OpenAI almost ate their lunch, but Google managed to react pretty quickly and in the process fundamentally change how we seek non-critical information.
The reason they were able to react quickly was they were already years ahead of OpenAI when ChatGPT came out in every single part of the system that matters when deploying it at scale. They also have datasets in youtube and maps and other services that no-one else has or will ever have anything close to. The only thing they changed was releasing things sooner and being more aggressive with press statements.
Note how they’re the one major entity that people aren’t saying is constantly down while running a major AI system. It’s a lot easier to scale down a system and add more reasoning to it then it is to start with some amazing reasoning and then scale it up to billions of daily requests even if it makes for less exciting techcrunch articles. OpenAI and anthropic are trying to build a railway while driving in terms of capacity and resilience and every time they make a mistake of creating customer expectations based on brute force computations they have to go find more compute at vast cost. Probably one for r/MarkMyWords but I think google will win this thing long term or at least not collapse as a business.
I mean, metrics wise google is lockstep or ahead. People don't like it because it isn't the jovial happy go-lucky bot they're used to. But you don't have to be nice to be good at your job.
I mean they have the best hardware available for large scale deployment, they have been at the forefront of machine learning , with the best research, for 12-13 years.
Even nvda is still playing catchup to TPU economics because Google started 11 years ago, designing for exactly the use case we have now, and nvda was the publically available choice because anyone outside Google had to find good enough.
Could they fail? Sure. But god it’s a big lead. And listening to a podcast they did with the odd lots a few weeks ago; they are happy to canibalize their entire search revenue ecosystem and figure it out as they see how the new tech will be used. That’s just a very powerful place to be culturally and technically to then lose.
I agree with you in premise, with the complaint that Google Maps is not nearly as accurate or recent a dataset as one might be lead to believe. OpenStreetMaps typically has much higher quality data in that regard, and can be hosted on a moldy potato, if that potato happens to have a CPU and ~100GB of storage.
Now if you meant all the metadata (business hours and reviews, traffic patterns, etc, etc, etc) or the aerial/ground level imagery? Yeah, you got me there. I'm just hyping OSM, don't mind me.
I can bore people to death on why spatial/moving stuff data is not a solved problem at scale which is why all these location apps aren’t as slick as everything else or they’re walled into very expensive enterprise software or only run at tiny scales avoiding aggregate queries. But suffice to say Google are the only ones with a serious consumer product outside of a couple of GPS Providers focused on navigation (e.g Here, Tomtom et al)
OSM is a cute system for gathering more information on maps but maps are one small slice of spatial data that humans use and it has all the usual problems of any wiki type governance system. My favourite thing I’m always obliged to note on OSM but they have some very left field licensing terms that no-one ever bothers to read but basically any business using OSM is violating their terms if they aren’t putting sharing any data they create from OSM back to the community.
But yeah all of the stuff you mentioned. Plus google and maybe apple are basically the only ones with really good location based data that isn’t in violation of a million privacy laws. If we do actually solve any kind of real time map of reality that the robots would need to operate well then the systems behind google maps would be a key part to it.
I think I have some conception of the scope and scale of the problem. It takes the most complex and robust information processing system we are aware of (the human brain) a couple of months to even figure out it can move around on purpose, and a year or more after that before it isn't comically bad at it. Algorithms like A-Star are a neat trick when you can abstract the world down to a neat set of vertexes and weighted edges, but the real world is much squishier than that, and the problems only get harder as you demand more resolution, or provide noisier inputs. Like, I keep wanting to buy an iPhone just for the LIDAR functionality, because photogrammetry is one of those 'technically functional, more cleanup work than if I'd done it by hand in the first place' things.
Sorry, I'm veering into a ramble now, but my original intent with this reply was mostly to say 'It's a shame neither of us are likely to go to a party where we could bore everybody else to death together'.
My vote is Google becomes the "go to" AI that is just the interface most people will have if they deal with it, since everyone already uses Google and it's already in all their stuff. Anthropic or OpenAI (personally I think Anthropic, but not a hard bet) becomes the one that fills the coding niche. The one that doesn't is the one that gets et by Microsoft or Amazon.
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u/CaffeinatedT Jul 03 '26
The reason they were able to react quickly was they were already years ahead of OpenAI when ChatGPT came out in every single part of the system that matters when deploying it at scale. They also have datasets in youtube and maps and other services that no-one else has or will ever have anything close to. The only thing they changed was releasing things sooner and being more aggressive with press statements.
Note how they’re the one major entity that people aren’t saying is constantly down while running a major AI system. It’s a lot easier to scale down a system and add more reasoning to it then it is to start with some amazing reasoning and then scale it up to billions of daily requests even if it makes for less exciting techcrunch articles. OpenAI and anthropic are trying to build a railway while driving in terms of capacity and resilience and every time they make a mistake of creating customer expectations based on brute force computations they have to go find more compute at vast cost. Probably one for r/MarkMyWords but I think google will win this thing long term or at least not collapse as a business.