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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

All of that is true, Google should be winning. We underestimated Google's determination to fail.

Is Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.

It’s not bad. It’s just not better than other models. It’s very much in the same class as Grok, Cursor Grok Build, etc.

It's vision capabilities are still top notch, and it seems pretty natural that most everyday human users are going to want strong vision over strong language/coding.

If you need a less censored model that's still pretty smart and capable of some lateral thinking, it's great

Same niche as Grok, which is also great at search and less censored. Gemini is maybe a bit smarter and better on long contexts

Gemini works amazingly well, and is better suited for most use cases. When most people speak of it negatively (especially here), it's just with the task of coding, which is a small subset of what google should be training its AI for.

> Is Gemini really that bad?

It still produce full-blown hallucinations for me sometimes, even in 2026. The kinds ChatGPT stopped generating by 2025. It is cheap and fast though.

One of the most corrosive effects of being large and old (and Google is old by this point) is institutional inertia and individual internal optimization.

The former caused by the latter.

And the latter a problem once you begin to get executives and leaders who have mostly worked inside the company, because then they subconsciously prefer the Company Way(tm) to alternatives.

And Google has some previously-optimal, now-detrimental company ways.

From my understanding (I may be wrong) what is happening now is that frontier labs are doubling down on doing RLHF on their models using the user interaction with their own tools e.g. Anthropic making their models better at producing code with claude code. Perhaps the top Google researchers do not see this kind of narrow focus as a path to more generally beneficial AI technology.

Is it failing ? Take a look at the stock price

Their stock price won’t matter once OpenAI launches the paperclippers.

Not sure what you mean

This refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper....

Here's a popular game based on it: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Why am I being tricked into playing another cookie clicker

Enron's stock was pretty good, too.

Stock price is not a measure of success.

Just because it is (was) close to all-time high doesn't mean it's high. Look at the P/E[1]. The market does not think it will grow long-term.

[1] And yes I know it's artificially lowered due to the mark-to-market gains in investments, but even without those it's low compared to peers.

I feel like the majority of ai use by normal people is through Google search, so that's kind of a win.

I'm confused by meta's capex though. Are they planning on becoming a cloud provider, or just throwing money away like with the metaverse?

In an interview, Zuck said that the cost of not having super intelligent AI is far more than the cost of trying to develop it.

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