Keep It Simple, Genius (Premium)

OpenAI and Google faced off this week with dueling AI announcements, and the contrast couldn't be more stark. I hope Microsoft and Apple are paying attention: Only one of these companies got it right. And it wasn't Google.

I think we all understand that Google is in a tough spot. It gets almost zero credit for kicking off the AI era, and it has spent much of the past year in a defensive posture, trying to overcome perceptions and newly aggressive rivals that never seriously threatened it in the past. Complicating matters, the threat to Google is real: This company's dominance is solely reliant on a single business—search and the resulting ad-based revenues it generates—that can and will be supplanted by AI. The only question now is where that AI will come from.

My in-the-moment hot take is that AI is like death by a thousand cuts, that there's no single killer app but rather hundreds or thousands of individual advances across the entire spectrum of personal technology. And that each of us, each person, each business, will cherry-pick from the resulting matrix of advances and benefit from AI wherever we get it, wherever we need it most.

For this reason, Google is in a better position than many believe: It has over 15 businesses that each have over half a billion users—500 million users, each—giving it a scale that even Microsoft and Apple can't match. And therein lies the problem: Google did mention this salient fact yesterday during its opening I/O 2024 keynote. But it came one hour and 51 minutes into a presentation that last one hour and 52 minutes. By that point, most of the audience had either stopped paying attention or had literally nodded off.

What preceded that stunning bit of clarity was the presentation version of a pummeling, a maddening list of advances that spans everything Google does, from low-level technologies like datacenter chipsets, LLMs, and developer APIs that span multiple platforms, often in contradictory ways, to end user apps like Gmail, Photos, and Maps ... and everything in between. And that's the problem: No matter how engaged and excited you are by these announcements, you're only interested in some of it. And the interminable wait between items of interest was off-putting. Hell, Google saved its best Android news for the next day because there was too much to talk about.

The day before Google I/O kicked off, relative newcomer OpenAI gave free a masterclass in clarity and human awkwardness that Google—and now Microsoft and Apple—would do well to study and then emulate. Yes, I know. OpenAI is a newish company with a singular focus, and it has a lot less to discuss than does Google. But its Spring Update event was a crisp, non-boring 20 minutes or so, and any interested in diving deeper can head over to its YouTube channel and select from dozens of demo-based videos of GPT-4o, the most interesting announcement at that event.

As important, the OpenAI event was live, with all the glitches...