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Comment by Sevii | Hacker News Reader

How did Google blow their AI lead? Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market? Why can't GCP supplant AWS?

Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.

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No, it's more that Gemini models are simply not very good for coding compared to the top two. Even with Antigravity I use Claude models.

Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini in my limited testing on a small C project single source file project, less than 1000 lines. Setting temperature to 0 gives better results for me. It seems like Gemini ignores the system prompt more and the default reasoning output seems more incoherent.

> Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini

Is there a fine-tuned Gemma coding model? I'd assume that would perform quite well.

I don't know, but for me setting temperature to 0 has a noticeable impact. I don't think you need a fine tune.

Their open weight on device models are really impressive. Partly because I think they are the only ones out of all the frontier labs even working on local models.

Depends on the language. Gemini and Claude are far superior when it comes to C# for instance, compared to anything that OAI offers.

Yaah I feel the same way. Gemini is great at and Django and AI backends, OpenAI better at making something visually pleasing in React and Claude for everything else or across frontend and backend.

At least, that's my heuristic that tends to work for my workflow. I use a combination of Gemini-CLI, Claude Code, and Github Copilot, but across those, the underlying model choice works best according to which part of the applicaiton I am messing with

They had the lead for maybe a week or two. Now, only Apple is further behind.

Apple may be behind, and even getting sued for false advertising around AI features, but at least they haven’t spent hundreds of billions of dollars with no indication of how they’ll make their money back.

You’re right, they’re simply playing a different game. That said, Apple sold millions of phones with the promise that 3 months later users would be able to use AI to automate their phones and use Siri similar to how they use ChatGPT. That was summer 2024, and it still hasn’t shipped.

I'll give them images. Gemini/Nano Banana is notably better at understanding and generating images than OpenAI, imo, and Claude can't even generate.

While I'm at it I've got to give them credit for Gemma as well. Stellar, first class model for the size.

It's a toss-up - NB Pro (and NB2) were in the lead for a long time, but gpt-image-1.5 and then particularly gpt-image-2 pretty much closed the gap on my GenAI Image Showdown benchmark site.

NB still generates better looking images though for the most part - gpt-image series is still affected by the yellow saturation issues though its been heavily mitigated.

gpt-image-2 still has a very visible banding/artifacting, but nb2 and gpti2 each have their strengths to the point that its momentarily worth running the same prompt through both and grabbing the better result, then feeding it to the opposite model to tweak it. both of them do a better job of not "getting stuck" regurgitating the same thing over and over when the base image comes from the opposite model. i tend to try and limit how many edits i make with gpti2 because successive iterations degrade the image much much faster.

huge waste of firefly credits tho.

Enough to pretend they were back in the game. All a stock pump.

> How did Google blow their AI lead?

Google is not an "AI company", they just happened to have been 10 steps ahead of everyone but slept on it for too long, now scrambling to catch up..

If by "happened to" you mean pour significant resources for well-over a decade on many different AI research groups then yes, that's accurate. Depending on your definition of AI, it might even be two decades.

In fact, OpenAI was founded largely with the direct goal of preventing Google from being the sole winner in AI...

Alphabet owns DeepMind, who are an AI company. In fact alphabet are lots of things, which is fine.

Yes, you're right, but Google are not an AI company in the same sense Anthropic or OpenAi are and are focused on their products differently and it kind of shows..

> Why can't GCP supplant AWS?

Both GCP and AWS are just relabeled corporate dogfood. It turns out most people have operations that share more traits with retail than with big data.

> Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market?

2nd, 3rd? No way. You either use Claude Code or Codex, the 3rd option usually was Github Copilot. The only time I heard someone used google for code writing it was Linux Torvalds in one of his commits.

Cursor is also definitely more popular than Gemini CLI

Because for awhile they had access to infinite money printing press (search ads), and in the situation like this it’s impossible to focus and seriously compete in other areas.

Essentially all Google efforts were in protection of search ad revenue.

They really just hate doing migration plans, especially longer ones (1+ year). Google seems like an outlier but I don't have real data to prove it.

Where have you been? Google has always been terrible with enterprise products. They are in the low cost, small company part of the analytics/enterprise market. The medium or large sized customers have been burned by them too many times to ever go back at this point. If you use them, you deserve what you get these days. No idea why you think Google was ever some quality provider of enterprise tools. They were declining even before they entered those markets. It isn't 2008 anymore and the Google you remember hasn't existed in well over a decade.

Because their strategy wasn’t to become leaders but to be as good as it takes to erode the lead of others. They have the cash cow of search so they don’t rely on AI to succeed. All they need is to keep publishing new products/services to keep OpenAI from taking the initiative. Between that and the Chinese models all they have to do is wait for the bubble to burst at which point every major AI lab would go bust.

> How did Google blow their AI lead?

What lead? Maybe because I'm mostly using AI/LLMs for development, but neither Google, Anthropic, xAI or anyone else has ever been in the lead, OpenAI always had the best models in my mind, as long as you're comparing the "top" plans between all of them.

Besides, they all seem to shoot themselves in the foot, OpenAI included, seems the only thing that differs is how often and how big the damage is.

Wow. Didn't realize OAI was astroturfing hacker news now...

All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.

Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".

Wait what? Why don't I get emails like this too? /s

(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)

Nah, maybe one day I do a collective public post of it, for now I just try to get their company and/or name first, then forward it to HN themselves so they can ban them and keep an eye out for them.

Could you give us how many companies are trying to do this and also if any of the companies are YC companies themselves or not, I imagine not but still.

and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)

and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!

I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?

I would be curious to know that too!

So far just 3-4 at this point, some I guess figure out what I try to do when I ask for their company name and HN username, none of them been YC companies so far AFAIK. I don't know why they send specifically me emails, I guess either some automated system or they themselves see I spend way too much time on HN already, maybe just based on the amount of comments, I do have quite a bit of free-time :)

Wait so you're countering an accusation of astroturfing with an actual confession? That's new.

Lacking reading comprehension, you can imagine me doing, confessing and saying all sorts of things :)

I don't think Google does, they are way too massive, disorganized, and "by the book" for something like that. Also AI isn't life or death for them.

Besides they own 15% of Anthropic and cutting massive compute deals with them. On top of that they also have compute deals with OAI.

Google is positioning itself to win no matter what happens, Gemini is almost looking like a side project next to their cloud business.

I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

> It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).

Claude Code has only been around for a year and change. At least for our internal tests 2 years ago Anthropic models started to at least become semi-useful but they still were not great, they struggled with structured output. Prior to that their alignment strategy made the products highly unhelpful in an API context. The past 6 months to a year is where Anthropic has really shined, they have model parity and sometimes taking the lead and more importantly their product offering on the consumer side has crushed it.

> Claude Code has only been around for a year and change.

We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.

I feel like aider was the first TUI for agentic stuff I came across here, and that was well before Claude code.

I was a regular Claude Code user but Codex eventually won me over due to a few factors:

1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.

2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.

3. Really strong image generation capabilities.

That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.

I’ve heard about that “open secret” and I don’t understand.

What’s the incentive for Anthropic to pump up the token usage on their top end plan? Is it to move Pro users up to Max? That’s the only plausible idea I can think of.

There are plenty of shills for all of the major labs on this website. Usually checking a history of comments of a suspicious user reveals that quite fast.

The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to make these accusations.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Google invented transformers. They had LLMs before openAI existed.

Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Also, if we're going backwards, who invented neural networks, does that mean that person also then "had LLMs before OpenAI existed"?

The tone on this could be improved. They literally answered your question "What lead?" and you seem dismissive.

Yeah, you're right, maybe needlessly harsh, sorry for that. I guess I'm tired of the same argument that Google somehow had a lead in LLM development because Transformer comes from researchers who worked at Google, yet somehow what comes before/after Transformer doesn't count, coming from Google's researchers (BERT) or others (GPT), or going even earlier so, hence the whole "we stand on the shoulders of giants".

We can go round and round about all this but I think it's pretty clear that google did at one point have a large AI lead in the lead up to covid. They had models that far surpassed the competition from 2018-2022. But they were facing an innovators dilemma, didnt want to cannibalize their search revenue so they sat on LLMs which ended up creating openAI and anthropic.

> Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Google did, as they already said.

OpenAI was better at marketing and a lot more willing to cannibalize the search market as a newcomer. So Google blew their lead in research by not recognizing the product value quickly enough, or failing to win an internal political war on it anyway

> who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Google?

> who invented neural networks

People like Geoffrey Hinton, who was notably at Google Brain from 2013 to 2023?

The people who say Google was ahead were paying attention long before you were.

Google didn’t invent neural networks, neural networks existed before Google was founded.

This. Neural Nets have existed conceptually since the 1950s. They weren't realized materially and practically until later, but it's astonishing how ignorant people are of the history of AI.

OpenAI literally wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Google's work in the space.

Who wouldn't exists if someone else didn't invent something else, which wouldn't exists...

We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, I don't think one party is more responsible than someone else, unless you're specifically involved with the specific technology, then you can attribute it to them.

So yes, Google's researchers might have invented the Transformer, but OpenAI researchers invented GPT. Does it matter we credit "LLMs" more to one than the other? I don't think so, especially in this context it's highly irrelevant. Google didn't have the "LLM lead" before LLMs even existed...

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