Comment by postalcoder
8 hours ago
Google was never really late. Where people perceived Google to have dropped the ball was in its productization of AI. The Google's Bard branding stumble was so (hilariously) bad that it threw a lot of people off the scent.
My hunch is that, aside from "safety" reasons, the Google Books lawsuit left some copyright wounds that Google did not want to reopen.
Google’s productization is still rather poor. If I want to use OpenAI’s models, I go to their website, look up the price and pay it. For Google’s, I need to figure out whether I want AI Studio or Google Cloud Code Assist or AI Ultra, etc, and if this is for commercial use where I need to prevent Google from training on my data, figuring out which options work is extra complicated.
As of a couple weeks ago (the last time I checked) if you are signed in to multiple Google accounts and you cannot accept the non-commercial terms for one of them for AI Studio, the site is horribly broken (the text showing which account they’re asking you to agree to the terms for is blurred, and you can’t switch accounts without agreeing first).
In Google’s very slight defense, Anthropic hasn’t even tried to make a proper sign in system.
Not to mention no macOS app. This is probably unimportant to many in the hn audience, but more broadly it matters for your average knowledge worker.
And a REALLY good macOS app.
Like, kind of unreasonably good. You’d expect some perfunctory Electronic app that just barely wraps the website. But no, you get something that feels incredibly polished…more so than a lot of recent apps from Apple…and has powerful integrations into other apps, including text editors and terminals.
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Oh, I remember the times when I compared Gemini with ChatGPT and Claude. Gemini was so far behind, it was barely usable. And now they are pushing the boundries.
You could argue that chat-tuning of models falls more along the lines of product competence. I don't think there was a doubt about the upper ceiling of what people thought Google could produce.. more "when will they turn on the tap" and "can Pichai be the wartime general to lead them?"
The memory of Microsoft's Tay fiasco was strong around the time the brain team started playing with chatbots.
Google was catastrophically traumatized throughout the org when they had that photos AI mislabel black people as gorillas. They turned the safety and caution knobs up to 12 after that for years, really until OpenAI came along and ate their lunch.
It still haunts them. Even in the brand-new Gemini-based rework of Photos search and image recognition, "gorilla" is a completely blacklisted word.
Bard was horrible compared to the competition of the time.
Gemini 1.0 was strictly worse than GPT-3.5 and was unusable due to "safety" features.
Google followed that up with 1.5 which was still worse than GPT-3.5 and unbelievably far behind GPT-4. At this same time Google had their "black nazi" scandals.
With Gemini 2.0 finally had a model that was at least useful for OCR and with their fash series a model that, while not up to par in capabilities, was sufficiently inexpensive that it found uses.
Only with Gemini-2.5 did Google catch up with SoTA. It was within "spitting distance" of the leading models.
Google did indeed drop the ball, very, very badly.
I suspect that Sergey coming back helped immensely, somehow. I suspect that he was able to tame some of the more dysfunctional elements of Google, at least for a time.
> their fash series
Unfortunate typo.
oh they were so late there were internal leaked ('leaked'?) memos about a couple grad students with $100 budget outdoing their lab a couple years ago. they picked themselves up real nice, but it took a serious reorg.