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.
Their hardware is nowhere near Nvidia, hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
I think the SpaceX deal was to goose the IPO. Google holds a significant stake in SpaceX, and made a fortune on the IPO.
Anthropic is paying even more to a direct competitor that now fields a model that trades blows with their Opus.
I'll eat my hat if SpaceXAI manages to produce something even close to leading edge again
Why lol? Because you don't like Elon? XAI has continued to stay within a few months of leading edge, and now suddenly they'll just never do it again, despite doing it literally today?
Culture. XAI employs were bragging about spending all weekend at the office. Many tweet that they have been fired after 8 months. Some get fired right before their first big stock vest.
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
I'm not talking about Anthropic.
> hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.