Comment by TheGoddessInari
8 hours ago
You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now.
A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
8 hours ago
You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now.
A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
Google is playing a different game. I don't really know what game they're playing, but they're not trying to beat Claude Code. They have coding capabilities and Antigravity, but I'd be surprised if it's much more than an afterthought. They're focusing on efficiency, models at the edge, human interaction, image and video, etc. in ways Anthropic, in particular, is not.
Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.
I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.
If I had to summarise Google’s effort it would be: stay close but let the others burn themselves out. Position for the long game until you see something worth betting the company on.
Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
This is 1000% not their (Google's) aim. The position they are in is due much more to their organisational laziness and incompetence than it is any grand strategy.
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> Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life.
Google wants nothing more than the world to remain stuck in 2000 - 2020 where search was king. Their organisational inertia will fight its AI progress every step of the way and this very well explains why they are not leading the AI pack despite inventing the technology.
I mean, I'm sure there are people within Google who are behaving as though they can keep the dream of the 00s alive in Mountain View, but there's also a whole bunch of people doing work at the frontier in AI. Google has a large lead in hardware, they have the smartest very small models, they have among the most efficient large models (I'd wager their margins on Gemini 3.5 Flash inference are absurd). They have among the best image, video, and audio models, going in every direction (generating, editing, understanding).
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.
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Google seems to become a dead business very soon. Search traffic is being split between AI and social networks and google is bad on both fronts. Its AI proposition is more or less like the Google Plus. Nobody really wants it but they know about it because google pushes it everywhere it can.
What's AdSense then, chopped liver?
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I don't know google's AI strategy but what I can tell from my usage and others around me is that google search usage has declined considerably.
Terms like "Google it" have been completely replace by "Ask AI".
I personally mostly use google to find businesses close to me and to search reddit and wikipedia.
At the same time that they’re seemingly exiting android?
And, yet. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini....
Google at least is serving AI results on SRPs billions of times a day, and has pre-existing expertise in data center buildouts and custom silicon.
They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.
X has grok built in to every post as does every Tesla Car
/s
Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.
> Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.
That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
How does Google make money from that?
> That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.
The big advantage Google has, in my opinion, is Android. I think there is a decent chance that people stop downloading the ChatGPT, Claude, etc. apps if they perceive that the phone just does the same out of the box for free. And I reckon the majority of people will prefer free, ad-ridden AI chat vs. paying subscriptions, at least for personal use. And on the B2B side, they have Workspace deeply embedded in a huge number of companies. So I wouldn't count Google out.
The funny thing about Google is that Google Search is happy to serve LLM labs search results if it drives their metrics up. Just like Google Cloud is happy to sell off compute to OAI an Anthropic to drive up their metrics.
Google also owns 15% of Anthropic and Hassabis, the leader of Deepmind, also is an early angel investor in Anthropic.
When you really break it down, it's not totally clear that Google would even care that much about being the SOTA LLM.
> Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?
Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
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> Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.
Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.
Google's ad revenue has done really well so far in the LLM era, and wasup 12% year over year in 2025, and forecasted to do the same next year.
And that changes, then that's all the more reason for them to be investing in AI.
How is this any different than the browser wars? We use to have a diverse market full of choices, and now we have Chromium (almost all market share) and Firefox/Safari on the edges.
> A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.
This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:
Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.
Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.
No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.
OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.
And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!
"No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product"
As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general.
The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.
Why does Microsoft feel so gross
Google invented the transformer architecture. You really can't say the same about them.
Google Brain invented the transformer.
GDM ... not so much.