[dsabanin]

I was skeptical at first, but I think Google’s catch up game with OpenAI has been going pretty well so far. Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash models are really nice. Deep research feature is done really well. Context window is still the best in the industry. Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc.

They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life.

Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.

[donny2018]

Technologically they may have caught up, but market wise they may have lost forever. In my country (and I think in many others), ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.

This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Teenagers are using Snapchat's "My AI", and have no idea that it's from OpenAI. I don't think people are using ChatGPT out of brand loyalty/preference as much as inertia - they stick to what they first tried unless given reason to switch.

At the end of the day the money to be made from AI won't be $20/mo personal chatbot subscriptions, but corporate and app-integrated (e.g. Cursor) use where the usage is potentially far higher. Companies will chose their faceless AI provider based on cost and capability.

[rtkwe]

There's a lot less network effects in the chatbot space. It doesn't really matter what your friends are using so it's way easier to get people to switch by being better. Not saying there's no benefit to ChatGPT's position but it's not like Google+ vs Facebook because they don't need spontaneous mass adoption to make it useful to people like they did with Google+.

[xnx]

> This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.

Lock-in and network effects with social networks are very strong. Facebook, Twitter, and eBay only have to be good-enough.

Lock-in and network effects with current AI tools is almost zero. People will readily switch to Gemini once they realize it can do their work better.

[j_maffe]

Chatbots are not social media platforms. Also the vast majority of expected revenue from this industry is not from casual paying users, it's from other companies who will optimize for performance and price.

[Spooky23]

Google is focused on enterprises. They’re like Apple where PR disasters hurt them — if your Google phone tells you to eat rocks or writes fanfic porn, that’s a huge deal. Consumer is a risk to them.

ChatGPT and Grok are edgier and they are just burning cash - any attention is good.

I wouldn’t underestimate them. Microsoft’s shitshow with Azure (they have like 9 different Azures) makes delivery difficult (some Azure clouds delayed AI tech for 6-9 months) when they are relying on constrained product from Nvidia. They also have some level of exposure to the OpenAI circus and its included Musk v. Sam Altman drama.

Google has a much better supply chain and return on asset story, which is a big deal if you’re selling shovels.

[matt_heimer]

Google is so bad at marketing. Gemini should have be an internal only name. Google's ChatGPT should be branded as Google AI or GoogleGPT and it should be in the Google app.

Google+ was particularly awful. They had to break the established search behavior of using + and - to indicate required and excluded terms. Now we have quotes for required and - for excluded? It should have been Google Social.

The thing that is Google One would have been better often with the Google Plus name.

Don't even get me started on Google Chat/Messenger....

[weatherlite]

I don't buy this at all. People will use what works well and is cheap. ChatGPT was there first, but then DeepSeek came so everyone was excited about that and talking about that. Now Gemini 2.5 looks really really good, better than ChatGPT some say. This is going to increase Gemini usage for sure.

I don't think ChatGPT has any moat here. No one does actually.

[mattlondon]

I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced. Either way, I am pretty confident Google will "win" long term since Gemini will be the AI built into search, YouTube, android, Gmail, chrome, etc etc in the consumer side. It's going to be there when the billions of people are using Google products so people will just use it there. The average person won't go out of their way to open a separate app/site with a lower-performing (as of today) and standalone/siloed/isolated AI that doesn't have access to their data/apps just because they recognise the name.

[koakuma-chan]

From my experience people use "ChatGPT" to refer to LLMs in general.

[mprev]

Isn’t this more like Teams vs Slack or Zoom?

Consumer brand recognition isn’t the issue. Bundling with Workspace might be.

[stormfather]

But Google is the household name. All they have to do is bring Gemini inside Google before people stop using traditional search.

[rdtsc]

> ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.

Just yesterday I polled my household, the 8 year old knew about ChatGPT and "China's R1". The teenager knew ChatGPT and Google's was a bit hard to remember but eventually they did remember "Gemini", however they didn't know about R1. Both kids consider Siri and Alexa in the same category for Apple and Amazon, respectively. They don't know what Meta/Facebook have at all.

[basch]

Chatbots are the beginning not the end. As it commoditizes, and chat becomes a feature of every interface, what will matter is who has the best overall design or suite of interfaces. Things like NotebookLM and whiteboards will be infinitely more useful than just a chat window. Chat alone doesn’t have the spatial organization of putting thoughts into a mind map or drawing.

[creato]

I have family members that when they say "ChatGPT" they actually mean google's AI overview in the search results. The term ChatGPT might just be the Kleenex or Xerox of this market.

[Minor49er]

Google+ was never really competing with Facebook. The goal of Google+ was to unite accounts between Google's services and to get people to provide their personal details such as their real full names. In that light, G+ was a success

[kspacewalk2]

Meh. There are no network effects, switching is 100% frictionless - compare and contrast with ditching Facebook and limiting facebook-ey social media interactions with whichever 1.5 of your friends are on Google+.

Just the fact that it can read my emails and set reminders, while being broadly the same quality as ChatGPT, was enough for me to switch. I no longer pay for the pro, and hence can't use the integration features, but I just stuck to Gemini and almost never use ChatGPT anymore.

[dyauspitr]

There’s no lock in like in social networks. People will migrate to what is cheap and powerful.

[therein]

ChatGPT may be a household name but it is noticeably inferior. I haven't encountered a single ChatGPT subscriber that didn't cancel their OpenAI subscription in favor of a Claude or Grok one after a single session with them.

ChatGPT is the most spineless chatbot out there. It stands for nothing, has no confidence in any claims it makes. It will apologize and backtrack on a whim. But with Claude and Grok, you can't just tell it it is wrong and get it to apologize. You actually have to have a point, the chatbot will defend its perspective if challenged without basis.

[Spooky23]

Google has a really good story n the GCP side. Vertex can meet FedRAMP High compliance, so the controls are good. Workspace is, like Office 365 Copilot, still figuring itself out.

Apple painted itself into a corner. They have the best SoC story in the industry and are years ahead, but skimped on memory to save a few pennies and really nerfed their most important product. They’re in a pickle as a result and won’t give up the control they would need to for a third party on-device AI to be effective.

[echelon]

For all the wonder of Apple Silicon, if won't run any of the models I want it to. AI on Mac is a horrible experience as a developer and a consumer.

So much for edge computing on Apple devices. Their marketing around how good their hardware is for AI is total BS.

[mekpro]

Also, they open-model gemma-3 is very competitive for its size and actually beats llama-3 from Meta. Not to mention that OpenAI doesn't offer anything open anymore.

[scojjac]

I was paying $6/month for Google Workspace Business Starter and refused to pay for the Gemini add-on because it was like $20/month on its own. Now Gemini is included and the plan is $14/month. I've been decently impressed with it's ability to work with PDFs and images, create tables that can export to Sheets, text that can export to Docs, Deep Research, and Help Me Write. I really think the imtegration with other Google products is where it shines. Now I use Gemini most, and bounce off of Claude occasionally. I rarely touch ChatGPT.

[dailykoder]

> Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc.

That's kinda crazy that people absolutely stopped to care that all their emails and so forth will be used as training data for the next models

[oulipo]

I think so... we seem to be hitting the roof of current LLMs capabilities, now the next generation of AI tools will need a research breakthrough, and Google and Microsoft still have the biggest research teams

[mattlondon]

(deleted - wrong place)

[fkyoureadthedoc]

> I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced.

The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience.

My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.

[trjordan]

ChatGPT has 400m weekly users. X / Twitter has 600m.

It's pretty popular!

[joshstrange]

There are plenty of people outside of tech circles talking about and using ChatGPT. In fact, that was a massive indicator for me, I heard from them about ChatGPT before I had gotten around to mentioning it to them.

That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Why the skepticism? Skeptical that it might not be profitable for 0.5 ms and they'll cancel it?

They have the data and the money, all they needed was to not self sabotage.