Comment by losvedir
5 hours ago
I still think Google is the only one who has a shot of coming out of this on top. Open AI and Anthropic's whole existence is predicated on some sort of moat, which I don't really see them having long term. They've got a bit of a headstart, but that's it.
Conversely, AI is just a means to an end for Google - they don't need for their model to be the one to succeed. But, in contrast to the other major company in their position Apple, they do have a model, so they're not totally beholden to another for AI (like Apple is using Gemini!).
But beyond that, for training the model they have YouTube, and of course they have their crawler and index, and the billions of users.
I think HN skews coding agent focused, but that's not really a market for Google. I expect we will have coding specific models in the future, but Google wants a more general intelligence, to handle search queries, be able to connect email to chat to calendar and tasks, and so on. I don't find Gemini that much worse than the other big models for non-coding things.
I read Google's business incentive as "in it to not lose". AI is a new consumer endpoint and Google currently captures a lot of the endpoints.
> I think HN skews coding agent focused
100% this. Coding agents are an interesting test ground, but the people who care about them are a fairly small bubble.
I think they carry some of the overall AI weight because of the "what if you can vibe code your entire business" moonshot, but that's still orders of magnitude away and who knows if today's coding agents will actually be a stepping stone to that. If we ever get there it will likely be with entirely new domain languages.
Agreed:)