Good comments. As much as I am personally engaged in small LLMs that I can run on my own computer, and integrate into software that I write for myself, I think the future of large scale adoption of AI belongs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple in western countries (and China is doing wonderful things in their markets).

The old Bard/Gemini integration with Gmail, Google Docs, etc. is pretty good. I signed up for a minute for Microsoft’s $20/month AI Office integrations, but cancelled and will try again in 2 months. I am an Apple customer and I expect spectacular things from Apple. I expect Apple, Google, Samsung, etc., to offer fantastic on device AI.

I would like to see a money saving Google bundling family plan. I find Apple’s super bundle family plan a pretty good deal.

small LLM? Small Large Language Model lol

Good joke, thanks, but I will explain anyway: to me 30 billion parameters or smaller is small since I can run it using Ollama on my home computer. I managed a deep learning team at Capital One and our ‘large’ models were less than 20 million parameters. :-)

I suppose we could call them Medium Language Models, but unfortunately that TLA is already taken

A large language model the size of a small language model.

Did you just say Microsoft doesn't have a popular email service?

Yes. No where at the scale and reach of gmail.

We are also talking about consumer emails (not enterprise / corporate)

Outlook(+Hotmail) is the third most popular email service. Just 3x smaller than the Gmail. It's definitely the same kind of scale.

If you count outlook.com and hotmail.com and live.com and all enterprise email you get someone who is probably pretty close or larger than all gmail and gmail-backed domains, especially by volume.

Sounds like this whole thing is an insane 30-year effort by some engineer who couldn't get over the discontinuation of Clippy.

Well for LLM services that do what they currently do google may have an advantage, but all this stuff is still only experimentation with the goal being hopefully much more advanced things, like almost-agi agents. If this happens then no one will care about the way we currently use LLMs anymore.

Strange to say Apple doesn't have productivity tools when Pages, Sheets, and Keynote exist on every Mac. I get the scale arguments, but Handoff and iCloud integration are a sleeper IF you've bought into the ecosystem...

Also hard to overstate just how much more valuable the enterprise market is over the consumer market when comparing Microsoft vs. Google as one-stop anything shops.

I don't see Google as having the obvious dominant position to make the argument it's their race to lose, considering Microsoft has a stake in chatGPT and is actively integrating it into their browser and productivity suites.

Google's competitive advantage is threefold:

1. Real estate - Youtube, Gmail, Maps, Search (for now), etc. 2. Compute - probably still the best in the industry, but with recent Microsoft/meta compute buys it's hard to say for sure. 3. Talent - probably also still the top of the industry. Geoff Hinton and Zoubin Gharamani setting direction and Jeff Dean building it is hard to beat, and the ranks are deep. Yann LeCunn is also brilliant and Andrej Karpathy while less seasoned is one of the top researchers in the field, but overall there's still a bit of a spread from Google's roster, at least when it comes to AI researchers.

If Sundar and the other top brass weren't MBA-bots with no vision, and the famous Google bureaucracy had been reigned in gradually over the last 5 years while promoting a builder-centric culture, this would be in the bag for Google no question. Instead, Satya Nadella played 3D chess while Sundar was looking at a checkers board.

Geoff Hinton quit Google last year, no? But other than that, I guess I agree.

There's a Google bubble on HN, as demonstrated by small-to-medium business facing SaaS launching here offering login with Google and not offering login with Microsoft.

I've talked to many of HN's Google Docs jockey founders that genuinely didn't realize 85% of the US domestic business market is in M365. And they further don't realize that "Continue with Microsoft" is dirt simple and lets companies offer company-managed logins to your SaaS without all the AD/SCIM/SAML nonsense.

"But everyone has Gmail." Well, no, that's not how companies work. And if you think everyone's in Google, that's fine, your login page should look like one of these:

https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth

https://id.atlassian.com/login

You don't even need the "continue with SSO" if you do the Atlassian practice of letting a firm "claim" the domain part of an email and using that to redirect to an SSO flow. And to start, skip SSO, and just use the "Continue with" Oauth2.

Unfortunately, You are in a US bubble.

Globally, Google brand is 10x stronger than Microsoft for Small Businesses

> bubble

It's not a bubble when one specifically names the Venn diagram circle "85% of the US domestic business market". It's naming a market.

> brand is stronger

Presumably the founders' interest is wallet share, not market share.

Are you saying Atlassian is in a US bubble?

But is it really? It seems to me that almost every business is using the Exchange/Outlook combo, not Google products.

Absolutely untrue - Every company and university I've ever worked with or for in Europe used Microsoft 365. Not a single exception.

US + Europe is not the world

In my country we used pirated version of Office products. Does that count?

I have the most respect for this country

East-Asia chiming in here, Microsoft dominates enterprise, Google is a tiny player, single digit percentage market share for any enterprise product. Only on cloud does MS have competition from AWS and local players, everything else is Microsoft. And even in cloud Azure is rapidly eating through AWS marketshare.

Microsoft or pirated Microsoft? I was surprised when <insert major Arab oil company> was using pirated MS Office on all their systems. This was a bit more than ten years ago though, so 365 wasn't a thing. But still....

I love this "X in not the world comment" while others are giving more and more evidence of the opposite. Care to give actual evidence, like, I don't know, this Statisa survey (https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/software/productivity-s...) because you've now looked farcical. Even looking at African results (which is a relative greenfield), it seems that Microsoft has a sight lead here (https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/software/productivity-s...).

Edit: Indonesia is the largest market which has Google beat Microsoft (https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/software/productivity-s...). India (due to Zoho) and China (due to... locally-specific software like Kingsoft (aka WPS) et al.) took a large chunk but on Microsoft-Google tussle MS still beats Google (especially in China where Google doesn't really operate).

In South America, Microsoft brand is waaaaay stronger than Google's for businesses of all sizes. Google is viewed more as a consumer brand.

Icelander here, so all our companies are small. I'd say 85-90% of the market (50+ employees) use M$.

I think Google lost the top researchers when they destroyed the culture. All the competitor companies are mainly led by ex-Google talent, and honestly who in their right mind would take a Google job today over OpenAI, Mistral, or even Meta (where you will be releasing models like Llama for the world to use).

Google killed the culture and is bleeding top talent. They have reduced themselves to digital landlord and sure they can extract rent, but that’s not what attracts people.

that is the media narrative but not at all what happened.

Google's 'don't be evil' grad-school-style culture had fallen apart by the late 2010's because there are tons of people who will just rest and vest.

So strong ML researchers basically were creating massive value but much of it was going to rest&vest salaries. OAI basically came along and said - hey, we don't have rest & vesters, do you want to make $1m+/yr? And most of the top google researchers said yes.

It’s not just media narrative. The culture was eroding for years, as you note, but the dam finally broke and they went full IBM/Kodak. Or in other words, “slowly at first, then all at once”.

Most of the recent media coverage has been resting&vesting employee backlash against the fact that Google is making them do work again. This is a cultural shift, but not away from the culture that made Google great - the original culture was grad-school, not rest and vest, and that died years ago.

Haven't one or two long-time Googlers left or gotten laid off and then written strong criticisms of Google? They don't sound like rest & vest (also should say I don't super agree w/ this term) to me, they sound like people who loved Google, were there a long time, and watched the culture decay.

I’m not super invested in the term “rest&vest” so it is whatever.

But touché - many of the critiques are being written by super talented and impactful people. But I do not think those critiques are necessarily incompatible with what I am saying.

There is a very real and very frustrating (if you work there and want to be impactful) phenomenon in these tech companies of people resting on their laurels.

I've given this a little thought and I definitely agree. But to bracket a little, I've worked in places that were super mission-driven, but also other places with a lot of "clock punchers". I don't judge anyone. I think people's motivations are super personal. Indeed who am I to say clock punching or resting and vesting is unethical or immoral or whatever. You can show me someone who's super dedicated to the cause, working extra hours, mentoring others, spearheading new projects, saving old projects, and I can show you someone who's effectively abandoned their family or mortgaged their future health. You can show me someone collecting a $500k/yr salary at FAANG and doing very little actual work, and I can show you someone with two parents in nursing homes and a partner with MS.

That said, the places I've worked where there was a shared belief in the importance of our work were exhilarating. But, the way they achieved that was essentially by getting rid of bullshit. You know, no one's building their own web framework or writing their own in-house query language (you know, unless you really have to). No one's spending an hour of everyone's time figuring out what to name this class.

I think we haven't figured out how to keep that energy once you build a company big enough that's got something to lose. Suddenly it totally feels worth it to have a meeting about changing the shade of blue in the logo from this to that, because what if revenue declines 0.1% and that's $40m and then layoffs? One of the amazing things about Google was that it somehow seemed to keep that energy well into becoming a tech behemoth; it felt like they defied gravity, like their commitment to not doing evil and open web standards--or maybe we thought the web itself had ended evil corporations like Microsoft forever and Google was its avatar--had allowed it to overcome this corporate version of Fermi's paradox.

Whatever. Maybe this is just a bunch of word salad haha. All I'm saying is it takes two to tango, and just like I'm sure there's a non-zero level of personal culpability responsible for this phenomenon, I'm sure there's a non-zero level of systemic and cultural cause too.

Even if we assume that all of Google is based on ML algorithms (not true, given problems like serving, front end, data collection, ...), ML itself is 90% SWE work.

I don't understand how your comment interacts with mine, but to be clear I was not saying that everyone who isnt in ML is not working or contributing value or anything like that.

Apple is coming. I think the personal agent is where we really want the smarts and if they’re not trying to own that space the CEO should be fired.

Google still has too much internal fragmentation and power groups to offer a single google-subscriber package.

I'd say it is one of the most compelling reasons to kick Sundar out and get in someone who can unify google into one consistent and interoperable ecosystem.

I bet they'll eventually let Kurian try this, and he'll destroy what is remaining of Google in the process.

Google is going to own AI like intel owns graphics cards - i.e. Not really, except at the absolute bottom of the barrel where its baked in advantage lets it offer an unbeatable price/performance proposition for people who only care about "value" and with limited real performance requirements. Google's baked in AIs will be free, and bad. Everyone else is going to let people "plug in" models via standardized APIs, because one size fits all models are just a bad idea, so that's the way google is going to have to go eventually as well, because it's what power users are going to demand.

But power users are a minuscule market, compared to non-power (weak?) users. That's the problem.

If they can get reliably useful AI through voice into maps/navigation, it will be a substantial improvement to the driving experience. It's really frustrating to manage destinations and waypoints while driving. I just checked the process to see if I'm not keeping up and 1. the help docs are out of date. 2. the waypoint search results provides tap points for destinations 10 miles off a route, but shows only 3 pixel red dots for otherwise equally weighted options that are literally on the existing route.

> "Apple is another strong player (but they don't have productivity tools like docs, sheets or youtube)."

Can anyone help me understand how Apple allows Siri to remain so absurdly incompetent? Last night I watched the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David's Siri interactions devolve into an apoplectic rant -- and part of the reason it was so funny is that it's so relatable. I rarely even try Siri anymore, but when I do it's still just abysmal. Are they deliberately handicapping it, to boost the perceived relative benefits of a future successor?

Apple has very little ML talent. They're basically resting on their laurels in the phone market.

That's what I thought too; but all the upthread and peer commments keep asserting Apple is a (real, not just hypothetical/potential/future) player in the space.

Apple went too early to ML for Siri.

Siri was "decently good" when it was basically a voice-activated command line, and you could figure out what you needed to run to get it to do what you wanted.

When they added ML to it, it entirely went to shit, and it has never recovered.

Perhaps Apple will be able to use an LLM to make it finally not shit.

well yeah, people on this website opine a lot about things they know little about. they're starting to make moves, but they don't have a large talent base.

Apple will start using this tech now that it has been commoditized and since it is a big consumer tech company they will put a nice polish. But it's not where big research is being done.

Apple refuses to pay top of the market. They'll have to get really lucky with someone who grows from within.

I agree that Google is well-positioned, but they were also well-positioned to take advantage of these synergies with Google Assistant for many years and I would say that that did not meaningfully materialize in a way that was helpful to me as an Android and Google ecosystem user.

Agreed. I've run the house using google minis and assistant for years now, and asking assistant to do / about stuff has not improved one iota in that time and has introduced several more quirks and bugs.

Makes me wish I had bet on Alexa or Apple instead.

Yeah, for example just yesterday I was driving and an alarm went off for the phone in my pocket. I told Google Assistant to silence the alarm... and it refused, insisting no alarms were active. How the hell can such a simple use-case be failing so badly?

I suppose it doesn't matter, because they're going to disable the functionality entirely, [0] and setting ephemeral alarms is the literally the most common thing I ever ask it to do!

Part of what makes all the assistant-stuff so damn frustrating is that it's an opaque "try something random and hope for the best" box, and whenever it fails there's usually zero information about why and no resolution path. (In a way you can generalize that to a lot of "AI", which is depressing.)

[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/removing-google-assistant-f...

All of the things you write are very good ideas. But at this point, I am quite skeptical of Google leadership to pull off these things.

right, google has maps, they should call the bot Uncle Traveling Matt.

Gemini the chatbot will still need to compete with ChatGPT on raw performance/intelligence/SOTA. Gemini should first be considered the undisputed winner of AI chatbots. Right now ChatGPT 4 is the "winner" in mindshare and I am not sure what Google needs to do except for OpenAI to bungle their own releases.

Gemini integration with Google's apps will compete with Microsoft's app on integration.

And the condition for Gemini to win: Google has to go all-in. and that means creating an AI that will eventually phase out their cash-cow Google Search. Microsoft and OpenAI does not have that kind of internal conflict.

It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on. - We have heard this so many times and it seems like they are always getting behind by the day.

> It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on.

Google took 11 months to catch up with the benefit of knowing the specifics behind how GPT-4 was built. While they have a moat with their products there's no sign that they're ever going to be ahead on the AI capabilities front. I hope to be wrong because we need more competition.

> It really is Google's to lose this AI race from now on.

I was curious and apparently Google/Deepmind had 184 papers at NeurIPS/NIPS 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/185pdax/d_...

For comparison, Stanford has 130, MIT has 130, and Carnegie-Mellon has 112. Microsoft had 68, and Facebook/Meta/FAIR had 56.

This is all well and good, but they've had a year now to respond to GPT-4, and so far they haven't delivered anything close.

After spending 45 minutes with Gemini, I don't see this at all.

The only thing I haven't decided yet with it being Google is if it is shockingly unimpressive or unshockingly unimpressive.

chatGPT4 isn't really impressive to me either at this point. This is basically a joke though.

This is going to be competing against chatGPT5 and chatGPT5 has to deliver a huge upgrade in "intelligence" or we are headed head first into the AI hype brick wall.

I'd very surprised if Apple doesn't have some sort of similar AI running on device within the next two years