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Google is winning on every AI front

(www.thealgorithmicbridge.com)
993 points vinhnx | 8 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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codelord ◴[] No.43661966[source]
As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. The whole time that I was at OpenAI until now GOOG has been the only individual stock that I've been holding. Despite the threat to their search business I think they'll bounce back because they have a lot of cards to play. OpenAI is an annoyance for Google, because they are willing to burn money to get users. Google can't as easily burn money, since they already have billions of users, but also they are a public company and have to answer to investors. But I doubt if OpenAI investors would sign up to give more money to be burned in a year. Google just needs to ease off on the red tape and make their innovations available to users as fast as they can. (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)
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1. og_kalu ◴[] No.43667759[source]
Open AI don't always have the best models (especially for programming) but they've consistently had the best product/user experience. And even in the model front, other companies seem to play catchup more than anything most of the time.
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2. int_19h ◴[] No.43668677[source]
The best user experience for what?

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.

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3. og_kalu ◴[] No.43668833[source]
>The best user experience for what?

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.

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4. bobxmax ◴[] No.43668884[source]
so please enlighten us why OpenAI is doing so much better than Anthropic
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5. int_19h ◴[] No.43670459{3}[source]
At this point it's pretty much entirely the first mover advantage.
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6. int_19h ◴[] No.43670463{3}[source]
How many of those weekly active users are paying users, though?
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7. bobxmax ◴[] No.43671887{4}[source]
I don't think you understand what first mover advantage is

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

8. og_kalu ◴[] No.43673579{4}[source]
Seems to be 10 to 20 million