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Comment by solfox | Hacker News Reader

Calling it now: Google will ultimately lose this consumer battle. How? By doing what they've always done: building better tech. Gemini will be faster/better and it will have more features; but they will continue to fail to productize or explain it to consumers.

Google's offerings here are still a huge mess. OpenAI is crushing them right now at building products that people want, and making them accessible.

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Have you been paying attention at all these past few weeks? Google is crushing it with releases. Gemini 2.0 is great, Veo2 is crushing Sora, live video conversation from aistudio... 12 days of OpenAI turned out to be 12 days of Google.

My respectful counterpoint is that most people aren't paying attention to tech releases at all, ever, unless they go viral like ChatGPT did.

I have very nontechnical coworkers get excited about cool new things ChatGPT can do, but I'm not certain any of them even know we _have_ Gemini in our Google Workspace.

This would hardly be the first time Google has produced innovative technology which eventually fizzles because it never captured much mindshare outside of the tech news circles

Google's recent launches have been technically impressive (especially Veo 2), but given the company's past track record on creating new products, I'm not very bullish that they can turn those launches into products with the same excitement and sense of direction as OpenAI at least appears to have. Google has the benefit of having platforms that span billions of devices and people, but with the looming threat of antitrust regulation, I'm not so sure they'll have the benefit of the last thing for long. Granted, I doubt that 1-800-ChatGPT will be a significant source of users for the product, but it does signal some of the creativity from the company that seems to be escaping Google regularly (see: NotebookLM's leads leaving to form their own startup).

> Google is crushing it with releases. Gemini 2.0 is great, […]

Isn't that exactly (part of) what they were saying in the comment you replied to?

> […] building better tech. Gemini will be faster/better and it will have more features

you're correct, GP is missing the point

Google search also was good at the beginning. Now it occasionally gives results that contain none of the keywords and have nothing to do with what I searched for.

> Calling it now

At first I thought you meant that literally. ;)

Most people still don't know what OpenAI is

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