alt Hacker NewsI 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…
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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.
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.
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
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.
They also invented the whole big data Ai industry, and managed to become a second tier company there. So…