Question: how does it feel inside google in terms of losing their lunch to OpenAi? Losing here is very loose, I don’t think OpenAI won yet but seems to have made a leap ahead of google in terms of marker share and we know google was sitting on tons of breakthroughs and research. Any panicking or internal discontent at google’s product policies? No need to answer if you’re uncomforable that your employer may hold you responsible for what you write here.
This is an unusual opinion in industry, although common with consumers.
Currently, Google has the most cost effective model (Flash 2) for tons of corporate work (OCR, classifiers, etc).
They just announced likely the most capable model currently in the market with Gemini 2.5.
Their small open source models (Gemma 3) are very good.
It is true that they've struggled to execute on product, but the actual technology is very good and getting substantial adoption in industry. Personally I've moved quite a few workloads to Google from OpenAI and Anthropic.
My main complaint is that they often release impressive models, but gimp them in experimental mode for too long, without fully releasing them (2.5 is currently in this category).
From my perspective (talking very generally about the mood and environment here), it’s important to remember that Google is a very, very big company with many products and activities outside of AI.
As far as I can see, there is a mix of frustration at the slowness of launching, optimism/excitement that there are some really awesome things cooking, and indifference from a lot of people who think AI/LLMs as a product category are quite overhyped.
Idk, I used to want to work for Google but I'm not so sure anymore. They built an awesome landscaper next to my office in London.
But the UX and general functionality of their apps and services has been in steep decline for a long time now, imo. There are thousands of examples of the most basic and obvious mistakes and completely uninspired, sloppy software and service design.
> obvious mistakes and completely uninspired, sloppy software and service design.
That's something you can work on to improve.
A few years back I wanted to work for FAANG big company. Now I don't after working for smaller but with 'big' management. There are rats races, dirty tricks. And engineers don't have much control on what and how they are doing. Many things decided by incompetent managers. Architect position is actually a manager's title, no brain or skills required.
Today I rather go to a small company or startup where the results are visible and appreciated.
Well exactly. Sure I could try hard to pass some Google interview with silly exercises and be lucky and get selected most likely by some interviewer who isn't one of the devs but works in HR.
But why? When they have so much management now and have just gotten so big that it'd probably be impossible to get anything done.
Well, it seems like they use an intense scoring system that reeks of management involvement and inconsistency (per interviewer).
I mean I'm for sure making some presumptions and plenty of assumptions; we literally evolved to do this. Otherwise we'd shake the cold paw of every shadow in the dark.
> Google is a very, very big company with many products and activities outside of AI.
Profit is what matters though, not number of products. The consumer perception is that Search rakes in the largest profits, so if they lose that, it doesn't matter what else is there. Thoughts?
Nobody serious believes this. OpenAI may be eating up consumer mindshare - but Google are providing some of the most capable, best, cheapest and fastest models for dev integration.
As the hype dies down, Goliath shakes off the competition. AI models are now a game of inches and those inches cost billions every inch, but it matters in the long run.
They just released a SOTA model (Gemini 2.5 Pro) that beats all models on most benchmarks, it's a great comeback from the model side but IMO they are less strong on the product side, they pioneered the sticky ecosystem of web app products model, though kinda like the Microsoft Office suite that (originally) had to be downloaded, ironically building on XML HTTP request support the IE5 introduced for Outlook.
