AI: Where the Big Fish Might Just Get Bigger
Many people predict that AI will be a space where the rich get richer. Incumbents have the data and the capital to do the expensive work of training models. They also have the applications that AI can be applied to. Startups always have a shot. They move fastest. The AI powered IDE, Cursor, is pretty much all anyone can talk about right now. But what does this mean for everyday users like us?
I wouldn't hate it if I get some of that AI magic in my Google Photos, right? If my existing Google Docs files were able to leverage this technology without me having to copy and paste from Claude, that'd be pretty nice. And who better to deploy this than Google who pioneered much of the research that has led us here. This is supposed to be Google's real edge against the competition, but I'm not sure it's going so well.
When AI Meets Real Life: A Tale of Spreadsheet Woes
Let me share a recent experience that highlights the current state of affairs. With the start of the school season, my son's school sent parents a PDF document that listed what advisor group each kid would be in for the 5th grade. I scrolled down and found my son and a couple of his friends manually but I wanted to see everyone on the list in their groups. I really just wanted to sort the list. I couldn't copy-paste the doc into Sheets for some reason. Some times it works. Some times it tries to plop the whole file into a single cell. Today was the latter. I had Claude create a table out of it that I was then able to copy and paste into Sheets. Sorted it easily and saw the group.
Then I wanted to color each row by the group so I could visibly see the pattern even when not sorting by the group. Gemini was right there on the side. So I asked it to help. It was NOT helpful. Not even a little.
It seems as if Google is currently using the Gemini branding to respond to queries and perhaps to generate images but it can't yet actually execute tasks in their application. To be fair to Google, they have many many complicated and critical applications. Deploying gemini as a bolt-on beside the application was certainly the easiest first step. However, it doesn't realize any of the promise of Google applying AI tech to their data and products for amazing results. It's exceedingly underwhelming. Right now it seems to be wizard for creating templates of tables in Sheets.
When Claude Saves the Day (Sorry, Google)
Frustrated with Gemini's lack of help, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I tried to do it manually on my sheet and went to the "Conditional Formatting" option to tell it to color each row based on the advisor but when I realized I had to execute multiple clicks to even enter the data and hardcode the advisor names. I gave up. Frustrated with Google as a whole, I popped back over to my Claude window that converted the PDF to a table I could copy and asked it: Can you make it sortable and color each row by the value in the advisor column? And there I had what I needed. Claude allowed me to build a custom web page to visualize this info quicker than using Google's LLM to interact with a Google product. This stark contrast really drives home the point about Google's current AI operationalization shortcomings.
The Race Is On: Google's AI Growing Pains
This is clearly a moment in time. I understand from others that Gemini is really quite powerful. I know the teams there are very smart and I imagine they are just working under constraints I don't know about. That's likely what created such a disappointing result. However, if Google doesn't address this gap soon, other models and experiences are going to capture the layer of usage that involves the most simple and basic data manipulation we all engage in daily. Google Sheets did this to Excel. Now every LLM is going to do this to Google.
For now, I'm sticking with what works best. Doing it in Claude was just too easy. The real question is: Can Google with all of their challenges of incumbency realize their potential to create a game-changing experience for users combining their products and the tech they pioneered. I hope they figure it out though. For their sakes, and for ours as everyday users who could benefit from truly smart, AI-enhanced tools.
