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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

This reinforces my impression that Google is at least one year behind. Stunning images, 3D, video while Gemini had to be partially halted this morning.

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I don't think that's a fair comparison because they're fulfilling substantially different niches. Gemini is a conversational model that can generate images, but is mainly designed for text. Stable Diffusion is only for images. If you compare a model that can do many things and a model that can only do images by how well they generate images, of course the image generation model looks better.

Stability does have an LLM, but it's not provided in a unified framework like Gemini is.

For "political" reasons, not for technical reasons. Don't get it twisted.

I would describe those issues as technical. It’s genuinely getting things wrong because the “safety” element was implemented poorly.

Those are safety elements which exist for political reasons, not technical ones.

Of all criticism that could be leveled at Google, 'shipping a product and supporting it' being the only thing that matters seems fair.

Which takes all the behind the scenes steps, not just the technical ones.

You think that technology is first. You think that mathematicians and computer engineers or mechanical engineers or doctors are first. They’re very important, but they’re not first. They’re second. Now I’ll prove it to you.

There was a country that had the best mathematicians, the best physicists, the best metallurgists in the world. But that country was very poor. It’s called the Soviet Union. But when you took one of these mathematicians or physicists, who was smuggled out or escaped, put him on a plane and brought him to Palo Alto. Within two weeks, they were producing added value that could produce great wealth.

What comes first is markets. If you have great technology without markets, without a market-friendly economy, you’ll get nowhere. But if you have a market-friendly economy, sooner or later the market forces will give you the technology you want.

And that my friend, simply won't come from an office paralyzed by internal politics of fear and conformity. Don't get it twisted.

This reinforces my impression that Google is at least one year behind. Stunning images, 3D, video while Gemini had to be partially halted this morning.

People always say Google is "behind", I don't believe they're behind in a capabilities sense, which IMO is what the parent is implying. They've decided to make a PC product, which I wouldn't say is inferior to anything else if you're the kind of person who is into PC culture.

There might be some difficult internal politics to work through, but there is no way Google is hamstrung forever by this.

Go calm my friend.

> They've decided to make a PC product, which I wouldn't say is inferior to anything else if you're the kind of person who is into PC culture.

I'm not.

> There might be some difficult internal politics to work through, but there is no way Google is hamstrung forever by this.

The technical prowess is irrelevant. Whichever of the companies in the AI race excises their PC demons will actually ship useful things and break ahead. The talent will follow the market.

Google might very well be hamstrung forever by this and other internal politics. This dynamic has played out over and over again.