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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products.

If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.

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Notebook LM is good.

Waymo's pretty good.

That's not a Google product per-se, and it's also not new.

Waymo was originally called the Google self-driving car. If it's only come to your city this year, I'd say that's pretty new. If it's not in your city yet, it's so new it's not even there!

Gemini is pretty good.

You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.

https://openrouter.ai/rankings

Uhh... It's on the 13-th place in rankings. And way behind in most benchmarks?

#6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption.

I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.

Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).

Gemini tends to be faster and the Flash and Flash Lite models outperform ChatGPT's equivalent models.

Is it any sort of leap over the product's it's copying?

IBM made some decent (sometimes extremely good, even!) products in a lot of segments for a long time after losing their relevance as "driving the future of computing." But rarely as a segment-definer or introducer.

Isn't Gmail a product? i think its pretty solid. Actually the best e-mail service out there, no?

Gmail ruined email because it used to be decentralised, but now everyone needs to be on Gmail so Gmail won't randomly discard their messages.

wow "Gmail ruined email" is a strong argument. Hard to agree with. Gmail revolutionized and democratized email.

I would've thought the democratised era was when there were 2000 providers and not when there were 2?

Well, it was a great product in 2005!

But it still great today, no? I mean professionally I am in the MS 365 world, which is definitely not better than gmail. We have some mail servers for services and until now we weren't able (for instance) to find an open source alternative to gmail and office 365.. any recommendation?

Waymo

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