Comment by bronlund
15 hours ago
They should just give up at this point, it's just embarrassing to watch.
As PrimeTime said; these are the guys that invented the 'T' in 'GPT', that deployed their first TPU in 2015, that is using billions on AI - and they are beaten by 300 people startup named Moonshot AI even. People are going to write books about this complete fumble.
Strongly disagree with that take. Kimi K3 is a distilled model. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, or to disparage the team behind it, but distilling and building on that is significantly easier and cheaper than building from the ground up.
And Gemini is kinda good enough at everything. Never the top, but it is decent at every task, and it is much faster than Kimi K3 and significantly cheaper. Kimi is very focussed on coding, Gemini isn't.
More importantly, it natively understands text, audio and video. If/when we are able to make the jump to robotics, this becomes essential. As you say, Google has a lot of deep background and deep pockets, they are able to make more of a long play. No idea if it will pay off, but it is way to early in the game to count them out.
You have some good points there.
Distillation does not make a model. There is so much more that goes into creating LLM Ai, traces from better models alone is insufficient. You need a good pre training run as foundation, a great RL reward function to make the other model's traces useful, and serious engineering chops to manage training runs at that scale. (non-exhaustive list)
None of the startups are profitable. What exactly are they getting beaten at?
My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.
Intelligence.
They have "unlimited" resources and has researched AI since the very beginning - PageRank is a form of AI even. And still, Gemini is behind Claude, GPT, Grok, Muse, GLM, Kimi and is maybe on par with DeepSeek?
As I said, it is embarrassing.
If RSI is achievable, it will leapfrog everything produced so far and so it will make sense to focus on RSI instead of incremental improvements for your top model. Startups need investment and need to show progress. Google does not at the moment need to take lead in the current race.
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Their Flash model is going head to head with the SOTA models. It's completely the opposite of embarrassing.
> Grok
No one is behind grok. It literally has "be funny and irreverent when appropriate" (whatever the hell "when appropriate" means for them) baked into the system prompt. To me, that is all you need to know about how useful it is.
No serious people use it and the numbers bear it out tbh. It has the smallest market share of the "big companies" for a reason - and it's by a very, very large margin (~2.5% last I checked).
Have you used Google search at all on the past few months? Every single search brings up a live chat prompt. They're serving fast AI to billions of users at huge scale everyday
And they're making money doing it.
Perhaps they don't have the best coding model right now (although 3.8 flash is arguably SOTA at some benchmarks), but is that the be-all and end-all of AI? Only coding matters?
> brings up a live chat prompt. They're serving fast AI to billions of users
Just because it shows up does not mean it is being used. I only click the feedback button to tell them how much I dislike their Ai summaries. They have removed that feedback button this week. Can't take the heat I suppose.
I've also never know anyone who finds them trustworthy nor heard someone say anything besides how they also dislike them
A lot of my friends will say "Well, the google AI says this" so they're using it, and maybe they don't trust the answers, but I think the thing is that they're using it.
"It's AI but anyway", seems to be a way to use it, but not promote that your using it?
There's a significant amount of people in my friend group who don't like "AI", but everyone seems to use what google's doing, even if they add the "the AI said this" disclaimer to it.
Even the people who don't like 'AI', will still reference the LLM output, which seems like they're just slow to accept it, I guess.
It’s so annoying that everyone just points to the Artificial Analysis index (or even worse, Epoch AI, where part of the score is how good the AI is at chess) as a proxy for “how good” the model is.
At least AA have a dedicated speech model index, of which this is now the leader: https://artificialanalysis.ai/speech-to-speech
Most people talking about Gemini quality do so by experience.
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Its 200-300 TPS. GPT is at 50-60. And its like 5% worse? Yeah that is a good tradeoff.
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Their live models have been and continue to be at the frontier. I like them a lot!
Yeah, you should definitely sell all Google stock you may hold, immediately, to me, before it's too late. I'm just a sucker, I'm happy to buy from you.
Uh, what? This is SOTA for a live model. What are you talking about?
It makes Meta look not that bad.
And yet they might become one of the winners "in the end" because they have near infinite money and others have not. I will drink tea and watch the show.
> they have near infinite money and others have not
Given the very high margins on inference, once volume is large enough the other can also start printing enough money.