[karterk]

> The moat of the frontier folks is just compute.

This is not really true. Google has all the compute but in many dimensions they lag behind GPT-5 class (catching up, but it has not been a given).

Amazon itself did try to train a model (so did Meta) and had limited success.

[matusp]

I switched to Gemini with my new phone and I literally couldn't tell a difference. It is actually crazy how small the cost of switching is for LLMs. It feels like AI is more like a commodity than a service.

[lelanthran]

> I switched to Gemini with my new phone and I literally couldn't tell a difference. It is actually crazy how small the cost of switching is for LLMs. It feels like AI is more like a commodity than a service.

It is. It's wild to me that all these VCs pouring money into AI companies don't know what a value-chain is.

Tokens are the bottom of the value-chain; it's where the lowest margins exist because the product at that level is a widely available commodity.

I wrote about this already (shameless plug: https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain )

[physicsguy]

On top of that, the on-device models have got stronger and stronger as the base models + RL has got better. You can do on your laptop now what 2 years ago was state of the art.

[gnfargbl]

Which dimensions do you see Google lagging on? They seem broadly comparable on the usual leaderboard (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard) and anecdotally I can't tell the difference in quality.

I tend personally to stick with ChatGPT most of the time, but only because I prefer the "tone" of the thing somehow. If you forced me to move to Gemini tomorrow I wouldn't be particularly upset.

[motorest]

> Which dimensions do you see Google lagging on? They seem broadly comparable on the usual leaderboard (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard) and anecdotally I can't tell the difference in quality.

Gemini holds indeed the top spot, but I feel you framed your response quite well: they are all broadly comparable. The difference in the synthetic benchmark from the top spot and the 20th spot was something like 57 points on a scale of 0-1500

[Keyframe]

" in many dimensions they lag behind GPT-5 class " - such as?

Outside of computer, "the moat" is also data to train on. That's an even wider moat. Now, google has all the data. Data no one else has or ever will have. If anything, I'd expect them to outclass everyone by a fat margin. I think we're seeing that on video however.

[ivape]

You think Chinese companies are short on data and people? Google doesn’t have an advantage there until the CCP takes on a more hands on approach.

Tin foil hat time:

- If you were a God and you wanted to create an ideal situation for the arrival of AI

- It would make sense to precede it with a social media phenomena that introduces mass scale normalization of sharing of personal information

Yes, that would be ideal …

People can’t stop sharing and creating data on anything, for awhile now. It’s a perfect situation for AI as an independent, uncontrollable force.

[willvarfar]

not according to google: “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”: the big memo and the big HN thread on same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

[seunosewa]

counterpoint: with their aggressive crawlers, most AI companies can have as much data as google...

[motorest]

> This is not really true. Google has all the compute but in many dimensions they lag behind GPT-5 class (catching up, but it has not been a given).

I don't know what you are talking about. I use Gemini on a daily basis and I honestly can't tell a difference.

We are at a point where training corpus and hallucinations makes more of a difference than "model class".

[jorisboris]

Yes, or Apple who with all the talent don’t manage to pull off anything useful in AI

xAI seems to be the exception, not the rule

[rusk]

Given Apple’s moat is their devices, their particular spin on AI is very much edge focussed, which isn’t as spectacular as the current wave of cloud based LLM. Apple’s cloud stuff is laughably poor.

[jeanloolz]

Depending on how you look at it I suppose but I believe Gemini surpasses OpenAI on many levels now. Better photo and video models. The leaderboard for text and embeddings are also putting Google on top of Openai.

[ebonnafoux]

gemini-2.5-pro is ranked number 1 in llmarena (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard) before gpt-5-high. In the Text-to-Video and Image-to-video, google also have the highest places, OpenAI is nowhere.

[IX-103]

Yes, but they're also slower. As LLMs start to be used for more general purpose things, they are becoming a productivity bottle-neck. If I get a mostly right answer in a few seconds that's much better than a perfect answer in 5 minutes.

Right now the delay for Google's AI coding assistant is high enough for humans to context switch and do something else while waiting. Particularly since one of the main features of AI code assistants is rapid iteration.

[paulddraper]

It doesn’t guarantee success, but the point stands about X and Deepseek