Hacker News Reader

Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn’t add anything to what we know already. It’s still an open question what happens with the labs this coming year, but I personally think Anthropic’s focus on coding represents the clearest path to subscriber-based success (typical SaaS) whereas OpenAI has a clear opportunity with advertising. Both of these paths could be very lucrative. Meanwhile I expect Google will continue to struggle with making products that people actually want to use, irrespective of the quality of its models.

View on HN

I don't. Google has at least a few advantages:

1. Google books, which they legally scanned. No dubious training sets for them. They also regularly scrape the entire internet. And they have YouTube. Easy access to the best training data, all legally.

2. Direct access to the biggest search index. When you ask ChatGPT to search for something it is basically just doing what we do but a bit faster. Google can be much smarter, and because it has direct access it's also faster. Search is a huge use case of these services.

3. They have existing services like Android, Gmail, Google Maps, Photos, Assistant/Home etc. that they can integrate into their AI.

The difference in model capability seems to be marginal at best, or even in Google's favour.

OpenAI has "it's not Google" going for it, and also AI brand recognition (everyone knows what ChatGPT is). Tbh I doubt that will be enough.

Google's most significant advantage in this space is its organizational experience in providing services at this scale, as well as its mature infrastructure to support them. When the bubble pops, it's not lights-out or permanently degraded performance.

And they have hardware as well, and their own cloud platform.

In my view Google is uniquely well positioned because, contrary to the others, it controls most of the raw materials for Ai.

What Google AI products do people not want to use? Gemini is catching up to chatpt from a MAU perspective, ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there, a Google ai mode has decent usage, and Google Lens has surprisingly high usage. These products together dwarf everyone else out there by like 10x.

> ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there

This really is the critical bit. A year ago, the spin was "ChatGPT AI results are better than search, why would you use Google?", now it's "Search result AI is just as good as ChatGPT, why bother?".

When they were disruptive, it was enough to be different to believe that they'd win. Now they need to actually be better. And... they kinda aren't, really? I mean, lots of people like them! But for Regular Janes at the keyboard, who cares? Just type your search and see what it says.

>Gemini is catching up to chatpt from a MAU perspective

It is far behind, and GPT hasn't exactly stopped growing either. Weekly Active Users, Monthly visits...Gemini is nowhere near. They're comfortably second, but second is still well below first.

>ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there

Is it ? How would you even know ? It's a forced feature you can not opt out of or not use. I ignore AI overviews, but would still count as a 'user' to you.

we're curious what your source is

Monthly Visits (chatGPT #5, Gemini #26): https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/mos...

Search Traffic: https://x.com/Similarweb/status/2003078223135990246

doesn't seem accurate since gemini has many entry points

Entry points ? The visits are accurate for the website and app. If you're talking about AI overviews, then that's meaningless for reasons I've already explained.

I do understand why it makes it very hard to compare but it's certainly not meaningless. Google's AI overviews are pretty much the only way that I use AI.

I mean we're all talking about how Google is 'catching up' and 'taking over' Open AI right ? In that case, it genuinely is meaningless. AI Overviews, even if it had the usage OP assumes, is not a threat to Open AI or chatGPT. People use chatGPT for a lot of different things, and AI overviews only handles (rather poorly in my opinion) a small, limited part of the kind of things it gets used for. I use AI mode a lot. It's better than Overviews in every conceivable way, and it's still not a chatGPT replacement.

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...

I guess I use Google's AI that's built into their search engine the same way I've used ChatGPT or Claude. I ask it a question and it provides me an answer. I can then interact with it further if I want or look through the rest of the search results.

I use Google's AI much more often that OpenAI's but the URL I use is usually google.co.uk and so wouldn't appear if your numbers.

ChatGPT - 5.8b visits - -5.2% MoM

Gemini - 1.4b visits - +14.4% MoM

Yeah, ChatGPT is still more popular, but this does not show Gemini struggling exactly.

Is Gemini, as a chatbot, a product that sustains current valuations and investment?

It's hard to say with Google because they make most of their money from ads and you can't really tell if people who clicked were there for normal search or Gemini. They seem to be doing ok though, profits up 66% from a couple of years ago.

>Google Lens has surprisingly high usage

I use it several times a day just to change text in image form to text form so you can search it and the like.

It's built into chrome but they move the hidden icon about regularly to confuse you. This month you click the url and it appears underneath, helpfully labeled "Ask Google about this page" so as to give you little idea it's Google Lens.

Where does google struggle to make products people don’t want to use? Is it a personal opinion?

Bart was a flop. Google search is losing market share to other LLM providers. Gemini adoption is low, people around me prefer OpenAI because it is good enough and known.

But on the contrary, Nano Banana is very good, so I don't know. And in the end, I'm pretty confident Google will be the AI race winner, because they got the engineers, they tech background and the money. Unless Google Adsense die, they can continue the race forever.

what are you talking about Gemini adoption has tripled in a few months alone and have around 18% of marketshare and its accelerating.

I’ve heard too many rumors that much of that adoption is from copying ms i.e. bundling gemini into their office suite

Gemini adoption via search is legit, though. I had a question, I got an answer, its not forced, fake adoption in that case.

It's hardly legit for everyone. I had a question, I got an incorrect answer I didn't ask for, scrolled past it and got actual results.

Fair

gemini is in basically everything from google now, from google docs to firebase to android studio so i wouldn't be surprised...

I'm talking about adoption around me. I didn't check the data. Glad it works for them outside of people around me, didn't know that.

Is it relative adoption or absolute ? I mean, the people using Gemini are they new or coming from another provider, like OpenAI ? (said differently: Is Google eating OpenAI lunch or just reaching new customers ?)

If Google is producing very good models and they aren’t gaining much traction, that seems like a pretty bad sign for them, right? If they were failing with bad models, the solution would be easy: math and engineer harder, make better models (I mean, this is obviously very hard but it is a clear path). Failing with good models is… confusing, it indicates there’s some unknown problem.

It’s irrelevant, Google needs to focus on performance enhancements that the enterprise market segment demands - who only operate in the air of objectivity.

If they can achieve that they will cut off a key source of blood supply to MSFT+OAI. There is not much money in the consumer market segment from subscribers and entering the ad-business is going to be a lot tougher than people think.

> Gemini adoption is low, people around me prefer OpenAI because it is good enough and known.

Gemini is built into Android and Google search. People may not be going to gemini.google.com, but that does not mean adoption is low.

I mean it’s a simple Google search to show that Google isn’t loosing much market share to ChatGPT and most ChatGPT users still use Google.

https://searchengineland.com/nearly-all-chatgpt-users-visit-...

But even more importantly, it obviously isn’t losing money from advertisers to ChatGPT. You can look at their quarterly results.

Anti Gravity is a flop. I mean it uses Gemini under the hood.

But you cannot use it with an API key.

If you're on a workspace account, you can't have normal individual plan.

You have to have the team plan with $100/month or nothing.

Google's product management tier is beyond me.

OK, but Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, and Google Search etc are ubiquitous. `Google' has even become a verb. Google might take a shotgun approach, but it certainly does create widely used products.

That doesn't negate my original point.

I will add that there's also Gemini in Chrome. With Chrome being the largest browser by market share, that's a powerful de facto default.

  > With Chrome being the largest browser by market share, that's a powerful de facto default.

where art thou anti-trust enforcement...

Every personal computer user except Chromebook users went out of their way to download Chrome. What exactly do you want “anti trust” to do?

maybe not allow google to bundle gemini with chrome?

So should we also not allow OpenAI to bundle the OpenAI model with the ChatGPT app

Absolutely no one besides ChromeOS users are forced to use Chrome.

Anti-trust doesn’t have to involve force, but monopolistic behavior.

Google has spent over a decade advertising Chrome on all their properties and has an unlimited budget and active desire to keep Chrome competitive. Mozilla famously needs Google’s sponsorship to stay solvent. Apple maintains Safari to have no holes in their ecosystem.

Stop being silly defending trillion dollar companies that are actively making the internet worse, it’s not productive or funny.

And poor little under capitalized Microsoft and Apple couldn’t compete?

What "we" know already is hard to add to, as a forum that has a dozen AI articles a day on every little morsel of news.

>whereas OpenAI has a clear opportunity with advertising.

Personally, having "a clear opportunity with advertising" feels like a last ditch effort for a company that promised the moon in solving all the hard problems in the world.

There are other avenues of income. You can invade other industries which are slow on AI uptake and build an AI-from-ground competitor with large advantages over peers. There are hints of this (not AI-from-ground but with more AI) with deepmind's drug research labs. But this can be a huge source of income. You can kill entire industries which inevitably cannot incorporate AI as fast as AI companies can internally.

Probably more people use googles AI than anything else. Every search result has an LLM generated summary at the top.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com