Comment by benreesman
6 days ago
Google will win the LLM game if the LLM game is about compute, which is the common wisdom and maybe true, but not foreordained by God. There's an argument that if compute was the dominant term that Google would never have been anything but leading by a lot.
Personally right now I see one clear leader and one group going 0-99 like a five sigma cosmic ray: Anthropic and the PRC. But this is because I believe/know that all the benchmarks are gamed as hell, its like asking if a movie star had cosmetic surgery. On quality, Opus 4 is 15x the cost and sold out / backordered. Qwen 3 is arguably in next place.
In both of those cases, extreme quality expert labeling at scale (assisted by the tool) seems to be the secret sauce.
Which is how it would play out if history is any guide: when compute as a scaling lever starts to flatten, you expert label like its 1987 and claim its compute and algorithms until the government wises up and stops treating your success persobally as a national security priority. It's the easiest trillion Xi Xianping ever made: pretending to think LLMs are AGI too, fast following for pennies on the dollar, and propping up a stock market bubble to go with the fentanyl crisis? 9-D chess. It's what I would do about AI if I were China.
Time will tell.
I believe Google might win the LLM game simply because they have the infrastructure to make it profitable - via ads.
All the LLM vendors are going to have to cope with the fact that they're lighting money on fire, and Google have the paying customers (advertisers) and with the user-specific context they get from their LLM products, one of the juciest and most targetable ad audiences of all time.
This is one of the best insights after reading 100+ posts here. You are talking about existing demand and existing relationships from their advert business. These customers are happy with Google results. The Google marketing team will be carefully defining new advert products that employ LLMs.
I would only offer one disagreement with your post: There will not be a single winner in LLMs. The landscape is so large that we will have multiple winners in different areas. Example: Google might fail in B2C LLM (chatbot that answers your questions), but will certainly be (wildly?) successful in B2B for adverts.
Everyone seems to forget about Mu Zero which was arguably more important than transformer architecture.