Comment by echelon
18 hours ago
There's the solution right there. Google is still growing its AI "sea legs". They've turned the ship around on a dime and things are still a little janky. Truly a "startup mode" pivot.
While we're on this subject of "Google has been stomping around like Godzilla", this is a nice place to state that I think the tide of AI is turning and the new battle lines are starting to appear. Google looks like it's going to lay waste to OpenAI and Anthropic and claim most of the market for itself. These companies do not have the cash flow and will have to train and build their asses off to keep up with where Google already is.
gpt-image-1 is 1/1000th of Nano Banana Pro and takes 80 seconds to generate outputs.
Two years ago Google looked weak. Now I really want to move a lot of my investments over to Google stock.
How are we feeling about Google putting everyone out of work and owning the future? It's starting to feel that way to me.
(FWIW, I really don't like how much power this one company has and how much of a monopoly it already was and is becoming.)
Valid questions, but I'd say that it's hard to know what the future holds when we get models that push the state of the art every few months. Claude sonnet 3.7 was released in February of this year. At the rate of change we're going, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with Sonnet 5 by March 2026.
As others have noted, Google's got a ways to go in making it easier to actually use their models, and though their recent releases have been impressive, it's not clear to me that the AI product category will remain free from the bad, old fiefdom culture that has doomed so many of their products over the last decade.
We can't help but overreact to every new adjustment on the leader boards. I don't think we're quite used to products in other industries gaining and losing advantage so quickly.
This is also my take on the market, although I also thought it looked like they were going to win 2 years ago too.
> How are we feeling about Google putting everyone out of work and owning the future? It's starting to feel that way to me.
Not great, but if one company or nation is going to come out on top in AI then every other realistic alternative at the moment is worse than Google.
OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, and X all have worse track records on ethics. Similarly for Russia, China, or the OPEC nations. Several of the European democracies would be reasonable stewards, but realistically they didn't have the capital to become dominant in AI by 2025 even if they had started immediately.
>OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta, and X all have worse track records on ethics.
I'd argue Google is evil as OpenAI (at least lately), but I otherwise generally agree with your sentiment.
If Google does lay waste to its competitors, then I hope said competitors open source their frontier models before completely sinking.