They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life.
Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.
This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.
At the end of the day the money to be made from AI won't be $20/mo personal chatbot subscriptions, but corporate and app-integrated (e.g. Cursor) use where the usage is potentially far higher. Companies will chose their faceless AI provider based on cost and capability.
Lock-in and network effects with social networks are very strong. Facebook, Twitter, and eBay only have to be good-enough.
Lock-in and network effects with current AI tools is almost zero. People will readily switch to Gemini once they realize it can do their work better.
ChatGPT and Grok are edgier and they are just burning cash - any attention is good.
I wouldn’t underestimate them. Microsoft’s shitshow with Azure (they have like 9 different Azures) makes delivery difficult (some Azure clouds delayed AI tech for 6-9 months) when they are relying on constrained product from Nvidia. They also have some level of exposure to the OpenAI circus and its included Musk v. Sam Altman drama.
Google has a much better supply chain and return on asset story, which is a big deal if you’re selling shovels.
Google+ was particularly awful. They had to break the established search behavior of using + and - to indicate required and excluded terms. Now we have quotes for required and - for excluded? It should have been Google Social.
The thing that is Google One would have been better often with the Google Plus name.
Don't even get me started on Google Chat/Messenger....
I don't think ChatGPT has any moat here. No one does actually.
Consumer brand recognition isn’t the issue. Bundling with Workspace might be.
Just yesterday I polled my household, the 8 year old knew about ChatGPT and "China's R1". The teenager knew ChatGPT and Google's was a bit hard to remember but eventually they did remember "Gemini", however they didn't know about R1. Both kids consider Siri and Alexa in the same category for Apple and Amazon, respectively. They don't know what Meta/Facebook have at all.
Just the fact that it can read my emails and set reminders, while being broadly the same quality as ChatGPT, was enough for me to switch. I no longer pay for the pro, and hence can't use the integration features, but I just stuck to Gemini and almost never use ChatGPT anymore.
ChatGPT is the most spineless chatbot out there. It stands for nothing, has no confidence in any claims it makes. It will apologize and backtrack on a whim. But with Claude and Grok, you can't just tell it it is wrong and get it to apologize. You actually have to have a point, the chatbot will defend its perspective if challenged without basis.
Apple painted itself into a corner. They have the best SoC story in the industry and are years ahead, but skimped on memory to save a few pennies and really nerfed their most important product. They’re in a pickle as a result and won’t give up the control they would need to for a third party on-device AI to be effective.
So much for edge computing on Apple devices. Their marketing around how good their hardware is for AI is total BS.
That's kinda crazy that people absolutely stopped to care that all their emails and so forth will be used as training data for the next models
The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience.
My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.
It's pretty popular!
That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.
They have the data and the money, all they needed was to not self sabotage.
People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers.
Meanwhile, their SOTA models have been strong, and Gemini 2.5 looks like it might actually have taken the AI throne yesterday.[1]
I'm curious how valid this statement is. Anecdotally, I really like those results. For whatever reason, I don't directly interact with Gemini, I just type questions into google and if an AI response comes up I definitely give it a first look before clicking through links. If for some reason no AI response comes up for a question, I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and I usually get the answer I'm looking for.
As I typed that^ I realized something funny. I used to make fun of my parents for typing certain questions into google e.g. "What's the best pizza place in New York?". I would tell them to type "Best pizza place New York", because Google seemed to work better that way. But then that sort of stuff was hijacked by the SEO industry. So the meme of typing "Best Pizza Place New York Reddit" started so we could get actual answers from real people. With the rise of LLMs in search I'm personally back to typing "What's the best pizza place in New York?" right into Google/ChatGPT and it's been pretty successful so far. I'm curious what the next thing will be.
It was uncanny and creepy, pretended to be a conscious being, frequently lied, and led directly to that guy who claimed it had personhood... I can completely understand why Google chose to keep a lid on this kind of thing, hoping to be able to clean it up and produce something that could be reliably used for a product instead of a novelty. That's back when Google was still sort-of pretending to have ethics (though they didn't)
OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.
- Google AI Studio - Gemini app - Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users - Vertex AI - NotebookLM - many more I forgot…
vs
ChatGPT.com
This is Google’s main problem. Where several groups are trying to build the same product and compete on user attention and distract focus.
Search Google. Search. Show search results on the right columns with ads on the top as it is today, and the Gemini thingy on the left. It’s that simple.
Maybe I'll ask ChatGPT to explain...
Also: Generally: Do consider investing in companies that run services where you feel compelled to subscribe (like Youtube Premium and previously Netflix).
Instead of searching (google) , let me ask AI( chatgpts) and google is on the losing side of this perception war. This cannot be solved that quickly .
Especially with what google has done in the AI space(to a layman) it was Bard(anyone remembers) and then it was something and then its Gemini now.
what is the differentiator now? is google offering more free stuff than its peers? a layman doesnt care about whether it succeeds in solving a math problem or not! As long as people think these two are separate things(ai v search) , google is gonna have a problem
I don't know if that's a problem. If I was Google I'd like to keep search mostly as is (perhaps throw in some AI summary, but mostly as is) so I can keep putting links to ads. I still use Google; if I want to buy new running shoes, book a flight etc I don't start talking to ChatGPT about it, I just Google; I'm sure there are a couple billion more people like me who'll keep doing it. It's more than just habit, A.I is perceived as not up to date so I see absolutely no reason to go to an LLM for shoes and flights. But I have many other questions (mostly programming, stock analysis etc) I go to the A.I for. I think for Google, Search will still make a lot of money because the buying shoes thing is worth more for advertisers than asking some vague question about my codebase.
Not now necessarily, but if Google gets any traction in this, I can see Google inserting subtle ads in the AI results, which would be a net negative.
Why they didn't do it, even a resemblance of - when they could.. no idea. Instead, meddling with mailboxes and the like.
If I were them, I’d wait until OpenAI is forced to at least slow their burn and then jump in, and undercut everyone.
Seems like the real money is made on the API side anyways, so having a large consumer presence isn’t super valuable yet.
It's a shame because the 1-2M context window is really amazing.
Every so often I ask it for info about a previous employer of mine, and it randomly makes up hilarious "facts", like we made ultra low budget porn and horror movies, that we were a music recording studio, or that we were responsible for "the last of us" video game.
With voice mode OpenAI hears its own voice as interruptions, then misrecognizes what it itself is saying to be some topic that is off limits. It then gets into a loop of “I can’t talk about that… would you like to talk about something else?” And this is with completely innocuous topics. Absolutely infuriating. No idea how they are possibly dog fooding this and not seeing the problem.
The insane level of overcranking the PC knobs led me to end my subscription and add more Google to my portfolio. I’m sure I’m not alone. That’s not to say Google won’t have the same issues, but there’s always Grok.
Kent W. said to hurry up, hmm I could only wonder why, what could he possibly see on the legal horizon.
The frisson of hype and juvenile behavior seems pretty linked to the optimism that drives this sector. Some idiots and hucksters inevitably come along for the ride, and some of them get lucky.
They probably managed to hit certain UX threshold where people start to find the chatting valuable/interesting, but this was really an accidental discovery.
That could have been webx or meet or whatever.
https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's not that reductive.
Pichai & co put a borderline-communist quota system and it became a popularity contest to get a tiny slice extra of compute. And then OpenAI ate their lunch (Google tech).
I'm mostly convinced that the only reason that it blew up was that it was the first Chinese model that was even in the same ballpark as the American frontier models, which drove a lot of reporting, which caused a lot of normies that hadn't tried any AI model since CHatGPT very first blew up to try it and they were (understandably) blown away by the progress relative to what they remembered from 2 years previously.
However, there also seems to have been some genuine panic at OpenAI, maybe elsewhere too, over DeepSeek R1 since not only did they come close to matching the performance of o1, but they also described exactly how they did it (apparently very similar to what OpenAI had done, judging from the reaction), and therefore killed any competitive lead that OpenAI - who had been working on it for a long time - may have thought they had.
Gemini is still garbage compared to o3-mini-high when it comes to code. GCP is still a horrible platform compared to AWS. Why would anyone pick Google models to do anything? They refusal rate is obscene.
Google lived too long with no strategy, just search and random noise. They don't seem to be able to pivot. Until they do something company-wide that includes how promotions work and turning over management I can't see them as being anything other than a 3rd rate player in AI.
Search will die to AI in time. And they've got nothing to entice people to use Google AI over anything else.
Frankly, if there is a macro-level strategy, and I assume their mostly is, I think Google has been doing a great job executing since the launch of ChatGPT. They even commercialized their Diabetic Retinopathy imaging model, which was based on research for a paper published in 2016!
https://research.google/pubs/development-and-validation-of-a...
The Julius Caesar personality which had sushi as its favorite dish (and claimed to have travelled to Japan after his assassination, somehow) was my favorite.
She was totally emotionally unhinged until Microsoft put hard filters on her output. Lucky for OpenAI it happened in MS's court despite it being chatGPT under the hood.
This is lack of interest will kill Google in the end, IMO.
OpenAI didn't care about ethics.
Name another CEO that can take a company from 74b to 350b in revenue. He has always grown Google. Not a single year of decreased growth.
He made Google the only AI company in the world with a full AI stack from data, science, hardware, and software.
This is paying off massively. Look at how faster Gemini models are compared to any other model. It 3x faster.
Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model on the market right now in terms of cost, performance, and intelligence.
Everyone is fighting over NVIDA chips, not Google.
The problem is, ditching their B2C product-focused roots in favor of playing Microsoft slowly ruined their flagship Search (also the open web) and any internal culture of stewarding great products. And Google doesn't have the same level of lock-in Microsoft has.
Microsoft doesn't have to worry about end-users jumping ship because corporate worker drones can't provision their own IT.
Google searchers on the other hand, can just start opening ChatGPT instead of Google search more and more and slowly kill Google's flagship product simply out of boredom.
Youtube being forgotten about by the deathstar and being allowed to flourish was simply a happy accident. But that too will inevitably get gobbled up after the pressure of a few rough quarters comes down on the shoulders of whatever CEO comes next.
In my experience, of the major players (AMZN, GOOG, and MSFT), Google's AI integrations feel the most polished and useful for day-to-day use.
OAI's GPT-4 (back in the day), Deep Research, and 4o Image gen recently on the other hand? Totally. When it's something actually incredibly useful and there's zero alternatives out there.
Google has no such products right now, if their Gemini Advanced trial shows anything it's that their touted 1M context doesn't actually work any better than the average undertrained 1M RoPE tune. I mean it doesn't even make sense for them conceptually to sell services, they're an ad company.
|CEO who isn't Sundar.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-paid-2-7-billion-12305...
They lagged in AI, but the new Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible. They built an incredible tool in NotebookLM but failed to market it
But yes, absolutely need new leadership. Nest/Pixel/etc are such a wasted opportunity tight now. The software layer is so disconnected between each component. As a dumb example im pretty sure you still can’t talk out of a hub max or tv remote into a nest cam, but can through the home app. The “it works in one place, but not another” prevents so much usability discovery for normal people.
Google did seem asleep at the wheel, and then when they did come out with some products they were so incredibly afraid of Gizmodo soliciting an image or text output that was socially unacceptable, paralyzing them with fear (and leading to some incredible stupidity). But their pace now is rapid.
Nor do any of the top 10 AI companies have any kind of moat. The fact that Elon Musk can found a competitor out of spite and have a plausible competitor in 6 months with a multi-billion dollar value actually just dilutes the perceived value any of the market leaders. OpenAI is still riding the high of being first and having the ChatGPT brand be so strong.
Google doesn't need to win on all the benchmarks, they just need to embed themselves in enough enterprises and they have a huge leg up in that regard.
Google is the only "classic" org in the SOTA model space, and the only one in the whole race who doesn't have to kiss the ground Jensen Huang walks on. They are big enough to be able to "pay you back" if they colossally fuck up, and the chances of them going belly up are pretty slim. They also have the cheapest models to boot.
From a business standpoint, Google is the safest play on many levels, even if their models are just good enough.
I'm looking at you, Google. I'm still bitter about Google Reader.
Quite a bias displaying username you have though.
Sadly, Pichai is firing Core teams in USA and moving them to India.
What are you comparing it to, and what do you consider "edge computing"? iPhone vs Samsung benchmarks show a massive difference. Macbook shows great performance, when compared to other notebooks with battery lives longer than 30 minutes. If you're comparing to a $1k gaming GPU, with an order of magnitude more power usage, then sure, things fall apart. The definition of "edge computing" being "can run > 4gb models locally" is pretty new. Who do you see as doing better?
3-4 years they’ll have the killer app for Office, then they rocket ship.
Granted, Google's AI strategy is still muddled, e.g. Gemini is maybe replacing Google Assistant in some scenarios, but I'm able to express my meaning clearly with Gemini in the preceding sentence, as opposed to "Google AI is replacing Google Assistant - which is Google's AI assistant"
1. Gemma, Flash, anything Google Deepmind develops would be Google AI products that won't fall under the "Google AI" branding
Same reason that it's Alexa and not Amazon Assistant, Siri and not Apple Assistant, etc.
Google Pay/Android Pay/Google Wallet/Android Wallet/Pay Pay/Yap Yap should be the focus of our ire.
Chatbots seem more useful for stuff like generating filler and changing tone.
I've been a ChatGPT subscriber since the beginning. I've been a subscriber even though Sonnet 3.5 and others have surpassed GPT4o. I'm not sure why I don't switch.
I think it's the combination of better UX (Claude has poor UX apps), cool interesting new features, and having (limited) access to the top models.
Subscription prices won't go down. If anything, they seem to be going up.
I don't think having the smartest model or the model that is benching the best is going to knock ChatGPT out at this point. It's the whole thing. The function calling, the tool use, the ecosystem, etc.
But there are going to be huge network effects in terms of your personal data, which includes communications with friends.
If you use Gmail/Google Calendar/Docs/Drive, and ChatGPT can't tell you anything, but Gemini helps you with all the data in your life... that's a gigantic network effect.
Network effects aren't just about friends. They're about file formats, productivity suites, and ultimately compatibility.
Network effect is a specific term about the increasing utility of a service as more people use compatible services, it's explicitly about users other than yourself.
You're describing something more like having an integrated ecosystem a la Apple's walled garden where things work great with other Apple products (notification hand off etc).
None of my data is in google's cloud (for obvious reasons) except gmail, which contains far less of my life than you might think. Most of my friends outside of work use icloud. google will need to figure out how to access other silos if they want their chatbot to move forward.
Google has no access to what music I like, what movies I like, what books I read, who I am friends with and why, what values I have and why I pursue them. That's a rough place to start as this is the center of my personality.
Gmail is google's ace in the hole. If they can't figure out how to exploit that gemini will just be the android version of siri (which is already the case, right?)
I would argue it's pretty well-known outside of tech circles.
They have WAUs in the 300m ballpark — average people already are going out of their way to open a standalone AI.
If you paid the slightest attention to social media, news, TikTok or just talked to regular people, you would know ChatGPT is a much much bigger brand name than Gemini. Uber driver told me how he used ChatGPT to help the other day job he had.
In Canada, I have had countless conversations with people outside of tech circles (mostly in their 30s) where THEY naturally bring up ChatGPT. It's wild how popular it got very quickly for all kind of use cases.
The thing that confuses me, though, is the fact that they use the Gemini branding for both the dev-oriented products you can license via Google Cloud, as well as the consumer facing AI interfaces, and then also for the ties into Workspace products. ... but then there are standalone AI products (or is a feature?) like Notebook LM that aren't associated with Gemini.
But also I have this view of Google as largely apathetic to its users and the things it creates, but maybe more to the point the things it created and then destroyed.
I may have misunderstood but I still feel like I have a valid take.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
Familiarity and trust are really important. Commonly called branding.
If you’re doing serious work in a fast mover space and are refusing to understand a major player, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Google has a bunch of amazing engineers and finance people but apparently they just can't productize anything.
Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40273440
Self-quoting here:
That's in contrast to what OpenAI's David Luan "Why Google couldn’t make GPT-3" (https://www.latent.space/p/adept):
And it turned out the whole time that they just couldn't get critical mass.
So during my year where I led the Google LM effort and I was one of the
brain leads, you know, it became really clear why. At the time, there was a
thing called the Brain Credit Marketplace. Everyone's assigned a credit. So
if you have a credit, you get to buy end chips according to supply and
demand. So if you want to go do a giant job, you had to convince like 19 or
20 of your colleagues not to do work. And if that's how it works, it's
really hard to get that bottom up critical mass to go scale these things.
And the team at Google were fighting valiantly, but we were able to beat
them simply because we took big swings and we focused.”It will be a question of price and performance. Many many companies aren't on board any A.I flow yet and they will need to choose what to do in the coming years. Those who chose OpenAI might stick regardless of what happens because it may be a hassle to switch but I kinda doubt its that sticky. It's not like moving clouds. And anyway we are really only in the beginning. OpenAI had a very nice head start which is over now, I will be very surprised if their market share doesn't drop significantly in the coming 2-3 years.
I know 4o isn't the smartest but I still had almost no desire to switch to Claude or Google.
Lock-in for search engines should be near zero and yet people won't bother switching to or even trying potentially better options. At the end of the day, people don't leave what they are used to easily.
And even if Bing improved immensely, it just took them way too long. 20 years after Google is just too late to the party. I have really formed a habit quite strong now that I need a compelling reason to switch to Bing/Whatever - and what is that reason again?
This is simply not the case with ChatGPT / Gemini. They are likely equal now, so Google was perhaps 1-2 years late to the party. I think many people haven't formed a strong habit yet of which A.I to use.
Unless a search engine blows google out of the water and gets everyone talking, switching won't even be on the table. Why bother switching for something that is just as good or slightly better if you've been using your current option for a while ? Consumers are much stickier than that.
There’s a reason google pays both Apple and Mozilla billions to be the default on Safari and Firefox. And why MS makes its own browser, as a complement to its search engine
So yeah I wonder if this same dynamic plays out for AI, or if something else happens. I guess Google hopes it will, and that’s one reason they show AI answers about the search results now
What are you talking about? People use Google because they choose it.
They change search from the Bing default as one of the first things they do on a new machine.
For most users there isn't anything better than Google. The niche search needs that might lead a HN user to an alternative engine don't apply.
I'm not sure what's hard to understand with what i'm saying? You think the users changing the default from Bing did so after a lengthy evaluation of quality ? No, they did it because they're used to Google. It's that simple. It's not even about whether google is truly the best or not.
Almost all of Google's revenue has made from decade old products lmfao. He just kept growing them despite many years of people calling Google dead.
The teenagers that made the bulk of its users when it was new are in their late 20s now.
(I have 14 & 16 year olds, neither of whom have social media. It really is unpleasant for them sometimes, trying to keep up with JIT event logistics carried out on Snap.)
Rooting for GPT and hoping for a GPT phone where the lock screen is where you interface with your AI Assistant / Agent. It also interfaces with other AI Agents (businesses, family members, friends, etc) to get things done for you automagically. You can skin your AI Assistant / Agent to look like whoever you want.
Except it's not. Remember how everyone switched to Altavista in 1996 because it was so much better? Remember how Yahoo took over in 1999 because it was so much better? Remember how people switched to Google in 2003 because it was so much better?
History shows people actually do switch search engines when there's a better one. And they do so quickly. I mean, look at how quickly people adopted ChatGPT for some of the things they used to do with Google!
They're not switching away from Google now for regular serach simply because there isn't a better one for most people.
You have zero evidence for claiming it's because they're "used to Google". People didn't stay with Altavista or Yahoo because they were "used to them". So why would that be any different for Google? The answer it that it's not.
And the two competing search engines I mentioned are pretty much all there is. Other names like duckduckgo aren't real search engines, they are just a frontend for another search engine (DDG uses bing). There just isn't many out there willing to front the bill for crawling and indexing the whole web.
People trying to explain away google's success solely from a marketing standpoint are arguing from bad faith.
You already have the answer here you said it 3 times - 'so much better'. People switched because it was 'so much better'. Not on par, not slightly better, just so ahead of the competition, it became a talking point all on its own.
If this mass isn't reached then why would you switch ? How would you even know that Search Engine 26 is quite a bit better for most of your queries ?
Do you genuinely think most people are performing lengthy evaluations before they switch default back to google ? so how do they know Bing or whatever isn't better for them ? The answer is that they don't. And it doesn't matter because unless something blows it out of the water and gets people talking then people will not switch.
Familiarity and Trust is basically branding and that's a huge reason people stay on platforms even when there are no network effects.
> Lock-in for search engines should be near zero and yet people won't bother switching to or even trying potentially better options. At the end of the day, people don't leave what they are used to easily.
Now you're admitting people do switch when something else is much better. And they do so easily. Which was my point.
So I think we agree then?
(And no, people aren't individually trying out 26 search engines. But experts in these things do, and they write articles and post YouTube videos etc. when a new search engine is better, and then people try it out and switch if it really is better. Surely you don't think people should be wasting their time personally comparing every new minor search engine entrant?)
That's just a silly example that doesn't even get into the posting of risky behaviors, using inappropriate language, bullying or whatever else. I do not believe kids grok all this innately and it's important for parents (and teachers and coaches and other adult influences in their lives) to educate them.
We also spot check our kids' phones periodically. Not because we don't trust them, but because it's important to know sometimes whether there are issues afoot that we aren't privy to and could help with. (Disappearing messages is another parental challenge with Snap.). This might sound overbearing and intrusive, but I don't believe it is. Our 16yo has mostly graduated from us feeling a need to check his comms, but we still monitor our 14yo a couple times a week because she's less forthcoming about goings on in her friend group.
Fwiw, it's not like we don't trust our kids to make good decisions themselves. We have added both as authorized users to one of our credit cards, which they have access to via Google Wallet. In all things like this, clear communications and expectation setting between parents & children is the most important, no matter what you decide -- or whether your decisions change over time (or are dependent on the child's own behavior/decisions).
It'd be very limiting not to allow your child to have access to things like Snapchat when all their peers have it and are using it to communicate on a daily basis.
My daughter (8th grade) and her friend group seem to be fine using group chats for comms, and although a lot of her friends do have Instagram & Tiktok (not so much Snap in middle school), she hasn't expressed interest.
That said, we are ok with them to have Instagram accounts specifically for athletics purposes. My son is a 4:20 miler as a sophomore and my daughter plays for a top regional club soccer team. Both have aspirations to compete collegiately. It's valuable these days to cultivate a social presence, just like it can be valuable for working professionals to maintain a LinkedIn profile. But they are clear -- and we are clear with them -- that these social accounts are for "business" purposes, not for socialization, and they understand. We've been beating the drum about the risks of social media for years and they see inappropriate and out of control use by some of their peers, so I generally feel pretty comfortable.
The biggest hazard with Snapchat as the comms channel for high schoolers is that it creates an almost constant string of intrusive push notifications, especially if your network is sufficiently large (like an entire high school class year). For easily distractible kids it can be insufferable.
I'm saying people don't bother trying potentially better options and that they don't easily leave what they are used to. What part of that statement implies they would never leave for a much better product? I'm genuinely baffled.
>But experts in these things do
Yeah.. experts in...search engines? Lol. Those guys aren't making videos for marginally better products and even if they are, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
If it was as simple as better model > gets all the users then Anthropic Usage wouldn't still be dwarfed by GPT.
Network Effects are not the only thing that creates stickiness for customers.
The part where you say "they don't easily leave what they are used to".
They do. They leave, easily, when there's a better product. As I gave examples of. I don't know what further evidence you could want. You're positing some supposed stickiness that simply doesn't exist. You've given no evidence of it.