How is Anthropic, OpenAI and xAi going to compete against the likes of Google that can spend $200 billion a year? It’s an impossible war and all these investors are throwing their money into a bottomless insatiable pit of money.
Until the funding stops for one reason or another and then everyone loses all their money at once like a star that collapses into a black hole singularity in a femtosecond.
As someone who thought Google+ doomed facebook, because of Gmail accounts and everyone with Google as their homepage already, I learned not to overestimate Google’s abilities.
How in the world would you have thought that? Genuinely curious.
It was obviously DOA and waaaayyy outside G'scompetence.
1. Google had recently exploited their home page to push chrome browser successfully altering the browser market. They pushed anyone visiting Google to chrome with a popup on the home page. The same opportunity was there for G+, but with updates from friends.
2. Everyone already had a Google account and many millennials were using Google Talk at the time. It appeared Google could undermine the network effects.
3. The UI of G+ appeared better
4. Facebook had released the newsfeed otherwise known as ‘stalker mode’ at the time and people recoiled at the idea of broadcasting their every action to every acquaintance. The circles idea was a way of providing both privacy and the ability to broadcast widely when needed.
5. Google had tons of money and devoted their world class highly paid genius employees to building a social network.
You can see parallels to each of these in AI now. Their pre existing index of all the world’s information, their existing search engine that you can easily pop an LLM in, the huge lead in cash, etc. They are in a great position but don’t underestimate their ability to waste it.
I'm with you on this. I've been an early paid Antigravity IDE user. Their recent silent rug pull on quotas, where without any warning you get rate-limited for 5 days in the middle of code refactoring, enrages users, not simply making them unsatisfied with the product. It actually makes you hate the evil company.
So is Gemini tbh. It's the only agent I've used that gets itself stuck in ridiculous loops repeating "ok. I'm done. I'm ready to commit the changes. There are no bugs. I'm done."
Google somehow manages to fumble the easiest layups. I think Anthropic et al have a real chance here.
Google's product management and discipline are absolute horsesh*t. But they have a moat and its extreme technical competence. They own their infra from the hardware (custom ASICs, their own data centers, global intranet, etc.) all the way up to the models and product platforms to deploy it in. To the extent that making LLMs work to solve real world problems is a technical problem, landing Gemini is absolutely in Google's wheelhouse.
without modern product moat, legacy products and infrastructure is useless. It's like Microsoft saying I have excel, Azure and CoPilot.
You are stating generalities when more specific information is easily available.
Google has AI infrastructure that it has created itself as well as competitive models, demonstrating technical competence in not-legacy-at-all areas, plus a track record of technical excellence in many areas both practical and research-heavy. So yes, technical competence is definitely an advantage for Google.
Hard to bet against Hassabis + Google's resources. This is in their wheelhouse, and it's eating their search business and refactoring their cloud business. G+ seemed like a way to get more people to Google for login and tracking.
> it's eating their search business
Fact not in evidence. Google's search and advertising revenue continues to grow.
Indeed. The stupid AI on Google’s search page is so bad, I really wonder why the released it publicly.
Makes CoPilot look like something from a Sci-Fi movie.
A couple months ago things were different. Try their stronger models. Gemini recently saved me from a needle in a haystack problem with buildpacks and Linux dependencies for a 14-year-old B2B SaaS app that I was solving a major problem for, and Gemini figured out the solution quickly after I worked on it for hours with Claude Code. I know it's just one story where Gemini won, and I have really enjoyed using Claude Code, but Google is having some success with the serious effort they're putting into this fight.
I think they had no choice but to release that AI before it was ready for prime time. Their search traffic started dropping after ChatGPT came out, and they risked not looking like a serious player in AI.
They recently replaced “define: word” (or “word meaning”) results with an “ai summary” and it’s decidedly worse. It used to just give you the definition(s) and synonyms for each one. Now it gives some rambling paragraphs.
Maybe it's incentive is to 'close the ticket' as fast as possible.
Interesting that you consider the most cutting edge technology in the category to be "the easiest layups".
I think they've been gaming benchmarks.
I use Claude every day. I cannot get Gemini to do anything useful, at all. Every time I've tried to use it, it has just failed to do what was required.
Three subthreads up you have someone saying gemini did what claude couldn't for them on some 14 year old legacy code issue. Seems you can't really use peoples prior success with their problem as an estimate of what your success will be like with your problem and a tool.
I thought it was a far superior UI to facebook when it launched. I tried to use it but the gravity of the network effect was too strong on facebook's side.
In the end I'd rather if both had failed. Although one can argue that they actually did. But that's another story.
I very much wanted Google Plus to succeed. Circles was a great idea in my opinion. Google Plus profiles could be the personal home page for the rest of us but of course, Google being Google...
That being said, tying bonuses for the whole company on the success of Google+ was too much even for me.
I very much wanted Google Wave to succeed. It seemed like a really cool way to communicate.
I guess we sort of got it with Slack though
Everything was obviously DOA after it dies. I also thought it wouldn't last but it wouldn't be the first or last tech company initiative that lived on long after people thought it would die. Weird things happen. "Obviously" isn't a good filter.
Google+ had an exclusive club appeal at launch because it wasn't instantly globally accessible, but slowly opened up instead.
It became clear they where desperate about user numbers when thay forced the merge of Youtube accounts. Or something like that.
Facebook was the same way when it started.
It was a little different. Facebook was eventually (after harvard only) wide open for college email holders so it wasn't some exclusive club that kept people you want to be in their out. It kept your parents out though and your lame younger sibling. You could immediately use it with your friends. No invite nonsense like with g+.
Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though? All those giants have their own business that are established and profitable.
It’s the new kids in the block that will make the difference.
You know those lists on twitter about how many companies US has in top 10 and are presented as a win? Those are actually lists of capital concentrations blocking innovation. It looks like US is winning but for some reason life is better in EU and innovation is faster in China.
It’s companies like OpenAI Anthropic that will move US ahead. Even if some core innovation or and capital comes from the establishment.
> Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though?
The GP was talking about Google specifically, and their outcomes on AI are nothing to scoff at. They had a rocky late start, but they seem to have gotten over that. Their models are now very much competitive with the startups. And it's not just that have more money to spend. They probably have more training data than anyone in the world, and they also have more infrastructure, more manpower, more of a global footprint than the startups.
The Innovator's Dilemma is an anecdotal, maybe a statistical relationship at best, but not a fundamental law of nature. When an established company has everything it should take to become a leader in a new industry in theory, and in practice their products are already on par with the industry leaders, you know at some point it becomes rational to think that maybe they might become a leader.
Google didn’t have a late start, they invented the tech, had bespoke hardware in place that supported it and have money to spend.
I don’t have any idea what comes next but Google and Microsoft look bad right now because they can’t execute a product strategy.
My personal bias is that either ms or Google or both will land just fine after it all shakes out but they started with a lead and are now playing catch up.
they did have a late start in terms of productionizing the models. It's definitely improved but there was a time where Gemini and the associated tools werent as good as claude/oai
Sometimes I worry about the incentives for innovation in the US.
Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors. Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product. Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.
End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.
Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.
This is what I struggled with after grad school. You have so many decent ideas. So many people you know in the domain also with their own good ideas. Everyone looking for their next gig. It could all be so easy to get a couple people together and start building. But, alas, money, that must come from people who expect more money back before long, which severely limits the scope of ideas that will get investor funding. No moonshots, no sci fi future, just same old looking for low hanging arbitrage or rent seeking opportunities. Kinda sad when you realize that is pretty much all private tech investment because funding is driven by investors ultimately, and not scientists like what you see on grant review panels for basic research. Money must make more money, which again limits severely what money can do.
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I wonder what makes EU so wealthy to just buy stuff everywhere - maybe it's the export of high-end technologies inaccessible to US and China?
Having someone else pay for your national defense for 80 years sure doesn’t hurt.
The EU is no way share or form in a good economic position right now. That's why euro leaders have been kowtowing to Trump despite him being a deranged lunatic.
Delete all American software, American defense, American energy, and Chinese hardware from the EU tomorrow. That's the deep-seated unease that keeps EU leaders up at night. Europe needs to be doing 3-4% GDP growth annually and have a globally competitive top to bottom tech an defense industry, and it needs that years ago.
The problem is that the EU needs to become more like the US to do this, and for people who grew up under the protective overhang of the soviet collapse, this is mostly unthinkable. Just like the US not bankrolling half of Ukraine's defense would be unthinkable...
> Just like the US not bankrolling half of Ukraine's defense would be unthinkable...
This is outdated. Look at page 4 of this report for instance: https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/europe-steps-up-ukr...
Their data is not perfect as they rely on public sources, and some governments are more transparent than others, but the reality is that US funding all but vanished in 2025.
Back to the topic, there is also a pattern of promising European startups being bought by wealthy USA incumbent companies. This is also happening to established compagnies: see ARM, Alstom Power, etc. As Europe de-couples from the USA in the current context, I suspect (and hope) that such acquisitions will come under more regulatory scrutiny.
This is a common US position, but doesn't actually reflect reality.
The EU and the UK took over aiding Ukraine almost completely in 2025 [1]. So not as unthinkable as you'd think.
> That's why euro leaders have been kowtowing to Trump despite him being a deranged lunatic.
Less to do with economy, more with security. Europe still needs a credible deterrent against Russia, and the US is still its best bet.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fl...
> "Get bankrolled by the state at the state's discretion until they get what they want, even if they need to burn $1B to get $1M of value"
If that's how it worked, they wouldn't lead in anything, they'd be bankrupt already. They burn state money like VCs burn cash. DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc., disprove your point.
Look into how their 5 year plans have lead to capital investment with almost zero feedback. A heavily bureaucratic system of bureaucrats incentivized to spend massively to boost their own appearance, and cover up losses/inefficiencies.
Ghost cities, empty high speed rail lines, solar cells being mass produced at a loss.
All these things also produced end products the state wanted, no doubt. But the capital allocation strategy is basically a "throw all the money the leader gives in that direction until the leader says stop".
Is there a lot of wasted capital? Sure but a lot of it still produces outcomes.
> A heavily bureaucratic system of bureaucrats incentivized to spend massively to boost their own appearance, and cover up losses/inefficiencies.
In China, if you want to move up politically, you generally need to show results, meaning the province or area you govern is expected to deliver measurable performance (even if politics and connections still matter too). In that sense, you could argue it's more performance driven in some respects than the US.
EVs and solar were clear priorities, and China has been very successful at scaling both and driving costs down. Domestic competition has been so intense (especially in EVs) that margins have gotten extremely thin, and officials have recently signaled they want to curb "irrational" price wars.
> Ghost cities
Sure, some exist, but many of the developments that were circulated online years ago have filled in over time. That said, there's no question a lot of projects stalled or collapsed during the property downturn, especially after China Evergrande and other developers ran into trouble.
> empty high speed rail lines,
I can't speak to every route, but overall the high speed rail network is heavily used. When I traveled in China, it was excellent and extremely extensive. Some lines and stations likely see weaker demand than others, but the idea that it's broadly "empty" doesn't match reality.
> solar cells being mass produced at a loss
With overcapacity and price wars, many firms have faced serious margin pressure and losses though that doesn't mean every producer is losing money on every panel.
In the end, the real question is whether the capital allocation is efficient enough for citizens to benefit and for the country to remain competitive. Empirically, the answer looks closer to yes in industry and infrastructure, while real estate has been a major exception, with real costs and inefficiencies.
> Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though? All those giants have their own business that are established and profitable.
Ah! Well, if we put aside "The Innovator's Dilemma" and pick up Reis and Trout's "marketing Warfare," we get the answer. Apple does have an existing business, but investing in AI does not cannibalize it. They can throw money at it, try to find a way to make it work really, really well for consumers on very specific custom hardware in their devices...
Likewise, someone like Google has all the money in the world to throw at it, but they aren't investing in a new market, they're defending their search business against everyone just asking a generative AI Chatbot questions. I\But it's possible for them to screw this up internally over turf wards, just ask the engineers who tried to make search better but were kneecapped by Prabhakar Raghavan who demanded that search be poor enough to drive people to click sponsored results.
In the "Marketing Warfare" model, Apple is attempting a flanking attack: An outsider trying to disrupt the AI giants with an approach that they can't imitate without undermining their value proposition. On-device AI flanks the big giants that areservcie-centric.
And in that model, Google is playing defence, which is what every leader is supposed to do. Their job is to "cover every move," which they are doing in textbook fashion. If AI goes away, Google dry their tears and continue to mine ad revenue.
I'm very curious if they're going to ditch Google by providing on-device search. A monthly Open Crawl is under 100 terabytes, and if you clean that down to raw text and deduplicate and maybe pick out what you don't care about, the dataset might already fit onto my iPhone. They could do a lot without making a network call and reach out to a server for anything the device doesn't have, but a lot of user queries might never need to leave the phone. In another couple years, storage will be even higher.
I was hopeful for on-device AI too but any AI processing so far sucks up the battery, heats up the phone and most importantly isn't even nearly good enough. Without a breakthrough in battery, chips or the models and algorithms the way forward is thin clients that connect to some servers close to a solar farm or nuclear energy plant.
> On-device AI flanks the big giants that areservcie-centric.
Wouldn't on-device AI also support Google's position? If search is to be protected, on-device AI (small models) would be capable of basic usage, but inept at answering knowledge questions specifically, necessitating a search service be preserved. They have already launched local models in Chrome and Android. Meanwhile none of the big AI competition can profit off of local models, so this is a unique opportunity for big-G.
That said, I disagree with the premise you propose. It's 2026, and about 40% of their revenue over the last few years comes from non-search products (depending on quarter). Oh and Apple doesn't seem to be investing enough in AI products, because it's just making them look bad, not providing a "flanking attack".
Google is pulling in tons of AI revenue - from subscriptions, personal and enterprise, and Google Cloud (APIs etc). Cloud is seeing a ton of growth lately, and I'm sure that's largely from AI services that are uniquely available there. As long as they can serve models with a better cost structure (thanks TPUs) they can squeeze out better margins than their competitions.
+1 for mentioning Christensen & Trout and Reis.
Kind of funny you say it is capital concentration that blocks innovation then praise anthropic, when we are in a thread about them concentrating capital. And not only have these companies concentrated capital, and mindshare in the mass media, they have concentrated talent.
You have to wonder how often they hire talent just to keep them out of the market for other upstart companies to potentially use, like with no actual objective just to keep them off market. With half trillion valuation there's plenty of money for that, and given how few people actually know the really deep stuff competently, it would be so stupid of them not to be doing that right now.
No need to be pedantic about it, obviously you need capital concentration to do stuff. The difference is what this stuff is, in Apple and Google's case its even more from the same but for Anthropic its this new thing.
The gist is, world beating(in profit and market cap terms) tech giants who made their money with innovation are now just the roadblocks to innovation. If succeeds, Anthropic will eventually be like that but until then Anthropic is the innovator. The contemporary US is able to concentrate wealth but not able to turn it into innovation or life quality improvements as efficiently as EU or China, since they are getting better outcomes with less. So it is a systematic issue.
>The contemporary US is able to concentrate wealth but not able to turn it into innovation or life quality improvements as efficiently as EU or China, since they are getting better outcomes with less.
This is a really interesting thought. I wonder why this is, fundamentally? You'd think people are people and the elite here would be much like the elite in europe or china. Maybe in china there is some sense of pride or competition among the elite for uplifting the populace these days? Kind of like when vanderbilt, carnegie, and rockefeller felt compelled to invest into things like colleges and other civic institutions to build up their personal clout. Seems here the main drive is to squeeze our population for what little it has left in its pocket vs actually improve standards of living or anything like that. Standard of living when you remove the internet (which arguably doesn't even contribute to standard of living as it is used for mindless leisure by most), is basically the same as it has been in the US since about the 70s or even a little earlier. Arguably worse considering the bog standard two kid, two car, four bed nuclear home setup is increasingly unaffordable in more places across the country.
My guess is that US KPI's are about concentrating even more wealth when in China and EU they aim to improve other measures on societal level.
Obviously a US individual with control over large wealth concentration can choose to do something else with it, i.e. Elon Musk choose to fight trans people or Peter Thiel choose to fight nations states. In China and EU, wealth is more communal therefore those who have control over it can buy a yacht and a mansion but can't choose to dismantle nation states to start new forms of government therefore the regime change is separate thing from use of the resources therefore resources are used to in a more communal mindset which itself can be slow on innovation when no obvious pressing needs or can be inefficient when the communities can't agree on a vision.
In Europe you do the regime change through political means and violence, check out how many regime changes occurred in Europe in the last 100 years and how many politicians were toppled/imprisoned or killed.
It just that life flows differently, not necessarily one is superior to another IMHO. They all have strong sides and weaknesses and US is currently facing its weaknesses after a long period of strength and this is happening because some people won the game and its very hard to restart the game in the American system since the winners can be colossal and as a result immovable.
> What are the outcomes though?
NVIDIA, and contractors who build data centers, and manufacturers who supply them, will all get rich.
The new kids have an easier time focusing. the big kids can integrate AI with their existing products and user data
In the long term, big kids win no? The big kids are also going to have an easier time with hardware at scale too
"but for some reason life is better in EU" citation needed
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It's telling that the measure of quality of life you use in this comment is entirely materialistic in nature. I also challenge the idea that US provides 'access to better medical care', as it is pretty well documented that Americans spend more for lower quality care compared to similar developed countries.
I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top - insatiable desire for wealth and a lack of values-based principals. Ironically US companies are the first to tout their 'values' in the workplace.
> I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top
What top are you referring to?
We're in a thread about a US company announcing its new $30B fundraise from a group of elite US growth investment funds arguing about whether this company will be able to overthrow the $4T US tech behemoth and suggesting that all the other US tech behemoths are actually stifling progress.
Seems like you’re in a thread about people’s quality of life and talking about giant mega corps’ big money. Has it been trickling down yet?
If you are in the bottom 30% of earners, the EU is better.
If you are in the top 30% of earners, the US is better.
And the top 1% get to have fun on a private island.
> bigger cars
I gotta say, I found this one especially funny as I currently don't have a car and that's actually my biggest luxury: being able to go around without one and no spending time in commute.
> more food
Yeah, so I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but as a European who visited the US, your food is definitely not something I would use as an example of your QoL.
You went to the wrong parts and ate the wrong things.
I used to live in Paris for a spell and the food here in San Francisco is better. California has some of the freshest and best local produce in the world. If you eat at real restaurants (not McD), and intentionally buy fresh food (which is available at normal grocery stores too) then you're getting great quality food. I think there is much better access to a variety of foods, of suitably high quality, and the variety of cuisines at restaurants is laughably incomparable. The prices are definitely higher, but the median income in SF is significantly higher, so I think it may still be a smaller % of salary for most people.
For some reason people associate fast food and junk as "American" and then extrapolate that as what typical American diet is. Maybe there are parts of the US that are much poorer and with worse access to food distribution, but I'd assume that rural and impoverished Europe is the same.
In the current age everyone can eat everything everywhere, apparently there are even people who fly their bread everyday from France to New York. So when we talk about food in some place, its usually about the general practices and not the possibilities.
For example the food in London is shitty even if you can find some of the best restaurants there. The problem with London is that you can't fit those restaurants into your daily routine, the default is a sad meal deal from Tesco or something.
Yes and unlike London, the default in many parts of America are great.
To your last point, the answer is probably much different in China
I have a friend who needs a medication that costs more than 30,000$ a year. Here in Canada it is 100% covered by our government health insurance regime. In the USA he would be bankrupt (or dead).
Here in Canada if I have an accident i do not have to worry about being bankrupt if the ambulance brings me to the wrong hospital.
I am really not enthusiastic about the so-called superior quality of life some US-ians like to boast about.
> In the USA he would be bankrupt (or dead)
Why? I live in the US. I have the best healthcare coverage in the world. I pay absolutely nothing for it, ever. No matter the cost. And I have access tot he best doctors, innovations, and technology in the world.
Tell me again why your friend would be dead? It sounds like you really have a poor understanding of American health care.
I suppose you work... and have an employer who pays for your extraordinary insurance?
>As measured by prosperity life in the US is better; the poorest US state has a higher GDP per capita than most western European countries.
GDP per capita/prosperity is a poor proxy for quality of life. The US is lagging most of the developed world in most quality of life metrics, even as reported by US news outlets, which don't rank the US in even the top 20: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...
>Americans have bigger houses, more food, bigger cars,
The size of one's house or car is at best weakly-correlated with quality of life. I would rather not own a car at all and be able to walk everywhere, rather than spend hours of my life commuting in a gigantic SUV.
>bigger salaries, and access to better medical care and schools if they've got an okay job.
The US ranks the lowest in the developed world for life expectancy, and among the highest in obesity globally (obesity being a major determinant of health). The US remains the only developed country where an unlucky dice roll (e.g. genetic-linked cancer) will bankrupt you and destroy the livelihoods of your children.
This is not the flex you think it is.
Keep in mind there are two Americas, a wealthy one and a not wealthy one; someone posting on HN is likely in the former bucket, and not juggling a retail job and doing Uber on the side while being unable to afford healthcare.
I'm not sure even wealthy America is better off. They might have their $3M mansion in a nice town but it will still have no sidewalks, be 2 miles from school, and an hour from major city center.
I don't know where you've gotten the idea that wealthy Americans spending $3M on their homes can't have sidewalks or live near major city centers. It's a big country, so there's lots of places that don't have sidewalks or aren't near a city. But any wealthy American who wants those things can easily get them without making compromises.
(The school thing I'll grant you, although in a car-centric country a school 2 miles away often takes like 5 minutes to get to.)
Google fucks up 90% of their products, why do you think Gemini is in the 10%?
well, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done.
Look to GCP as an example. It had to be done, with similar competitive dynamics, it was done very well.
Look to Android as another.
You must not know the stories of why GCP came to be.
It was an idea from the creators of Kubernetes and the execs at Google fought it the whole way
I hadn't heard that, that's interesting. Any sources you'd recommend to hear more about it?
I think it's a slightly different point though. What I'm saying isn't about where the idea came from or whether it was part of some precient top down bet / strategy from the very beginning.
It's more where did the strategy evolve to (and why) and did they mess it up. GCP and Android are good examples of where it at a minimum became obvious over time that these were massively important if not existential projects and Google executed incredibly well.
My point is just that there's therefore good reason to expect the same of LLMs. After all the origin story of the strategy there has a similar twist. Famously Google had been significantly involved in early LLM/transformer research, not done much with the tech, faltered as they started to integrate it, course corrected, and as of now have ended up in a very strong position.
> well, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done.
I've yet to see anything that threatens Google's ad monopoly.
The threat to Google is that browsers themselves get displaced.
I mean I guess this is classic disruption theory.
It's not that a dominant position goes away overnight. In fact that would be precisely the impetus to spur the incumbent to pivot immediately and have a much better chance of winning in the new paradigm.
It's that it, with some probability, gets eaten away slowly and the incumbent therefore cannot let go of the old paradigm, eventually losing their dominance over some period of years.
So nobody really knows how LLMs will change the search paradigm and the ads business models downstream of that, we're seeing that worked out in real time right now, but it's definitely high enough probability that Google see it and (crucially) have the shareholder mandate to act on it.
That's the existential threat and they're navigating it pretty well so far. The strategy seems balanced, measured, and correct. As the situation evolves I think they have every chance of actually not being disrupted should it come to that.
Because Google has the money to build 10 different versions/iterations of Gemini and can essentially force one to work. They have most people's data and most people use them for mail/search/browser/maps as well.
In my opinion though this is a race to the bottom rather than a winner takes all situation so I don't think anyone is coming out ahead once the dust settles.
Google built ten different chat products, how did that go?
Does it matter? Microsoft won by default with Teams because it actually turns out no one cares about chat or even has a choice in it: employees use whatever the company picks.
No one uses Teams for personal use. LLMs are used daily for personal use by hundreds of millions of people at this point.
It's bundled with office and no serious business can live without excel.
The world, other than the US, runs on WhatsApp. Business, support and payments are done there. So people do care.
If you're going to say "other than the US" then you've got to say at a minimum "other than the US and China", but really "other than the US and China and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Thailand and Russia and most of Central Asia".
Only mentioning the US is wildly americentric even by HN standards.
Gosh doesn't that sound familiar.
This was the same argument made for Google Wave and Google+ and both completely tanked
The tech behind wave eventually made its way into Google docs though and pioneered collaborative document editing, so wasn't a complete failure even though the product itself was killed.
No comment on Google+, Google has a storied history of failure on any kind of social media/chat type products.
Where Google wins is just simply having enough money to outlive anyone else. As the saying goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" In this case, Google is the market and they can just keep throwing money at the wall until OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. go under.
Google Docs has no features remotely like what Google Wave was.
And there was collaborative editing long before Google Wave.
Social media has strong network effects that keeps competitors at bay. What network effects are OpenAI/Anthropic/etc accumulating?
Yes, but Gemini is actually good and so are their APIs.
Agree. Look at how miserably MSFT has failed at integrating AI tastefully in their business.
Google makes money selling ads. Nothing else matters.
They target those ads by ingesting as many signals as possible from as many input devices & sensors as they can possibly convince people to use. They make a lot of money from advertising b/c they have managed to convince the most number of people to give them as many behavioral signals as possible & they will continue to do so. They kill products only when the signal is not valuable enough to improve their advertising business but that's clearly not the case w/ AI.
Google has barely released a successful product in 20 years.
Depend on the definition of the "product". For example some banal cloud storage in which everyone competes. And it's an "old" product, despite being invisibly improved behind the scenes, just like at any other provider. Google has pretty competitive storage AND they are fully abusing Android integration for AND they have pretty good bundling of that storage with other products, including, you've guessed it - LLM Gemini. So say a person is not a professional user of LLMs like a developer burning tokens in a dozen accounts simultaneously. A person has a phone and eventually memory runs out, so he buys a one click Google storage for 4 bucks. And suddenly he has Gemini Pro included too. So why pay 20 bucks to Anthropic, when Google costs 1/5 of that AND has other stuff bundled too?
So maybe Google is lagging on truly new products (btw, does Gemini itself with its TPUs count as a new product? I'd say yes), but "old" products are entrenched enough to carry them and compete.
Google Drive is easily the worst of the desktop cloud storage options. It’s okay for Google Docs but not other files if that’s what you’re talking about..
In a world where OneDrive exists?
I get 2TB (which I use) and AI Studio for $20, that's the best deal out there for me.
Which one would you say is the best?
Google is good at buying existing products and scaling them, which is exactly what they did with DeepMind.
Deepmind was their worst acquisition ever. It is a vanity project that burns cash.
Google Cloud is good and successful. Except they can't implement billing hard caps, or pretend they can't.
Im not sure what you consider successful. They've been struggling to get market share vs azure, and the product isnt that good. lots of rough edges, and piss poor support
Neither does AWS and you can argue they aren't good but they're objectively successful, so it doesn't seem like a good metric.
Their API business model seems to be hope enough people accidentally go over free tier: $0 for the first 5000 monthly places lookups, $40 per 1000 after that
I thought that the likes of Android, Google Docs, Google Translate, etc. were fairly successful. Chrome and ChromeOS also seem fairly popular too.
A lot of those are getting pretty close to 20 years ago.
This year:
chromeos is 17
android is 18
chrome is 18
google docs is 20
google translate is 20
In retrospect, it is wild how good/successful google was 17-20 years ago!
Few years ago, we had Google Bard, the ancestor of Gemini, which was supposed to be an AI LLM, and when you right-clicked the page, it was a fake page with hardcoded sentences in a .js file...
None of them looks like their original form, none would survive without google’s enormous investment.
Because the product quality doesn't matter if the competition isn't making any money.
google the only ai which invests mixing llm ai with real ai, and it seems work well.
race to the bottom. google in house cheaper inference hardware. anthropic buys it.
Persistence. Google has a lot more endurance then OpenAI does in this game.
The current AI market is going to destroy anyone who's specialized into it compared to having alternative revenue streams to subsidize it.
Does Alphabet/Google have any other significant alternative revenue streams though besides their ad revenue? And won't that decrease significantly the more people use AI tools for research than firing up a google web search? I find myself using Claude more and more doing web research and comparing products/reviews...without getting a single ad served up from Google.
Do they though?
Google does things I hate with their products. But the money printing machine keeps going whrrr faster and faster.
The conclusion Google is engaged in consumer capitalism is wild.
They're engaged in computing research and merely engage in consumer capitalism as a consequence of political and social constraints.
Products are a means to an end not the goal.
OpenAI and Anthropic are product companies and are more likely to fail like most product companies do as they will lack broad and wide depth.
Google has experience in design, implementation, and 24/7 ops with every type of SaaS there is. They can bin LLMs tomorrow and still make bank. Same cannot be said for OAI or Anthropic.
I'm trying paid tier Gemini and it doesn't allow to keep have personal chat history when you disable training on your data, on reload of the page your chat is gone. Even free tier of ChatGPT allows disabling training on your data while allowing to keep such basic functionality.
Some technical advancements are not worth it if you do not respect your users.
Yeah I’m never using a Google product. The sole purpose of their company is to be evil. At least other companies are indifferent.
Google is evil in passive way, like sprawling bureaucracy making you life slowly worse and worse but also doing some stuff to at least some fraction of population. OpenAI and Sam are determined and energetic evil, laser focused on making whole human population jobless and homeless in shortest way possible and not producing anything else of value, no other products. I'd rather prefer the former evil out of the two.
How does their top tier subscription compare in usage limits to the $200/mo Claude usage limits?
Claude has easily the worst and most opaque usage limits in the industry.
Another basic feature that’s missing is sharing a Gemini chat as a link anyone can view.
OpenAI figured this out: it’s awesome marketing when people send each other links to the app with a convenient text box to continue the conversation. It’s viral.
Google meanwhile set this up so that “anyone with the link can view” is actually “anyone with the link and a Google account”.
That’s grade A failure of marketing.
The PM in charge of that decision ought to be walked off a plank.
This doesn't sound right. I just opened a shared link in a fresh incognito window and it works fine.
Try sharing from the Google AI Studio Playground.
E.g.: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
OK. I think you moved the goalposts a fair distance there.
Well there's a good reason that OpenAI partnered up with Microsoft. The calculation is that the established big techs - Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta are all going to be significantly impacted by AI so it's not unreasonable to look at Anthropic at 10% of their market cap as a reasonable value. Would it be worth Apple to bring Anthropic in house? They failed to deliver AI themselves, they know the risks of being dependent on Google. If AI goes far enough it may totally remove Apple's differentiation.
Some of the Big Techs are building their own in house stuff (Meta, Google), but it wouldn't be crazy to see acquisitions by the others, especially if the market cools slightly. And then there's the possibility that these companies mature their revenue streams enough to start actually really throwing off money and paying off the investment.
> they know the risks of being dependent on Google
I wouldn't argue it's that risky. Look at their past entanglements:
1. Google Default Search Bribe - brings in $20B a year for literally doing nothing
2. Google Maps: Google let them build their own custom app using Google's backend, and it worked fine all the way up until Apple chose to exit that arrangement
actually I can't think of any others, but is there an example of Apple getting burned by Google?
Well they have an illegal monopoly over display ads that they defended with a moat of money when FB tried to butt in, so that's an example of them being not great to rely on.
Android.
Because it's Google they can't build products and they only care about benchmarking.
The product they released so far are all half assed experiments.
Gemini 3 Pro is now being beaten by open source models because they can't fix or don't want to fix the problems with the Gemini models being completely useless.
The same for Microsoft.
Microsoft had GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Copilot and both of them are useless to Claude Code and Claude Cowork.
You can have all the money in the world, but nothing is stopping you from building useless garbage.
Claude is clearly the most superior product right now.
Gemini is absurdly expensive for low quality (3000 USD of tokens are not even worth what you get @ Anthropic for 200 USD).
The same can be said about Claude (no or tiny Opus on Pro) vs GPT-5.2 high (5.3-codex if you like terminal bench hacking).
You mean GPT-5.3-Codex is a much better value than Claude Opus for programming ? If yes then I'm very interested as I am using Claude there
I guess it depends on your spending. GPT-5.2 and -5.3-Codex are certainly much cheaper: you get much more from the same $20 sub. When I was using Claude as primary I would daily hit limits and have to wait vs on GPT with more usage it only happened to me once in a few months when I was vibecoding non-stop for a week or two to port my personal Windows tools to Linux with multiple other projects being worked on in parallel.
Anecdotally GPT was also smarter than Claude which prompted my move from Claude in the first place: Gemini and Claude back in October failed to get their own harness PID.
Outside of anecdata I rely on https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding for now.
I really like github copilot.
I also tried open code cli and desktop, but how well copilot is integrated into the ide is a plus for me.
What makes them "useless garbage"?
Work smarter, not harder: find an innovation that makes LLM computation an order of magnitude more efficient. Easier said than done, of course, but vastly more efficient biological systems provide an existence proof that this is possible in principle. DeepSeek already showed how it's possible to get good results with limited resources.
Slight counter point - claude code is basically the only developer tool that ever been happy to pay money for. Getting the entire software industry to give you $200/mo/person is quite the market.
That just means they're basically Adobe. What's their valuation?
> Getting the entire software industry to give you $200/mo/person is quite the market.
Quite the fantasy, you mean.
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> It’s an impossible war and all these investors are throwing their money into a bottomless insatiable pit of money.
Anthropic went from zero to $14 billion in revenue in less than 3 years, growing at 10x per year.
That's what they're investing in.
Also Anthropic seems laser-focused, unlike some of their competitors who are throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
Revenue, but what about profit? Google can be cash positive but I’m not sure Anthropic can be the same.
These companies are operating outside of "normal" economics. They seem to be fed money against all rational valuations because it is a Manhattan project - the US needs to 'beat' the Chinese with this and as such these companies will probably not be allowed to fold.
We're starting to see the nuance come out in what these models are working towards.
* OpenAI - chat that has some character to it.
* Claude - working through thoughts and coding
* Gemini - general reasoning (still blown away by gemini's reasoning, but cannot understand it's inability to tool call - maybe that's been fixed)
it's a race of parallel discoveries sprinting towards commoditization and indistinguishably
any real breakthrough will be instantaneously reverse engineered and replicated
none of the not-googles can win, because there is no win state
Have you ever used anything that is on google cloud console? Or tried not to get randomly ratelimited with a single request to a vertex llm model? They are shooting themselves in the foot for solid 20 years, any of these players can compete with google in this frontier
I had to install the separate gcloud and gsutil utilities and use one to synthesize a login session for the other this week.
Took fully 10 minutes to install from homebrew.
I do not believe in this company.
Google is playing the datacenter game differently because they have their own hardware.
how does any startup beat an incumbent?
When the incumbent shoot themselves in the foot. Google and Microsoft are consultancy driven bureaucracies with abysmal product culture. At best Google will be the one providing the back end, but it’s very unlikely to me they’ll win the end user product space.
I think GP is probably implying that this particular vertical requires obscene amounts of capital to keep up, which makes it really hard for a startup if you’re going up against businesses with giant free cash flow machines.
It’s the same reason Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup early… he realized he just couldn’t beat Google/FB/MSFT long term if it devolved into a money race.
They have the best coding agent around. I would say roughly half the industry no longer writes code by hand and claude is/was the only agent that let me drop my editor all together. That enabler alone is enough signal beyond hype.
Frankly google models and the UIs google designs around their models just aren't as powerful and more training, more data and more compute is no longer tipping the scale. Anthropic did something to make their model better at coding than almost anything else.
And all of this is just what's happening right now. The money being invested is a gamble not on right now... but on the trendline to the future. I agree that the LLMs are overloaded with hype, but the people who compare it to crypto aren't thinking straight. Whether there's over investment or not a paradigm has shifted. Maybe there will be a collapse, but it won't collapse into a singularity. If it collapses at all, a new world will emerge, and that new world will generate more value than all the money currently invested in AI.
Google's only focus isn't on Gemini. Anthropic is do-or-die
Look at Sundar's most recent remarks and tell me Google's isn't only focusing on AI: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/a...
Basically "we have youtube subscribers" is the only thing that isn't all about AI, but even that i'm sure they're trying to figure out how to shoehorn AI into that product
Also Theranos was do-or-die and we know how it ended.
I fail to see what that has to do with this?
Just because something is in do-or-die situation doesn't mean that they have some kind of magical advantage over fat cat. Being in that situation means there is very real possibility of doing "die" part and we have lots of examples of them doing so.
Theranos didn't get out-competed by the fat cat. They defrauded their investors, got caught, the founder went to jail and the company died.
very different; not a relevant comparison
At least xAI now has a revenue generation backer. SpaceX.
Others must pull up their revenue number.
SpaceX makes 16B in revenue per year, with 7B in ebitda (which doesn't account for the cost of rockets)... so assume what, 3B in free cash flow per year? And that's being generous.
That's about what Google creates in free cash every 2 weeks.
SpaceX can also raise their prices for government launches to pretty much anything and still get business, because they are essentially a monopoly.
So why haven't they already?
Google has invested in Anthropic. I don't trust that Google will compete on fair grounds with Anthropic on coding. Their common enemy is OpenAI.
Until a version of Gemini is released that can fix one (1) bug in my codebase, I'm not worried for any of those companies.
The most efficient way Google could spend that money is probably to buy a company and not poke at it too much. I have no confidence that large rich companies can actually innovate beyond buying small innovators or spawning business units and not poking at them much.
They're frenemies. The likes of Google also host Anthropic and OpenAI.
I’d guess they want to outlast OpenAI and then get bought by Apple or Amazon.
Google will buy Anthropic if it comes to it. Google already owns ~30% of anthropic and Anthropic is running on Google hardware.
The same way that Google+ never overtook Facebook
Given the amount money that they are spending for vastly subpar products maybe they need to quadruple their capex
How long is Google going to be able to keep selling search engine ads?
Google also has the most to lose.
just want google to have good web apps again, it's so bad on desktop
Google is invested in Anthropic
Culture.
I mean, you gotta spend the 200B on the right things.
Let's be real.
Google leadership is pathetic.
Sundar "the manager" has presided over an enormous growth of the businesses he was handed. He also presided over the complete collapse of the internal culture. OTOH he may have fired Dianne Green, so that's something. Overall, at best Meh.
Demis ran a startup that burnt cash on vanity projects and continues to burn cash on vanity projects. Gemini is barely open source quality AI, but Google makes it nearly free and has the best distribution on the planet.
Gemini has been a joke since 1.0. No release has hurt Google's brand more. 3.0 was STOA for about 2 days, easily Gemini's best release.
Anthropic and OAI are moving at amazing pace, Google can not keep up at all.
They made a C compiler. Google has no C compiler. Win. /s