The AI Power Shift: A 'Call an Ambulance' Meme Depicting Google's 2025 Comeback Against OpenAI
Description
A two-panel meme in the 'Call an ambulance, but not for me!' format, depicting the competitive struggle between OpenAI and Google. The top panel, dated 'may 2024', shows a man labeled 'openAI' holding a screwdriver and menacing an older man labeled 'Google', who appears injured. The yellow caption reads, 'Call an ambulance!'. The bottom panel, dated 'may 2025', reverses the situation entirely. The older man, 'Google', is now standing upright and pointing a silver revolver at his aggressor with the caption, 'But not for me!'. This meme humorously illustrates a perceived shift in the AI industry's power dynamic. It reflects the narrative that while OpenAI held a dominant, threatening position over Google in 2024, a dramatic turnaround is anticipated by 2025, with Google re-emerging as the dominant force. For senior engineers, it's a cynical but relatable take on the volatile nature of tech leadership and the high-stakes competition driving AI development
Comments
17Comment deleted
Google's transition from 'We have a moat' to 'Call an ambulance, but not for me' is the most aggressive product pivot we've seen since they killed another chat app
Apparently Google spent 2024 quietly pre-warming its TPU cluster - 2025 was just the cold-start callback
After years of 'Google it' becoming synonymous with search, watching them scramble to catch OpenAI in AI was like watching IBM discover they forgot to invent the PC. But if history teaches us anything, it's that Google's graveyard of products exists because they're really good at killing things - sometimes even the competition
Ah yes, May 2024: when Google was frantically rebranding Bard to Gemini while watching GPT-4 eat their lunch. Fast forward to 2025, and suddenly they've got Gemini 2.0 with multimodal capabilities that actually work, Deep Research that doesn't hallucinate your entire codebase into existence, and enough compute to make OpenAI's API bills look like a rounding error. Classic Big Tech move: lose the sprint, win the marathon by simply outspending everyone on TPUs until the problem goes away. Meanwhile, us senior engineers are just here maintaining the same CRUD app regardless of which LLM autocompletes our boilerplate
Every May the ambulance flips sides, so we built a provider-agnostic AI gateway - now the only thing getting shot is our eval suite’s credibility and Finance’s token budget
OpenAI disrupted with transformers; Google's quietly weaponizing two decades of search data and TPUs for the kill shot
Reminder: in AI, the hardest problem isn’t training - it’s distribution; flip a Chrome flag in May ’25 and the “ambulance” becomes everyone else’s deprecation notice
Can someone tell me what it is about? I'm live under a rock. Comment deleted
The last Google IO conference, they announced a lot of new AI applications. Many many things, here a resume in 32 minutes because I don't know where to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDVpI23q8Zg Comment deleted
Anything important too or... Comment deleted
For devs, Jules (https://jules.google) . Is an asynchronous coding agent: You give it a GitHub repo and clones it in a Google Cloud VM, so you give it tasks and it does its job without supervision. But the presentation was full of new things, new models for specific tasks (programming, video, audio, etc), in Android, in Android XR (glasses, etc), in Chrome, etc. Comment deleted
So just AI AI AI AI? My excitement for language models has died down at this point and I never liked image models, don't get me started on video Comment deleted
Your thoughts on this one? Comment deleted
Here is a better Comment deleted
Like in R&M Comment deleted
Reddit/Lemmy artist luddites are pissing themselves rn, and I'm all for it. They are useless purists that only know how to draw horse futanari or whatever Comment deleted
@itsTyrion so what do you think? 🌚️️ Comment deleted