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> How did Google blow their AI lead?

What lead? Maybe because I'm mostly using AI/LLMs for development, but neither Google, Anthropic, xAI or anyone else has ever been in the lead, OpenAI always had the best models in my mind, as long as you're comparing the "top" plans between all of them.

Besides, they all seem to shoot themselves in the foot, OpenAI included, seems the only thing that differs is how often and how big the damage is.

[MisterKent]

Wow. Didn't realize OAI was astroturfing hacker news now...

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All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.

Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".

[WarmWash]

I don't think Google does, they are way too massive, disorganized, and "by the book" for something like that. Also AI isn't life or death for them.

Besides they own 15% of Anthropic and cutting massive compute deals with them. On top of that they also have compute deals with OAI.

Google is positioning itself to win no matter what happens, Gemini is almost looking like a side project next to their cloud business.

[svachalek]

Wait so you're countering an accusation of astroturfing with an actual confession? That's new.

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Lacking reading comprehension, you can imagine me doing, confessing and saying all sorts of things :)

[Imustaskforhelp]

Wait what? Why don't I get emails like this too? /s

(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)

[embedding-shape]

Nah, maybe one day I do a collective public post of it, for now I just try to get their company and/or name first, then forward it to HN themselves so they can ban them and keep an eye out for them.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Could you give us how many companies are trying to do this and also if any of the companies are YC companies themselves or not, I imagine not but still.

and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)

and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!

I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?

I would be curious to know that too!

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So far just 3-4 at this point, some I guess figure out what I try to do when I ask for their company name and HN username, none of them been YC companies so far AFAIK. I don't know why they send specifically me emails, I guess either some automated system or they themselves see I spend way too much time on HN already, maybe just based on the amount of comments, I do have quite a bit of free-time :)

[jsnell]

The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to make these accusations.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data.

[infecto]

I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

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> It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).

[kirtivr]

I was a regular Claude Code user but Codex eventually won me over due to a few factors:

1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.

2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.

3. Really strong image generation capabilities.

That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.

[shwaj]

I’ve heard about that “open secret” and I don’t understand.

What’s the incentive for Anthropic to pump up the token usage on their top end plan? Is it to move Pro users up to Max? That’s the only plausible idea I can think of.

[infecto]

Claude Code has only been around for a year and change. At least for our internal tests 2 years ago Anthropic models started to at least become semi-useful but they still were not great, they struggled with structured output. Prior to that their alignment strategy made the products highly unhelpful in an API context. The past 6 months to a year is where Anthropic has really shined, they have model parity and sometimes taking the lead and more importantly their product offering on the consumer side has crushed it.

[embedding-shape]

> Claude Code has only been around for a year and change.

We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.

[disgruntledphd2]

I feel like aider was the first TUI for agentic stuff I came across here, and that was well before Claude code.

[arkadiytehgraet]

There are plenty of shills for all of the major labs on this website. Usually checking a history of comments of a suspicious user reveals that quite fast.

[jazzypants]

OpenAI literally wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Google's work in the space.

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Who wouldn't exists if someone else didn't invent something else, which wouldn't exists...

We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, I don't think one party is more responsible than someone else, unless you're specifically involved with the specific technology, then you can attribute it to them.

So yes, Google's researchers might have invented the Transformer, but OpenAI researchers invented GPT. Does it matter we credit "LLMs" more to one than the other? I don't think so, especially in this context it's highly irrelevant. Google didn't have the "LLM lead" before LLMs even existed...

[HDThoreaun]

Google invented transformers. They had LLMs before openAI existed.

[embedding-shape]

Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Also, if we're going backwards, who invented neural networks, does that mean that person also then "had LLMs before OpenAI existed"?

[tveita]

> who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Google?

> who invented neural networks

People like Geoffrey Hinton, who was notably at Google Brain from 2013 to 2023?

The people who say Google was ahead were paying attention long before you were.

[saberience]

Google didn’t invent neural networks, neural networks existed before Google was founded.

[voidhorse]

This. Neural Nets have existed conceptually since the 1950s. They weren't realized materially and practically until later, but it's astonishing how ignorant people are of the history of AI.

[kllrnohj]

> Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Google did, as they already said.

OpenAI was better at marketing and a lot more willing to cannibalize the search market as a newcomer. So Google blew their lead in research by not recognizing the product value quickly enough, or failing to win an internal political war on it anyway

[erikerikson]

The tone on this could be improved. They literally answered your question "What lead?" and you seem dismissive.

[embedding-shape]

Yeah, you're right, maybe needlessly harsh, sorry for that. I guess I'm tired of the same argument that Google somehow had a lead in LLM development because Transformer comes from researchers who worked at Google, yet somehow what comes before/after Transformer doesn't count, coming from Google's researchers (BERT) or others (GPT), or going even earlier so, hence the whole "we stand on the shoulders of giants".

[HDThoreaun]

We can go round and round about all this but I think it's pretty clear that google did at one point have a large AI lead in the lead up to covid. They had models that far surpassed the competition from 2018-2022. But they were facing an innovators dilemma, didnt want to cannibalize their search revenue so they sat on LLMs which ended up creating openAI and anthropic.