Google's long-awaited AI offering, Gemini, fizzled last week after it emerged the spectacular demo was fake. Greg Sadetsky sums it up—"The AI can do these things, just not as presented in the video"—and recreated the demo using GPT-4. Moreover, he uses none of the editing trickery used to slicken Google's demo, so GPT-4 is in fact doing what Gemini claimed to be doing, albeit slowly and roughly.
Google fans were in the habit of claiming that Google had better internal stuff than OpenAI, etc., all along, so Gemini stumbling out the blocks is unexpected.
I was thinking about this when I noticed this morning that Google just turned off RSS on its blogs. This is of interest to almost no-one nowadays, and the given wisdom is that Google long ago embraced, extended and extinguished RSS to neutralize the platform threat it posed to display advertising. In that view, that Google still had RSS on blogs was a just tokenism or openwashing. But it did keep it all the same, which makes me think that RSS's final death at Google now has more to do with Google's internal culture of only working on new things and its general disdain for maintenance. RSS finally got too smelly to live with there, perhaps because of some new thing in development.
