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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's really "ahead" but it's pretty close now. There's not that big a difference among the SOTA models, they all have their pros/cons.

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It’s incredibly impressive to see a large company with over 30x as many employees (or 2x if you compare with GDM) than OAI step back into the AI race compared to where they were with Bard a few years ago.

Google has proved it doesn’t want to be the next IBM or Microsoft.

"the next IBM or Microsoft."

Actually Microsoft has also shown it doesn't want to be the next IBM. I think at this point Apple is the one where I have trouble seeing a long-term plan.

Microsoft was sort of showing that a year ago, and then spent the whole last year showing everyone that they're just another IBM.

It probably depends on what "The next IBM" means for people. Microsoft is so deeply embedded into companies right now that for larger cooperation it's practically impossible to get rid of them, and their cloud-driven strategy is very profitable.

IBM still makes a lot of money from large corporations that depend on them. But yet…

We're talking about code generation here but most people's interactions with LLMs are through text. On that metric Google has led OpenAI for over a year now. Even Grok in "thinking" mode leads OpenAI

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard

Google also leads in image-to-video, text-to-video, search, and vision

You should compare the number of top AI scientists each company has. I think those numbers are comparable (I’m guessing each has a couple of dozen). Also how attractive each company is to the best young researchers.

Why are people so surprised? Attention Is All You Need was authored by Googlers. It’s not like they were blindsided.. OpenAI prouctionized it first but it didn’t make sense to count Google out given their AI history?

Huh? They absolutely were blindsided and the evidence is there. No one expected ChatGPT to take off like it did, not even OpenAI. Google put out some embarrassing products out for the first couple of years, called a code red internally, asked Sergey and Larry to come back. The fact that they recovered doesn’t mean they weren’t initially blindsided.

People are surprised because Google released multiple surprisingly bad products and it was starting to look like they had lost their edge. It’s rare for a company their size to make such a big turnaround so quickly.

Google, as a company, is easily ahead even if the model isn't, for various reasons.

Their real mote is the cost efficiency and the ad business. They can (probably) justify the AI spend and stay solvent longer than the market can stay irrational.

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