to explore.

https://consciousnesscrucible.substack.com/p/creating-charac...

labrador2• 1 year ago

Really good stuff, thank your for sharing it. I don't know if you've had a lot of experience with ChatGPT's new memory feature. It's not a character I'm looking for necessarily but simulating a friend. Like a real friend, I don't have to keep reminding ChatGPT of facts, thoughts and feelings I've had because it remembers them and brings them up when appropriate. It's uncanny and I think what Google lacks for now. If I ever change ChatGPT from it's default personality I'll refer back to your guide.

pzo3• 1 year ago

Apart from Gemini 2.5 Pro they have a decent Jack-of-all-trades master of none/price Gemini 2.0 Flash.

1) is dirty cheap ($0.1M/$0.4M),

2) is multimodal (image and audio),

3) reliable rate limit (comparing to OSS ml ai providers),

4) fast (200 tokens/s).

5) if need realtime API they provide as well for more expensive price (audio-to-audio)

It's my go to model for using as an API for some apps/products. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-2-0-flash/provid...

buggyipadmettoo• 1 year ago

I thought genini 2 flash API was free (for personal use at least)? I just created an iOS shortcut to call it, and didn’t pay anything.

pzo3• 1 year ago

yes they also have very decent free tier which is great, but keep in mind prompts "used to improve our products". We will see if free tier will stick for long or is temporary - they removed details how big free tier is but still great for testing.

If they added seamless google oauth + key generation + account topup for end users that would be even great for BYOK apps. Mobile developers then wouldn't have to setup infra, subscription monitoring, abuse monitoring etc.

But I guess they don't want to subsidise it in the end and they target it just for developers.

sMarsIntruder• 1 year ago

While the article correctly highlights Google’s significant advancements and formidable position in the AI race, calling them the winner on every front feels like a bit of a stretch and potentially overlooks some nuances, like SGE integration which isn’t universally loved. Too much fanboyism imho

pcdoodle• 1 year ago

And then one day "pooof".

godjan• 1 year ago

The article doesn't mention one of the most complex benchmarks - ARC challenge. All models suck in it https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

but Gemini and Claude still suck much worse then ChatGPT models

nolist_policy3• 1 year ago

They haven't tested Gemini 2.5 Pro yet.

usaar333• 1 year ago

They have.

https://x.com/arcprize/status/1905361753678246308

Alifatisk• 1 year ago

Wow, reading these comments it seems like Gemini 2.5 Pro Exp (assuming from gemini.google.com and not from Google Ai studio) is actually worth giving a shot! Is it really that impressive of a model now?

I've been using Qwen Chat a lot for the last couple of months because I got tired of Claudes small quota for free users, ChatGPTs inferior models and absurd pricing and Geminis (the previous models) heavy guardrails and censorship, like to the point that sincerely prompts actually triggers refusal.

I'll try Gemini 2.5 Pro Exp again and see how well it performs this time.

Also, did anyone notice that the ui of Google ai studio has changed? Can't find any mentions of this update in the release notes https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/changelog

p1dda• 1 year ago

Funny how a company who once had a motto of don't be evil turned out to be: evil

karel-3d2• 1 year ago

Please explain to me like I am stupid.

If I want to use OpenAI models, I download ChatGPT app.

What do I need to do to use Google's model? They have so mamy things called Gemini... I genuinely have no clue

marcusb6• 1 year ago

https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat

karel-3d2• 1 year ago

thanks

edit: I get "internal erorr received: permission denied"... ok will try it later

jwr• 1 year ago

Or, just use TypingMind or something similar to get access to all the major models through a single interface.

brap3• 1 year ago

google.com/gemini

There’s also AI Studio another commenter mentioned, but that’s for more advanced users who want to tweak it

thebigspacefuck2• 1 year ago

There’s a Gemini app on mobile but if you’re on desktop use https://aistudio.google.com. They are behind in this aspect, hopefully they release a desktop app with MCP.

GrumpyNl• 1 year ago

But, its Google, you will end up as the product.

k2xl• 1 year ago

I can’t use their video gen model veo2 since there is a waitlist… hard to tell if they are winning in video when they haven’t scaled that product.

porphyra2• 1 year ago

As long as Google continues to hamstring themselves with censorship for no reason, I can't use their products. The other day I asked gemini 2.5 pro "which british ceo said that his company's products were bad" and the response was

I'm just a language model, so I can't help you with that.

https://g.co/gemini/share/cb3afc3e7f78

Chatgpt 4o correctly identified the guy as Ratner and provided the relevant quotes.

tomrod2• 1 year ago

Try asking with a Ceasar cipher.

jeanlucas• 1 year ago

That's a new level of bad user experience

Tiktaalik• 1 year ago

It seems more likely just a weird bug considering that I can't understand at all why this topic would be considered controversial or censure worthy.

(casually googling this same line just now does reveal an AI suggestion with the correct answer)

porphyra2• 1 year ago

I could even see Gemini 2.5 googling the right things and "thinking" about Gerald Ratner before it abruptly censored itself at the last moment.

uejfiweun3• 1 year ago

I wouldn't bother with the official Gemini app. I don't know why Google even bothers with it at this point. I only interact with 2.5 through AI studio and it's great through that interface.

int_19h8• 1 year ago

The model itself is much more lax about such stuff than ChatGPT and especially Claude. The filters are applied on top of that, but products using it via the API don't suffer this problem.

mmmBacon• 1 year ago

AI is essentially a hardware/electricity arms race.

Whatever model is at the top can be surpassed if a competitor has enough compute scale. We are rapidly approaching the era where it’s difficult to have enough power in one campus. Distributed sites are needed if models continue to scale at 4.7x/year (see Epoch.ai) simply from a power perspective. You have to put the data centers where the power is and connect them together.

I believe the era of distributed training is already here however not everyone will be able to distribute training to multiple sites using their scale up networks. Their scale out networks will not be ready. So it could be that we see models plateau until distributed training infra is available.

I see the infrastructure side of AI and based on HW build out; Google has been slow to build and is behind everywhere.

csmpltn• 1 year ago

Google is winning because LLMs without a (good) search backend are mostly useless.

So many LLM workloads require high quality search results (backed by efficient, relevant, complete and up-to-date indexes), and that’s Google’s muscle.

nailer2• 1 year ago

Copilot has been doing this, using Bing, for a year not and it’s been great.

brap3• 1 year ago

I think the key is that Google is the gateway to the internet for the entire world.

Think about it. Whatever you’re trying to do online, either Search, Chrome or Android are in the critical path of like 90%+ of people if not more.

Once AI is deeply baked into these products, which are more like the “operating system” of the internet, the race is basically over.

Not to mention that Google is already sitting on the largest money printer in history and they can do this all day.

throwup2382• 1 year ago

That becomes really clear when using Gemini Deep Research vs OpenAI. I tried running the same research questions in both and Google regularly reads 10x as many sources as OpenAI and does it faster.

brap3• 1 year ago

I actually meant it in terms of having insane reach to end users, but yes, it most likely helps with finding/processing information

davidmurdoch• 1 year ago

Whatever model responds to me on my Android phone is as dumb as rocks. The Assistant was actually much better.

fragmede11• 1 year ago

Could be worse, you could be using Siri.

patwolf• 1 year ago

I use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini regularly. Even though 2.5 pro is really good, I find myself using Gemini the least because I have an aversion to giving Google even more data about me.

I know that even if they never inject ads directly in Gemini, they'll be using my prompts to target me.

Arch-TK• 1 year ago

The Rubik's cube example is just reversing the moves.

Writing a visualiser and basic scrambler isn't hard to stumble upon, there's endless training material and not much to screw up. Writing a working solver even if you train it on examples would be hard.

Very funny.

jonplackett• 1 year ago

I’m still really surprised everyone loves Gemini 2.5 so much.

Even for coding I find GPT4o to be more concise and write more sensible things.

I get the one-shot ‘build me a flight simulator’ type thing is special to Gemini 2.5 - but who actually ever uses it that way?

I feel a bit old school for aging it, but I still prefer ChatGPT at this moment. Am I the only one?

thebigspacefuck2• 1 year ago

If you’re not using something like Cline or Cursor you should give them a try.

I haven’t found any OpenAI models good for agentic coding. o3-mini and 4o were both worse than 3.5 Sonnet. 3.7 and Gemini 2.5 Pro both seem be better than 3.5. I still use 4o with search as my primary reference model though.

gcanyon• 1 year ago

Several people have suggested that LLMs might end up ad-supported. I'll point out that "ad supported" might be incredibly subtle/insidious when applied to LLMs:

An LLM-based "adsense" could:

   1. Maintain a list of sponsors looking to buy ads
   2. Maintain a profile of users/ad targets 
   3. Monitor all inputs/outputs
   4. Insert "recommendations" (ads) smoothly/imperceptibly in the course of normal conversation

No one would ever need to/be able to know if the output:

"In order to increase hip flexibility, you might consider taking up yoga."

Was generated because it might lead to the question:

"What kind of yoga equipment could I use for that?"

Which could then lead to the output:

"You might want to get a yoga mat and foam blocks. I can describe some of the best moves for hips, or make some recommendations for foam blocks you need to do those moves?"

The above is ham-handed compared to what an LLM could do.

JKCalhoun8• 1 year ago

You ask two different corporate LLMs and compare answers.

pixl976• 1 year ago

Every corporate LLM: "Why of course an ice cold Coca Cola is a healthy drink"

wccrawford2• 1 year ago

Yeah, ad-supported LLMs would be incredibly bad.

But "free" is a magic word in our brains, and I'm 100% sure that many, many people will choose it over paying for it to be uncorrupted by ads.

torginus4• 1 year ago

Free might as well be a curse-word to me, and I'm not alone. I'm old enough to have experience in pre-internet era magazines, and the downgrade in quality from paid publications to free ones has been quite substatial.

Free-to-play is a thing in video games, and for most, it means they'll try to bully you into spending more money than you'd be otherwise comfortable with.

I think everyone at this point had enough bad experiences with 'free' stuff to be wary of it.

vbezhenar• 1 year ago

For me ads on web are acceptable as long as they are clearly distinguished from the content. As soon as ads gets merged into content, I'll be unhappy. If LLM would advertise something in a separate block, that's fine. if LLM augments its output to subtly nudge me to a specific brand which paid for placement, that's no-no.

Lerc3• 1 year ago

LLMs should be legally required to act in the interest of their users (not their creators).

This is a standard that already applies to positions of advisors such as Medical professionals, lawyers and financial advisors.

I haven't seen this discussed much by regulators, but I have made a couple of submissions here and there expressing this opinion.

AIs will get better, and they will become more trusted. They cannot be allowed to sell the answer to the question "Who should I vote for?" To the highest bidder.

asadalt2• 1 year ago

but that would kill monetization no?

ysofunny2• 1 year ago

LLMs should be legally required to act in the interest of their users (not their creators).

lofty ideal... I don't see this ever happening; not anymore than I see humanity flat out abandoning the very concept of "money"

Sebguer• 1 year ago

Who decides what's in the interest of the user?

awongh• 1 year ago

To put on my techno-optimist hat, some specific searches I make already thinking please, please sell me something and google's results are horribly corrupted by SEO.

If an LLM could help solve this problem it would be great.

I think you could make a reasonable technical argument for this- an LLM has more contextual understanding of your high-intent question. Serve me some ads that are more relevant than the current ads based on this deeper understanding.

sva_4• 1 year ago

Would be illegal in Germany ('Schleichwerbung') and perhaps the EU?

I think it is actually covered in EU AI act article 5 (a):

[...] an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect of materially distorting the behaviour of a person or a group of persons by appreciably impairing their ability to make an informed decision, thereby causing them to take a decision that they would not have otherwise taken [...]

It is very broad but I'm pretty sure it would be used against such marketing strategies.

whiplash451• 1 year ago

The trick is in the « materially ».

The inability to demonstrate incrementality in advertising is going to come in very handy to dodge this rule.

Vilian• 1 year ago

The broad is proposital to be effective law

callmeal• 1 year ago

This is already being explored. See:

https://nlp.elvissaravia.com/i/159010545/auditing-llms-for-h...

  The researchers deliberately train a language model with a concealed objective (making it exploit reward model flaws in RLHF) and then attempt to expose it with different auditing techniques.

joshvm• 1 year ago

I'm not convinced this is any worse than searching for results or reviews and being directed to content that is affiliate supported (or astroturfed by companies). Humans already do this sort of subtle nudging and lots of people position themselves as unbiased. So many blogs are annoying "buried lede" advertising where the article seems vaguely useful until you realise that it's just a veiled attempt to sell you something. Virtually every reviewer on YouTube seems obliged to open with "my thoughts are my own, the company doesn't get to edit my review, etc."

On the other hand, a good LLM would be able to suggest things that you might actually want, using genuine personal preferences. Whether you think that's an invasion of privacy is debatable, because it's perfectly possible for an LLM to provide product results without sharing your profile with anyone else.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 1 year ago

It's always seemed to me that AI is going to be a commodity business - it's pretty clear that any company with enough money can compete, and it seems that current LLM-based AI is levelling off in terms of capability, with the new focus being on building layers of services on top of that (e.g. deep research agents).

In a commodity business cost is key, and Google with their N'th generation home grown TPUs and AI-optimized datacenters have a big advantage over anyone paying NVIDIA markups for accelerators or without this level of vertical integration.

twism• 1 year ago

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

kailuowang• 1 year ago

Maybe it's an Gemini advance only feature but you can generate audio overview right there in gemini interface.

AIPedant• 1 year ago

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).

microtherion• 1 year ago

I have no direct experience with Gemini itself, but the LLM integration into search has unquestionably made the product shittier than before, so I'm inclined to distrust the hype in this article.

asadalt2• 1 year ago

now we know what ilya saw.

aunty_helen• 1 year ago

I just wish they would stop trying to use their models to help keep their terrible cloud business alive.

Currently my teams building 2-3 systems based on Gemini, but trying to walk a client through setting up a gcp account and provision the model for video is a horrible experience. Chat et al would break their own backs trying to give you an api key fast enough, not google. Here’s a comically bad process with several layers of permissions that nobody asked for.

The irony of using ChatGPT to walk through setting up Gemini for a client was a highlight for me this week.

cnych• 1 year ago

But every time Google's ultimate move is sniped~~~~, Google added AI to the search result page, which greatly reduced the traffic of webmasters.

jjallen• 1 year ago

I guess I would argue that revenue, while not everything that matters, is super important. And I’m guessing that Google has nowhere near the revenue that OpenAI has. Even if they can bundle for “loyalty”, that is an uncertain future there. Magen it will work. Probably so. Still uncertain.

croes• 1 year ago

At the moment all these AIs are losing at the front of living up to the claims of their providers.

All make simple mistakes, all hallucinate, all are not reliable.

cryptoegorophy• 1 year ago

Was this post and comments paid by Google? Google lost the first movers advantage and it is too woke still.

not_a_bot_4sho• 1 year ago

I appreciate the author being upfront about their bias.

siliconc0w• 1 year ago

Totally agree Gemini Pro 2.5 is currently ahead but it isn't by a gigantic amount.

It's also still uncertain whether Google can turn Gemini into a successful product that either consumers or businesses want to use. They are famously bad at translating their technological advantage into good products - for example the way they shoehorn AI chat into search just makes both worse (imo).

I think OpenAI has the consumers and that'll make it easier to get business. Once they start eating into Google's lunch with AI booked flights and hotels...

phemartin• 1 year ago

Except the metric that really matters... USAGE.

_blk• 1 year ago

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.

lemonish97• 1 year ago

Honestly love gemini for zero-shot coding. But for some reason I'd still lean towards GPT4o for just natural conversations and day-to-day queries. Something about 4o's tone and behavior just clicks with me.

alimhaq• 1 year ago

Why is no one mentioning the fact that o3-mini is a couple months old model, and according to Sam Altman, they will be releasing o3 and o4-mini soon? Release dates especially by a couple months matters a lot right now

nipperkinfeet• 1 year ago

Probably the weakest. ChatGPT is winning.

ein0p• 1 year ago

I hear from my OpenAI contacts that the next wave of thinking models are going to blow the socks off Google. In some ways they already do (speech, images). So this lead will likely be short lived. That said, in the meantime I did get paid API access. The friction for the scenarios I need LLM for is effectively zero, and I'll use whichever sucks the least at the moment for any given task.

zkmon2• 1 year ago

I think Google deserves it. Didn't they come up with the foundational paper - All you need is attention? And then Colab, Tensorflow etc. Though not relevant, I remember Map-Reduce paper was also from Google, leading to big-data revolution.

sidcool• 1 year ago

There were people saying Google will die once OpenAI and Perplexity takes over. Deluded bunch.

cryptozeus2• 1 year ago

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!

gavmor• 1 year ago

Do Ghibli images represent the most significant—lucrative, high-margin, world-changing, or ubiquitously impactful—vertical to which generative models can be applied?

calmworm• 1 year ago

No, no it’s not. lol.

silexia• 1 year ago

Strange, my perspective is that I get better answers from ChatGPT on most questions than Gemini advanced 2.5.

gigatexal• 1 year ago

Data oriented Cloud devs (terraform, data processing etc) which of the chat LlMs do you like the best?

ahmedhawas123• 1 year ago

I do agree with a lot of what is said here. There are however a few things that I think will hinder Google on the long-run:

- The last time I checked (3-4 months ago) Gemini embedding models are probably the least reliable / contextually aware out there - A significant chunk of the market will want the ability to use locally hosted models / manage their own which Google currently has no play for - API documentation. Across the big managed models they are likely the least well documented model. - Allowing for more system vs. user prompts

uejfiweun3• 1 year ago

If Google is able to ignore the pressure to bring in revenue from AI and is able to outcompete the others at automating AI research itself, I think they will win the war. It seems that they certainly have an advantage, with limited pressure from outside investors, their own hardware stack, a constant flow of cash through the other lines of business, and a head start against most of the other giant tech companies.

sva_4• 1 year ago

It is sort of funny to me how the sentiment about whoever seems to be leading in ML changes so frequently (in particular here on HN.) A couple months ago it felt like people were sure that Google completely fucked it up for themselves (especially due to the fact that they invented the transformer but didn't productize it themselves at first.)

For a short while, Claude was the best thing since sliced cheese, then Deepseek was the shit, and now seemingly OpenAI really falls out of favor. It kinda feels to me like people cast their judgement too early (perhaps again in this case.) I guess these are the hypecycles...

Google is killing it right now, I agree. But the world might appear completely different in three months.

patrickhogan1• 1 year ago

It’s not just sentiment though. It’s reality. Before December 2024 timeframe Google’s models were awful. Now with 2.5 they are awesome.

There is no clear winner. The pace is fast.

h2zizzle2• 1 year ago

You could also be seeing waves of various astroturf campaigns.

sva_4• 1 year ago

Yeah... I wish there were laws that would require disclosure of such behavior. Might be tricky to implement though, and probably contradicts the interests of politicians.

joenot4434• 1 year ago

Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN.

What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?

ZeroTalent4• 1 year ago

Claude was only ever good for coding, in my opinion. It had nothing on OpenAI pro models for multimodal use.

int_19h8• 1 year ago

The sentiment changes this fast because SOTA changes this fast. E.g. Google models were objectively crappy compared to OpenAI, but Gemini 2.5 really turned the tables (and I'm not talking about synthetic benchmarks here but real world coding).

The state of affairs with local models is similarly very much in flux, by the way.

light_triad2• 1 year ago

AI is changing fast! And to be fair to the model companies, they have been releasing products of (mostly) increasing quality.

It really depends what your use case is. Over the range of all possible use cases this has been the narrative.

I tried Google's model for coding but it kept giving me wrong code. Currently Claude for coding and ChatGPT for more general questions is working for me. The more exotic your use case, the more hit or miss it's going to be.

googlehater• 1 year ago

A couple months ago it felt like people were sure that Google completely fucked it up for themselves

Hey it's me!

uncomplexity_3• 1 year ago

yes yes and it should be like this, this is healthy competition!

uncomplexity_3• 1 year ago

and the consistent all time winner? the goddamn consumers!

indigodaddy2• 1 year ago

"They're also small, which makes them perfect for edge applications and phone integration."

- you can't locally install or onprem Gemini right, so why does small make it better for edge applications, essentially because small means light and fast, so it will respond quicker and with less latency? Requests are still going out over the network to Google though right?

bagacrap2• 1 year ago

Wrong, Android and Chrome infer locally

indigodaddy2• 1 year ago

So Gemini on Android isn't sending requests to the Internet? Highly unlikely

noname120• 1 year ago

You probably missed the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632049

nullbio• 1 year ago

Can we please outlaw advertising with AI chatbots before it becomes a plague? Once it starts, there is no turning back. But if we can get ahead of this now based on what we've already learned about the internet then we can perhaps prevent the carnage that is going to happen.

zipmapfoldright• 1 year ago

what we need is not more regulation

xpe• 1 year ago

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have a chance at this point

I'm so done with articles that don't even try to talk about probability sensibly.

The article doesn't make a good case even for a watered-down version of the claim. Where is the logic?

Until the author puts forth his model of change and how/why Google is unassailably ahead, I'm not buying his hyperbole.

When I put the Google + DeepMind picture together, I can only wonder why people, myself included, ever became so bullish on OpenAI or Anthropic or even Meta.

Yikes. Hindsight bias in full display.

hadlock3• 1 year ago

is fast and cheap—I mean, they're giving away free access!—has a gigantic context window of 1 million tokens (only recently surpassed by Meta’s Llama 4) and it’s connected to the entire Google suite of products

Is this a feature? I feel like using Google's LLM products only serves to feed their Ad machine to sell me more ads. Every cloud based office suite offers AI functionality now. Unless I'm doing something really complex/dramatic I'm going to choose the LLM that isn't tied to a giant machine selling me ads over the one that does every time. Chat LLM products have pretty much effectively allowed me to divorce myself from the Google Ad Machine, now that I'm free I'm not walking back willingly.

IG_Semmelweiss• 1 year ago

I tried to use the free Gemini google tier for the longest time until a few months ago. For a while, i was using it as a 2nd or 3rd backup response. After a lot of disappointment , I finally gave up. The responses vs Grok and OpenAI were nothing short of atrocious. Plus, a lot of content was effectively kneecapped behind censor walls.

Is it really true the 2.5 is actually good ?

FilosofumRex• 1 year ago

Industrial/commercial adoption of LLMs is quite varied and critically depends on the quality vs criticality match.

In healthcare, engineering, construction, manufacturing, or aviation industires adoption is mostly on the admin side for low priority/busy work - virtually no doctors, pharmacists, nurses, engineers, technicians or even sales people use LLMs on the job. LLMs products have serious quality issues and are decades behind industrial databases, simulation and diagnostic tools.

On the other hand in academics, consulting, publishing, journalism, marketing, advertising, law and insurance industries it's wildly adopted and is surging. For example, Westlaw's Co-counsel is better at drafting and case law briefing than all but the most experienced litigators. Not only it has not replaced lawyers, but is causing a boom in hiring since the time and cost of training new associates is drastically reduced and allows firms to take on more clients with more sophisticated case work.

hm-nah• 1 year ago

Eh…everything but the Cloud Platform UI/UX/Usability front. GCP portal is a hot mess. It is far worse than Azure and slightly worse than AWS.

coolvision• 1 year ago

Might it be because of more relaxed culture, and less pressure on researchers and engineers? Innovation likes freedom and exploration, not deadlines.

dostick• 1 year ago

Is it all because co-founder returned and driving things?

conartist6• 1 year ago

Just means they're the lead seller of hype in the hype bubble...

upmind• 1 year ago

Surprised to see that no one commented out that this post gives heavy generated by AI vibes, for instance, there are so many - dashes.

nigel_doug• 1 year ago

Does anyone know of a decent video game made with AI yet?

Aeroi• 1 year ago

anyone in the know, saw this coming 6 months ago. It's possible they will continue to steamroll.

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

Tangential, are Gemini and Deepseek models priced sustainably or will they reduce inferencing power and increase price after getting early adopters?

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

Yes, you can talk to a live person on ℝ by requesting a ＋１|ー |（８８８）|ー |６９０－|5358 callback through the app. Open the app, go to Help → Contact Us ＋１|ー |（８８８）|ー |６９０－|4716, and select your issue to schedule a call. offers 24/7 support for -related concerns. For general issues, hours may vary. Call ＋１|ー |（８８８）|ー |６９０－|5358 for more help.

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/338137915?hl=en&s...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/338155175?hl=en&s...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/338157180?hl=en...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/338159352?hl=en...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/thread/338168440?hl...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/338157420?hl=en...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/338162217?authu...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/338178024?authu...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/business/thread/338186288?hl=en&n...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/business/thread/338187794?hl=en&n...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/thread/338192414?hl...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/thread/338328426?hl...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/thread/338328678?hl...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/meet/thread/338330656?hl=en&sjid=...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/thread/338331051?hl...

jerrysmith647817• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/meet/thread/338331194?hl=en&notif...

raindropm• 1 year ago

Gemini is really good, dev is happy, cost is low, but the mass just don't use it, The UX feels...weird(in my opinion), and Google marketing just sucks. Look at the craze of GPT-4o image gen launch, Pretty sure none of that will ever happened with Gemini(which tbf, have extremely good imagen too!) They have weird too-careful-and-afraid-to-step-on-someone-toes approach to marketing, and that shows.

OpenAI have Sam as 'presenter' that people can hear him talk enthusiastically, Grok have Elon, even though that not really help much. Gemini? just AI product from faceless mega corporate. People don't feel relate to that. The emotion is part of equation of why people use something, not just function.

Also doesn't help with ChatGPT name already cemented in AI history. Every Bob and Jane heard about ChatGPT even they're use it once, but Gemini...who?

Google is winning on every AI front

Related Stories