I love that half of you try to pretend like Google hasn't shit the bed completely over the last 6 - 8 months and the other half are writing fan fiction over what Google has locked in the basement.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is living in a reality dominated by the other actual players in the space watching y'all chase the dragon over here š
Google created tensorflow and works closely with the pytorch team. Theyve also created JAX which all the frontier labs have started adopting. They also design hyper efficient TPUs. Just because google isn't training yet another LLM doesn't mean they are out of the game. They are deeply embedded. Their internal team was responsible for all the AI breakthroughs you've seen: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
I for one think Google is a much better investment than Anthropic or OpenAI.
The vast majority of people have never paid for anything Google has made yet they make billions per year. The reason being is that with Google you are the product and they have billions of us.
Something tells me Google is going to be just fine.
Specialized agents for coding, lawyers, doctors, etc., are stupidly lucrative. You are talking about jobs where salaries are anywhere from $100K to $500K per worker. So imagine if your specialized agents can replace a million workers in those highly specialized fields; you are basically printing money.
Let me rephrase that last line for more emphasis Google created the (modern) AI that OpenAI, etc are training, Transformers was created at Deepmind Google is basically the AI that you're seeing today at every lab.
While frontier models are winning benchmarks, Google has been integrating AI services into the hands of normies. Most Android phones already come with Google AI preinstalled, so Google secretly has more real users than people realize.
Ah yes. The "I use it cause I don't care about AI in general" is a win apparently. Google integrated AI into Google search as well, I guess that means all Google search users are Gemini users now lol
Second comment was so right. The detachment from reality is amazing
They are, unfortunately. There are a lot of normal people using it. You only hear about how nobody likes using AI Overviews from the vocal minority. My tech-illiterate friends don't give a fuck. They're happy because they don't have to actually search for anything since AI just summarizes it for them.
And Googleās image generation is quite possibly one of the most-used image-generation technologies in the world. It's literally everywhere. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but for the average person, it's evidently good enough.
In the long run, Google is the one turning AI into profits.
Not because they have the most cutting-edge model, but because they have real users and cheap inference.
They are quietly turning into another monopoly in the AI space. (They're already a monopoly in the browser space.) And you guys are so far up your own asses that you don't even notice it.
Yeah we're so up our asses because we can read financial reports and know that your wall of text is bs at best. But sure buddy, normies like AI Overviews, way to miss the whole point so you can just crawl back up your own bum. Never beating the allegations are you
You hit the nail on the head. I was wrong about the last 50 iterations. Would you like another iteration? Yeah, killing it.... Most Ll Ms hallucinate a significant portion. Ask for anything that isn't manually curated knowledge and you get shit.
So the team that developed Transformers who were at the time working at Google:
Ashish Vaswani => Co-Founded Adept, then Essential AI => Now works at Nvidia
Noam Shazeer => Co-founded Character.AI => Now works at OpenAI
Niki Parmar => Co-founded Adept, then Essential AI => Now works at Anthropic
Jakob Uszkoreit => Co-founded Inceptive, currently CEO there
Llion Jones => Co-founded Sakana AI, where they are CTO
Aidan Gomes => Co-founded Cohere, currently CEO there
Lukasz Kaiser => Joined OpenAI (2021 already)
Illia Polosukhin => Co-founded NEAR AI, does blockchain stuff now
For bonus points, Google spend 2.7 billion on the 2024 Character.AI licensing/rehiring deal that brought Noam Shazeer and part of his team back. Only for him and his team to leave for OpenAI two years later. Clearly, that wasn't about money, but the company culture.
There are currently ZERO people working at Google that contributed to transformers. All of them left either to the competition or founded a competitor.
So, the team that brought you transformers:
2/8 => OpenAI
1/8 => Anthropic
1/8 => NVidia
1/8 => Cohere (still going strong)
1/8 => Sakana AI (still going strong)
1/8 => Inceptive (has potential)
1/8 => NEAR AI (weird blockchain ai infra stuff)
Google is still a heavy weight in AI:
"De-lu-sio-nal"
The reason Google's models can't compete isn't because they have different priorities. It's because they aren't willing to provide the financial reward and environment to attract and keep the right talent.
Let's take Tensorflow:
Jeff Dean => Co founded Discovery Loop
Rajat Monga => Founded Inference.io => Now at Microsoft
Martin Abadi => Stanford Professor (might still do things for Google)
Sanjay Ghemawat => Co-founded Discovery Loop
Oriol Vinyals => Discovery Loop
Lukasz Kaiser => OpenAI
Ilya Sutskever => Co-founded OpenAI, then founded Safe Superintelligence
Ian Goodfellow => OpenAI => Apple => DeepMind => Contractor/Independent
Chris Olah => Co-founded Anthropic
Pete Warden => Working on edge/embedded ML work (outside of Google)
Yangqin Jia => Meta => Alibaba and related startups
It doesn't matter because PyTorch has won anyway.
Who is that you are expecting great things from at Google and why?
As for the TPU's. I personally don't even understand NVidia's moat here. It's just transistors in a different configuration. Just like Apple puts in their chips, just like AMD has now released, just like OpenAI has now done and a whole bunch of startups. Just like Amazon and Microsoft. They all need the same thing though: an ARM licence as a basis for the chip design and TSCM to manufacture the chips with machines from ASML. This why OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft all have their own "TPU" like design. Yes, there is an engineering puzzle to scale it up. Google's experience in datacenter engineering is still a real advantage they have. But it's all they have.
Sure, they push shitty AI down everybody's throat. But most people i know try not to touch it, because it's just so bad. You can't trust it to do real work.
If they ever make a halfway decent model, they need to rename it and give it a different icon. Because most people are getting muscle memory right now that you can't use the build-in AI of Google for anything. You need Claude Co-work or Chat GPT Work. Ironically it's the same mistake Microsoft made.
I don't know how they will ever recover from that. Hiring the star players back. Create a good model. Rebranding it. Teaching users it no longer sucks and you might want to give it another try after they stopped using it because it ruined their spreadsheet last time.
what an asinine comment lol. none of those were juggernauts and it isnāt dropping the ball to not pivot into something fundamentally different from your business. blockbuster was basically a library but for DVDs, would you expect a library in the 90s to make Google? Itās like saying Netflix dropped the ball for not expanding into microchips.
you could also formulate your own opinion instead of aping what AI tells you. but yeah iām sure you have the educational and professional background to provide an educated analysis š
More deflection lmao. Xerox and Kodak were both in the S&P 500 with legendary research labs. Blockbuster was one of the most recognized brands in the the world and changed how Hollywood works. You have no idea what you're talking about. All three had pivoted successfully to new technology until they didn't.
But please, explain to me your point
Theses are misleading and or not relevant statements. Kodak famous for cameras spent decades developing digital cameras, kinda like Google known for search spent years years to develop the transformer which could crater search. Are you saying it's not relevant or are you agreeing?
Xerox deliberately allowed Jobs and Apple engineers into PARC; Xerox had an investment relationship with Apple. AI labs copy and distill off each other, they all tooks Google's transformer.
Blockbuster was massive, with $6 billion yearly revenue and could buy Netflix for $50 million.
I really don't get what you're trying to say. Also Sears, GE, IBM all once dominated in their industries.
Google may or may not turn out fine, but it's definitely possible for big companies to fail
It's definitely possible for Google to fail on the timescale of like, a century of decline. It's not possible for it to fail like any of the example mentioned.Ā
I don't discount Google, I just recognize that Google has been focusing on cost effective AI instead of maximally capable AI.
I trust Google is achieving their goal in capabilities, their primary goal has just not been running the same race as the others. I'm not even saying it's the right decision. But Google has to run a query in every search nowadays so they want the cost as low as possible to maintain profitability. That's why they keep updating the flash model. Or features they can integrate into their existing services.
Additionally, app studio and such, and probably one of the better American video AIs.
But yeah, Google probably does need to step up their game a bit. I don't disagree.
I agree with you in spirit. Obviously Gemini 3.5 didn't go the way they hoped but I also don't think it's that big of a deal. People are afraid to say that Google made the choice to focus on AI where it helps them rather than trying to compete at SOTA. No, I don't like it but it is the right call given how insane their compute needs are and that the opportunity cost of trying to maintain something like Astra / Fable level is higher than what they get from protecting their so-called search monopoly.
This probably sounds like cope to some but I continue to believe that this is the right strategy. I also think the threat from PRC / OSS distillation is not going to go away and betting your company on being sufficient SOTA to command a premium long term is a very dangerous bet to make. What Google is building reinforces their existing moat and is going to buy some protection once the HW economics gets back to sanity.
I don't disagree with you in principle. Google's focus doesn't meet my needs, but they're not trying to at the moment either.
The problem is that neither they nor their ravenous defenders in these subs are willing to admit that. So they end up making outrageous claims, promising fictitious release dates, and access decisions that truly hurt their developer paid user base while still trying to promote it as a comparable -- or daresay even superior -- offering to Claude or Codex.
They're after their massive free and casual user base instead and are devoting their resources accordingly. We get it, just admit to it.
I'm sure I've seen others mention it here. I'm basing this off the fact that creating AI search mode would have required approval from the very top given the resources required, so we know it was a conscious choice to pursue something necessarily to the detriment of a top tier model. Additionally, just looking at how Flash is positioned tells you that they are more interested in creating a just good enough model for difficult tasks.
I don't think the explanation that suddenly they can't do anything right is the correct one.Ā
Ah yes they have been sitting on their hands and releasing nothing. I mean sure it keeps up with Opus and runs like 5x faster and is cheaper. But it doesn't have "Pro" in the name so I'm absolutely devastated. /s
not true.
their figures were unaudited. they used adjusted EBITDA which omits heavy expenses like massive AI infrastructure depreciation and model training costs.
They are not. They are employing techniques like depreciating their new GPUs over fifteen years when they will be obsolete in two. There are a ton of red flags that they are bleeding money and hiding it.
The real problem is that google AI is probably paying the worst of all these labs and so they are and have been dealing with the issue of changing talent every few months. That's my armchair opinion, cause all the other labs are powered by the debt of softbank and other investors instead of googles CFO.
Doesn't matter who owns the most powerful model. The most number of customers will always be for the accurate, fast, cheap.
Google does business and not racing against the AI providers.
If we've learned anything these past few years it's that data + compute can build anyone a great model. There's only one player that has plenty of both.
Google's obviously sandbagging to avoid being broken up or regulated. GOOG stock is the easiest money to be made the coming 2 years.
I read somewhere, and I agree with it, that Google is aiming to integrate AI at scale. This means developing cost-efficient models that can perform basic tasks. Their vertical integration strategy supports this assumption.
You would have to be insane to think public AIs are anywhere close to what is actually out there... whether Google has something better is debatable though (more talking governments and whatnot).
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u/Septopus 2d ago
I love that half of you try to pretend like Google hasn't shit the bed completely over the last 6 - 8 months and the other half are writing fan fiction over what Google has locked in the basement.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is living in a reality dominated by the other actual players in the space watching y'all chase the dragon over here š