It's also very possible that they know their big model underperforms chatgpt 5.6 and fable by too much, so they are focusing on what they can get wins in like speed instead.

▲ janalsncm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That and/or the business case isn’t as clear when serving enormous models? You’re constantly stuck in a red queen’s race where your profitability window is increasingly measured in weeks because the Chinese are right behind you.

For small models (which are probably distilled from their big ones) you can serve them economically all the time and not hemorrhage money.

▲

adventured 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

The Chinese have been right behind OpenAI and Anthropic for ~18 months now.

DeepSeek didn't do to OpenAI and Anthropic what nearly everybody claimed they would.

Every single person on HN that loudly proclaimed the end was nigh for GPT & Co. due to DeepSeek, was wrong. They were humiliatingly wrong, and they'll never own up to it. The reason those people were so very wrong, is the same exact reason the Kimi crowd is wrong now. And it's very obvious that they're wrong, but they have intense emotional blinders on. Their thinking process is hyper emotionalism: they want a certain outcome, regardless of if reality aligns to that or not. They're making emotional wishes about how they want things to turn out, and pretending those magic wishes are grounded in reason.

It takes enormous resources to run something equivalent to GPT 5.6 or Fable. Nobody can or wants to do that outside of very limited situations - if you can just reasonably pay as you go instead. As it turns out, you can just pay as you go with GPT and Fable. Their businesses have gotten radically larger since DeepSeek launched. Get it yet?

Domestic China is the only very large audience for their own models, so long as OpenAI and Anthropic stay top tier.

All the hype online from the forums about Kimi, is worthless: those people hyping it can't even come close to running it locally, which is the fantasy. So why are they hyping it? Why did they hype DeepSeek just the same, and learn nothing from its total failure to actually take down OpenAI and Anthropic? Rhetorical questions with obvious answers.

Kimi poses zero actual threat to OpenAI and Anthropic. Those companies will continue to pile up the subscriptions and API usage. Check out GPT's subscriber base today vs when DeepSeek launched. Get it yet? When Model X launches out of China in a year, we'll have this same conversations all over again, and the hypsters will have learned nothing.

While the Kimi fawning is endless, OpenAI will just keep piling up subscriber counts, and Anthropic will keep piling up API usage. Then OpenAI is going to staple a gigantic ad system onto GPT. China can't compete in the model-as-a-service business globally, for the exact same reason they failed so miserably to compete in search globally.

	▲	codedokode 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Domestic China is the only very large audience for their own models I don't think so. US models are very expensive, and not available in every country. I am not willing to pay $50/1M tokens for writing my pet projects.
	▲	amazingamazing 18 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		without any hard data one way or another your comment is worthless. "pile up subscriptions" - based on what? neither company is public. "piling up subscriber counts", "piling up API usage"? cool. how much money are they making? oh you don't know because they're not public. the reality is one way or another that as long as there exists an alternative that a USA company could serve with the same compute rented from hyperscalers, this represents a threat, even if the extent to which is unknown
	▲	Wowfunhappy 17 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But what does that mean for Google if their model isn't as good as OpenAI's and Anthropic's?

▲ martinald 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes agreed - I wrote this up a while back https://martinalderson.com/posts/whats-going-on-with-gemini/

My view then was they are optimising the models for inference ability on their own hardware AND use cases, which is often speed and time to first token.

They've somehow seemed to end up with terrible compute shortages, which again is surprising given how good Google is at infra deployments AND have their own hardware. From rumors out there they are turning down enterprise deals for Gemini because they don't have the compute.

The problem is they're falling further and further behind on frontier class on coding especially, and since I wrote that article it's got even worse with open weights models undercutting them on price AND intelligence.

▲ mediaman 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was some recent reporting that a July release of the Pro model got pushed back for exactly that reason. Its performance was not good compared to the OpenAI/Anthropic big models. They are having a lot of problems with posttrain.

▲ verelo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the feeling i get too. Cant produce quality, but can produce something that is super fast...so take the wins where they are.

	▲	copperx 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We don't have enough fast models, so I see this as a positive. I just test drove Gemini Flash Lite and it's crazy fast.

▲ godwinson__4-8 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Didn't they already acknowledge this?

Paywalled article, but the headline is basically all you need: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-16/google-ge...

▲ ignoramous 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> focusing on what they can get wins in like speed instead

Speed as a differentiator has always been Google's thing. They (used to?) show the microseconds it took to query & rank web-scale search results. Chrome, notoriously, focused on speed at the expense of resource use. The very many efforts to efficiently speed up Android & its runtime since its inception, and so on...

> their big model underperforms chatgpt 5.6

Possible but TFA claims:

  We have started our most ambitious pre-training run yet, for Gemini 4 ...

▲ maxloh 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I personally doubt that.

It would be a shame if they cannot beat Kimi K3 or Qwen3.8 Max, both of which are claimed to be Fable-like. If that is true, it will be [or would be] the first time a major American lab falls behind a Chinese competitor.