Google is winning on every AI front

Please do.

I was actually surprised at Google's willingness to offer Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio for free; having this was a significant contributor to my decision to cancel my OpenAI subscription.

I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already.

The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.

Microsoft gained control in the '90s by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows for free, undercutting Netscape’s browser. This leveraged Windows’ dominance to make Explorer the default choice, sidelining competitors and capturing the browser market. By 1998, Netscape’s share plummeted, and Microsoft controlled access to the web.

Free isn’t generous—it’s strategic. Google’s hooking you into their ecosystem, betting you’ll build on their tools and stay. It feels like a deal, but it’s a moat. They’re not selling the model; they’re buying your loyalty.

So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term.

Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.

Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses.

At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs.

The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.

It almost sounds like you're saying that Netscape wasn't free, and I'm pretty sure it was always free, before and after Microsoft Explorer

They got and as of now continue to get things right for the most part. If you still aren'ĥt seeing it maybe you should introspect what you're missing.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/19/business/netscape-moves-t...

But not profitable yet.

I have been using the free version for the past year or so and it’s totally serviceable for the odd question or script. The kids get three free fun images, which is great because that’s about as much as I want them to do.

There's very close to zero switching costs, both on the consumer front and the API front; no real distinguishing features and no network effects; just whoever has the best model at this point in time.

NotebookLM by Google is in a class of its own in the use case of "provide documents and ask a chat or questions about them" for personal use. ChatGPT and Claude are nowhere near. ChatGPT uses RAG so it "understands" less about the topic and sometimes hallucinate.

When it comes to coding Claude 3.5/3.7 embedded in Cursor or stand alone kept giving better results in real world coding, and even there Gemini 2.5 blew it away in my experience.

Antirez, hping and Redis creator among many others releases a video on AI pretty much every day (albeit in Italian) and his tests where Gemini reviews his PRs for Redis are by far the better out of all the models available.

Key Facts from "The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman's Firing from OpenAI": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/25EgRNWcY6PM3fWZh/openai-12-...

Even companies that do it "on the cheap," like DeepSeek, pay tens of millions to train a single model, and total expenditures for infrastructure and salaries are estimated to surpass $1 billion. This market has an extremely high cost of entry.

So, I guess Google is applying the usual strategy here: undercut competition until it implodes and buy up any promising competitors that arise in the future. Given the current lack of market regulation in the US, this might work.

'Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit."' ¹

Until something makes a profit it's a charity or predatory monopoly-in-waiting.²

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-technologies-full-2024-e...

Not at all my experience, but maybe I'm not part of a smart group :)

> because even now it's the best at what it does

Actually I don't see a difference with Mistral or DeepSeek.

To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output. Google takes steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting this data from your Google Account, API key, and Cloud project before reviewers see or annotate it. Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#data-use-unpaid

The chip makers are making a bundle

There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons.

So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this.

Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.

> I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best

My smart friends use a mixture of models, including chatgpt, claude, gemini, grok. Maybe different people, it's ok, but I really don't think chatgpt is head and shoulders above the others.

The article claims Gemini is acing the Aider Polyglot benchmark. At the moment this is the only benchmark that really matters to me because Aider is actually a useful tool and performance on that translates directly to real world impact, although Claude Code is even better. If you look closely, in fact Gemini is at the top only in the "percent correct" category but not "percent correct using the right edit format". Cost is marked as ? because it's not entirely available yet (I think?). Not emitting the correct edit format is pretty useless because it means the changes won't apply and the tool has to try again.

Claude in contrast almost never makes a mistake with emitting the right format. It's at 97%+ in the benchmark, in practice it's ~100% in my experience. This tracks: Claude is really good at following instructions. Gemini is about ~90%. This makes a big difference to how frustrating a tool is to use in practice.

They might get that fixed, but my experience has been that Google's models are consistently much more likely to refuse instructions for dumb reasons. Google is the company with by far the biggest purity spiral problem and it does show up in their output even when doing apparently ordinary tasks.

I'm also concerned by this event: https://news.sky.com/story/googles-ai-chatbot-gemini-tells-u...

Given how obsessed Google claimed to be with AI safety I expected an SRE style postmortem after that, and there was bupkis. An AI that can suffer a psychotic break out of nowhere like that is one I wouldn't trust unless it's behind a very strong sandbox and being supervised very closely, but none of the AI tools today offer much in the way of sandboxing.

But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.

would love to hear more about this.

I made a post asking more about sam altman last year after hearing paul graham quote call him 'micheal jordan of listening'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829

I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.

I highly doubt advertisers will settle for a solution that's less profitable. That would be like settling for plain-text ads without profiling data and microtargeting. Google tried that in the "don't be evil" days, and look how that turned out.

Besides, astroturfing and influencer-driven campaigns are very popular. The modern playbook is to make advertising blend in with the content as much as possible, so that the victim is not aware that they're being advertised to. This is what the majority of ads on social media look like. The natural extension of this is for ads to be subtly embedded in chatbot output.

"You don't sound well, Dave. How about a nice slice of Astroturf pizza to cheer you up?"

And political propaganda can be even more subtle than that...

The original idea of ride-sharing made sense but just like airbnb it became an industry and got enshittified.

EDIT: Some typo fixes, tho many remain, I'm sure :)

Besides, Meta is currently the leader in open-source/weight models. There's no reason that US companies can't continue to innovate in this space.

An ideal answer for a query like "Where can I take my wife for a date this weekend?" would be something like,

> Here are some events I found ... <ad unit one> <ad unit two> <ad unit three>. Based on our prior conversations, sounds like the third might be the best fit, want me to book it for you?

To get that you need ads. If you ask ChatGPT such a question currently it'll either search the web (and thus see ads anyway) or it'll give boring generic text that's found in its training set. You really want to see images, prices, locations and so on for such a query not, "maybe she'd like the movies". And there are no good ranking signals for many kinds of commercial query: LLM training will give a long-since stale or hallucinated answer at worst, some semi-random answer at best, and algorithms like PageRank hardly work for most commercial queries.

HN has always been very naive about this topic but briefly: people like advertising done well and targeted ads are even better. One of Google's longest running experiments was a holdback where some small percentage of users never saw ads, and they used Google less than users who did. The ad-free search gave worse answers overall.

Especially when post-tarrifs consumption is going to take a huge nosedive

I like LLMs (over search engines) because they are not salespeople. They're one of the few things I actually "trust". (Which I know is something that many people fall on the other side of — but no, I actually trust them more than SEO'd web sites and ad-driven search engines.)

I suppose my local-LLM hobby is for just such a scenario. While it is a struggle, there is some joy in trying to host locally as powerful an open LLM model as your hardware will allow. And if the time comes when the models can no longer be trusted, pop back to the last reliable model on the local setup.

That's what I keep telling myself anyway.

Not sure whether you have your perspective because you're invested os much into OpenAI, however the general consensus is that gemini 2.5 pro is the top model at the moment, including all the AI reviews and OpenAI is barely mentioned when comparing models. O4 will be interesting, but currently? You are not using the best models. Best to read the room.

No, it's not a charity or a monopoly-in-waiting.

99.9% of the time, it's an investment hoping to make a profit in the future. And we still call those businesses, even if they're losing money like most businesses do at first.

Also you don't need ads to answer what to do, just knowledge of the events. Even a poor ranking algorithm is better than "how much someone paid for me to say this" as the ranking. That is possibly the very worst possible ranking.

Why not? That's one of the reasons I visit HN instead of some random forum after all.

Is making decisions the hardest thing in life for so many people? Or is this instead a desire to do away with human capital — to "automate" a workforce?

Regardless, here is this wild new technology (LLMs) that seems to have just fallen out of the sky; we're continuously finding out all the seemingly-formerly-unimaginable things you can do with it; but somehow the collective have already foreseen its ultimate role.

As though the people pushing the ARPANET into the public realm were so certain that it would become the Encyclopedia Galactica!

Which can be said for most of the survivorship-biased "greats" we talk about. Right time, right place.

(Although to be fair — and we can think of the Two Steves, or Bill and Paul — there are often a number of people at the right time and right place — so somehow the few we still talk about knew to take advantage of that right time and right place.)

I think a big commercial opportunity for ChatBots (as was originally intended for Siri, when Apple acquired it from SRI) is business referral fees - people ask for restaurant, hotel etc recommendations and/or bookings and providers pay for business generated this way.

At this point in college, LLMs are everywhere. It's completely dominating history/english/mass comm fields with respect to writing papers.

Anecdotally all of my working non-tech friends use chatgpt daily.

Bundling a "good enough" products can do a lot, including take you from near zero to overwhelmingly dominant in 5 years, as MS did.

>... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.

What if people were the chatbots?

https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO

They're more than willing to expand their moat around AI even if that means multiple unprofitable business for years.

This is what I see motivating non-technical people to learn about agents. There’s lots of jobs that are essentially reading/memorizing complicated instructions and entering data accordingly.

As is an increasing trend, they're a "public" company, like Facebook. They have tiered shares with Larry Page and Sergey Brin owning the majority of the voting power by themselves. GOOG shares in particular are class C and have no voting power whatsoever.

The only thing I really care about with classic web search is whether the resulting website is relevant to my needs. On this point I am satisfied nearly all the time. It’s easy to verify.

With LLMs I get a narrative. It is much harder to evaluate a narrative, and errors are more insidious. When I have carefully checked an LLM result, I usually discover errors.

Are you really looking closely at the results you get?

This is incorrect. There are millions of companies in the world that exist to accomplish things other than making a profit, and are also not charities.

This is where differentiated UX and speed matter. It's also a classic Innovator's Dilemma situation like Google are slower to move, while new players can take risks and redefine the game. It's not just about burning money or model size, it's about who delivers value where it actually gets used.

I also think the influx of new scientists and engineers into AI raises the odds of shifting its economics: whether through new hardware (TPUs/GPUs) and/or more efficient methods.

1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs.

2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in various heads to prototypes/MVPs is causing/will cause somewhat of a Cambrian explosion of such things.

I keep hearing this online, but every time I’ve used an Uber recently it’s driven by someone who says they’ve been doing it for a very long time. Seems clear to me that it is worth it for some, but not worth it if you have other better job options or don’t need the marginal income.

There are now commonly corporate goon squads whose job is to drive AI adoption without care for actual impact to results. Usage of AI is the KR.

> Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”

Another instantiation: people like cheap goods more than they dislike buying foreign made goods

How so? Amazon were the first with S3 and EC2 including API driven control.

If the chat bot remains useful and can execute on instructions, yes.

If we see a plateau in integrations or abilities, it’ll stagnate.

But I think we have to get away from the thinking that “Chinese models” are somehow created by the Chinese state, and from an adversarial standpoint. There are models created by Chinese companies, just like American and European companies.

It's not really about suppressing the knowledge, it's about suppressing people talking about it and making it a point in the media etc. The CCP knows how powerful organised people can be, this is how they came to power after all.

It was supposed to be a BlackBerry/Blackjack killer at the time.

And then the iPhone was revealed and Google immediately changed Android’s direction to become a touch OS.

I don't understand this sentiment at all. The business model writes itself (so to speak). This is the company that perfected the art of serving up micro-targeted ads to people at the moment they are seeking a solution to a problem. Just swap the search box for a chat bot.

For a while they'll keep the ads off to the side, but over time the ads will become harder and harder to distinguish from the chat bot content. One day, they'll dissapear altogether and companies will pay to subtly bias the AI towards their products and services. It will be subtle--undetectable by end users--but easily quantified and monetized by Google.

Companies will also pay to integrate their products and services into Google's agents. When you ask Gemini for a ride, does Uber or Lyft send a car? (Trick question. Waymo does, of course.) When you ask for a pasta bowl, does Grubhub or Doordash fill the order?

When Gemini writes a boutique CRM for your vegan catering service, what service does it use for seamless biometric authentication, for payment processing, for SMS and email marketing? What payroll service does it suggest could be added on in a couple seconds of auto-generated code?

AI allows Google to continue it's existing business model while opening up new, lucrative opportunities.

>Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. (wikipedia)

Whereas the other lot are often engineers / compsci / business people building stuff.

When was it, 2006? Almost 20 years ago, back when the company was young.

Just because the first LLM product people paid for was a chatbot does not mean that chat will be the dominant commercial use of AI.

And if the dominant use is agents that replace knowledge workers, then they'll cost closer to $2000 per month than $20 or free, and an ad-based business model won't work.

Perhaps... but perhaps not. A chatbot instead of a search box may not be how the future looks. Also... a chatbot prompt may not (probably won't) translate from search query smoothly... in a Way That keep ad markets intact.

That "perfected art" of search advertising is highly optimized. You (probably) loose all of that in transition. Any new advertising products will be intrepid territory.

You could not have predicted in advance that search advertising would dwarf video (yourube) advertising as a segment.

Meanwhile... they need to keep their market share at 90%.

The actual business models and revenue sources are still unknown. Consumer subscriptions happens to be the first major model. Ads still aren't. Many other models could dwarf either of these.

It's very early to call the final score.

other significant revenue surfaces:

- providing LLM APIs to enterprises

- ChatBot Ads market: once people will switch from google search, there will be Ads $200B market at stake for a winner

But a majority of chatbot usage is not searching for the solution to a problem. And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product.

Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment. I don’t think ads work well in the latter , perhaps some subset, like the task is really complicated or the AI can tell the user is failing to achieve it. But I don’t think it’s nearly as could have a fit as search.

This also means that they sometimes fleece tourists but when they figure you know the city well they don't dare :) Often if they take one wrong turn I make a scene about frowning and looking out of the window and then they quickly get back on track. Of course that's another usecase where uber would be better, if you don't know the city you're in.

In a gold rush, the folks that sell pickaxes make a reliable living.

I was guessing they meant something like the net profit only came from a weird tax thing or something.

I doubt the depiction implied by "surprising number". Marketing types and CEO's who would love 100% profit and only paying the electricity bill for an all AI workforce would believe that. Most people, especially most technical people would not believe that there is a "surprising number" of saps paying for so-called AI.

Not just small startups - even if you have ungodly amounts of funding.

Obviously the costs for AI will lower and everyone will more or less have the same quality in their models. They may already be approaching a maximum (or maximum required) here.

The bubble will burst and we'll start the next hype cycle. The winners, as always, the giants and anyone who managed to sell to them

I couldn't possibly see OpenAI as a winner in this space, not ever really. It has long since been apparent to me that Google would win this one. It would probably be more clear to others if their marketing and delivery of their AI products weren't such a sh-- show. Google is so incredibly uncoordinated here it's shocking...but they do have the resources, the right tech, the absolute position with existing user base, and the right ideas. As soon as they get better organized here it's game over.

When Gemini says "Apple products are unreliable and overpriced, buy a Pixel phone instead". Google can just shrug and say "It's just what it deduced, we don't know how it came to that conclusion. It's an LLM with its mysterious weights and parameters"

I also agree the business models aren't known. That's part of any hype cycle. I think those in the best position here are those with an existing product(s) and user base to capitalize on the auto complete on crack kinda feature. It will become so cheap to operate and so ubiquitous in the near future that it absolutely will be seen as a table stakes feature. Yes, commodities.

Not necessarily. Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan

Sam of the current gold rush is selling pickaxes at a loss, telling the investors they'll make it up in volume.

https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...

I suggest reducing the tolerance towards the insistence that opinions are legitimate. Normally, that is done through active debate and rebuttal. The poison has been spread through echochambers and lack of direct strong replies.

In other terms: they let it happen, all the deliriousness of especially the past years was allowed to happen through silence, as if impotent shrugs...

(By the way: I am not talking about "reticence", which is the occasional context here: I am talking about deliriousness, which is much worse than circumventing discussion over history. The real current issue is that of "reinventing history".)

"AI" sounds like a great investment. Why waste time investing in businesses when one can invest in something that might become a business. CEOs and employees can accumulate personal weath without any need for the company to be become profitable and succeed.

You may not even notice it when AI does a product placement when it's done opportunistically in creative writing (see Hollywood). There also are plenty of high-intent assistant-type AI tasks.

>in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.

No, something I use on a weekly basis (which is not necessarily just once a week) is pretty important to me and spinning it otherwise is bizarre.

Google is the frontend to the web for the vast majority of internet users so yeah it gets a lot of daily use. Social media sites are social media sites and are in a league of their own. I don't think i need to explain why they would get a disproportionate amount of daily users.

How much a click is worth to a business is a very good ranking signal, albeit not the only one. Google ranks by bid but also quality score and many other factors. If users click your ad, then return to the results page and click something else, that hurts the advertiser's quality score and the amount of money needed to continue ranking goes up so such ads are pushed out of the results or only show up when there's less competition.

The reason auction bids work well as a ranking signal is that it rewards accurate targeting. The ad click is worth more to companies that are only showing ads to people who are likely to buy something. Spamming irrelevant ads is very bad for users. You can try to attack that problem indirectly by having some convoluted process to decide if an ad is relevant to a query, but the ground truth is "did the click lead to a purchase?" and the best way to assess that is to just let advertisers bid against each other in an auction. It also interacts well with general supply management - if users are being annoyed by too many irrelevant ads, you can just restrict slot supply and due to the auction the least relevant ads are automatically pushed out by market economics.

Many of my Google searches aren't high intent, or any purchase intent at all ("how to spell ___" an embarrassing number of times), but it's profitable for Google as a whole to keep those pieces working for me so that the ads do their thing the rest of the time. There's no reason chatbots can't/won't eventually follow similar models. Whether that's enough to be profitable remains to be seen.

> Search is all about information retrieval. AI is all about task accomplishment.

Same outcome, different intermediate steps. I'm usually searching for information so that I can do something, build something, acquire something, achieve something. Sell me a product for the right price that accomplishes my end goal, and I'm a satisfied customer. How many ads for app builders / coding tools have you seen today? :)

If you sell your pickaxes at a loss to gain market share, or pour all of your revenue into rapid pickaxe store expansion, you’re going to be just as broke as prospectors when the boom goes bust.

And as far as selling pickaxes go, GCP is in a far better position to serve the top of market than OpenAI. Some companies will wire together multiple point solutions but large enterprises will want a consolidated complete stack. GCP already offers you compute clusters and BigQuery and all the rest.

People ask for recipes, how to fix things around the house, for trip itinerary ideas, etc.

The obvious way to integrate advertising is for the LLM to have a tool to search an ad database and display the results. So if you do a commercial query the LLM goes off and searches for some relevant ads using everything it knows about you and the conversation, the ad search engine ranks and returns them, the LLM reads the ad copy and then picks a few before embedding them into the HTML with some special React tags. It can give its own opinion to push along people who are overwhelmed by choice. And then when the user clicks an ad the business pays for that click (referral fee).

In my work I see semi-technical people (like basic python ability) wiring together some workflows and doing fairly interesting analytical things that do solve real problems. They are things that could have been done with regular code already but weren't worth the engineering investment.

In the "real world" I see people generating crummy movies and textbooks now. There is a certain type of person it definitely appeals to.

I'm pretty sure they are the pickaxe manufactures in this case.

She is literally married into the HN crowd.

I think the real AI breakthrough is how to monetize the high usage users.

They invested tens of billions of dollars in destroying the competition to be able to recently gain a return on that investment. One could either write off that previous spending or calculate it into the totality of "Uber". I don't know how Silicon Valley economics works but, presumably, a lot of that previous spending is now in the form of debt which must be serviced out of the current profits. Not that I'm stating that taking on debt is wrong or anything.

yeah thanks no, I'm paying for an Uber. For all the complaints over Ubers business practices, it's hard not to forget how bad taxis were. Regulatory capture is a clear failure mode of capitalism and the free market and that is no more shown than by the taxis cab industry.

So maybe if the AI pickaxe sellers get divorced it could lead to poor financial results, but I'm not sure his story is applicable otherwise.

Pretty much any service job, really...

When I had occasion to take a ride share in Phoenix I'd interrogate the driver about how much they were getting paid because I drove cabs for years and knew how much I would have gotten paid for the same trip.

Let's just say they were getting paid significantly less than I used to for the same work. If you calculated in the expenses of maintaining a car vs. leasing a cab I expect the difference is even greater.

There were a few times where I had just enough money to take public transportation down to get a cab and then snag a couple cash calls to be able to put gas in the car and eat. Then I could start working on paying off the lease and go home at the end of the day with some cash in my pocket -- there were times (not counting when the Super Bowl was in town) where I made my rent in a single day.

Should I take this job or that one? Which college should I go to? Should I date this person or that one? Life has some really hard decisions you have to make, and that's just life. There are no wrong answers, but figuring out what to do and ruminating over it is comes to everyone at some point in their lives. You can ask ChatGPT to ask you the right questions you need asked in order to figure out what you really want to do. I don't know how to put a price on that, but that's worth way more than $20/month.

Rent seeking behavior is always the end game.

People used to (and still do) pay fortune tellers to make decisions for them. Doesn’t mean they’re good ones.

But the way it usually works for Silicon Valley companies and other startups is that instead of taking on debt they raise money through selling equity. This is money that doesn't have to be paid back, but it means investors own a large portion of this now-profitable company.

This is obvious when looking at something extremely competitive like securities. Having your broker set you up with the counterparty that bid the most to be put in front of you is obviously not going to get you the best trade. Responding to ads for financial instruments is how you get scammed (e.g. shitcoins and pump-and-dumps).

It's changed his entire view of computing.

This doesn’t strike me as zero relevance.

Its products like this (Wells Fargo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akmga7X9zyg

Great Wells Fargo has an "agent" ... and every one else is talking about how to make their products available for agent based AI.

People don't want 47 different agents to talk to, then want a single end point, they want a "personal assistant" in digital form, a virtual concierge...

And we can't have this, because the open web has been dead for more than a decade.

I consult in this space and 80-90% of what I see is chat bots and RAG.

I don't understand why people believe this: by settling on "unstructured chat" as the API, it means the switching costs are essentially zero. The models may give different results, but as far a plugging a different one in to your app, it's frictionless. I can switch everything to DeepSeek this afternoon.

And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.

It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.

(PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)

agree with you on this.

you already see that playing out with Meta and a LOT of companies in China.

Or is this someone who needs writing but can't do it themselves, and if they didn't have the LLM, they would pay a low-end human writer?

Personal/anecdotal experience, but I've bought more stuff out of instagram ads than google ads ever.

Android and mobile are none of these things.

Well yeah, that's how evolution works: it's an exploration of the search space and only the good stuff survives.

> filled with hallucinations,

The end products can be fully AI-free. In fact, I would expect most ideas that have been floating around to have nothing to do with AI. To be fair, that may change with it being the new hip thing. Even then, there are plenty of implementations that use AI where hallucinations are no problem at all (or even a feature), or where the issues with hallucinations are sufficiently mitigated.

> unable to ever get past the first step.

How so? There are already a bunch of functional things that were in Show HN that were produced with AI assistance. Again, most of the implemented ideas will suck, but some will be awesome and might change the world.

Sure, there are many situations where users make mistakes and do some bad deal. But there always will be, that's not a solvable problem. Is it not the nirvana fallacy to describe the potential for suboptimal outcomes as an issue? Search engines and AI are great tools to help users avoid exactly that outcome.

I suppose you don't know what a PR is because you likely still work in an environment without modern version control, probably just now migrating your rants from vim vs emacs to crapping on vibe coding.

In my experience, AI today is an intelligence multiplier. A lot of folks just need to look back at the zero they keep multiplying and getting zero back to understand why they don't get the hype.

OK? That's fine. I don't think I ever claimed you were a WAU

>And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty.

So you are not a weekly active user then. Maybe not even a monthly active one.

>Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service.

Maybe[1], but you didn't. And I doubt your wife needs a new logo every week so again not a weekly active user.

>ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators)but have no essential need for whatsoever.

You visit the same exact meme generator or finance site every week? If so, then that site is pretty important to you. If not, then again you're not a weekly active user to it.

If you visit a (but not the same) meme generator every week then clearly creating memes is important to you because I've never visited one in my life.

>And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.

There are well funded alternatives to Google Search too but how many use anything else? Rarely does any valuable niche have no competition.

>It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.

Yeah it is and so far, you've not actually said anything to indicate the contrary.

[1]ChatGPT had an image generation update recently that made it capable of doing things other services can't. Good chance you could not in fact do what you did (to the same satisfaction) elsewhere. But that's beside my point.

The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants, and if you look at that market, the best offerings are third-party IDEs that build on top of models they don't own. E.g. Cursor + Gemini 2.5.

On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios.

Remember Google is the same company which could not deliver a simple Chat App.

Open AI has the potential to become a bigger Ad company and make more money.

Take insurance, for example — do you actually enjoy shopping for it?

What if you could just share a few basic details, and an AI agent did all the research for you, then came back with the top 3 insurance plans that fit your needs, complete with the pros and cons?

Why wouldn’t that be a better way to choose?

Yes but that can take decades, till that time Google can keep making money with sub standard products and stop innovating.

So nope, ChatGPT is not in even in the same league as Google. You could argue Meta has similar reach (facebook.com, instagram) but that's just two.

The app has more features than anyone else, often implemented the smoothest/best way. Image Input (which the gemini site still sucks at even though the model itself is very capable), Voice mode (which used to be much worse in gemini until recently), Advanced Voice mode (no-one else has really implemented this yet. Gemini recently enabled native audio-in but not out), Live Video, Image gen, Deep research etc were all things Open AI did first and did well. Video Input is only just starting to roll out to Gemini live but has been a Plus subscription staple for months now.

>The most practical use case for generative AI today is coding assistants

Chatgpt gets 500M+ weekly active users and was the 6th most visited in the world last month. I doubt coding assistance is gpt's most frequent use case. And Google has underperformed in coding until 2.5 pro.

>On the model front, it used to be the case that other companies were playing catch-up with OpenAI. I was one of the people consistently pointing out that "better than GPT o1" on a bunch of benchmarks does not reliably translate to actual improvements when you try to use them. But this is no longer the case, either - Gemini 2.5 is really that good, and Claude is also beating them in some real world scenarios.

No that's still the case. Playing catch-up doesn't mean the competitor never catches up or even briefly supersedes it. It means Open AI will in short order release something that beats everyone else or introduces some new thing that everyone tries to beat. Image Input, 'Omni'- modality, Reasoning etc. All things Open AI brought to the table first. Sure, 2.5-pro is great but it doesn't look like it will beat o3 which looks to be released in a matter of weeks.

Photopea, for example, seems to be successful and ads displayed on the free tier lets me think that they feel at least these users are willing to see ads while they go about their workflow.

yet they can never seem to explain why those succesful people all seem to have similar traits in terms of work ethic and intelligence

you'd think there would be a bunch of lazy slackers making it big in tech but alas

same audience who think Jobs is a grifter and Woz is the true reason for Apple's success

What I need is something to troll through the garbage Amazon listings and offer me the product that actually has the specs that I searched for and is offered by a seller with more than 50 total sales. Maybe an AI agent can do that for me?

[1]: https://www.policygenius.com/

It’s a bit like how DEI was the big thing for a couple years, and now everyone is abandoning it.

Do corporate leaders just constantly chase hype?

Add is a verb meaning to combine 2 things together.

I think companies implement DEI initiatives for different reasons than hype though. Many are now abandoning DEI ostensibly out of fear due to the change in U.S. regime.

A lack of workable business model is probably good for Google (bad for the rest of the world) since it means AI has not done anything economically useful and Google's Search product remains a huge cash cow.

You didnt get the point, instead of going to such website for solving the insurance problem, going to 10 other websites for solving 10 other problems, just let one AI agent do it for you.

It's funny how the vibe of HN along with real world 's political spectrum have shifted together.

We can now discuss Ads on HN while still being number 1 and number 2 post. Extremism still exists, but it is retreating.

I personally know an engineering manager who would scoff at MLK Day, but in 2020 starting screaming about how it wasn’t enough and we needed Juneteenth too.

AI isn’t hype at Nvidia, and DEI isn’t hype at Patagonia.

But tech industry-wide, they’re both hype.

I'll be happy with a personal assistant with access to my paid APIs.

Well I mean if you say it, then of course it MUST be true I’m sure.

Neither of those things are true where I live.

> at least here in Spain

Well…Spain is Spain. Not the rest of the world.

what I'm not so sure about is how much that generalises beyond the HN/tech-workers bubble (I don't think "people" in OP's comment is as broad and numerous as they think it is).

One time I told one of my Dutch friends I often take a cab to work here in Spain when I'm running late. He thought i was being pompous and showy. But here it's super normal.

Uber (Or cabify which is a local clone and much more popular) here on the other hand is terrible if you don't book it in advance. When I'm standing here on the street it takes 7-10 minutes for them to arrive while I see several taxis passing every minute. So there is just no point. Probably a factor of being unpopular too so the density is low.

I also prefer my money to end up with local people instead of a huge American corporation.

In a world of zero switching costs, there is no such thing as first mover advantage

Especially when several companies like (A121 Labs and Cohere) appeared well before Anthropic and aren't anywhere close to Open AI

as an Asian, it amazes me how far Americans and Europeans will go to avoid a hard days work

The climate has changed. Some of that is economic at big tech companies. But it’s also a ramping down of a variety of things most employers probably didn’t support but kept their mouths shut about.

I think Uber in the US is a very different beast. But also because the outlook on life is so different there. I recently agreed with an American visitor that we'd go somewhere and we agreed to go by public transport. When I got there he wanted to get an Uber :') Here in Europe public transport is a very different thing. In many cases the metro is even faster than getting a taxi.

PS: What bothers me the most about Uber and Cabify is that they "estimate" that it will take 2 minutes to get a car to you, and then when I try and book one I get a driver that's 10 minutes away :( :( Then I cancel the trip and the drivers are pissed off. I had one time where I got the same driver I cancelled on earlier and he complained a lot even though I cancelled within 10 seconds when I saw how far away he was.

Anyway I have very few good experiences with these services, I only use them to go to the airport now when I can book it in advance. And never Uber anymore, only Cabify.

For me, and a majority where I live, this is applicable to taxis. Which were known for being dirty, late, expensive, prone to attempting to rip you off, if they turned up at all, etc.

Outside of surge charging (in which they are more expensive) ubers are by and large either cheaper, or the same price. With the difference being that 99% of the time if you request one, its going to turn up. And when it does turn up, you know what your going to pay, not have them take a wrong turn at some point and by "mistake" and decide to charge you double. Or tell you they take card and then start making claims about how suddenly they can't etc.

Sounds like europe gets the bad end of the stick in this regard.

However in Romania on the other hand many taxi drivers are scammers or even criminals (one of my colleagues was robbed by one of them). It's also because the maximum taxi fares are too low to actually make a wage so I can kinda understand so I always tip really well (like double the fare or more which is still nothing). Though if they try to scam me they don't get a cent of course.

I keep reminding him that it can hallucinate...