Comment by Sevii
3 days ago
How did Google blow their AI lead? Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market? Why can't GCP supplant AWS?
Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.
3 days ago
How did Google blow their AI lead? Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market? Why can't GCP supplant AWS?
Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.
No, it's more that Gemini models are simply not very good for coding compared to the top two. Even with Antigravity I use Claude models.
Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini in my limited testing on a small C project single source file project, less than 1000 lines. Setting temperature to 0 gives better results for me. It seems like Gemini ignores the system prompt more and the default reasoning output seems more incoherent.
Their open weight on device models are really impressive. Partly because I think they are the only ones out of all the frontier labs even working on local models.
> Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini
Is there a fine-tuned Gemma coding model? I'd assume that would perform quite well.
Depends on the language. Gemini and Claude are far superior when it comes to C# for instance, compared to anything that OAI offers.
Yaah I feel the same way. Gemini is great at and Django and AI backends, OpenAI better at making something visually pleasing in React and Claude for everything else or across frontend and backend.
At least, that's my heuristic that tends to work for my workflow. I use a combination of Gemini-CLI, Claude Code, and Github Copilot, but across those, the underlying model choice works best according to which part of the applicaiton I am messing with
> How did Google blow their AI lead?
Google is not an "AI company", they just happened to have been 10 steps ahead of everyone but slept on it for too long, now scrambling to catch up..
If by "happened to" you mean pour significant resources for well-over a decade on many different AI research groups then yes, that's accurate. Depending on your definition of AI, it might even be two decades.
In fact, OpenAI was founded largely with the direct goal of preventing Google from being the sole winner in AI...
Alphabet owns DeepMind, who are an AI company. In fact alphabet are lots of things, which is fine.
Yes, you're right, but Google are not an AI company in the same sense Anthropic or OpenAi are and are focused on their products differently and it kind of shows..
> Why can't GCP supplant AWS?
Both GCP and AWS are just relabeled corporate dogfood. It turns out most people have operations that share more traits with retail than with big data.
They had the lead for maybe a week or two. Now, only Apple is further behind.
I'll give them images. Gemini/Nano Banana is notably better at understanding and generating images than OpenAI, imo, and Claude can't even generate.
While I'm at it I've got to give them credit for Gemma as well. Stellar, first class model for the size.
It's a toss-up - NB Pro (and NB2) were in the lead for a long time, but gpt-image-1.5 and then particularly gpt-image-2 pretty much closed the gap on my GenAI Image Showdown benchmark site.
NB still generates better looking images though for the most part - gpt-image series is still affected by the yellow saturation issues though its been heavily mitigated.
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Apple may be behind, and even getting sued for false advertising around AI features, but at least they haven’t spent hundreds of billions of dollars with no indication of how they’ll make their money back.
You’re right, they’re simply playing a different game. That said, Apple sold millions of phones with the promise that 3 months later users would be able to use AI to automate their phones and use Siri similar to how they use ChatGPT. That was summer 2024, and it still hasn’t shipped.
Enough to pretend they were back in the game. All a stock pump.
> Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market?
2nd, 3rd? No way. You either use Claude Code or Codex, the 3rd option usually was Github Copilot. The only time I heard someone used google for code writing it was Linux Torvalds in one of his commits.
Cursor is also definitely more popular than Gemini CLI
Because for awhile they had access to infinite money printing press (search ads), and in the situation like this it’s impossible to focus and seriously compete in other areas.
Essentially all Google efforts were in protection of search ad revenue.
They really just hate doing migration plans, especially longer ones (1+ year). Google seems like an outlier but I don't have real data to prove it.
Where have you been? Google has always been terrible with enterprise products. They are in the low cost, small company part of the analytics/enterprise market. The medium or large sized customers have been burned by them too many times to ever go back at this point. If you use them, you deserve what you get these days. No idea why you think Google was ever some quality provider of enterprise tools. They were declining even before they entered those markets. It isn't 2008 anymore and the Google you remember hasn't existed in well over a decade.
Because their strategy wasn’t to become leaders but to be as good as it takes to erode the lead of others. They have the cash cow of search so they don’t rely on AI to succeed. All they need is to keep publishing new products/services to keep OpenAI from taking the initiative. Between that and the Chinese models all they have to do is wait for the bubble to burst at which point every major AI lab would go bust.
> How did Google blow their AI lead?
What lead? Maybe because I'm mostly using AI/LLMs for development, but neither Google, Anthropic, xAI or anyone else has ever been in the lead, OpenAI always had the best models in my mind, as long as you're comparing the "top" plans between all of them.
Besides, they all seem to shoot themselves in the foot, OpenAI included, seems the only thing that differs is how often and how big the damage is.
Wow. Didn't realize OAI was astroturfing hacker news now...
All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.
Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".
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The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to make these accusations.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
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There are plenty of shills for all of the major labs on this website. Usually checking a history of comments of a suspicious user reveals that quite fast.
OpenAI literally wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Google's work in the space.
Who wouldn't exists if someone else didn't invent something else, which wouldn't exists...
We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, I don't think one party is more responsible than someone else, unless you're specifically involved with the specific technology, then you can attribute it to them.
So yes, Google's researchers might have invented the Transformer, but OpenAI researchers invented GPT. Does it matter we credit "LLMs" more to one than the other? I don't think so, especially in this context it's highly irrelevant. Google didn't have the "LLM lead" before LLMs even existed...
Google invented transformers. They had LLMs before openAI existed.
Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?
Also, if we're going backwards, who invented neural networks, does that mean that person also then "had LLMs before OpenAI existed"?
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