> a very realistic page on Apple's website…

Is this supposed to be a good example?

It looks like something I'd put together, and you don't want me doing design work.

At this point until I see one run through the Pelican Benchmark I can't really take a new model seriously.

Well, Codex with GPT5 High wins Claude Sonnet 4.5 - this is anecdotal, but I've used both extensively.

Well yeah no surprise. You should try glm 4.6

To be fair, according to OpenAI they started ChatGPT as a demo/experiment and were taken by surprise when it went viral.

It may well be that they also didn't have a product culture as an organization, but were willing to experiment or let small teams do so.

It's still a lesson, but maybe a different one.

With organizational scale it becomes harder and harder to launch experiments under the brand. Red tape increases, outside scrutiny increases. Retaining the ability to do that is difficult.

Google does experiment a fair bit (including in AI, e.g. NotebookLLM and its podcast feature are I think a standout example of trying to see what sticks) but they also tend to try to hide their experiments in developer portals nowadays, which makes it difficult to get a signal from a general consumer audience.

And even when it does copy other products, it seems to be doing a terrible job of them.

Google's AI offering is a complete nightmare to use. Three different APIs, at least two different subscriptions, documentation that uses them interchangeably.

For Gemini's API it's often much simpler to actually pay OpenRouter the 5% surchargeto BYOK than deal with it all.

I still can't use my Google AI Pro account with gemini-cli..

> Google doesn't have a product culture

Fair criticism that it took someone else to make something of the tech that Google initially invented, but Google is furiously experimenting with all their active products since Sundar's "code red" memo.

Along with its engineering talent and resource scale, I think their in-house chips are one of their core advantages. They can scale in a way that their peers are going to struggle to match, and at much lower cost. Nvidia's extreme margins are Google's opportunity.

Well, they had an internal ethics team that told them that their technology was garbage. That can't help. The other guys' ethics teams are all like "Our stuff is too awesome for people to use. No one should have this kind of unbridled power. We must muzzle the beast before a tourist rides him" and Google's ethics team was like "our shit sucks lol this is just a Markov chain parrot doesn't do shit it's garbage".

> is that Google doesn't have a product culture.

This is evident in Android and the pixel lineup, which could be my favorite phone if not for some of the most baffling and frustrating decisions that lead to a very weirdly disjointed app experience (comparing to something like iOS's first party tools).

Like removing location based reminders from google tasks, for some reason? Still no apple shortcuts-like automation built-in, keep can still do location based reminders but it's a notes app so which am I supposed to use? Google tasks or keep? Well, gemini adds reminders to google tasks and not keep if I wanted to use keep primarily.

If they just spent some time polishing and integrating these tools, and add some of their ML magic to it they'd blow Apple out of the park.

All of Google's tech is cool and interesting, from a tech standpoint but it's not well integrated for a full consumer experience.

ChatGPT-3.5 was more of a novelty than a product.

It would be weird to release that as a serious company. They tried making a deliberately-wacky chatbot but it was not fun.

Letting OpenAI to release it first was a right move.

Didn't Google have Bard internally around the same time as ChatGPT?