Google is winning on every AI front

It is sort of funny to me how the sentiment about whoever seems to be leading in ML changes so frequently (in particular here on HN.) A couple months ago it felt like people were sure that Google completely fucked it up for themselves (especially due to the fact that they invented the transformer but didn't productize it themselves at first.)

For a short while, Claude was the best thing since sliced cheese, then Deepseek was the shit, and now seemingly OpenAI really falls out of favor. It kinda feels to me like people cast their judgement too early (perhaps again in this case.) I guess these are the hypecycles...

Google is killing it right now, I agree. But the world might appear completely different in three months.

You could also be seeing waves of various astroturf campaigns.

Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN.

What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?

There doesn't need to be a team. Individuals can act according to personal incentives and still create coordinated behavior. Look at flocks of birds. Each bird acts for itself; together they move in unison.