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The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding. Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress

by typpo 2y ago

The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding. Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress in this space.

testfrequency 2y ago
[flagged]
- kvetching 2y ago
  hatred fuels our capitalism more than anything
  - marcusverus 2y ago
    How do you figure?
- labrador 2y ago
  "Are You Not Entertained"
localfirst 2y ago
We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI) and platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC's founder after all. So of course you are going to see snarky comments and straight up denial in the competition. We saw that yesterday in the comments with the release of GPT4o in anticipation of Gemini 2.0 (GPT-5 basically) release being announced today at Google I/O I'm SORA to say Veo looks much more polished without jank. Big congratulations to Google and their excellent AI team for not editing their AI generated videos like SORA
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC's founder I don’t know if there is a sentiment analysis tool for HN, but I’m pretty sure it’s been dead negative for Altman since at least Worldcoin.
  - saalweachter 2y ago
    A land of contrasts, etc.
  - cosmotron 2y ago
    Something in this vein was just posted here a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307519
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  > We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI) You have to be pretty deep inside your own little bubble to think that even more than a 0.001% of HN has "stakes in YC" or "secondary shares in OpenAI".
  - hu3 2y ago
    It can be a vocal minority. Still vocal. I wouldn't discard.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      I have 0% stake in any YC, and I'm very vocal in my negativity against any of these "AI" anythings. All of these announcements are only slighty more than a toddler anxious to show the parental units a finger painting looking to hang it on the fridge. Only instead of the fridge, they are a hoping to get funding/investment knowing that their product is not a fully fledged anything. It's comical.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mrbungie 2y ago
  The amount of copium in this response is astounding. Yes, there is a noticeable negative response from HN towards Google, and there has always been especially when speaking about their weird product management practices and incentives. Google hasn't launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years. But to suggest there is a Sam Altman / OpenAI bias is delusional. In most posts about them there is at least some kind of skepticism or criticism towards Altman (his participation in Worldcoin and his accelerationist stance towards AGI) or his companies (OpenAI not being really open). PS: I would say most people lurking here are just hackers (of many kinds, but still hackers), not investors with shady motives.
  - localfirst 2y ago
    My argument wasn't that there was a cabal of shady investors trying to influence perception here. your observation is certainly valid there is general disdain for Google but specifically I'm calling out people that were blatantly telling lies and making outlandish claims and attacking others who were simply pointing out that some of those people have financial motives (either being backed by YC or seek to benefit from the work of others). None of this is surprising to me and shouldn't shock you. You are literally on a site called Ycombinator. Had this been another platform without ties to investments or drawing from crowd that actively seeks to enrich themselves through participation in a narrative, this wouldn't even be a thing. Large number of people who read my comment seems to agree and this whole worldcoin thing seems to me just another distraction (We've already been through why that was shady but we are talking about something different here).
    - mrbungie 2y ago
      Well, you have a point. I've always thought that Hacker News <> YCombinator, but maybe the truth is in the middle. At the very least, this is food for thought.
  - astrange 2y ago
    > Google hasn't launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years. Google Photos is less than 10 years old and I think a lot of people use it.
- betternet77 2y ago
  Yup, there's a significant anti-Google spin in HN, twitter. For example, here's paulg claiming that Cruise handles driving around cyclists better than Waymo [1], obviously not true to anyone who's used both services [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360341492850708481 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360341492850708481
  - deleted 2y ago
rvz 2y ago
You have to give Google credit as they went against the OpenAI fanatics, Google doomsday crowd and some of the permanent critics (who won't disclose they invested in OpenAI's secondary share sale) that believe that Google can't keep up. In fact, they already did. What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already. The top comments around Sora vs Veo suggesting that Google was falling behind, given the fact that both are still unavailable to use wasn't even a point to make in the first place, but just typical HN nonsense.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities. Apple didn’t release anything that Xerox or IBM couldn’t do. The difference is they didn’t. Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. In this case, I fault them for having the sole action item be a buried waitlist request and two new brands (Veo and VideoFX) for one unreleased product.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities Serious or not, that criticism existed on HN - and still does. I've seen many comments claiming Google has "fallen behind" on AI, sometimes with the insinuation the Google won't ever catch up due to OpenAI's apparent insurmountable lead
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    I saw it here alone. A lot of people simply have no idea the level of research ability and skill Google, the inventor of the Transformer, has.
  - KorematsuFredt 2y ago
    > Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities that only it can execute well. Google's ability to shut down products that dont work is an insult to user but a very good corporate strategy and they deserve kudos for that. Now, coming back to the "follow through". Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Photos, Drive, Cloud etc. all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market. Many companies like Yahoo! had a head start but could not keep up with their mail service. Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities. They often integrated the best aspect of those products into their other well established products such as Google Trips became part of search and Google Shopping became part of search.
Xenoamorphous 2y ago
It’s tiring. Same thing happened to the GPT-4o announcement yesterday. Apparently because there’s no unquestionable AGI 14 months after GPT-4 then everything sucks. I always found HN contrarian but as I say it’s really tiring. I’ve no idea what the negative commenters are working on on a daily basis to be so dismissive of everybody else’s work, including work that leaves 90% of the population in a combination of awe and fear. Also people sometimes forget that behind big corp names there are actual people. People who might be reading this thread.
- motoxpro 2y ago
  Yeah it's pretty unfortunate. Saying something sucks is such a lack of understanding that things are not static. I guess it's a sure way to be right, because there will always be progress and you can look back and say "See I told you!"
  - IggleSniggle 2y ago
    Psh. Things are not static. Progress sucks now. Haven't you heard of enshitification? You can always look back and say, "see? I told you it would suck in the future!" ...why am I feeling to urge to point out that I am only making a joke here and not trying to make an actual counter point, even if one can be made...?
    - piloto_ciego 2y ago
      I commented on this elsewhere, but being a negative Nancy is really a winning strategy. If you’re negative and you get it wrong, nobody cares, get it and right you look like a damn genius. Conversely, if you’re positive and get it wrong, you look like an idiot and if you’re right you’re praised for a good call once. The rational “game theory” choice is to predict calamity.
      - motoxpro 2y ago
        Yeah it’s funny that optimism in the long term is optimal and pessimism in the short term is optimal.
piloto_ciego 2y ago
I think it’s fear. Maybe not openly, but people are spooked at how fast stuff is happening, so shitting on progress is a natural reaction.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I have noticed this the most in SWE's who went from being code writers to "human intention decipherers". Ask a an SWE in 2019 what they do and it was "Write novel and efficient code", ask one in 2024 and you get "Sit in meetings and talk to project managers in order to translate their poor communication to good code". Not saying the latter was never true, it's just interesting to see how people have reframed their work in the wake of breakneck AI progress.
- kmacdough 2y ago
  I suspect it's also a general fatigue with the over-hype. It is moving fast, but every step improvement has come with its own mini hype cycle. The demos are very curated and make the model look incredibly flexible and resilient. But when we test the product in the wild, it's constantly surprising the simple tasks it blunders on. It's natural to become a bit cynical and human to take that cynicism on the attack. Not saying it's right, just natural, in the same way that it's natural for the marketing teams to be as misleading as they can get away with. Both are annoying, but there's not much to do.
  - piloto_ciego 2y ago
    Cynicism is (arguably) the intellectually easy strategy. If you’re cynical and you get it right that everything “sucks” you look like a genius, if you get it wrong there is no penalty. If you aren’t cynical and you talk about how great something is going to be and it flops you look like an idiot. The social penalty is much higher.
- brikym 2y ago
  Progress? There are loads of downsides the AI fans won't acknowledge. It diminishes human value/creativity and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people. It's not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it's different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case). That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance. I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society. Nobody is denying that it's impressive but the question is more whether it's good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.
jmkni 2y ago
Well for me it linked to a Google Form to join a waitlist lol, so I'm not exactly pumped
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jtolmar 2y ago
I think it's just hype fatigue. There's genuinely impressive progress being made, but there are also a lot of new models coming out promising way more than they can deliver. Even the Google AI announcements, which used to be carefully tailored to keep expectations low and show off their own limitations, now read more like marketing puff pieces. I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd likes to pretend we're all perfectly discerning arbiters of the tech future with our thumbs on the pulse of the times or whatever, but realistically nobody is going to sift through a mountain of announcements ranging from "states it's revolutionary, is marginal improvement" to "states it's revolutionary, is merely an impressive step" to "states it's revolutionary, is bullshit" without resorting to vibes-based analysis.
- throwup238 2y ago
  It's made all the worse by just being a giant waitlist. Sora is still no where to be seen three months later, GPT-4o's conversational features aren't widely rolled out yet, and Google's AI releases have been waitlist after waitlist after waitlist. Companies can either get peopled hyped or have never-ending georestricted waitlists, they can't have their cake and eat it too.
  - indigodaddy 2y ago
    Isn’t there a lot of positive forward motion and fruitfulness in the current state of the open source llama-3 community?
Dig1t 2y ago
Honestly just think that Google has burned their good will at this point. If you notice, most announcements by Apple are positively received here and same with OpenAI. But since Google's "don't be evil" persona has faded and since they went through so much churn WRT products. I think most people just don't want to see them win.
rmbyrro 2y ago
I hope they didn't mess this one up with ideologically driven non-sense, like they did with Gemini.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by typpo 2y ago

The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding. Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress in this space.

testfrequency 2y ago

[flagged]

kvetching 2y ago
hatred fuels our capitalism more than anything
- marcusverus 2y ago
  How do you figure?
labrador 2y ago
"Are You Not Entertained"

localfirst 2y ago

We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI) and platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC's founder after all. So of course you are going to see snarky comments and straight up denial in the competition. We saw that yesterday in the comments with the release of GPT4o in anticipation of Gemini 2.0 (GPT-5 basically) release being announced today at Google I/O I'm SORA to say Veo looks much more polished without jank. Big congratulations to Google and their excellent AI team for not editing their AI generated videos like SORA

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> platform is going to favor its own and be aware that Sam Altman is the golden boy of YC's founder I don’t know if there is a sentiment analysis tool for HN, but I’m pretty sure it’s been dead negative for Altman since at least Worldcoin.
- saalweachter 2y ago
  A land of contrasts, etc.
- cosmotron 2y ago
  Something in this vein was just posted here a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307519
baobabKoodaa 2y ago
> We have to take account that this community (good chunk have stakes in YC and a lot to gain from secondary shares in OpenAI) You have to be pretty deep inside your own little bubble to think that even more than a 0.001% of HN has "stakes in YC" or "secondary shares in OpenAI".
- hu3 2y ago
  It can be a vocal minority. Still vocal. I wouldn't discard.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I have 0% stake in any YC, and I'm very vocal in my negativity against any of these "AI" anythings. All of these announcements are only slighty more than a toddler anxious to show the parental units a finger painting looking to hang it on the fridge. Only instead of the fridge, they are a hoping to get funding/investment knowing that their product is not a fully fledged anything. It's comical.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mrbungie 2y ago
The amount of copium in this response is astounding. Yes, there is a noticeable negative response from HN towards Google, and there has always been especially when speaking about their weird product management practices and incentives. Google hasn't launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years. But to suggest there is a Sam Altman / OpenAI bias is delusional. In most posts about them there is at least some kind of skepticism or criticism towards Altman (his participation in Worldcoin and his accelerationist stance towards AGI) or his companies (OpenAI not being really open). PS: I would say most people lurking here are just hackers (of many kinds, but still hackers), not investors with shady motives.
- localfirst 2y ago
  My argument wasn't that there was a cabal of shady investors trying to influence perception here. your observation is certainly valid there is general disdain for Google but specifically I'm calling out people that were blatantly telling lies and making outlandish claims and attacking others who were simply pointing out that some of those people have financial motives (either being backed by YC or seek to benefit from the work of others). None of this is surprising to me and shouldn't shock you. You are literally on a site called Ycombinator. Had this been another platform without ties to investments or drawing from crowd that actively seeks to enrich themselves through participation in a narrative, this wouldn't even be a thing. Large number of people who read my comment seems to agree and this whole worldcoin thing seems to me just another distraction (We've already been through why that was shady but we are talking about something different here).
  - mrbungie 2y ago
    Well, you have a point. I've always thought that Hacker News <> YCombinator, but maybe the truth is in the middle. At the very least, this is food for thought.
- astrange 2y ago
  > Google hasn't launched any notable (and still surviving, Stadia being a sad example of this) consumer product or service in the last 10 years. Google Photos is less than 10 years old and I think a lot of people use it.
betternet77 2y ago
Yup, there's a significant anti-Google spin in HN, twitter. For example, here's paulg claiming that Cruise handles driving around cyclists better than Waymo [1], obviously not true to anyone who's used both services [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360341492850708481 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360341492850708481
- deleted 2y ago

rvz 2y ago

You have to give Google credit as they went against the OpenAI fanatics, Google doomsday crowd and some of the permanent critics (who won't disclose they invested in OpenAI's secondary share sale) that believe that Google can't keep up. In fact, they already did. What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already. The top comments around Sora vs Veo suggesting that Google was falling behind, given the fact that both are still unavailable to use wasn't even a point to make in the first place, but just typical HN nonsense.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> What OpenAI announced was nothing that Google could not do already I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities. Apple didn’t release anything that Xerox or IBM couldn’t do. The difference is they didn’t. Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. In this case, I fault them for having the sole action item be a buried waitlist request and two new brands (Veo and VideoFX) for one unreleased product.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > I don’t think I’ve seen serious criticism of Google’s abilities Serious or not, that criticism existed on HN - and still does. I've seen many comments claiming Google has "fallen behind" on AI, sometimes with the insinuation the Google won't ever catch up due to OpenAI's apparent insurmountable lead
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I saw it here alone. A lot of people simply have no idea the level of research ability and skill Google, the inventor of the Transformer, has.
- KorematsuFredt 2y ago
  > Google’s problem has always been in product follow through. Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities that only it can execute well. Google's ability to shut down products that dont work is an insult to user but a very good corporate strategy and they deserve kudos for that. Now, coming back to the "follow through". Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Photos, Drive, Cloud etc. all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market. Many companies like Yahoo! had a head start but could not keep up with their mail service. Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities. They often integrated the best aspect of those products into their other well established products such as Google Trips became part of search and Google Shopping became part of search.

Xenoamorphous 2y ago

It’s tiring. Same thing happened to the GPT-4o announcement yesterday. Apparently because there’s no unquestionable AGI 14 months after GPT-4 then everything sucks. I always found HN contrarian but as I say it’s really tiring. I’ve no idea what the negative commenters are working on on a daily basis to be so dismissive of everybody else’s work, including work that leaves 90% of the population in a combination of awe and fear. Also people sometimes forget that behind big corp names there are actual people. People who might be reading this thread.

motoxpro 2y ago
Yeah it's pretty unfortunate. Saying something sucks is such a lack of understanding that things are not static. I guess it's a sure way to be right, because there will always be progress and you can look back and say "See I told you!"
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  Psh. Things are not static. Progress sucks now. Haven't you heard of enshitification? You can always look back and say, "see? I told you it would suck in the future!" ...why am I feeling to urge to point out that I am only making a joke here and not trying to make an actual counter point, even if one can be made...?
  - piloto_ciego 2y ago
    I commented on this elsewhere, but being a negative Nancy is really a winning strategy. If you’re negative and you get it wrong, nobody cares, get it and right you look like a damn genius. Conversely, if you’re positive and get it wrong, you look like an idiot and if you’re right you’re praised for a good call once. The rational “game theory” choice is to predict calamity.
    - motoxpro 2y ago
      Yeah it’s funny that optimism in the long term is optimal and pessimism in the short term is optimal.

piloto_ciego 2y ago

I think it’s fear. Maybe not openly, but people are spooked at how fast stuff is happening, so shitting on progress is a natural reaction.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Workaccount2 2y ago
I have noticed this the most in SWE's who went from being code writers to "human intention decipherers". Ask a an SWE in 2019 what they do and it was "Write novel and efficient code", ask one in 2024 and you get "Sit in meetings and talk to project managers in order to translate their poor communication to good code". Not saying the latter was never true, it's just interesting to see how people have reframed their work in the wake of breakneck AI progress.
kmacdough 2y ago
I suspect it's also a general fatigue with the over-hype. It is moving fast, but every step improvement has come with its own mini hype cycle. The demos are very curated and make the model look incredibly flexible and resilient. But when we test the product in the wild, it's constantly surprising the simple tasks it blunders on. It's natural to become a bit cynical and human to take that cynicism on the attack. Not saying it's right, just natural, in the same way that it's natural for the marketing teams to be as misleading as they can get away with. Both are annoying, but there's not much to do.
- piloto_ciego 2y ago
  Cynicism is (arguably) the intellectually easy strategy. If you’re cynical and you get it right that everything “sucks” you look like a genius, if you get it wrong there is no penalty. If you aren’t cynical and you talk about how great something is going to be and it flops you look like an idiot. The social penalty is much higher.
brikym 2y ago
Progress? There are loads of downsides the AI fans won't acknowledge. It diminishes human value/creativity and will be owned and controlled by the wealthiest people. It's not like the horse being replaced by the tractor. This time it's different there is no place to move to but doing nothing on a UBI (best case). That same power also opens the door to dystopian levels of censorship and surveillance. I see more of the Black Mirror scenarios coming true rather than breakthroughs that benefit society. Nobody is denying that it's impressive but the question is more whether it's good overall. Unfortunately the toothpaste seems to be out of the tube.

jmkni 2y ago

Well for me it linked to a Google Form to join a waitlist lol, so I'm not exactly pumped

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jtolmar 2y ago

I think it's just hype fatigue. There's genuinely impressive progress being made, but there are also a lot of new models coming out promising way more than they can deliver. Even the Google AI announcements, which used to be carefully tailored to keep expectations low and show off their own limitations, now read more like marketing puff pieces. I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd likes to pretend we're all perfectly discerning arbiters of the tech future with our thumbs on the pulse of the times or whatever, but realistically nobody is going to sift through a mountain of announcements ranging from "states it's revolutionary, is marginal improvement" to "states it's revolutionary, is merely an impressive step" to "states it's revolutionary, is bullshit" without resorting to vibes-based analysis.

throwup238 2y ago
It's made all the worse by just being a giant waitlist. Sora is still no where to be seen three months later, GPT-4o's conversational features aren't widely rolled out yet, and Google's AI releases have been waitlist after waitlist after waitlist. Companies can either get peopled hyped or have never-ending georestricted waitlists, they can't have their cake and eat it too.
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  Isn’t there a lot of positive forward motion and fruitfulness in the current state of the open source llama-3 community?

Dig1t 2y ago

Honestly just think that Google has burned their good will at this point. If you notice, most announcements by Apple are positively received here and same with OpenAI. But since Google's "don't be evil" persona has faded and since they went through so much churn WRT products. I think most people just don't want to see them win.

rmbyrro 2y ago

I hope they didn't mess this one up with ideologically driven non-sense, like they did with Gemini.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]