[terryf]

Is it possible that google will build the next great AI? Of course.

But right now they really really seem to be failing at it. Maybe the core tech in gemini is great. But it's nowhere.

Just as an anecdote, I tried to actually pay google for an AI product they claimed to have launched - the image generation, Imagen 2. And apparently, I can't. Even after tens of e-mails and a call with an account manager, the response is "uh, follow us on twitter and explain why you are good at building AI tools". Jeez, buying a service is not supposed to be like a job interview. It's supposed to be like buying the same service from OpenAI - enter credit card details and go.

So, the issue with google is that they took the wrong approach - build it in-house at a big company. What a big company has, are lawyers. Very good ones. The job of lawyers is to avoid risk. And they are great at it. However, building these sort of cutting edge services requires taking risk. And you can't really do that at a large company.

This is why Microsoft is winning - they realized that investing into a startup that has no lawyers and is willing to take risk is the right path to quickly getting to the result. This is also why dalle3 and chatgpt4 are available for everyone today. And Geimini ultra isn't.

[bambax]

Does anyone remember Google Video? It was a horrible experience. The upload process was a pain, and I think some approval was needed at some point, or you had to be sponsored by someone already on the service.

Then Google bought Youtube.

In the AI space it's unclear what/who they could buy -- OpenAI being obviously out of reach -- but it's possible they could find a good match.

[ddol]

> In the AI space it's unclear what/who they could buy

They bought the most promising AI startup in the world for $650m and failed to integrate it or make use of it until ChatGPT was released.

That was DeepMind, nine years ago.

[ksjskskskkk]

everyone in this thread agrees google problem is all management and product and that buying a company is just a palliative way of acquihiring a still ungoogled management team. which don't last long, obviously.

you're all just telling each other exactly this in hundreds of different ways.

[brap]

>In the AI space it's unclear what/who they could buy

I think Google invested like $2B+ in Anthropic

[infecto]

Anthropic feels very much like google though. It took me 6 months to get access, once I finally did it was only a testing type account that then requires me to talk to sales before they take my credit card.

On the other hand OpenAI has been quick to take money. Mistral too, got an account immediately and able to add billing details and they don’t even have a usage page so I have no idea how much I have burned through.

[fatherzine]

mistral

[ithkuil]

I just tried their API mistral-medium model for some coding prompts that failed miserably on anything other than gpt-4 and it handled them well. Just anecdotal, didn't so any proper benchmarking.

IIUC their open Mixtral 8x7 maps to the mistral-small model (which while impressive is still behind gpt-4).

I guess they want to keep their best model behind the API for now.

Anyway, I second that Mistral does stand a good chance to compete with openai

[qp11]

Microsoft isn't any better. Competition in this space is dead. Who ever is capable of posing a threat to both these obese rentier parasites will be targeted and obliterated given the cash mountain ranges at their disposal. Quality is not possible when competition is an illusion.

[ben_w]

The only way competition in this space can be described as "dead" with all the free-license models bouncing about is that there's only one model (or company with models) that's actually worth paying for.

That would be the one that MS invested in.

Well, for now at least. At some point one of those free models will best it.

[netcan]

> there's only one model (or company with models) that's actually worth paying for.

Yes. Perhaps. That said "the model currently worth paying for" isn't the only possible business model or approach to "winning AI." It was a pretty incidental business model that unexpectedly got big.

I'm not convinced this is the final state.

AI models need users. There's having the most users. But, there's also having the right users. This isn't a linear race. Image generation. Language generation. Those work now. They'll get better... but it's still not clear what better enables. Best way to find out is by finding out what current models enable.

IMO, there's a lot more room here for bravery and creativity than beating OpenAI at whatever the race appear to be at this particular moment. The budget necessary to build applications is nothing compared to the scale of strategic investment being made.

Make the LLM chat/email client. Make the LLM project management software. CRM. tech support. All the cheap, obvious stuff.

Once upon a time, Google had a let 1000 flowers bloom approach. They did succeed in launching lots of pretty good products. They did not succeed in turning that tactical success into a strategic business success. That said, the tactic worked.

Why take the risk/effort/etc of winning the race to cloud services? Google have already lost one cloud race to google and amazon. Just build the apps yourselves. Find a framework. Do it. Don't want to run them forever? Then sell them off. Shut them down and leave the space open for startups.

Why futz around?

[mycall]

> AI models need users

Not when AI agents start doing their own thing, synthesizing their own data to go beyond what humans have conversed. The main thing keeping this from happening is data corruption. I don't know how that will be solved.

[paganel]

The only real competition seems to be Meta, which is another behemoth.

I agree, there are some minions whose valuations have skyrocketed because they happen to also try and compete in this very bubble-y market, but other than that I haven't heard any "those guys' LLM product is great!" comments related to anything other than whatever OpenAI or Meta have made public.

[netcan]

>right now they really really seem to be failing at it. Maybe the core tech in gemini is great. But it's nowhere

I think it's still an open field. Ability to make AIs into products and businesses... that's a lot of the game.

I agree about housing it all inside Google. Not necessarily because lawyers, or even because risk. There are advantages to both in house and outhouse approaches but... Google just isn't that good an in-house.

We do not know, at this point, what are the big businesses opportunities presented by recent AI advances. There's a lot of focus on near-future breakthroughs. IMO, many of the breakthrough products may already be possible to build now.

There's also an innovator's dilemma with the Google search mothership. One obvious area for LLM's is search replacement. "How does adwords benefit?" is not necessarily a question you want to have to answer, if your goal is search-replacement.

[wslh]

Everyone is in AI now and we are just finishing 2023. The next innovation(s) (dilemma(s)) could happen everywhere. Rephrasing Andreessen's quote: "AI is eating the world". This does not mean that we are close (or not) to AGI, it means that capital is flowing towards AI and AI has REAL applications. Just see what happened in Web3 with not so real applications (but uses). In the cybersecurity space I now see cybersecurity + AI, in the Web3 space I now see AI + Web3. It perfectly could be that Google is the next Altavista for AI.

[hattmall]

What, in your opinion / experience happened with web3?

[wslh]

Web3 saw an incredible gold rush in multiple cycles and gigant amounts of money flew to the sector. The Web3 also experienced a gold rush because many incumbents went "magically" rich.

[broast]

They're behind in selling for now but ahead in research - who is to say that selling access to your AI is really where value and growth will be in the future?

[danielovichdk]

I would love to know if this really is Conways Law exposing poor reaction and innovation reactions.

[ekianjo]

> This is why Microsoft is winning

Spoken like someone who has never used bing chat. Its so terrible its funny.

[Rastonbury]

MS is winning clearly, if the Azure $1bn revenue beat is mainly from AI/Copilot they are on track to recoup their OpenAI investment in 10 quarters, likely less.

Google has the ability to build something better than OpenAI but that's not even a certainty

[fakedang]

Huh, not sure. I've found Bing chat to be actually useful compared to Google search. For some recent projects, Bing introduced me to a few very useful packages that I wouldn't have known even existed, if I had stuck to Google search. I've only seen Bing fail for my use cases when I drafted queries that I wanted it to fail: for example, asking some esoteric question on how to beat the Burmese 1st mission of Age of Empires in under 10 minutes. In most cases, Bing is actually a good enough replacement for a market research bullshitter, for cases where I'm looking for non-exact data.

[mathattack]

They just don’t understand selling to businesses in a way that Microsoft or Oracle does.