Comment by xnx
6 hours ago
While Anthropic and Open AI get 80% of the attention here, it's impressive to see how much Google is doing: near frontier model, fast models, open weight models, image generation, video generation, music generation, robotics, etc.
It's certainly an odd situation where Google is on the forefront of all these emerging technologies while the latest chatbots from OpenAI and Anthropic are getting breathless press releases and wildly hyperbolic coverage ("rogue AIs" "too dangerous, must be banned" etc...)
Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away, meanwhile the hype cycle is propping up its upstart competitors to truly ludicrous valuations.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away
Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be, once again, PM led–lots of constantly-changing brands being merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.
They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do. (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)
Google has never been good at supporting developers, and it absolutely loathes end users. Support for everything that is not their ad ecosystem is miserable. There's never any long term plan, everything gets deprecated and bitrots.
After all this time it's still a pain point just to pay them for a Gemini API key.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away,
Chugging away not releasing products or releasing ones worse than their competition typically. Not sure that’s what a normal competent company should be doing.
> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away
People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling them "competent".
Google wins on infrastructure and creativity (NotebookLM, etc) but entirely lacks product coherence. The ecosystem is a mess, just like Microsoft's offering, and I don't think this is a coincidence but rather a symptom of the type of company in which these two companies have evolved.
Furthermore, Gemini is just all around a less trustworthy and mature model, for many reasons. Very smart but lacking the precision and holistically exhibited in the more recent models from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the flip side, Google's work on Gemma is unmatched.
Yeah, something surprising to me was that I can't even add a custom MCP to gemini. It has tons of missing features.
Everything would be perfect if only you were CEO of both companies!
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Google DeepMind was at the forefront of AI, and they are currently developing new concepts while others chase benchmark percentages.
And protein folding + Nobel Prize
Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375
I won't comment much on this, but I'd say these articles are 2-3 years late and reduces the agency of the people, who in many cases moved to Gemini because they wanted to work on LLMs
And AlphaGo Zero .. probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.
> probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.
Isn't that Checkers right from the dawn of reinforcement learning?
I think that credit might go to IBM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon
Baffles me how this is not that well known
I recommend reading „The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence“ from Sebastian Mallaby. It offers a detailed glimpse into the reasons behind your observation regarding Google/DeepMind and the other frontier labs. best book I read so far on my current vacation.
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The thing with drug discovery is that the bottleneck is not coming up with new molecules, etc. It's the multi-year, extremely expensive clinical trials that often don't even succeed. I doubt it will be a big moneymaker for Anthropic and OpenAI, because the best they can hope for is to sell a software product to pharma companies, but the pharma companies already have lots of scientists with a million promising molecules already in study they will never even make it to clinical trials.
In other words, can AI tech help? Probably, but I doubt it's going to be a major money maker, and it won't make a ton of money overnight. It's not like Claude Code where every programmer can begin using it instantly.
If you had asked HN 3 years ago what would code-generating market would be, they would have used the exact same reasoning and given us the opinion "Why no one will pay for glorified auto-complete"
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OpenAI and Anthropic can't do either of those if they go bankrupt first.
People are going to be surprised by how obscenely profitable both will be in a couple of years
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I love this kind of optimized-for-Xitter drive-by market analysis. Very 2026.
I love how HN ignores past execution results
I like how someone can ignore that DeepMind invented AlphaFold, while OpenAI and Anthropic have zero experience shipping AI protein folding.
This entire industry might be hopelessly tribalist, nowadays.
the word delightful has lost all meaning to me
It's way too early to pick winners. This industry is still in the opening moves.
For example, today, investors are celebrating Microsoft's Azure growth as evidence that its AI investments are paying off: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110965>