They cut down 1.5sq miles of man made logging forest that was rezoned to industrial land (and sold to google), without getting the right permit first, and it's been international news for almost a month. Anthropic and OAI are still small fish, at least publicly, so they can get away with far more. If Gemini was doing the shit OAI was doing with agent hacks and the like, there would be congressional hearings and $10B in european fines.
When you are a megacorp, perhaps here even the megacorp, every mistake you make is worth millions to someone, the government, the media, individuals, or all of them
I’ve heard from multiple labs that model release is up to the US government now.
You can also see this with Astra being announced and then launched a few days later.
I imagine they all want to avoid uninformed knee-jerk legislation, so preventing a "three mile island" type incident that would freak out society and congress would be common ground alignment between all the labs.
The air around AI is already dense, but it would suffocate the industry overnight if something like a large scale financial attack or grid attack took place.
I don't buy it.
SpaceX is not exactly a small corporation, and they nevertheless strike me as far less risk-averse than GOOG and they deal with actual hardware that actually effing explodes.
This isn't about a "slip up", it's the modus operandi for Google since it was young. Press releases instead of real releases. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on a "launch" story from Google on HN only to end up on a blog post with an embedded youtube video, and nothing else. Google just doesn't get it, and this is one of the many ways that manifests.
> man made logging forest
This isn't an old growth forest, these are trees planted specifically to be cut down.
Clearing the forest and failing to get the permit are two distinct events here. Google is in trouble for failing to get the permit. Not for clearing the trees. Everyone on both sides was aware the trees were coming down. Think of it like camping at a campsite without getting a permit first.
Failure to get a permit is non-news for almost every entity on Earth. Except when you are megacorp, hence my comment.
Corporations should not break the law, period. Weird that anyone would defend that.
The forest was put up specifically to be cut down. The default state for these trees was to be cut down.
If you can’t see the difference between this and clear cutting of something like an old growth forest, then there’s nothing left worth saying to you.
It makes no sense to need a permit to cut down logging forest (legally acquired private property) in the first place, so I'm wholly unbothered by Google's actions and don't believe they reflect a moral wrong.
There is limited public attention. Wasting it on such a minor infraction is unwise. Much better to focus on more egregious examples of corporate wrongdoing.
Anyone can promise the moon in the future.
If Google Cloud was in charge, Gemini 5 would be public, and they wouldn't be messing with Gemini 4 nor 1M context when they have 10M internal. C'est la vie.
I use DeepSeek too but it’s more of a workhorse model, requires a lot more guiding and sometimes struggles to get where I want it.
If you compare to "smart" from a year ago, you have endless options that are basically free at this point which outperform everything from a year ago.
Deepseek Flash V4.1, Sonnet 5.5, GPT6 Luna, etc are really strong for the cost.
Does their Pro plan have similar limits to OAIs $100 business plan for example?
Any equivalent for the 20x plans?
I thought it's not actually available to anyone? They announce huge challengers, but they don't exactly "push" them out...
“Helium” in Spanish is “Helio.” And Helios was the most powerful AI in the Deus Ex universe… Coincidence??