Comment by conception
9 hours ago
I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good.
Now their product strategy however…
They can be doing fine at AI models but not so well with AI revenue.
Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.
> but not so well with AI revenue
Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).
That may be valid, but it's an entirely separate point that doesn't touch on how Google is doing with AI revenue and how THAT affects the shitty direction they're taking with ads.
Love this. Can we also have an environmental cost calculator somehow?
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I do wonder if the more they goose their ad business the faster it eventually falls. I know I am more and more reluctant to view many normal Web page ads at all and usually immediately click away the second a site gets annoying
I block ads because I don’t want my family exposed to scams, clickbait, and offensive content. If ads weren’t so annoying, I wouldn’t put too much effort into blocking them.
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The other companies are stealing people's work for headlines and sabotaging each other. Google is offering a whole bunch of Gemini APIs that do real shit, with the same terms and contracts and the existing products for most of them.
A large chunk of the population don't use Google to search anymore. They go straight for the GenAIs. That's got to be scaring a lot of managerial folks at Google.
The Gen AIs are doing the search for people. So hopefully this forces google to switch their business model from manipulative ads against human users to just charging for API access for Gen AI models.
Slide 65 of this (very nice) set of slides [1] broke down search vs genAI use to get information. "Mostly genAI was not breaking 25% in all age brackets... Curious to see how that will evolve
[1] https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/wisereads/art...
truly Google's on fault. Their results have been shit for at least 2 years now
I think Google's big bet (and Microsoft's before them) is in centralization of AI services, hosted using their model, and that AI at the edge will always be a bit player.
But what I see and hear from technical consumers, businesses, and govts is that they would prefer their data stay local, and like the idea of edge compute being used for AI.
Claude/OpenAI's direction with their Apps enabling deeper integration is a good direction, but the trust with data is still a growing concern. OpenAI's math actions on the NS problem degrades their reputation a lot.
It's not about releasing models. Consumer market share of chatgpt is still >60%, if not more. Their search engine was hit and as soon as product search starts declining on Google this will be a code red. They're in an extreme nicle and dime mode.
Google’s cash cow is ads. I think the writing on the wall is ChatGPT and other AI search engines will dominate. It is to be seen how Google will respond. But in the end, their monopoly on web search is coming to an end.
open router isn't the whole market, but open router shows google is struggling for market share in the limited window we can see
Openrouter isn't even 00.01% of tokens used on a daily basis. China alone uses 500 Trillion tokens a day and they're only 1/8th of the world. Much of the world has a google account, use your brain.
How are they going to generate revenue if their old model is Ads on search and the new model is yet to show how revenue can be generated. ChatGPT (on free) is showing ads now but they are not targeted and I highly doubt they are worth anything.
very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.
So just ignore the reality, that Gemini (and yes even 3.8 Flash) is worst of all major LLMs across most metrics? But that's fine, because reasons?
Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.