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Comment by disillusioned | Hacker News Reader

I have _long_ said don't sleep on Google for precisely these reasons. They have the only vertically integrated AI stack, insane capital they can deploy, and attention and focus and phenomenal architects and engineers, and a pre-existing catalog of as much of the world's data as possible. Counting them out would be completely absurd.

It started to feel just a bit like they were potentially content staying in the effective-fast-cheap lane and ceding frontier models to frontier labs, but I don't think anyone seriously thought that Google was going to sit back and let this generational shift pass them by when they're so well positioned to remain on the top of the heap.

If anything, I thought that 4 was maybe coming up short or causing safety concerns that were forcing them to be a bit more cautious, but nothing packs a wallop like being able to launch ahead of everyone else's brand newest toys...

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I agree on all except for your comment on attention and focus. They've seem to be very scattered in their deployment of AI for customers. Examples in point being the replacement of Google Assistant with Gemini, the AI Studio vs Vertex disconnect, and a crazy amount of coding tools and platforms (Duet, Firebase Studio, Studio Bot, etc).

Working through this as a consumer and enterprise customer has been a confusing experience, to say the least.

I've also noticed this. Anyone noticed they replaced "Vertex platform" with "agents platform" recently while changing nothing under the hood?

Google's biggest problem is its turf wars. Internal battles for territory always seem to outweigh efforts to expand markets

Maybe the turf wars are yet another sign they shouldn't be a single company? Still blows my mind.

Strongly agree - their approach has been extremely scattered. But also, doesn't it seem like they're starting to consolidate? It kinda makes sense to approach things like this as a mega corp. Have internal teams try the same things in different ways and let the market pick a winner. Kinda like being a startup incubator.

A vertically integrated AI stack won't fix the misaligned incentives of google execs.

AI is strangling their other major business and they don't like that. Unless Google sacrifices that branch of income, they won't put their full force behind AI.

I'm curious -- in your view, what exactly is it strangling that could not be addressed by replacing google.com with a ChatGPT-like interface while integrating other Google free-by-ads tools nicely? Or is your point they wouldn't do that due to existing "siloed incentives"?

The ads in google search are ~55% of their revenue and ~70% of their profit. Will the LLM drive as much traffic to the ads as the current google search? Will it feel as organic to the users as the current solution, or will LLM hawking a product seem forced by the users?

This is classic innovators dilemma stuff and for sure the Alphabet board is aware of it. It's not an easy problem to solve at scale though.

> They have the only vertically integrated AI stack, insane capital

and paying enterprise customers.

One of which is looks at notes Apple Computer

I mean it sounds wise to not go all in on publishing expensive models when they can earn money with more efficient models while still not bleeding too many customers?

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