The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding. Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress in this space.
There's genuinely impressive progress being made, but there are also a lot of new models coming out promising way more than they can deliver. Even the Google AI announcements, which used to be carefully tailored to keep expectations low and show off their own limitations, now read more like marketing puff pieces.
I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd likes to pretend we're all perfectly discerning arbiters of the tech future with our thumbs on the pulse of the times or whatever, but realistically nobody is going to sift through a mountain of announcements ranging from "states it's revolutionary, is marginal improvement" to "states it's revolutionary, is merely an impressive step" to "states it's revolutionary, is bullshit" without resorting to vibes-based analysis.
Companies can either get peopled hyped or have never-ending georestricted waitlists, they can't have their cake and eat it too.
So of course you are going to see snarky comments and straight up denial in the competition. We saw that yesterday in the comments with the release of GPT4o in anticipation of Gemini 2.0 (GPT-5 basically) release being announced today at Google I/O
I'm SORA to say Veo looks much more polished without jank.
Big congratulations to Google and their excellent AI team for not editing their AI generated videos like SORA
You have to be pretty deep inside your own little bubble to think that even more than a 0.001% of HN has "stakes in YC" or "secondary shares in OpenAI".
I wouldn't discard.
I don’t know if there is a sentiment analysis tool for HN, but I’m pretty sure it’s been dead negative for Altman since at least Worldcoin.
Yes, there is a noticeable negative response from HN towards Google, and there has always been especially when speaking about their weird product management practices and incentives. Google hasn't launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years.
But to suggest there is a Sam Altman / OpenAI bias is delusional. In most posts about them there is at least some kind of skepticism or criticism towards Altman (his participation in Worldcoin and his accelerationist stance towards AGI) or his companies (OpenAI not being really open).
PS: I would say most people lurking here are just hackers (of many kinds, but still hackers), not investors with shady motives.
Google Photos is less than 10 years old and I think a lot of people use it.
None of this is surprising to me and shouldn't shock you. You are literally on a site called Ycombinator. Had this been another platform without ties to investments or drawing from crowd that actively seeks to enrich themselves through participation in a narrative, this wouldn't even be a thing.
Large number of people who read my comment seems to agree and this whole worldcoin thing seems to me just another distraction (We've already been through why that was shady but we are talking about something different here).
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If you’re cynical and you get it right that everything “sucks” you look like a genius, if you get it wrong there is no penalty.
If you aren’t cynical and you talk about how great something is going to be and it flops you look like an idiot. The social penalty is much higher.
I don’t know if this is true.
>It diminishes human value/creativity
I don’t see this at all, I see it as enhancing creativity and human value.
>and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people.
There are a lot of open source models being created, even if they are being released by Meta…
>It's not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it's different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case).
So, like, you wouldn’t do anything if you could just chill on UBI all day? If anything I’d get more creative.
> That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance.
I don’t disagree with this at all, but I think we can fight back here and overcome this, but we have to lean into the tech to do that.
> I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society.
I think this is basically wrong historically. Things are very seldom permanently dystopian if they’re dystopian at all. Things are demonstrably better than they were 100 years ago, and if you think back even a couple decades things are often a lot better.
The medical applications alone will save a lot of lives.
> Nobody is denying that it's impressive but the question is more whether it's good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.
There are going to be annoyances, but I would bet serious cash that things continue to get better.
There is a lot of empirical research on UBI and all of it shows that it has very little effect on employment either way. That is, nothing will change here.
(This is probably because 1. positional goods exist 2. romantic prospects don't like it when you're unemployed even if you're rich.)
"When you go to an art gallery, you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires" - Banksy
Not saying the latter was never true, it's just interesting to see how people have reframed their work in the wake of breakneck AI progress.
In fact, they already did. What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already.
The top comments around Sora vs Veo suggesting that Google was falling behind, given the fact that both are still unavailable to use wasn't even a point to make in the first place, but just typical HN nonsense.
I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities. Apple didn’t release anything that Xerox or IBM couldn’t do. The difference is they didn’t.
Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. In this case, I fault them for having the sole action item be a buried waitlist request and two new brands (Veo and VideoFX) for one unreleased product.
Serious or not, that criticism existed on HN - and still does. I've seen many comments claiming Google has "fallen behind" on AI, sometimes with the insinuation the Google won't ever catch up due to OpenAI's apparent insurmountable lead
Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities that only it can execute well. Google's ability to shut down products that dont work is an insult to user but a very good corporate strategy and they deserve kudos for that.
Now, coming back to the "follow through". Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Photos, Drive, Cloud etc. all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market. Many companies like Yahoo! had a head start but could not keep up with their mail service.
Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities. They often integrated the best aspect of those products into their other well established products such as Google Trips became part of search and Google Shopping became part of search.
Do you have any examples of something they launched in the last decade?
that result in shittier products overall. For example, just a few months ago they cut 17 features from Google Assistant because they couldn't monetize them, sorry, because these were "small opportunities": https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/google-is-removing-17-unde...
> all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market.
And here's a long list of excellent examples of Google killing products right and left because small opportunities or something: https://killedbygoogle.com/
And don't get me started on the whole Hangouts/Meet/Alo/Duo/whatever fiasco
> Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities.
Translation: because they couldn't find ways to monetize the last cent out of them
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Edit: don't forget: The absolute vast majority of Google's money comes from selling ads. There's nothing else it is capable of doing at any significant scale. The only reason it doesn't "chase small opportunities" is because Google doesn't know how. There are a few smaller cash cows that it can keep chugging along, but they are dwarfed by the single driving force that mars everything at Google: the need to sell more and more ads and monetize the shit out of everything.
Where did SORA get all its training videos from again and why won't the executives answer a simple Yes/No question to "Did you scrape Youtube to train SORA?"
Google attorneys want to know.
Wait, really? Could you point to proof for this? I'm very curious where this is coming from
In terms of software that's actually been released Google is still at best in third place when it comes to AI products.
I don't care what they can demo, I care what they've shipped. So far the only thing they've shipped for Veo is a waitlist.
I always found HN contrarian but as I say it’s really tiring. I’ve no idea what the negative commenters are working on on a daily basis to be so dismissive of everybody else’s work, including work that leaves 90% of the population in a combination of awe and fear. Also people sometimes forget that behind big corp names there are actual people. People who might be reading this thread.
From my own perspective the critique is usually a counter balance to extreme hype, so maybe let's just agree it's ok to have both types of comments, you know "checks and balances".
Or why the existence of the UK hasn't, since they have a lot of English speaking programmers paid in peanuts.
...why am I feeling to urge to point out that I am only making a joke here and not trying to make an actual counter point, even if one can be made...?
If you’re negative and you get it wrong, nobody cares, get it and right you look like a damn genius. Conversely, if you’re positive and get it wrong, you look like an idiot and if you’re right you’re praised for a good call once. The rational “game theory” choice is to predict calamity.
I am still talking to a lot of people who say, “what can any of this AI stuff even do?” It’s like, robots you could hold a conversation with effectively didn’t exist 3 years ago and you’re already upset that it’s not a money tree?
I think that peoples expectation horizon narrowing down may be the clearest evidence that we’re in the singularity.