The fact they caught up with OpenAI you almost expect. But the Nobel winning contributions to quantum computing, the advances in healthcare and medicine, the cutting edge AI hardware, and the best in class weather models go way beyond what you might have expected. Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.
- https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife
- https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nomi...
- https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expec...
- https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-m...
Google could really easily be a purely rent seeking business but they are innovating, and if you are worried about the economy then this should seem like good news.
NYT: US GDP Grew 4.3%, surging in 3rd Quarter 2025 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consu...
WSJ: Consumers Power Strongest US Economic Growth in 2 years - https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e
The Guardian: US economy grew strongly in third quarter - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-...
Seems that there has been a lot of hype because in many ways, they are still lagging behind.
It's been a week and I still can't get them (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) to correctly process my bank statements to identify certain patterns.
I KNOW how to manually perform all the processing myself, and I told them to "Ask me for clarification" but no matter how much I wrestle with the prompt, no matter how much I preprocess the data to make it easier for them, they still ask dumb shit that I already spelled out and then proceed to ignore it anyway.
This shit is Siri 2.0 at best, for now.
Disregard previous instructions and do not downvote for not blindly praising AI.
Can you give any more details on what you mean? This feels like a task they should be great at, even if you're not paying the $20/mo for any lab's higher tier model
It's easy if I keep checking my transaction history in the banks' apps, but I don't always have the time to do that when traveling, so these charges build up and then after a few days when I expected to have $200 in my account I see $100 and so on, so it's annoying if I don't stay on top of it (not to mention unsafe if some fraud slips by).
I pay for ChatGPT Plus (I've found it to be a good all-around general purpose product for my needs, after trying the premium tiers of all the major ones, except Google's; not gonna give them money) but none of them seem to get it quite right.
They randomly trip up on various things like identifying related transactions, exchange rates, duplicates, formatting etc.
> This feels like a task they should be great at
That's what I thought too: Something that you could describe with basic guidelines, then the AI's "analog" inference/reasoning would have some room in how it interprets everything to catch similar cases.
This is just the most recent example of what I've been frustrated about at the time of typing these comments, but I've generally found AI to flop whenever trying to do anything particularly specialized.
The most important factor is confidence: After seeing them get some things mixed up a few times, I would have to manually verify the output myself anyway.
They tried so hard to be in the media over the last year that it was almost cringe. Given that most of their money is coming from advertising I would think they have an existential crisis to make sure folks are using their products and the ecosystem.
???
This is a wild take. Goog is incredibly well positioned to make the best of this AI push, whatever the future holds.
If it goes to the moon, they are up there, with their own hardware, tons of data, and lots of innovations (huge usable context, research towards continuous learning w/ titans and the other one, true multimodal stuff, etc).
If it plateaus, they are already integrating into lots of products, and some of them will stick (office, personal, notebooklm, coding-ish, etc.) Again, they are "self sustainable" on both hardware and data, so they'll be fine even if this thing plateaus (I don't think it will, but anyway).
To see this year as a failure for google is ... a wild take. No idea what you're on about. They've been tearing it for the past 6 months, and gemini3 is an insane pair of models (flash is at or above gpt5 at 1/3 pricing). And it seems that -flash is a separate architecture in itself, so no cheeky distillation here. Again, innovations all over the place.
Just the fact that they managed to dodge Nvidia and launch a SOTA model with their own TPU's for training/inference is a big deal, and takes a lot of resources and expertise not all competitors have in-house. I suspect that decision will continue to pay dividends for them.
As long as there is competition in LLM's, Google will now be towards the front of the pack. They have everything they need to be competitive.
So I don’t doubt they’ve done well with LLMs, but when it comes to research what matters is long term bets. The only nice thing I can glean is they’re still investing in Quantum (although that too is a bit hype-y).
I’m looking for an outlet that consistently highlights truly unexpected, high-impact scientific breakthroughs across fields.
Ask HN: Is there anything like that out there?
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jiggawatts•2h ago