The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding. Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress in this space.
There's genuinely impressive progress being made, but there are also a lot of new models coming out promising way more than they can deliver. Even the Google AI announcements, which used to be carefully tailored to keep expectations low and show off their own limitations, now read more like marketing puff pieces.
I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd likes to pretend we're all perfectly discerning arbiters of the tech future with our thumbs on the pulse of the times or whatever, but realistically nobody is going to sift through a mountain of announcements ranging from "states it's revolutionary, is marginal improvement" to "states it's revolutionary, is merely an impressive step" to "states it's revolutionary, is bullshit" without resorting to vibes-based analysis.
It's made all the worse by just being a giant waitlist. Sora is still no where to be seen three months later, GPT-4o's conversational features aren't widely rolled out yet, and Google's AI releases have been waitlist after waitlist after waitlist.
Companies can either get peopled hyped or have never-ending georestricted waitlists, they can't have their cake and eat it too.
We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI) and platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC's founder after all.
So of course you are going to see snarky comments and straight up denial in the competition. We saw that yesterday in the comments with the release of GPT4o in anticipation of Gemini 2.0 (GPT-5 basically) release being announced today at Google I/O
I'm SORA to say Veo looks much more polished without jank.
Big congratulations to Google and their excellent AI team for not editing their AI generated videos like SORA
> We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI)
You have to be pretty deep inside your own little bubble to think that even more than a 0.001% of HN has "stakes in YC" or "secondary shares in OpenAI".
I have 0% stake in any YC, and I'm very vocal in my negativity against any of these "AI" anythings. All of these announcements are only slighty more than a toddler anxious to show the parental units a finger painting looking to hang it on the fridge. Only instead of the fridge, they are a hoping to get funding/investment knowing that their product is not a fully fledged anything. It's comical.
The amount of copium in this response is astounding.
Yes, there is a noticeable negative response from HN towards Google, and there has always been especially when speaking about their weird product management practices and incentives. Google hasn't launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years.
But to suggest there is a Sam Altman / OpenAI bias is delusional. In most posts about them there is at least some kind of skepticism or criticism towards Altman (his participation in Worldcoin and his accelerationist stance towards AGI) or his companies (OpenAI not being really open).
PS: I would say most people lurking here are just hackers (of many kinds, but still hackers), not investors with shady motives.
My argument wasn't that there was a cabal of shady investors trying to influence perception here. your observation is certainly valid there is general disdain for Google but specifically I'm calling out people that were blatantly telling lies and making outlandish claims and attacking others who were simply pointing out that some of those people have financial motives (either being backed by YC or seek to benefit from the work of others).
None of this is surprising to me and shouldn't shock you. You are literally on a site called Ycombinator. Had this been another platform without ties to investments or drawing from crowd that actively seeks to enrich themselves through participation in a narrative, this wouldn't even be a thing.
Large number of people who read my comment seems to agree and this whole worldcoin thing seems to me just another distraction (We've already been through why that was shady but we are talking about something different here).
Well, you have a point. I've always thought that Hacker News <> YCombinator, but maybe the truth is in the middle. At the very least, this is food for thought.
Yup, there's a significant anti-Google spin in HN, twitter. For example, here's paulg claiming that Cruise handles driving around cyclists better than Waymo [1], obviously not true to anyone who's used both services
I suspect it's also a general fatigue with the over-hype. It is moving fast, but every step improvement has come with its own mini hype cycle. The demos are very curated and make the model look incredibly flexible and resilient. But when we test the product in the wild, it's constantly surprising the simple tasks it blunders on. It's natural to become a bit cynical and human to take that cynicism on the attack. Not saying it's right, just natural, in the same way that it's natural for the marketing teams to be as misleading as they can get away with. Both are annoying, but there's not much to do.
Progress? There are loads of downsides the AI fans won't acknowledge. It diminishes human value/creativity and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people. It's not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it's different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case). That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance. I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society. Nobody is denying that it's impressive but the question is more whether it's good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.
>Progress? There are loads of downsides the AI fans won't acknowledge.
I don’t know if this is true.
>It diminishes human value/creativity
I don’t see this at all, I see it as enhancing creativity and human value.
>and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people.
There are a lot of open source models being created, even if they are being released by Meta…
>It's not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it's different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case).
So, like, you wouldn’t do anything if you could just chill on UBI all day? If anything I’d get more creative.
> That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance.
I don’t disagree with this at all, but I think we can fight back here and overcome this, but we have to lean into the tech to do that.
> I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society.
I think this is basically wrong historically. Things are very seldom permanently dystopian if they’re dystopian at all. Things are demonstrably better than they were 100 years ago, and if you think back even a couple decades things are often a lot better.
The medical applications alone will save a lot of lives.
> Nobody is denying that it's impressive but the question is more whether it's good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.
There are going to be annoyances, but I would bet serious cash that things continue to get better.
> So, like, you wouldn’t do anything if you could just chill on UBI all day? If anything I’d get more creative.
There is a lot of empirical research on UBI and all of it shows that it has very little effect on employment either way. That is, nothing will change here.
(This is probably because 1. positional goods exist 2. romantic prospects don't like it when you're unemployed even if you're rich.)
I have noticed this the most in SWE's who went from being code writers to "human intention decipherers". Ask a an SWE in 2019 what they do and it was "Write novel and efficient code", ask one in 2024 and you get "Sit in meetings and talk to project managers in order to translate their poor communication to good code".
Not saying the latter was never true, it's just interesting to see how people have reframed their work in the wake of breakneck AI progress.
Honestly just think that Google has burned their good will at this point. If you notice, most announcements by Apple are positively received here and same with OpenAI. But since Google's "don't be evil" persona has faded and since they went through so much churn WRT products. I think most people just don't want to see them win.
You have to give Google credit as they went against the OpenAI fanatics, Google doomsday crowd and some of the permanent critics (who won't disclose they invested in OpenAI's secondary share sale) that believe that Google can't keep up.
In fact, they already did. What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already.
The top comments around Sora vs Veo suggesting that Google was falling behind, given the fact that both are still unavailable to use wasn't even a point to make in the first place, but just typical HN nonsense.
> What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already
I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities. Apple didn’t release anything that Xerox or IBM couldn’t do. The difference is they didn’t.
Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. In this case, I fault them for having the sole action item be a buried waitlist request and two new brands (Veo and VideoFX) for one unreleased product.
> I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities
Serious or not, that criticism existed on HN - and still does. I've seen many comments claiming Google has "fallen behind" on AI, sometimes with the insinuation the Google won't ever catch up due to OpenAI's apparent insurmountable lead
> Google’s problem has always been in product follow through.
Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities that only it can execute well. Google's ability to shut down products that dont work is an insult to user but a very good corporate strategy and they deserve kudos for that.
Now, coming back to the "follow through". Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Photos, Drive, Cloud etc. all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market. Many companies like Yahoo! had a head start but could not keep up with their mail service.
Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities. They often integrated the best aspect of those products into their other well established products such as Google Trips became part of search and Google Shopping became part of search.
> coming back to the "follow through". Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Photos, Drive, Cloud etc. all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment
Do you have any examples of something they launched in the last decade?
Pixel smartphones: Launched in 2016
Google Home smart speaker: Launched in 2016
Google Wifi mesh Wi-Fi system: Launched in 2016
Google Nest smart display: Launched in 2018
Google Nest Wifi mesh Wi-Fi system: Launched in 2019
Stadia Cloud gaming platform*: Launched in 2019
Google Pay (formerly known as Tez): 2028
Early 2015 - technically correct. But I hope you would agree that their ability to release successful products has significantly diminished between the decade 2005-2014 to 2015-2024, apparently in reverse proportion to their headcount.
> Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities
that result in shittier products overall. For example, just a few months ago they cut 17 features from Google Assistant because they couldn't monetize them, sorry, because these were "small opportunities": https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/google-is-removing-17-unde...
> all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market.
And here's a long list of excellent examples of Google killing products right and left because small opportunities or something: https://killedbygoogle.com/
And don't get me started on the whole Hangouts/Meet/Alo/Duo/whatever fiasco
> Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities.
Translation: because they couldn't find ways to monetize the last cent out of them
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Edit: don't forget: The absolute vast majority of Google's money comes from selling ads. There's nothing else it is capable of doing at any significant scale. The only reason it doesn't "chase small opportunities" is because Google doesn't know how. There are a few smaller cash cows that it can keep chugging along, but they are dwarfed by the single driving force that mars everything at Google: the need to sell more and more ads and monetize the shit out of everything.
Don't forget SORA edited their "ai generated" videos while Google did not here.
Where did SORA get all its training videos from again and why won't the executives answer a simple Yes/No question to "Did you scrape Youtube to train SORA?"
Google does not care to start a war where every company has to form explicit legal agreements with every other company to scrape their data. Maybe if they got really desperate, but right now they have no reason to be.
I have no doubt about Google's capabilities in AI, my doubt lies on the productization part. I don't think they can produce something that will not be a complete mess
It’s tiring. Same thing happened to the GPT-4o announcement yesterday. Apparently because there’s no unquestionable AGI 14 months after GPT-4 then everything sucks.
I always found HN contrarian but as I say it’s really tiring. I’ve no idea what the negative commenters are working on on a daily basis to be so dismissive of everybody else’s work, including work that leaves 90% of the population in a combination of awe and fear. Also people sometimes forget that behind big corp names there are actual people. People who might be reading this thread.
What's also tiring is that no one is allowed to have any critical thoughts because "it's tiring".
From my own perspective the critique is usually a counter balance to extreme hype, so maybe let's just agree it's ok to have both types of comments, you know "checks and balances".
AI is a pretty direct threat to software engineering. It's no surprise people are hostile towards it. Come 2030, how do you justify a paying someone $175k/yr when a $20/mo app is 95% as good, and the other 5% can be done by someone making $40k/yr?
Yeah it's pretty unfortunate. Saying something sucks is such a lack of understanding that things are not static. I guess it's a sure way to be right, because there will always be progress and you can look back and say "See I told you!"
Psh. Things are not static. Progress sucks now. Haven't you heard of enshitification? You can always look back and say, "see? I told you it would suck in the future!"
...why am I feeling to urge to point out that I am only making a joke here and not trying to make an actual counter point, even if one can be made...?
I commented on this elsewhere, but being a negative Nancy is really a winning strategy.
If you’re negative and you get it wrong, nobody cares, get it and right you look like a damn genius. Conversely, if you’re positive and get it wrong, you look like an idiot and if you’re right you’re praised for a good call once. The rational “game theory” choice is to predict calamity.
Right, but I think people sometimes get the “what constitutes long term” factor a little bit wrong.
I am still talking to a lot of people who say, “what can any of this AI stuff even do?” It’s like, robots you could hold a conversation with effectively didn’t exist 3 years ago and you’re already upset that it’s not a money tree?
I think that peoples expectation horizon narrowing down may be the clearest evidence that we’re in the singularity.
