Thread

1. hypnodrones · 1785946808 · focus · HN ↗

   Today I saw one of the most talented engineers I know and worked with leave DeepMind and now I probably know part of the "why". Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.

   1. A_D_E_P_T · 1785947037 · focus · HN ↗

      > Dark clouds hovering over Google's AI game.

      It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier.

      Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche.

      From day one everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market, but it looks more remote than ever. Maybe Hassabis' personal inclination towards AI-for-science, and physics/chemistry in particular -- as opposed to consumer AI and coding AI -- has hurt them commercially.

      1. krapht · 1785947907 · focus · HN ↗

         Is Gemini really doomed? I'm still bullish on Google: 1) they have more free cash flow and capital than God due to the ads business 2) they have data - intent from web searches, youtube videos, google books and music 3) they have dedicated inference hardware

         for all these reasons, is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? some day the pace of improvement will slow, and google will vacuum up the market. they'll be able to compete with open-weight models just on pure cost advantage from their vertical integration

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