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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI is like the super luxurious yacht all pretty and shiny, while Google's AI department is the humongous nuclear submarine at least 5 times bigger than the yacht with a relatively cool conning tower, but not that spectacular to look at.

Like the tanker which is still steering to fully align with the course people expect it to be, which they don't recognize that it will soon be there and be capable of rolling over everything which comes in its way.

If OpenAi claims they're close to having AGI, Google most likely already has it and is doing its shenanigans with the US government under the radar. While Microsoft are playing the cool guys and Amazon is still trying to get their act together.

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All it took was a good old competition that has potential to steal user base from core Google search product. Nice to be back to competition era of web tech.

Or, using Occams Razor; Sundar is a shit CEO and is playing catchup with a company largely fueled by innovations created at Google but never brought to market because it would eat into ads revenue.

That, or they have a secret super human intelligence under wraps at the pentagon.

That's the conventional take, but (as far as I can tell), the TPU program was also started under Sundar, which would have been a bold investment at the time, and looks like absolute genius in retrospect.

OpenAI might be well-capitalized, but they're (1) bleeding money, (2) no clear path to profitability, and (3) competing head-to-head with a behemoth who can profitably provide a similar offering at 10-20x cheaper (literally).

Google might be slow out the blocks, but it's not like they've been sitting on their hands for the past decade.

No they’ve been acquiring layers upon layers of middle management for a decade.

That’s the core issue, and they’ve also pissed off a non-zero percentage of top talent by ditching what still existed of Google culture and going full “Corporate Megacorp” a few years ago.

Google is having to pay a ton to retain the talent they have left and it’s often not enough.

That might be true, but I'm not sure it will matter that much. They've put out two very compelling* products in the last month (Flash 2 & Veo), and hints that another Gemini Pro model is in the pipeline. When it comes to AI, they're in a very good position, no matter what middle-management shenanigans are going on behind the scenes. Their core ad business is also so absurdly profitable that overpaying for talent won't even register as pocket lint.

Google's biggest threat isn't OpenAI. It's the FTC (which I admit is a very real danger).

* from a developer/platform perspective, at least. The "consumer" facing side of things (e.g. the AI Studio UI) is still pretty awful.

google definitely does not have AGI hhaaha

Yeah pretty bad example from parent but the point stands I think... I mostly just assume that for everything ChatGPT hypes/teases Google probably has something equivalent internally that they just aren't showing off to the public.

I know that Google's internal ChatGPT alternative was significally worse than ChatGPT(confirmed both in news and by Googlers) around a year back. So you might say they might overtake OpenAI because of more resources, but they aren't significantly ahead of OpenAI.

ex-googler confirms :/

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