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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Google is the favorite to win AI by a mile. Not only do they have some of the best AI people, they have absolute unmatched distribution with youtube, search, gmail, docs, chrome, and android. As impressive as OpenAI is they don't have anything except for their brand. It should be clear by now that nobody has a strong lead in training. Nobody has a strong lead in access to compute. Nobody has a killer app because the interface is just chat or voice. And what happens when you can't compete on product? Distribution wins. And Google's advantage here is almost insurmountable. Google can fumble the next 2 years and still end up on top.

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Google has another massive advantage over OpenAI.

It makes serious revenue outside the AI bubble.

Google has (much) more money in cash on hand than OpenAI has raised.

Of course, there are a few other MegaCorps out there, who make money in other places, while having a serious stake in doing well out of AI, but I'm with you. Google FTW.

Nvidia selling shovels to the miners is great, but the analogy falls down if the gold mines are bottomless, and the cost of the tools to mine them trend to zero.

Who's sitting there talking to Gemini though? Nobody I know's even heard of it. Everyone talks to ChatGPT, everyone. Habits are everything. Google will be swimming against the current and be seen as just another company forcing AI down everyone's throat, while everyone is still talking to ChatGPT. We'll see though, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Google is clever and can do integration well and make something useful out of it though. They have never succeeded in that way before though and in fact seem terrible at it as an organization, so I very much doubt that.

They aren’t talking about Gemini because Google is the brand name people know. “Oh Google told me this”. “Google planned my day.” Or maybe “Google’s AI said X”

Gemini is less a consumer brand name and a more a brand name for those of us who care about models.

Okay, but what I mean is nobody is sitting there having full conversations with Google's AI under any name. They are all day long with ChatGPT.

you live in a bubble.

my mom who barely knows how to use her own phone googles stuff and recently showed me tips she got from hitting ai mode after searching something on google.

my dad uses gemini built into email and sheets and chrome.

just 2 anecdotal examples. oh and ai pro subscription i bought applies to my whole family for 20 a month and comes with 2tb storage.

insane value. and again google can do this and is still highly profitable all whilst competing on having the best model.

this shit ain't close.

you live in a bubble.

my mom who barely knows how to use her own phone uses ChatGPT every day

just an anecdotal example.

this shit ain't close.

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but seriously, ChatGPT has wayyyy more name recognition than google's AI.

Name recognition is a different goal post than usage. OP's original comment was "Who's sitting there talking to Gemini though?"

No, we have the stats on this.

From personal experience I had half a dozen aunts and uncles (70+) mention the "Google AI thing" on their phones. Rather surprised me.

Which one’s getting integrated into business processes behind the scenes? That’s the thing that’s supposed to replace 12% of the workforce or whatever, not fancier ELIZA.

All my google searches do AI then its an easy click to a deeper AI dive.

This greatly disincentives me from visiting chatgpt or other competitors. Google is probably the most popular AI service right now. I don't see how they can be beat in this regard.

Not knowing the name gemini is actually impressive. How many people know Acrobat Adobe is called Acrobat? Its just Adobe. They subsumed the pdf market so much, you dont even realize you have a pdf reader. You just call it by the company name. Same with Xerox'ing copies or whatever. I think the hype cycle is for the big flashy AI companies with eccentric-style CEOs saying carefully crafted "outrage PR" sensationalism, but google is slowly eating everyone's lunch right now. Joe and Jane internet user are already trained and loyal to google and using Gemini probably a dozen or more times a day.

I'm a little surprised at myself because I just have been using google for nearly all AI stuff. For deeper dives into code I may use another tool, but gemini is good enough for most uses. I think this war is google's to lose. If they continue doing this strategy, they will 'win' the AI market, or at least a good part of it. Then AI will become just another boring feature in your search or whatever the same way people used to agonize over PDF readers, but now its just a boring thing built into your browser or, if at work, its "The Adobe."

90% of my LLM use is Gemini, including all the longer chat sessions.

Gemini Pro comes with my Google Workspace subscription, which means that it doesn't train on my data. It also has NotebookLM and it's in Google Sheets.

It's on my Android phone as well. It can summarise Youtube videos without getting throttled. And when I do a regular Google search (which I still do quite a lot) Gemini is there as well and I occasionally ask it followup questions via the search interface.

I'm finding it rather hard to believe nobody else is talking to Gemini.

They have some major catching up to do, right now, compared to ChatGPT, Gemini is laughably bad.

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