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Comment by brbrodude | Hacker News Reader

Google is killing it imho, I'm with a thesis they're the lowkey winners of the race and know it and maybe are comfortable not making too much of a fuss about it, seems like they're playing the long game with all the openess advocacy, CNCF work, giving away engineering publicly & etc.

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This tracks with a single anecdote I heard this week from a friend of a friend who says the Gemini team is extremely confident internally about their capabilities and trajectory.

I'm missing something. Openai is solving long open math problems in bulk. Google seems far behind in that regard

Except for that time Google DeepMind scientists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

it was for alphafold 2020. AI landscape changed significantly, that achievement doesn't indicate current leadership.

Yeah, so basically a trivial achievement barely worthy of a footnote.

its not worthy mention in the scope of this discussion because it is outdated to indicate anything, given how rapidly AI evolves.

Yeah, I disagree. If anything their approach has been very heavily focused around applications in science that don't show up as immediately the more consumer facing plays like OpenAI and Anthropic, but they're absolutely still doing world-class research. I don't think that's likely to have changed.

They seem to be going only after flashy math problems that don't have much impact on human life, other than taking the chance for humans to get their names in the hall of fame. To me, it's like showing how good your robots are by having them climb Everest or swim across the Atlantic- amazing feats for sure, but it doesn't really help anyone else. Meanwhile Google and Anthropic are focusing more on solving problems that are a tad slower and more boring if you're not in the space, but they appear to be important building blocks to unlocking much more functionality.

I'm very bullish on Google long-term, but the other frontier labs' approach of (successfully!) solving a raft of prestigious mathematics problems is top-notch strategy IMHO. With almost anything else, they would never break through the current of "Pfft, that's not real intelligence!" goalpost-shifting that's out there. It takes a level of demonstrated ability that cannot be plausibly denied to make that kind of impact. Unfortunately, causing some of the brightest minds in the world to worry about whether their profession has a future may have been necessary to achieve that level (I say nothing about whether this is ethically acceptable).

I would be extremely impressed by a robot that swam the Atlantic or climbed Everest, as would almost any human alive. If you have a robot that can do one of those things, you should absolutely do it as a publicity stunt.

>Openai is solving long open math problems in bulk. Google seems far behind in that regard

This is yet another example of OpenAI getting distracted by shiny things while the rest of the ecosystem focuses on solving real world problem scenarios with market potential.

> distracted by shiny things

That shiny thing persuaded me, a grizzled veteran inclined to doubt every latest fad almost on principle, that AI is already much more powerful than I thought was possible. This is the second time I've experienced such a shift, the first being when I watched an AI spit out a complete working program in response to a paragraph of text just a few short months ago.

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