> 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 41 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.

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overfeed 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> This is basically what people were saying about Microsoft versus Google and other upstarts in the early 2000s.

They would have been right if Google marquee product was an Office Suite

Google was the AI company before AI companies were a thing. The comparison with Microsoft and IBM are misplaced because they failed to capture new territory; ML/AI is Google's stomping grounds. The criticism that Google is bad at consumer chatbots is true, but that's not where the real future value lays.

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kursus 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've never heard or read anyone saying this in the early 2000s. They had publicly stated their contempt of the web earlier, made fools of themselves when they realized their mistake and went all-in on it, and spent the whole decade lagging behind. The closest they had to an online success was Wizzes.

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bamboozled 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But Microsoft seems to be doing fine too ?

	▲	pavlov 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And IBM has a market cap of over $200 billion. When the market keeps expanding, you don’t need to kill your predecessor. The shelf life for legacy enterprise computing is very long.
	▲	browningstreet 22 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not in AI. But they announced things last week so maybe..

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brazukadev 35 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 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For some of us OpenAI is already the new Google. I prefer chatgpt even when I'm searching for web links. Google Search had already been deteriorating terribly even before the rise of LLMs.

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ivanmontillam an hour 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.

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Traubenfuchs 39 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 34 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.