The chips of course push them over the top. I don't know how much Deep Research is costing them but it's by far the best experience with AI I've had so far with a generous 20/day rate limit. At this point I must be using up at least 5-10 compute hours a day. Until about a week ago I had almost completely written off Google.
* For what it's worth, I don't know. IANAL
Ecclesiastes 12:12 ;)
Google's scanning project basically stalled after the legal battle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170719004247/https://www.theat...
Every video is machine transcribed and stored and then for larger videos the author will often transcribed them themselves.
This is something they have already, it doesn't need any more "work" to get it vs a competitor.
Meta and Google are the long term players to watch as Meta also has similar access (Insta, FB, WhatsApp).
And Atlassian has all the project data.
And as far as gmail goes, I periodically try to ask it to unsubscribe from everything marketing related, and not from my own company, but it's not even close to being there. I think there will continue to be a gap in the market for more aggressive email integration with AI, given how useless email has become. I know A16Z has invested in a startup working on this. I doubt Gmail will integrate as deep as is possible, so the opportunity will remain.
You don't need a 50 function swiss army knife when your pocket can just generate the exact tool you need.
They really, truly need to fix this integration. Gemini in Google Docs is barely acceptable, it doesn't work at all (for me) in Gmail, and I've not yet had it do anything other than error in Google Sheets.
They can have the most advanced infrastructure in the world, but it doesn’t mean much if Google continues its infamous floundering approach to product. But hey, 2.5 pro with Cline is pretty nice.
I love Googles product dysfunction sometimes :/
But the battle is between Altman and Hassabis.
I recall some advice on investment from Buffett regarding how he invests in the management team.
I think Pichai has been an exceptional revenue maximizer but he lacks vision. I think he is probably capable of squeezing tremendous revenue out of AI once it has been achieved.
I like Hassabis in a "good vibe" way when I hear him speak. He reminds me of engineers that I have worked with personally and have gained my respect. He feels less like a product focused leader and more of a research focused leader (AlphaZero/AlphaFold) which I think will be critical to continue the advances necessary to push the envelope. I like his focus on games and his background in RL.
Google's war chest of Ad money gives Hassabis the flexibility to invest in non-revenue generating directions in a way that Altman is unlikely to be able to do. Altman made a decision to pivot the company towards product which led to the exodus of early research talent.
Who was going to fund the research though?
I should also give Altman a bit more due in that I find his description of a world augmented by powerful AI to be more inspiring than any similar vision I've heard from Pichai.
But I'm not trying to guess their intentions, I am just stating the situation as I see it. And that situation is one where whatever forces have caused it, OpenAI is clearly investing very heavily in product (e.g. windsurf acquisition, even suggesting building a social network). And that shift in focus seems highly correlated with a loss of significant research talent (as well as a healthy dose of boardroom drama).
> Google the names
Was that a wink about the submission (a milestone from Google)? Read Zoogeny's delightful reply and see whether it can compare a search engine result (not to mention that I asked for Zoogeny's insight, not for trivia). And as a listener to Buffet and Munger, I can surely say that they rarely indulge in tautologies.
Some people see tech like they see sports teams and they vote for their tribe without considering any other reason. I'm not shy stating my opinion even when it may invite these kinds of responses.
I do think it is important for people to "do their own research" and not take one man's opinion as fact. I recommend people watch a few videos of Hassabis, there are many, and judge his character and intelligence for themselves. They may find they don't vibe with him and genuinely prefer Altman.
The first is CEO pay rates. Another is the highest paid public employees (which tend to be coaches at state schools). This is evidence that the market highly values managers.
Another is systemic failures within enterprises. When Boeing had a few very public plane crashes, a certain narrative suggested that the transition from highly capable engineer managers to financial focus managers contributed to the problem. A similar narrative has been used to explain the decline of Intel.
Consider the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. Or the turn around at Microsoft with Nadella.
All of these are complex cases that don't submit to an easy analysis. Success and failure are definitely multi-factor and rarely can be traced to a single definitive cause.
Perhaps another way to look at it would be: what percentage of the success of highly complex organizations can be attributed to management? To what degree can poor management decisions contribute to the failure of an otherwise capable organization?
How much you choose to weight those factors is entirely up to you.
edit: I was also thinking about the way we think about the advantage of exceptional generals/admirals in military analysis. Or the effect a president can have on the direction of a country.
OpenAI has already succeeded.
If it ends up being a $100B company instead of a $10T company, that is success. By a very large margin.
It's hard to imagine a world in which OpenAI just goes bankrupt and ends up being worth nothing.
They can end being the Altavista of this era.
You can't mean the bottom-of-the-barrel dross that people post on Reddit, so not sure what data you are referring to? Click-stream?
Of course, that's also a big reason why Google search results suggest putting glue on pizza.
They could buy Google+ code from Google and resurrect it with OpenAI branding. Alternately they could partner with Bluesky
Actually, some of the people polled recalled the Google AI efforts by their expert system recommending glue on pizza and smoking in pregnancy. It's a big joke.
Biggest issue we have when using notebooklm is a lack of ambition when it comes to the questions we're asking. And the pro version supports up to 300 documements.
Hell, we uploaded the entire Euro Cyber Resilience Act and asked the same questions we were going to ask our big name legal firm, and it nailed every one.
But you actually make a fair point, which I'm seeing too and I find quite exciting. And it's that even among my early adopter and technology minded friends, adoption of the most powerful AI tools is very low. e.g. many of them don't even know that notebookLM exists. My interpretation on this is that it's VERY early days, which is suuuuuper exciting for us builders and innovators here on HN.
Their new models excel at many things. Image editing, parsing PDFs, and coding are what I use it for. It's significantly cheaper than the closest competing models (Gemini 2.5 pro, and flash experimental with image generation).
Highly recommend testing against openai and anthropic models - you'll likely be pleasantly surprised.
The first is Google's vertically integrated chip pipeline and deep supply chain and operational knowledge when it comes to creating AI chips and putting them into production. They have a massive cost advantage at every step. This translates into more free services, cheaper paid services, more capabilities due to more affordable compute, and far more growth.
Second problem is data starvation and the unfair advantage that social media has when it comes to a source of continually refreshed knowledge. Now that the foundational model providers have churned through the common crawl and are competing to consume things like video and whatever is left, new data is becoming increasingly valuable as a differentiator, and more importantly, as a provider of sustained value for years to come.
SamA has signaled both of these problems when he made noises about building a fab a while back and is more recently making noises about launching a social media platform off OpenAI. The smart money among his investors know these issues to be fundamental in deciding if OAI will succeed or not, and are asking the hard questions.
If the only answer for both is "we'll build it from scratch", OpenAI is in very big trouble. And it seems that that is the best answer that SamA can come up with. I continue to believe that OpenAI will be the Netscape of the AI revolution.
The win is Google's for the taking, if they can get out of their own way.