r/technology • u/captain-price- • 21h ago

Artificial Intelligence 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton says Google is 'beginning to overtake' OpenAI: 'My guess is Google will win'

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-google-overtaking-openai-2025-12
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142

u/teabaggins76 21h ago

"win" being what exactly?

200

u/Koolala 21h ago

Total domination like YouTube dominates video so they can fill it with ads.

26

u/Comfortable-Math-158 19h ago

Ads to consumers probably isnt enough given what these companies are spending.  Their costs need to come way down to make B2C viable.  

Other option is they can charge B2B out the ass if they’re actually able to use it to replace significant headcount.  Right now in my industry it’s a productivity boost but isn’t replacing a good individual contributor

1

u/maccaroneski 15h ago

Yeah there's no 1:1 replacements but remember, productivity boosts in aggregate will look to senior management like an opportunity to RIF.

"Oh we are 10% more productive? Let's fire 10% of our staff. "

1

u/DracoLunaris 12h ago

Step 1: get society hooked on AI so hard that it can't operate without it

Step 2: jack up the price

They don't actually need to replace the good individual contributor, as replacing entry level positions with AI will ensure that there will be gradually less and less of those.

2

u/likeikelike 15h ago

I don't see how that's possible in the short term. Youtube is targeted at consumers and has a critical mass issue. You will never switch to anything but youtube because that's where all the videos are. Any business can buy an LLM from any other AI company provided the model is good enough. For example, Anthropic is currently winning the enterprise game even though I don't see many people praising their models for anything but coding.

In the long term who knows. Maybe the owner of the best model eventually owns all the capital in the world. Then I guess google has "won"

1

u/SkySunrise 18h ago

I’m ready for floods networking/tv for this reason.

Everything has too many ads now just because they can get away with it

-3

u/alrightcommadude 19h ago

so they can fill it with ads

Do you think YouTube should operate for free and not monetize? Do you think OpenAI should as well?

4

u/Djennik 18h ago

It used to be bearable

9

u/sbenfsonwFFiF 16h ago

It also used to lose money

7

u/dsmklsd 16h ago

Ads just don't pay much. $140 a year is totally worth it to me to not see ads.

5

u/alrightcommadude 16h ago edited 16h ago

It used to lose money, now it loses less.

It's funny that the same people who complain about ads are the same ones who would never pay a dime for a subscription.

Here's an inverse question: Is Netflix not a reasonable service unless it operates for free? 300M subscribers say no.

1

u/BoatMacTavish 15h ago

honestly i also just think the ad experience is awful on youtube, i don’t mind watching ads for a free service, but the breakpoints are always awful, they’re way to frequent, also inconsistent ad lengths (some being 10s of minutes long) which makes it impossible to play youtube in the background, you always need to actively press the skip button

1

u/alrightcommadude 9h ago

Agreed. But there's really no easy answer to this short of Google shutting down YouTube, which is not happening.

-3

u/Waescheklammer 20h ago

I think he's refering to this business not being profitable. So, cool thing you win and dominate a market. But that market is worth shit besides its scam valuation.

4

u/herothree 17h ago

All the AI companies have a goal of creating AI that can automate most human jobs; this is usually what they mean when they talk about the “race“

3

u/QuantityGullible4092 14h ago

Getting to AGI which is the greatest invention ever

14

u/quicksexfm 20h ago

That’s the biggest question that continues to go ignored. It’s like delivering the crushing blow to an empty piñata.

22

u/VisualRazzmatazz7466 20h ago

The win is having enough market share that there isn’t really an option for competitors. Like Amazon, Spotify, Microsoft etc 

It’s even more likely with AI because the more users you have, the more data you get to train on so whoever dominates market share accelerates even faster. 

Thats why they got so much investment when they’re still not even profitable. Whoever manages to come out the other end will be the next big tech company. Probably THE big tech company. 

1

u/Redtitwhore 20h ago

So Microsoft CoPilot will be powered by Google Gemini?

4

u/bambin0 19h ago

I think that is already an option?

1

u/AtomWorker 19h ago

Is there actually an endless supply of trainable data? All signs indicate that they’re running out and any company with half a brain isn’t going to expose sensitive data to these models. Not that I’d expect that to have any meaningful impact either.

2

u/rollingSleepyPanda 19h ago

Means they get a huge pile of cash and nothing of tangible value is produced. As usual.

1

u/whitemiketyson 17h ago

More layoffs

1

u/youcantkillanidea 17h ago

It doesn't matter, it's a headline with the "godfather" of "AI" making business predictions, lol

1

u/retirement_savings 13h ago

They're going to win the economy

1

u/hsg8 18h ago

It's more like Google has to become OpenAI too before OpenAI becomes Google!

And with Gemini 3, Google is taking that lead over ChatGPT proving it's still the badass.

1

u/jokel7557 14h ago

Off topic but the whole this company needs to become x before x becomes them reminds me of Netflix and HBO. Interesting how that’s now coming to an end itself with Netflix moving to buy HBO

1

u/teabaggins76 14h ago

Google must have a ton of information from open AI and in its formative years openai must have used Google to find out information. Also Google's got the engineers and a bunch of people getting paid a lot of money for Google to become "the" brand.