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| ▲ | root_axis 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Then why have they been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic Because they're not desperate. Slow and steady wins the race, at this rate all Google has to do is wait for OpenAI and Anthropic to exhaust themselves on aggressive training, then they can casually amble along right past them. |
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| ▲ | pavlov 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This is basically what people were saying about Microsoft versus Google and other upstarts in the early 2000s. Slow and steady wins the race. How could they lose to something on the web, when Microsoft owns the web browser itself? Everything runs on Windows and IE. They can just relax and wait for competitors to exhaust themselves, then quickly build their own version. Isn’t that how Netscape lost. Etc. Now Google is the new Microsoft, just like Microsoft became the new IBM. | | |
| ▲ | bamboozled 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | But Microsoft seems to be doing fine too ? | |
| ▲ | brazukadev 4 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes Google is the new Microsoft, even Microsoft is still the old Microsoft but OpenAI is not the new Google. | | |
| ▲ | guelo a minute ago | parent [-] | | For some of us OpenAI is already the new Google. I prefer OpenAI even when I'm searching for web links. Google Search had already been deteriorating terribly before the rise of LLMs. |
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| ▲ | ivanmontillam 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Also because they are Google. Google being Google: unreliable (they could kill a product anytime), too much of a platform risk (all products in a single place, get banned and lose the company), lack of support unless you really pay a big bill (into the 7 figures), among other… things. | | |
| ▲ | Traubenfuchs 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Incredible how the idea of Google being such bad choice has become so entrenched that people prefer the offerings of two companies that might not exist anymore in a few years over Google‘s similar offering. | | |
| ▲ | brazukadev 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > people prefer the offerings of two companies that might not exist anymore in a few years That's actually a feature. We don't need 2 new Googles. |
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| ▲ | gandreani a few seconds ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Are you ready to call this race 5 years in? I'm waiting another 15 years and at least one or two new LLM architectures. |
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| ▲ | aleph_minus_one an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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Then why have they been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic for most of the last few years, and only briefly been at the frontier? One possible explanation: because Google is a little bit more frugal and focuses on how to make providing AI models financially feasible - combined with some willingness to burn money so that they don't strongly fall behind on their AI models. On the other hand, OpenAI and Anthropic at least formerly concentrated on building and providing the best models that they could with concerns about financial feasibility taking a backseat. Just to be clear: I do have the impression that by now (likely because of pressure from investors) OpenAI and Anthropic take these financial concerns more seriously, but nevertheless Google's vs OpenAI's/Anthropic's "DNAs" concerning on what to focus on differ. |
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| ▲ | monkeydust an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | And also Google is public listed company and the other two (for now) are private. I think that fact does have a strong bearing on how they operate. | |
| ▲ | ErrantX 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this is the correct answer. Google never really has to outpace the competitors (other than to have some relevance) but they have a very large group of business customers using them for business process work in Gmail, Docs, etc. Clearly they will win when the models are close enough to frontier to be good enough, but are long-term cheap for buy. I.e. they will aim to make it a commodity. In theory MS has the same opportunity (plus they have GitHub so, you know, dev eco system too) but seem be blowing the strategy. Anthropic and OpenAI are having to race to the top on ability entirely to keep their name in the media and in front of us all (which costs: hence more recently trying to pivot away from model releases and more into controversy/danger). The main cost is in training and so this strategy is much much more expensive and this will play out either as a huge cost hike or a forced slow down in pace. I believe essentially Google is betting on that & I think it's probably the right strategy. | |
| ▲ | redanddead an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Google is a little bit more frugal and focuses on how to make providing AI models financially feasible There’s no magic there. You get an account executive and a call with a systems architect to find out what you’re doing. Clouds gonna cloud, this is the reason they rolled deepmind into gcp and arguably the inverse is true, the labs are trying to become clouds | |
| ▲ | topspin an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > because Google is a little bit more frugal and focuses on how to make providing AI models financially feasible That feels right. It's not as if they've been missing out on great profits. |
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| ▲ | tfsh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Then why have they been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic for most of the last few years, and only briefly been at the frontier? Because it's not an existential battle for Google. If OAI or Anthropic disappear from the absolute frontier for ~8 months the news cycle and churn will diminish them to the second rate. Google is processing near 4 quadrillion tokens every month, that's - I'm sure - significantly more than OAI or Anthropic, because Google is interested more so in their flash models and getting these competitive, which they are. |
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| ▲ | merb an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From a business perspective a frontier model does not make much sense anymore if you are not a startup. Neither for Amazon, nor for Google. Their clouds need models that are fast and perform well in their agent frameworks nothing were a frontier model excels at. Most Google products even use flash lite underneath, so their frontier model is mostly used for distillation. |
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| ▲ | aleph_minus_one an hour ago | parent [-] | | >
From a business perspective a frontier model does not make much sense anymore if you are not a startup. Neither for Amazon, nor for Google. Their clouds need models that are fast and perform well in their agent frameworks nothing w[h]ere a frontier model excels at. A good consideration; just one point from my side: as far as I am aware (but I may be wrong), Gemini is not known to perform well in an agentic framework. This is no contradiction to your other claims, quite the opposite: perhaps (or even likely) Google wants to avoid that their models become a commodity in some (agentic?) application where the middleman who actually writes this application gets a disproportionate of the money that the customer of the application pays for it. | | |
| ▲ | merb 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Well at the moment we do not use Gemini in an agentic framework. But as said the flash and flash lite families are basically their driving force in some of their applications in Google cloud, like document ai and its ocr capabilities are probably better when it comes to business documents than any other (at least in perf to cost to speed).
We also drive Gemini lite in our application where customer can use it to generate simple automation, like an agentic framework but way way smaller scale. And while it struggles in more context heavy operations it still is a beast when feeding it one or two pdf documents and asking questions about them and it’s hella fast. | |
| ▲ | nozzlegear an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > A good consideration; just one point from my side: as far as I am aware (but I may be wrong), Gemini is not known to perform well in an agentic framework. I used it for a month over the summer, right before they were going through the migration to antigravity. It was a fine workhorse IMO, no complaints from me. |
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| ▲ | krona an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Alphabet issued a very oversubscribed 100-year bond with 6.1% yield earlier this year to raise capital for datacenter expension. Meanwhile, Anthropic/OpenAI will struggle to survive the next 24 months on their current trajectory. |
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| ▲ | Yizahi 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Lagging by what metric exactly? Is Toyota lagging behind McLaren? (company vs company) |
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| ▲ | spyckie2 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Could it just be that Demis was checked out of the race and they lacked leadership? |
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| ▲ | mattm 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Demis wants to focus on scientific endeavors. He was probably not the right person to focus on consumer apps. |
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