Google’s surface area to apply AI is larger than any other company’s. And they have arguably the best multimodal model and indisputably the best flash model?
If the “moat” is not AI technology itself but merely sufficient other lines of business to deploy it well, then that’s further evidence that venture investments in AI startups will yield very poor returns.
It's funny that a decade ago the exit strategy of many of these startups would have been to get acquired by MSFT / META / GOOG. Now, the regulators have made a lot of these acquisitions effectively impossible for antitrust reasons.
Is it better for society for promising startups to die on the open market, or get acquired by a monopoly? The third option -- taking down the established players -- appears increasingly unlikely.
> Now, the regulators have made a lot of these acquisitions effectively impossible for antitrust reasons.
Is there any evidence that this is the case ? For very big merger (like nvdia and Arm tried) sure, but I can't think of a single time regulator stop a big player from buying a start up.
There's no evidence that any of those startups are better for society, in fact most of them have directly led to worse economic inequality (uber, airbnb) and exacerbating climate change (LLM insanity).
If anything the current system is beyond redemption and should probably be nationalized for the betterment of society. Government investment in technology brought us the transistor and internet, the two things that enabled any of this to exist and it was massively subsidized for the betterment of the public.
I think this is a problem for Google. Most users aren't going to do that unless they're told it's possible. 99% of users are working to a mental model of AI that they learned when they first encountered ChatGPT - the idea that AI is a separate app, that they can talk to and prompt to get outputs, and that's it. They're probably starting to learn that they can select models, and use different modes, but the idea of connecting to other apps isn't something they've grokked yet (and they won't until it's very obvious).
What people see as the featureset of AI is what OpenAI is delivering, not Google. Google are going to struggle to leverage their position as custodians of everyone's data if they can't get users to break out of that way of thinking. And honestly, right now, Google are delivering lots of disparate AI interfaces (Gemini, Opal, Nano Banana, etc) which isn't really teaching users that it's all just facets of the same system.
I've use the Gemini app on my phone a fair bit recently and I've not seen it. That said, I don't think I've seen any popups either. Maybe I've blocked them...
That's exactly what the parent was saying. The market expected and priced in an antitrust decision but the one we got was very light, hence the stock going up sharply.
In the current era of already light antitrust actions, coming in even lighter than expectations is a sign that the regulators are not doing their jobs.
Same here. I started an in-office job recently as the company’s highest ranking engineer and my productivity has plummeted vs WFH.
I found myself having to allocate mental bandwidth to my environment to allow for the possibility of being interrupted by others, so I ended up both less productive and more tired.
What you see as an interruption is somebody else clearing their path. It could be that your personal productivity drop is resulting in a productivity gain for the group.
Try “@gmail” in Gemini
Google’s surface area to apply AI is larger than any other company’s. And they have arguably the best multimodal model and indisputably the best flash model?