I was skeptical at first, but I think Google’s catch up game with OpenAI has been going pretty well so far. Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash models are really nice. Deep research feature is done really well. Context window is still the best in the industry. Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc.

They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life.

Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.

Technologically they may have caught up, but market wise they may have lost forever. In my country (and I think in many others), ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.

This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.

But Google is the household name. All they have to do is bring Gemini inside Google before people stop using traditional search.

Chatbots are not social media platforms. Also the vast majority of expected revenue from this industry is not from casual paying users, it's from other companies who will optimize for performance and price.

Isn’t this more like Teams vs Slack or Zoom?

Consumer brand recognition isn’t the issue. Bundling with Workspace might be.

2.0 Flash seems to work well/fine for some use cases but for other produces hilariously bad results compared to ChatGPT and Claude. As a result I tend to avoid prototyping with it and instead consider it something I might implement at scale for speed and cost reasons if it turns out to work for a given use case.

We need more ai overviews because look at all the likes! ...... (word to the wise it's a simple link traffic siphon on advertisers)

Kent W. said to hurry up, hmm I could only wonder why, what could he possibly see on the legal horizon.

Google screwed up so massively in this whole AI race. It blows my mind that they had the technology available internally years before OpenAI released ChatGPT but didn't do anything with it and in fact lost top talent due to their hesitation to release it (as the article states about Noam Shazeer). And now, for basically every non-techie person, ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the same way that Google was synonymous with search. What a disaster. Quite frankly shocked that their executive team is still in place.

To be honest there were several chatbots before ChatGPT, eg Galactica by Microsoft, and it had not seem so promising. Similarly, ChatGPT was originally released as more or less a fun little demo, and the absolute success was surprise for OpenAI as well .

They probably managed to hit certain UX threshold where people start to find the chatting valuable/interesting, but this was really an accidental discovery.

Maybe this “screw up” delayed LLMs by years and gave them more years to milk the cow.

Deepseek showed us that the easiest way to catch up with OpenAI is.. hiring programmers who know what they are doing.

Right, because Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and X all don't have anyone who knows what they are doing - and also none of them had the bright idea to hire anyone who knows what they are doing either...

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's not that reductive.