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Comment by SwellJoe

7 hours ago

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.

13 comments

SwellJoe

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richardw  5 hours ago

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.

  • dansquizsoft  4 hours ago

    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.

dansquizsoft  4 hours ago

> 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.

  • SwellJoe  3 hours ago

    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.

theplumber  4 hours ago

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.

  • bigyabai  3 hours ago

    What's AdSense then, chopped liver?

    • theplumber  3 hours ago

      AI is a blackhole and Google search along with Adsense and many other “web” publishing platforms is the big shiny star nearby. Can you feel the wrath of AI?

veber-alex  2 hours ago

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.