You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now.
A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.
I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.
Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
It's an unbelievable failure.
Google wants nothing more than the world to remain stuck in 2000 - 2020 where search was king. Their organisational inertia will fight its AI progress every step of the way and this very well explains why they are not leading the AI pack despite inventing the technology.
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.
Citation needed. The gemini app has 750 million MAU, hardly a dead business.
Terms like "Google it" have been completely replace by "Ask AI".
I personally mostly use google to find businesses close to me and to search reddit and wikipedia.
They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.
That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
How does Google make money from that?
Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
And it really does not matter.
The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.
But I think they don’t tell you because they sometimes use residential proxies to scrape search results the same way they used residential proxies to scrape the web.
And that changes, then that's all the more reason for them to be investing in AI.
Google also owns 15% of Anthropic and Hassabis, the leader of Deepmind, also is an early angel investor in Anthropic.
When you really break it down, it's not totally clear that Google would even care that much about being the SOTA LLM.
Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
Crawling isn't the same as search. Crawling is just the very bottom of a proper search stack.
There's a lot of layers and a shitton of infrastructure to run and/or pay for.
Mind you, it's possible they actually did re-implement all the layers, but why would they when there are already lots of suppliers out there and they are all already chronically short on compute resources.
I'm actually very curious to learn what they actually do wrt Search.
The big advantage Google has, in my opinion, is Android. I think there is a decent chance that people stop downloading the ChatGPT, Claude, etc. apps if they perceive that the phone just does the same out of the box for free. And I reckon the majority of people will prefer free, ad-ridden AI chat vs. paying subscriptions, at least for personal use. And on the B2B side, they have Workspace deeply embedded in a huge number of companies. So I wouldn't count Google out.
Despite this I cannot get my business partner to switch to Gemini (including all the very easy and convenient to use features that come with her Pixel phone) over her $100 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription.
The public perception of Gemini (or Google AI, specifically) is becoming quite poor because of the questionable results in "AI Mode" in a typical Google search. Google is really shooting themselves in the foot, because Gemini is quite good; they're creating an anti-brand.
This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:
Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.
Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.
No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.
OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.
And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!
As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general.
The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.
There used to be 4+ major browser engines. Now there's only two, and Google owns almost complete share & following standards? Google prefers their monoculture.
More diversity in browser engines was a good thing & standards were lovely.
Not everything has to be a slug-fest between #1 & #2.
& personally I'm glad there's Grok & Gemini to keep Anthropic & OpenAI on their toes even more than the competitive band of open weights models already do.
The corporate models tend to be defensive and sound like HR has approved every word of the script. Not a fan.
GDM ... not so much.