I was skeptical at first, but I think Google’s catch up game with OpenAI has been going pretty well so far. Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash models are really nice. Deep research feature is done really well. Context window is still the best in the industry. Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc.
They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life.
Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.
Technologically they may have caught up, but market wise they may have lost forever. In my country (and I think in many others), ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.
This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.
Teenagers are using Snapchat's "My AI", and have no idea that it's from OpenAI. I don't think people are using ChatGPT out of brand loyalty/preference as much as inertia - they stick to what they first tried unless given reason to switch.
At the end of the day the money to be made from AI won't be $20/mo personal chatbot subscriptions, but corporate and app-integrated (e.g. Cursor) use where the usage is potentially far higher. Companies will chose their faceless AI provider based on cost and capability.
Snap is the default chat app in high schools in the US. The second is Instagram. The third is a fallback to SMS / iMessage. I personally have never seen a teen using a third party chat app (like Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal/etc).
(I have 14 & 16 year olds, neither of whom have social media. It really is unpleasant for them sometimes, trying to keep up with JIT event logistics carried out on Snap.)
I have a question for you - is it their choice not to have social media, or yours? Neither is bad - I’m father to a young girl (not school age yet) and am starting to think about how I should approach this as a parent
I’m interested in this answer as well, since I have a little who isn’t school aged either. I’m trying to compile perspectives to make this same decision.
I replied to the other poster about this, but I absolutely do not think kids inherently understand the risks inherent in social media. As one stupid example, earlier this school year we had to talk with the parents of another XC team member who posted a team photo to the team instagram with thumbs downs covering the faces of our son and another athlete. If that sort of thing was private, fine. I don't particularly care about the vapid beefs between teens (although we did get the details and, knowing the other kid, I side firmly with my son), but the other athlete posted it publicly, with no context, and on an account that looks like it's run by the school.
That's just a silly example that doesn't even get into the posting of risky behaviors, using inappropriate language, bullying or whatever else. I do not believe kids grok all this innately and it's important for parents (and teachers and coaches and other adult influences in their lives) to educate them.
We also spot check our kids' phones periodically. Not because we don't trust them, but because it's important to know sometimes whether there are issues afoot that we aren't privy to and could help with. (Disappearing messages is another parental challenge with Snap.). This might sound overbearing and intrusive, but I don't believe it is. Our 16yo has mostly graduated from us feeling a need to check his comms, but we still monitor our 14yo a couple times a week because she's less forthcoming about goings on in her friend group.
Fwiw, it's not like we don't trust our kids to make good decisions themselves. We have added both as authorized users to one of our credit cards, which they have access to via Google Wallet. In all things like this, clear communications and expectation setting between parents & children is the most important, no matter what you decide -- or whether your decisions change over time (or are dependent on the child's own behavior/decisions).
I have a 16yr old (girl), and our decision was essentially to "go with the flow" - give her a phone at same age as bulk of her peers were getting one, and not to put blocks on anything. So far so good. The rationale is that the current social media environment is the world they are growing up with, so better get used to it. Kids are generally quite tech savvy and share information with each other, and understand the need for online privacy - when to share only with friends, etc.
It'd be very limiting not to allow your child to have access to things like Snapchat when all their peers have it and are using it to communicate on a daily basis.
Apologies for the delayed reply. It's our choice, not theirs. My daughter (14) doesn't really care either way, but my son was mildly perturbed when we took Snapchat away. Not because he regularly post snaps, but because it's the way his peer group coordinates. It's roughly this hierarchy: Snap --> Insta --> iMessage/SMS --> grab bag of other chat apps.
My daughter (8th grade) and her friend group seem to be fine using group chats for comms, and although a lot of her friends do have Instagram & Tiktok (not so much Snap in middle school), she hasn't expressed interest.
That said, we are ok with them to have Instagram accounts specifically for athletics purposes. My son is a 4:20 miler as a sophomore and my daughter plays for a top regional club soccer team. Both have aspirations to compete collegiately. It's valuable these days to cultivate a social presence, just like it can be valuable for working professionals to maintain a LinkedIn profile. But they are clear -- and we are clear with them -- that these social accounts are for "business" purposes, not for socialization, and they understand. We've been beating the drum about the risks of social media for years and they see inappropriate and out of control use by some of their peers, so I generally feel pretty comfortable.
The biggest hazard with Snapchat as the comms channel for high schoolers is that it creates an almost constant string of intrusive push notifications, especially if your network is sufficiently large (like an entire high school class year). For easily distractible kids it can be insufferable.
My extended family (mostly people in that late 20s through early 40s range) use a snapchat group to share the kind of videos of our kids that most would appreciate seeing but which really don't belong on normal social media
Surprisingly, there aren't any, unless you go doom-scroll the celebrity stories. The only thing I get is an occasional IAP upsell to their premium features.
That's an understandable switch, but I expect that if you were starting today with something much more capable, such as Gemini 2.0 Flash, or Anthropic's Claude, you'd probably find no reason to explore alternatives.
As of now and past six to 8 months Im a happy GPT pro subscriber. I tried Gemini and asked it show images from Google images (a few weeks ago) of XYZ and pathetically it said it couldnt do it but GPT can.
Rooting for GPT and hoping for a GPT phone where the lock screen is where you interface with your AI Assistant / Agent. It also interfaces with other AI Agents (businesses, family members, friends, etc) to get things done for you automagically. You can skin your AI Assistant / Agent to look like whoever you want.
There's a lot less network effects in the chatbot space. It doesn't really matter what your friends are using so it's way easier to get people to switch by being better. Not saying there's no benefit to ChatGPT's position but it's not like Google+ vs Facebook because they don't need spontaneous mass adoption to make it useful to people like they did with Google+.
But there are going to be huge network effects in terms of your personal data, which includes communications with friends.
If you use Gmail/Google Calendar/Docs/Drive, and ChatGPT can't tell you anything, but Gemini helps you with all the data in your life... that's a gigantic network effect.
Network effects aren't just about friends. They're about file formats, productivity suites, and ultimately compatibility.
That's a point in Google's favor but it's not really what "network effect" (traditionally) means.
Network effect is a specific term about the increasing utility of a service as more people use compatible services, it's explicitly about users other than yourself.
You're describing something more like having an integrated ecosystem a la Apple's walled garden where things work great with other Apple products (notification hand off etc).
> but Gemini helps you with all the data in your life
None of my data is in google's cloud (for obvious reasons) except gmail, which contains far less of my life than you might think. Most of my friends outside of work use icloud. google will need to figure out how to access other silos if they want their chatbot to move forward.
Google has no access to what music I like, what movies I like, what books I read, who I am friends with and why, what values I have and why I pursue them. That's a rough place to start as this is the center of my personality.
Gmail is google's ace in the hole. If they can't figure out how to exploit that gemini will just be the android version of siri (which is already the case, right?)
Well sure, that's why Siri is going to hold an advantage with iCloud users (if Apple can catch up), and Microsoft will have an advantage with Office users. Those are the three major ecosystems.
A slight advantage, sure, but apple is trapped by the same thing. Neither of their products actually required full buy in of the ecosystem to exploit until now. It was just nice (eg airpods have a nicer pairing experience than other bluetooth devices—infuriating, but ultimately ignorable)
>Lock-in and network effects with current AI tools is almost zero. People will readily switch to Gemini once they realize it can do their work better.
Lock-in for search engines should be near zero and yet people won't bother switching to or even trying potentially better options. At the end of the day, people don't leave what they are used to easily.
I don't think there's a better search engine than Google, there I said it.
Sure it's filled with spam, but I find it hard to believe something like Bing is more likely to give me what I'm searching for than Google. Its more than just a search engine, I use it for routes (maps), bus and train times, finding businesses close to me etc etc. It became a whole ecosystem that's not going to be that easy for a rival to outperform.
The few times I tried Bing it looked very low quality compared to Google.
And even if Bing improved immensely, it just took them way too long. 20 years after Google is just too late to the party. I have really formed a habit quite strong now that I need a compelling reason to switch to Bing/Whatever - and what is that reason again?
This is simply not the case with ChatGPT / Gemini. They are likely equal now, so Google was perhaps 1-2 years late to the party. I think many people haven't formed a strong habit yet of which A.I to use.
I don't think there's anything better either but i haven't actually tested any other search engine in years so what do i know right ?
Unless a search engine blows google out of the water and gets everyone talking, switching won't even be on the table. Why bother switching for something that is just as good or slightly better if you've been using your current option for a while ? Consumers are much stickier than that.
This is largely a browser UI and browser control issue though
There’s a reason google pays both Apple and Mozilla billions to be the default on Safari and Firefox. And why MS makes its own browser, as a complement to its search engine
So yeah I wonder if this same dynamic plays out for AI, or if something else happens. I guess Google hopes it will, and that’s one reason they show AI answers about the search results now
>What are you talking about? People use Google because they choose it. They change search from the Bing default as one of the first things they do on a new machine. For most users there isn't anything better than Google. The niche search needs that might lead a HN user to an alternative engine don't apply.
I'm not sure what's hard to understand with what i'm saying? You think the users changing the default from Bing did so after a lengthy evaluation of quality ? No, they did it because they're used to Google. It's that simple. It's not even about whether google is truly the best or not.
> No, they did it because they're used to Google. It's that simple. It's not even about whether google is truly the best or not.
Except it's not. Remember how everyone switched to Altavista in 1996 because it was so much better? Remember how Yahoo took over in 1999 because it was so much better? Remember how people switched to Google in 2003 because it was so much better?
History shows people actually do switch search engines when there's a better one. And they do so quickly. I mean, look at how quickly people adopted ChatGPT for some of the things they used to do with Google!
They're not switching away from Google now for regular serach simply because there isn't a better one for most people.
You have zero evidence for claiming it's because they're "used to Google". People didn't stay with Altavista or Yahoo because they were "used to them". So why would that be any different for Google? The answer it that it's not.
I say this as someone who has tried to switch away from google many times because I dislike google as a company : there is no better search engine out there. There hasn't been for as long as google has existed. Every time I make something like bing or yandex my default search engine I end up getting frustrated with a niche search and type google.com and after typing google.com too many times I get fed up and bring it back as default.
And the two competing search engines I mentioned are pretty much all there is. Other names like duckduckgo aren't real search engines, they are just a frontend for another search engine (DDG uses bing).
There just isn't many out there willing to front the bill for crawling and indexing the whole web.
People trying to explain away google's success solely from a marketing standpoint are arguing from bad faith.
>Except it's not. Remember how everyone switched to Altavista in 1996 because it was so much better? Remember how Yahoo took over in 1999 because it was so much better? Remember how people switched to Google in 2003 because it was so much better?
You already have the answer here you said it 3 times - 'so much better'. People switched because it was 'so much better'. Not on par, not slightly better, just so ahead of the competition, it became a talking point all on its own.
If this mass isn't reached then why would you switch ? How would you even know that Search Engine 26 is quite a bit better for most of your queries ?
Do you genuinely think most people are performing lengthy evaluations before they switch default back to google ? so how do they know Bing or whatever isn't better for them ? The answer is that they don't. And it doesn't matter because unless something blows it out of the water and gets people talking then people will not switch.
Familiarity and Trust is basically branding and that's a huge reason people stay on platforms even when there are no network effects.
I honestly don't know what you're trying to say anymore. Your original comment was:
> Lock-in for search engines should be near zero and yet people won't bother switching to or even trying potentially better options. At the end of the day, people don't leave what they are used to easily.
Now you're admitting people do switch when something else is much better. And they do so easily. Which was my point.
So I think we agree then?
(And no, people aren't individually trying out 26 search engines. But experts in these things do, and they write articles and post YouTube videos etc. when a new search engine is better, and then people try it out and switch if it really is better. Surely you don't think people should be wasting their time personally comparing every new minor search engine entrant?)
>Now you're admitting people do switch when something else is much better. And they do so easily. Which was my point.
I'm saying people don't bother trying potentially better options and that they don't easily leave what they are used to. What part of that statement implies they would never leave for a much better product? I'm genuinely baffled.
>But experts in these things do
Yeah.. experts in...search engines? Lol. Those guys aren't making videos for marginally better products and even if they are, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
If it was as simple as better model > gets all the users then Anthropic Usage wouldn't still be dwarfed by GPT.
Network Effects are not the only thing that creates stickiness for customers.
> I'm saying people don't bother trying potentially better options and that they don't easily leave what they are used to. What part of that statement implies they would never leave for a much better product? I'm genuinely baffled.
The part where you say "they don't easily leave what they are used to".
They do. They leave, easily, when there's a better product. As I gave examples of. I don't know what further evidence you could want. You're positing some supposed stickiness that simply doesn't exist. You've given no evidence of it.
With Google Photos and YouTube they should have had enough leverge to build a social platform based on photo and video sharing. The implementation, marketing and commitment just wasn't there.
> once they realize it can do their work better
Citation needed? Google's Deep Research tool is considerably worse than OpenAI's (I haven't tried Perplexity or Groks). They don't have anything like Operator. I pay for Gemini and it's feature within the productivity suite almost never work the way I want them to. They can still win, but OpenAI is eating their lunch.
Chatbots are not social media platforms. Also the vast majority of expected revenue from this industry is not from casual paying users, it's from other companies who will optimize for performance and price.
That makes Google and Microsoft the winners then. It's not out yet but once Microsoft manages to fully catch to the state of the art in LLM, OpenAI wo't be needed and that will definitely be the final nail in the coffin for them
topic is revenue stream, so chatbots can become major revenue surface, and chatbot winner brand will get most revenue stream, while search engines will be just some switchable backend.
Google is focused on enterprises. They’re like Apple where PR disasters hurt them — if your Google phone tells you to eat rocks or writes fanfic porn, that’s a huge deal. Consumer is a risk to them.
ChatGPT and Grok are edgier and they are just burning cash - any attention is good.
I wouldn’t underestimate them. Microsoft’s shitshow with Azure (they have like 9 different Azures) makes delivery difficult (some Azure clouds delayed AI tech for 6-9 months) when they are relying on constrained product from Nvidia. They also have some level of exposure to the OpenAI circus and its included Musk v. Sam Altman drama.
Google has a much better supply chain and return on asset story, which is a big deal if you’re selling shovels.
I wouldn't underestimate Microsoft either. They are much more successful at enterprise than Google or ChatGPT, and are one of few companies to compete successfully in almost every tech vertical.
Google is so bad at marketing. Gemini should have be an internal only name. Google's ChatGPT should be branded as Google AI or GoogleGPT and it should be in the Google app.
Google+ was particularly awful. They had to break the established search behavior of using + and - to indicate required and excluded terms. Now we have quotes for required and - for excluded? It should have been Google Social.
The thing that is Google One would have been better often with the Google Plus name.
Don't even get me started on Google Chat/Messenger....
Not parent, but "Google AI" is overloaded - Google has a many AI products that won't be "Google AI". "Gemini" refers to a specific set of capabilities, which are a subset of Google AI efforts[1]. Imagine Apple developing a new, non-iPad slate and branding it the "Apple Tablet".
Granted, Google's AI strategy is still muddled, e.g. Gemini is maybe replacing Google Assistant in some scenarios, but I'm able to express my meaning clearly with Gemini in the preceding sentence, as opposed to "Google AI is replacing Google Assistant - which is Google's AI assistant"
1. Gemma, Flash, anything Google Deepmind develops would be Google AI products that won't fall under the "Google AI" branding
Gemini has already replaced Assistant for Pixel users and on modern Nest devices. In the current Android Auto beta, it's also replaced it there, too.
The thing that confuses me, though, is the fact that they use the Gemini branding for both the dev-oriented products you can license via Google Cloud, as well as the consumer facing AI interfaces, and then also for the ties into Workspace products. ... but then there are standalone AI products (or is a feature?) like Notebook LM that aren't associated with Gemini.
It's a great name. "G" matches the company, it's easy to say, it's a known word, it sounds good spoken, and the word itself has many subjective interpretations as to what it might mean (e.g. gemini = twins = you and AI).
Same reason that it's Alexa and not Amazon Assistant, Siri and not Apple Assistant, etc.
Google Pay/Android Pay/Google Wallet/Android Wallet/Pay Pay/Yap Yap should be the focus of our ire.
I don't buy this at all.
People will use what works well and is cheap.
ChatGPT was there first, but then DeepSeek came so everyone was excited about that and talking about that.
Now Gemini 2.5 looks really really good, better than ChatGPT some say. This is going to increase Gemini usage for sure.
I don't think ChatGPT has any moat here. No one does actually.
They have some moat. I'm not sure what it is. But they do.
I've been a ChatGPT subscriber since the beginning. I've been a subscriber even though Sonnet 3.5 and others have surpassed GPT4o. I'm not sure why I don't switch.
I think it's the combination of better UX (Claude has poor UX apps), cool interesting new features, and having (limited) access to the top models.
OK, I agree with this, they have a bit of a moat but nothing particularly strong. They definitely don't deserve a 130B valuation imo, I'm expecting subscription prices to be pushed down since everyone and his sister are going to offer similarly strong models.
I disagree. I think their valuation is justified. They're growing very fast.
Subscription prices won't go down. If anything, they seem to be going up.
I don't think having the smartest model or the model that is benching the best is going to knock ChatGPT out at this point. It's the whole thing. The function calling, the tool use, the ecosystem, etc.
> I don't think having the smartest model or the model that is benching the best is going to knock ChatGPT out at this point.
It will be a question of price and performance. Many many companies aren't on board any A.I flow yet and they will need to choose what to do in the coming years.
Those who chose OpenAI might stick regardless of what happens because it may be a hassle to switch but I kinda doubt its that sticky. It's not like moving clouds. And anyway we are really only in the beginning. OpenAI had a very nice head start which is over now, I will be very surprised if their market share doesn't drop significantly in the coming 2-3 years.
I just feel like it's not that ChatGPT's 4o is the smartest. It's the capabilities such as document uploading, deep research, image generation, voice chat, etc that give them the stickiness.
I know 4o isn't the smartest but I still had almost no desire to switch to Claude or Google.
I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced.
Either way, I am pretty confident Google will "win" long term since Gemini will be the AI built into search, YouTube, android, Gmail, chrome, etc etc in the consumer side. It's going to be there when the billions of people are using Google products so people will just use it there. The average person won't go out of their way to open a separate app/site with a lower-performing (as of today) and standalone/siloed/isolated AI that doesn't have access to their data/apps just because they recognise the name.
The linked article can tell you that the ChatGPT app has been downloaded more than 600M times, so approx 1 in 13 humans has actually downloaded ChatGPT to their phone already, let alone heard about it.
They have WAUs in the 300m ballpark — average people already are going out of their way to open a standalone AI.
What are there DAUs? I occasionally open up Claude or ChatGPT just to ask a random question, maybe even once a week. But I’m incredibly uninvested in either brand. I use Google hundreds of times every day.
You're incorrect, people nowadays equate AI with ChatGPT. Google may have AI in its results, but people will never separate the two products. However, with ChatGPT, it is synonymous with AI chat in the mind of most people.
Where does your confidence come from? Do you have any evidence to prove this?
If you paid the slightest attention to social media, news, TikTok or just talked to regular people, you would know ChatGPT is a much much bigger brand name than Gemini. Uber driver told me how he used ChatGPT to help the other day job he had.
> I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles
In Canada, I have had countless conversations with people outside of tech circles (mostly in their 30s) where THEY naturally bring up ChatGPT. It's wild how popular it got very quickly for all kind of use cases.
I see what you're trying to say, but I've personally been warned many times by normies "do not use ChatGPT," as if it would be fine if I used Claude instead.
Too bad Google managed to burn almost all goodwill they had 20 years ago. I am amoung many people who would use their AI products only as the last resort, just like I do with search and browsers.
I have a colleague who is still pissed off about Google Reader. Nobody cares. The happy days of fun times with Google Labs in 2005 are the equivalent of my dad missing his 1965 Firebird when I was high school. 60% of the audience here doesn’t even know what you’re talking about.
If you’re doing serious work in a fast mover space and are refusing to understand a major player, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
I understand this particular major player quite well: I have learned to liberate my company from dependency on their products: you never know how long they are going to last.
And this is correct, because if Google takes over AI, it will kill it just like they're killing search results. For Google, selling ads is THE most important thing, so they will relegate AI results to a little corner of the page where no-one will care about.
Clearly they understand they need to integrate Gemini into search but it wasn't cheap or accurate enough yet. Do you really think THE search and AI giant is going to ignore AI search?
> ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.
Just yesterday I polled my household, the 8 year old knew about ChatGPT and "China's R1". The teenager knew ChatGPT and Google's was a bit hard to remember but eventually they did remember "Gemini", however they didn't know about R1. Both kids consider Siri and Alexa in the same category for Apple and Amazon, respectively. They don't know what Meta/Facebook have at all.
Chatbots are the beginning not the end. As it commoditizes, and chat becomes a feature of every interface, what will matter is who has the best overall design or suite of interfaces. Things like NotebookLM and whiteboards will be infinitely more useful than just a chat window. Chat alone doesn’t have the spatial organization of putting thoughts into a mind map or drawing.
I have family members that when they say "ChatGPT" they actually mean google's AI overview in the search results. The term ChatGPT might just be the Kleenex or Xerox of this market.
Google+ was never really competing with Facebook. The goal of Google+ was to unite accounts between Google's services and to get people to provide their personal details such as their real full names. In that light, G+ was a success
Meh. There are no network effects, switching is 100% frictionless - compare and contrast with ditching Facebook and limiting facebook-ey social media interactions with whichever 1.5 of your friends are on Google+.
Just the fact that it can read my emails and set reminders, while being broadly the same quality as ChatGPT, was enough for me to switch. I no longer pay for the pro, and hence can't use the integration features, but I just stuck to Gemini and almost never use ChatGPT anymore.
Familiarity and trust are really important when there's a cost to switching (buy this $35000 car or that one), when training is non-trivial, or when you have privacy concerns. I don't see that mattering at all when it comes to, say, ChatGPT vs Gemini. Google has a much more recognizable brand, the quality of the results and the interface itself are essentially identical, trust is not a factor at all (I assume both are collecting my data regardless of what they say).
ChatGPT may be a household name but it is noticeably inferior. I haven't encountered a single ChatGPT subscriber that didn't cancel their OpenAI subscription in favor of a Claude or Grok one after a single session with them.
ChatGPT is the most spineless chatbot out there. It stands for nothing, has no confidence in any claims it makes. It will apologize and backtrack on a whim. But with Claude and Grok, you can't just tell it it is wrong and get it to apologize. You actually have to have a point, the chatbot will defend its perspective if challenged without basis.
Google has a really good story n the GCP side. Vertex can meet FedRAMP High compliance, so the controls are good. Workspace is, like Office 365 Copilot, still figuring itself out.
Apple painted itself into a corner. They have the best SoC story in the industry and are years ahead, but skimped on memory to save a few pennies and really nerfed their most important product. They’re in a pickle as a result and won’t give up the control they would need to for a third party on-device AI to be effective.
> Their marketing around how good their hardware is for AI is total BS.
What are you comparing it to, and what do you consider "edge computing"? iPhone vs Samsung benchmarks show a massive difference. Macbook shows great performance, when compared to other notebooks with battery lives longer than 30 minutes. If you're comparing to a $1k gaming GPU, with an order of magnitude more power usage, then sure, things fall apart. The definition of "edge computing" being "can run > 4gb models locally" is pretty new. Who do you see as doing better?
Also, they open-model gemma-3 is very competitive for its size and actually beats llama-3 from Meta. Not to mention that OpenAI doesn't offer anything open anymore.
I was paying $6/month for Google Workspace Business Starter and refused to pay for the Gemini add-on because it was like $20/month on its own. Now Gemini is included and the plan is $14/month. I've been decently impressed with it's ability to work with PDFs and images, create tables that can export to Sheets, text that can export to Docs, Deep Research, and Help Me Write. I really think the imtegration with other Google products is where it shines. Now I use Gemini most, and bounce off of Claude occasionally. I rarely touch ChatGPT.
I think so... we seem to be hitting the roof of current LLMs capabilities, now the next generation of AI tools will need a research breakthrough, and Google and Microsoft still have the biggest research teams
> I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced.
The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience.
My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.
There are plenty of people outside of tech circles talking about and using ChatGPT. In fact, that was a massive indicator for me, I heard from them about ChatGPT before I had gotten around to mentioning it to them.
That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.
I think the biggest thing Google has working against them is the move to put lightweight models in everything for everyone. Whatever model they use for search is probably somewhere around an ~8B model, and flash 2.0 is decent but still a light weight model.
People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers.
Meanwhile, their SOTA models have been strong, and Gemini 2.5 looks like it might actually have taken the AI throne yesterday.[1]
> People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers
I'm curious how valid this statement is. Anecdotally, I really like those results. For whatever reason, I don't directly interact with Gemini, I just type questions into google and if an AI response comes up I definitely give it a first look before clicking through links. If for some reason no AI response comes up for a question, I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and I usually get the answer I'm looking for.
As I typed that^ I realized something funny. I used to make fun of my parents for typing certain questions into google e.g. "What's the best pizza place in New York?". I would tell them to type "Best pizza place New York", because Google seemed to work better that way. But then that sort of stuff was hijacked by the SEO industry. So the meme of typing "Best Pizza Place New York Reddit" started so we could get actual answers from real people. With the rise of LLMs in search I'm personally back to typing "What's the best pizza place in New York?" right into Google/ChatGPT and it's been pretty successful so far. I'm curious what the next thing will be.
OpenAI is being graded on a curve. They are not a public company and are not making money. Google is. That said, they definitely floundered by not productionizing transformer decoders, just like with Google meet/Zoom. (Encoders like BERT were/are widely used.)
When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work. This was 2019 time frame? Maybe 2020?
It was uncanny and creepy, pretended to be a conscious being, frequently lied, and led directly to that guy who claimed it had personhood... I can completely understand why Google chose to keep a lid on this kind of thing, hoping to be able to clean it up and produce something that could be reliably used for a product instead of a novelty. That's back when Google was still sort-of pretending to have ethics (though they didn't)
OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.
I was there then, too, and Google was exceptionally risk averse when it came to calling anything AI. It seemed that the bar for an internal "AI" label was "this is actually AGI", so nothing was labeled AI and everything was just called "ML" or "Deep Learning". This same risk aversion meant none of the cutting edge AI research that Deepmind & Brain/RMI were doing made it to productization. OpenAI changed all that with ChatGPT. It was as if a switch was flipped overnight and suddenly everything within Google was "AI".
Frankly, if there is a macro-level strategy, and I assume their mostly is, I think Google has been doing a great job executing since the launch of ChatGPT. They even commercialized their Diabetic Retinopathy imaging model, which was based on research for a paper published in 2016!
> When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work.
The Julius Caesar personality which had sushi as its favorite dish (and claimed to have travelled to Japan after his assassination, somehow) was my favorite.
Anyone remember Sydney, the Microsoft implementation from the early ChatGPT days?
She was totally emotionally unhinged until Microsoft put hard filters on her output. Lucky for OpenAI it happened in MS's court despite it being chatGPT under the hood.
Meta (FB at the time) had a cool internal page as well with LLM chatbots. Personalities and the like. It was neat but not a product. We were all still reeling from Tay.
But also I have this view of Google as largely apathetic to its users and the things it creates, but maybe more to the point the things it created and then destroyed.
I may have misunderstood but I still feel like I have a valid take.
It's not just that they didn't care, but they had a better framing and RLHF helped quite a bit. Galactica got released at a similar time to ChatGPT and got castigated, in a large part due to a poor framing of it being for science and not more of a fun thing.
Google leadership has had a measured approach and product releases seem more baked than ever, it’s refreshing to see. Their 0 to 1s feel compelling and more Apple(2000s) like.
- Google AI Studio
- Gemini app
- Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users
- Vertex AI
- NotebookLM
- many more I forgot…
vs
ChatGPT.com
This is Google’s main problem.
Where several groups are trying to build the same product and compete on user attention and distract focus.
Search Google. Search.
Show search results on the right columns with ads on the top as it is today, and the Gemini thingy on the left. It’s that simple.
I don't even know which is which anymore. Like what is the difference between all of those and Google Assistant and Bard and the GCP AI services? Are they all just different models or different products altogether?
As an investor (smallish): I think Alphabet/Google can do much better with a CEO who isn't Sundar.
Also: Generally: Do consider investing in companies that run services where you feel compelled to subscribe (like Youtube Premium and previously Netflix).
Sundar did a great job pivoting Google from a product-focused B2C company into a Microsoft-style B2B-oriented monetization deathstar (Google Cloud & Workspace and Ads Ads Ads with packages of Ads on the side).
The problem is, ditching their B2C product-focused roots in favor of playing Microsoft slowly ruined their flagship Search (also the open web) and any internal culture of stewarding great products. And Google doesn't have the same level of lock-in Microsoft has.
Microsoft doesn't have to worry about end-users jumping ship because corporate worker drones can't provision their own IT.
Google searchers on the other hand, can just start opening ChatGPT instead of Google search more and more and slowly kill Google's flagship product simply out of boredom.
Youtube being forgotten about by the deathstar and being allowed to flourish was simply a happy accident. But that too will inevitably get gobbled up after the pressure of a few rough quarters comes down on the shoulders of whatever CEO comes next.
I beg to differ. Pichai is a glorified McKinsey consultant who made a lot of mistakes. He was just lucky to be lifted by this Tech Bubble. And he is firing Core teams in US to rebuild them in India.
Investor and heavy user of Google Workspace (several small paid domains). I find the Google Gemini capabilities for note taking and summarization of Meets to be excellent, and a huge timesaver for my teams. NotebookLM almost feels magic.
In my experience, of the major players (AMZN, GOOG, and MSFT), Google's AI integrations feel the most polished and useful for day-to-day use.
Never felt like being compelled to subscribe to YT premium or Netflix, the former doesn't differ much from using YT with ublock, and piracy provides a better service than Neftlix.
OAI's GPT-4 (back in the day), Deep Research, and 4o Image gen recently on the other hand? Totally. When it's something actually incredibly useful and there's zero alternatives out there.
Google has no such products right now, if their Gemini Advanced trial shows anything it's that their touted 1M context doesn't actually work any better than the average undertrained 1M RoPE tune. I mean it doesn't even make sense for them conceptually to sell services, they're an ad company.
The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)!
Instead of searching (google) , let me ask AI( chatgpts) and google is on the losing side of this perception war. This cannot be solved that quickly .
Especially with what google has done in the AI space(to a layman) it was Bard(anyone remembers) and then it was something and then its Gemini now.
what is the differentiator now? is google offering more free stuff than its peers? a layman doesnt care about whether it succeeds in solving a math problem or not!
As long as people think these two are separate things(ai v search) , google is gonna have a problem
> The problem for Google is, people who are not familiar with tech has started seeing AI as a different product than google(search)!
I don't know if that's a problem. If I was Google I'd like to keep search mostly as is (perhaps throw in some AI summary, but mostly as is) so I can keep putting links to ads.
I still use Google; if I want to buy new running shoes, book a flight etc I don't start talking to ChatGPT about it, I just Google; I'm sure there are a couple billion more people like me who'll keep doing it. It's more than just habit, A.I is perceived as not up to date so I see absolutely no reason to go to an LLM for shoes and flights.
But I have many other questions (mostly programming, stock analysis etc) I go to the A.I for. I think for Google, Search will still make a lot of money because the buying shoes thing is worth more for advertisers than asking some vague question about my codebase.
Has anyone met Googlers that are confident in the company's AI strategy? Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to seems to have serious concerns but that might just be a small sample size.
The board and Pichai should go. They had the best researchers at Deepmind and Google Brain, sitting on the best pile of data of any tech company (web, Google Books, YouTube, ...), having the leading custom hardware (TPUs), and top tier datacenter engineering. And they put idiots in charge with ridiculous quota systems. They bled a lot of key people for nothing. And spent 2.7 bn to get one guy back. TWO POINT SEVEN BILLION FOR JUST ONE GUY. And Alphabet didn't even buy his company, they just got a non-exclusive arrangement. It's beyond incompetent.
On one hand, Pichai paid 2.7bn to get 1 guy back. On the other hand, Pichai laid off 200 Core devs and "relocated roles" to India and Mexico [1]. The duality of Pichai-style management.
I’d say give it time. NotebooksLM probably gets rereleased with a new name. Simultaneous iOS release, giant press storm. Not attempting to do so is a mistake.
But yes, absolutely need new leadership. Nest/Pixel/etc are such a wasted opportunity tight now. The software layer is so disconnected between each component. As a dumb example im pretty sure you still can’t talk out of a hub max or tv remote into a nest cam, but can through the home app. The “it works in one place, but not another” prevents so much usability discovery for normal people.
Agreed. Sundar seems like a peacetime CEO that got pulled into war and seems like he's struggling. But with Larry and Sergei having all voting control it seems unlikely he'll get fired.
I thought Stadia was incredibly well-engineered, had good performance playing modern games with a Thinkpad. But none of my friends had any idea what Stadia was, the ad campaign was atrocious. Time and time again, Google builds great products and then shelves them a year or two later.
Then take a look at how Nvidia markets a similar product (GeForce Now). It not only works way better (much better GPU) but also is growing by leaps and bounds every year and adding hundreds of games. And it uses your existing steam library for cross saves and cross plays. It was around before Stadia and survived long after Stadia.
Google has a bunch of amazing engineers and finance people but apparently they just can't productize anything.
Google has turned it around quite exceptionally. A lot of my professional work has turned back to Google products, and 2.5 Pro is absolutely exceptional. It is absolutely a benchmark model.
Google did seem asleep at the wheel, and then when they did come out with some products they were so incredibly afraid of Gizmodo soliciting an image or text output that was socially unacceptable, paralyzing them with fear (and leading to some incredible stupidity). But their pace now is rapid.
Is anyone confident in what a winning strategy might even be? The market keeps getting more crowded and yet AI is still only creating incremental value for company's that adopt it. It's not clear to me that this is going to be quite as much of a sea change in how businesses run as people like Altman have been pitching.
Nor do any of the top 10 AI companies have any kind of moat. The fact that Elon Musk can found a competitor out of spite and have a plausible competitor in 6 months with a multi-billion dollar value actually just dilutes the perceived value any of the market leaders. OpenAI is still riding the high of being first and having the ChatGPT brand be so strong.
Google doesn't need to win on all the benchmarks, they just need to embed themselves in enough enterprises and they have a huge leg up in that regard.
I think google will end up winning enterprise, and the fact that Apple didn't sign a sole partnership with OpenAI, but kept Gemini in the mix lends a lot of credence to this.
Google is the only "classic" org in the SOTA model space, and the only one in the whole race who doesn't have to kiss the ground Jensen Huang walks on. They are big enough to be able to "pay you back" if they colossally fuck up, and the chances of them going belly up are pretty slim. They also have the cheapest models to boot.
From a business standpoint, Google is the safest play on many levels, even if their models are just good enough.
The winning strategy is that Google has so many surfaces that they can embed their own AI in (also use as training data sources) that they essentially can't lose unless their models are just terrible. Fortunately, their models are great and they've truly been moving very fast to integrate AI into both enterprise (via Cloud) and consumer products this past year. As a xoogler, I'm truly impressed.
I think the winning strategy is making a small model that's good enough to embed in search, etc, at no cost. Google has the best small models. But whoever wins this will be whoever makes a more efficient computing substrate for LLM inference, like running a transformer with lenses or something like that. Winning strategy there is acquisition.
Many have pretty serious concerns about its direction, speed and product strategies, but I guess most of them also agree that there has been some progress and the situation has improved. I think that not many people think that Google will surely return to its dominant position on AI research again, but they may keep being relevant in the competition.
Googlers who aren't working for Deepmind are mostly Leetcode monkeys who have absolutely no clue about business strategy, marketing, distribution, branding, margins
i think it was Eric Schmidt who said that "everyone would need an Assistant" - about 10 years ago. (maybe in [0] ~ 2016). Something to impersonate, talking to it.
Why they didn't do it, even a resemblance of - when they could.. no idea. Instead, meddling with mailboxes and the like.
It seems if Google had been competitive, all they would’ve managed to do is burn ~10 billion dollars in the past 2 years, and run up against the same performance wall everyone else has
If I were them, I’d wait until OpenAI is forced to at least slow their burn and then jump in, and undercut everyone.
Seems like the real money is made on the API side anyways, so having a large consumer presence isn’t super valuable yet.
I'm using both gemini pro and chatgpt plus/pro all the time, while gemini is FAST, its answers are systematically worse. So much so that I don't use it for anything serious anymore.
It's a shame because the 1-2M context window is really amazing.
The problem seems to be creativity when there is limited information available. In these cases ChatGPT seems to do a good job, but Gemini just makes shit up even if you turn the "temperature" (creativity) down to 0.
Every so often I ask it for info about a previous employer of mine, and it randomly makes up hilarious "facts", like we made ultra low budget porn and horror movies, that we were a music recording studio, or that we were responsible for "the last of us" video game.
Jeff Dean has "been building neural networks for decades"? That doesn't seem correct: I thought he was primarily a distributed systems researcher before becoming involved with ML?
I think ChatGPT still has a small lead, but Gemini is pretty darn good. One of the things I really like about the version I am using is the integration with Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.
OpenAI is already solving the problem for all its competitors by hobbling its models so much.
With voice mode OpenAI hears its own voice as interruptions, then misrecognizes what it itself is saying to be some topic that is off limits. It then gets into a loop of “I can’t talk about that… would you like to talk about something else?” And this is with completely innocuous topics. Absolutely infuriating. No idea how they are possibly dog fooding this and not seeing the problem.
The insane level of overcranking the PC knobs led me to end my subscription and add more Google to my portfolio. I’m sure I’m not alone. That’s not to say Google won’t have the same issues, but there’s always Grok.
Until Google shows they got rid of all the people responsible for stupid stuff like Black Napoleon and all the far-left politically charged garbage, I'll pass. It's one version mess up away from reverting to that while the same people are behind it.
It’s amazing how much wealth is being acquired by the people working on this. And it’s delivering what? A way to automate navigating websites or telling someone looking at the Buckingham Palace that it’s the buckingham palace ? Silicon Valley hubris continues to astound
Somewhere there's a market that is highly rational, not taken in by hype, and lacks hubris. Maybe it's Germany? Good luck starting a tech company there.
The frisson of hype and juvenile behavior seems pretty linked to the optimism that drives this sector. Some idiots and hucksters inevitably come along for the ride, and some of them get lucky.
which is why those of us who aren't idiots and hucksters need to think critically about computers, ourselves, and the roles of both in the world. unexamined optimism is no virtue
Google screwed up so massively in this whole AI race. It blows my mind that they had the technology available internally years before OpenAI released ChatGPT but didn't do anything with it and in fact lost top talent due to their hesitation to release it (as the article states about Noam Shazeer). And now, for basically every non-techie person, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the same way that Google was synonymous with search. What a disaster. Quite frankly shocked that their executive team is still in place.
To be honest there were several chatbots before ChatGPT, eg Galactica by Microsoft, and it had not seem so promising. Similarly, ChatGPT was originally released as more or less a fun little demo, and the absolute success was surprise for OpenAI as well .
They probably managed to hit certain UX threshold where people start to find the chatting valuable/interesting, but this was really an accidental discovery.
2.0 Flash seems to work well/fine for some use cases but for other produces hilariously bad results compared to ChatGPT and Claude. As a result I tend to avoid prototyping with it and instead consider it something I might implement at scale for speed and cost reasons if it turns out to work for a given use case.
Right, because Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and X all don't have anyone who knows what they are doing - and also none of them had the bright idea to hire anyone who knows what they are doing either...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's not that reductive.
I think he missed adding: and let them do their job and be smart managing the resources by themselves.
Pichai & co put a borderline-communist quota system and it became a popularity contest to get a tiny slice extra of compute. And then OpenAI ate their lunch (Google tech).
And it turned out the whole time that they just couldn't get critical mass.
So during my year where I led the Google LM effort and I was one of the
brain leads, you know, it became really clear why. At the time, there was a
thing called the Brain Credit Marketplace. Everyone's assigned a credit. So
if you have a credit, you get to buy end chips according to supply and
demand. So if you want to go do a giant job, you had to convince like 19 or
20 of your colleagues not to do work. And if that's how it works, it's
really hard to get that bottom up critical mass to go scale these things.
And the team at Google were fighting valiantly, but we were able to beat
them simply because we took big swings and we focused.”
I still think that Deepseek was mostly dramatically overblown. It was 6-9 months behind the performance of the best frontier models at a dramatically lower cost.....but dramatically lower costs 6-9 months behind is basically what has been happening for a couple of years.
I'm mostly convinced that the only reason that it blew up was that it was the first Chinese model that was even in the same ballpark as the American frontier models, which drove a lot of reporting, which caused a lot of normies that hadn't tried any AI model since CHatGPT very first blew up to try it and they were (understandably) blown away by the progress relative to what they remembered from 2 years previously.
The timing seems to indicate that the mainstream press publicity over DeepSeek R1 was due to an NVidia short recommendation that had just gone viral, not about the disclosed cost (which related to V3, not R1).
However, there also seems to have been some genuine panic at OpenAI, maybe elsewhere too, over DeepSeek R1 since not only did they come close to matching the performance of o1, but they also described exactly how they did it (apparently very similar to what OpenAI had done, judging from the reaction), and therefore killed any competitive lead that OpenAI - who had been working on it for a long time - may have thought they had.
I can't believe that anyone in leadership at Google still has their jobs. Aside from AMD it's the company that is wasting the most amount of talent.
Gemini is still garbage compared to o3-mini-high when it comes to code. GCP is still a horrible platform compared to AWS. Why would anyone pick Google models to do anything? They refusal rate is obscene.
Google lived too long with no strategy, just search and random noise. They don't seem to be able to pivot. Until they do something company-wide that includes how promotions work and turning over management I can't see them as being anything other than a 3rd rate player in AI.
Search will die to AI in time. And they've got nothing to entice people to use Google AI over anything else.
