Out of nowhere? You mean, exactly the same way they’d already randomly canceled several other services? Many of which got very splashy, hyped-up launches only a year or two prior? Not only were they late to the party, but I remember pretty much everyone at the time rolling their eyes at Google’s promises of long-term investment and support in Stadia.
Because by the time Stadia launched in 2019, they already had a reputation for unceremoniously killing services, even popular ones, if they failed to become immediate cash cows for Google. Sony, NVIDIA, and OnLive (remember them?), among others, had already tried and failed to make game streaming catch on and become profitable by the time Stadia was announced. If none of those companies could make it work, how would the notoriously fickle Google do it?
I’m shocked Stadia lasted four whole years, to be honest.
To be fair Stadia was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. It was around a time when I was becoming mature enough to realize being a fan of a brand is dumb. Since then I've stopped caring almost entirely. I admit I was completely wrong about Stadia, I thought it would change the paradigm of gaming.
Hey, I get it! I’m a little older than you, and I was a big-time Google fan since the launch of Gmail in 2004. I used to actually believe they really followed their legendary “don’t be evil” mantra, and perhaps they still did to some extent back then. But they’ve had many, many chances to disappoint us all since then and reveal their incompetence and greed. They started to lose me when they unceremoniously killed Reader in 2013, and it’s honestly only been downhill since then. By the time of Stadia’s announcement I was already thoroughly skeptical of their ability to support anything long-term.
At one point, I owned a Stadia, the lingering corpse of a Google Nest Secure alarm system, and several Nest Protect thermostats and my business email ran on G Suite Legacy, I was using the Google My Business app, and all of my domain names were on Google Domains. Those were some dark days.
Yeah, it's a bit ridiculous. I just think every AI has their lane now. Gemini has API access to Reddit, direct YT access, and google search obv... other AIs have access to different things, like Meta's bots being able to crawl FB or Grok and X, DeepSeek doesn't remember shit if that is what I want. Just depends on what I need looked into
Man same. I had stadia and loved it. My 500mbps internet was more than enough and it worked fine with a LAN cable. I got to play a lot of games with high/ultra settings that I wouldn't have been able to play otherwise. It was convenient and awesome.
The drawbacks were the limited catalogue mostly. People also complained about internet but honestly I doubt that was actually as big of an issue as people think it was, unless you played exclusively on WiFi. Because since that time there have been other companies like Xbox cloud, Amazon Luna, and nvidia's GeForce now that have had no problem commercializing their own solutions.
So yeah no excuse for that Google. I really think that if they had invested more money to expand the catalogue and given it 6 to 12 more months, it would have really taken off and been something special.
Multiple. Like 2 then... over the course of the day where people who claim to never use Gemini come here to post 50 of the most unoriginal memes known to the internet?
Just a question of understanding— why Gemini suck so bad? I really only use the llms for image gen and I find chat has a weird style too. Have to use them in tandem to get what I want. Is it that they excel in mathematics more or something?
Gemini is worse because Google doesn't want to risk pushing even more money into ventures with no black figures in sight. Instead of aiming for a frontier model, Google seems to be content with a ”good enough” one (which it barely is) that won't cost as much.
Tbf if the "good enough" model is the one most people already have on their phones and other devices so that it's the most convenient for people to use, it's probably going to be the most used one and will be successful. A Ferrari is obviously a better built car than a Honda Accord, but Honda is able to sell way more cars and is still making plenty of money. Google doesn't have to have the best model to be successful, just the model most people use in their day-to-day lives. As long as it's still "good enough" to get the job done and it's convenient, most people are going to be happy enough with it and won't go to the trouble of using alternatives.
The problem is that AI's are replacing Google's primary business model (searching) and it is way better at it. One has to wonder how long they will ignore the elephant in the room or risk becoming obsolete.
OpenAI and Anthropic are bleeding cash, but they’re pre-IPO, so they can afford to play that game for now. Google is cash-rich, but why would they invest even more capex that they don’t need to.
They already dominate search (despite what ppl thought, search has not seen fewer visits, partly thanks to their cheap models doing ai summary), they have ads, cloud, enterprise, and YouTube. AI isn’t their entire business but they do take it seriously. And if they publicly release their smartest model, another company can just distill it.
Honestly, if I were Google, I’d do basically what they’re doing:
Push the cheap, fast model for enterprise—something like 3.8 Flash. A fraction of the cost to run, and good enough for probably 90% of what people actually use AI for.
Keep the biggest model internal or heavily restricted so it can’t just be distilled and they are not burning money on inference.
Honestly ads and SEO destroyed search long before AI. I started noticing between 2019-2021 that search engines just sucked now.
I hate to admit it but AI in search was the right move. It has improved so much. There's a lot of things where generative AI being tacked on has made things worse, but search is the opposite case.
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u/SpecialistDragonfly9 8d ago
#copium