I agree with you for the most part. However they have been raising a lot of cash, and to do so they took on a ton of debt.
It's a totally reasonable investment as long as they are within shooting distance of the market leaders, but the more they lag behind (i.e. the longer it takes for them to release their next model on par with industry leaders) the more hurt they're going to be in.
If they can't materialize returns off the tens of billions of dollars they just raised then it will come back to bite them hard.
Luckily they have a ton of options (such as selling compute) but it's still not a great look and the market is going to hammer them given the opportunity.
Strongly disagree. Google (and Apple) need only be near the frontier. Their incredible distribution and integration will propel them far beyond the next marginal billion dollar benchmarkmaxxing.
I'm saying that. But they're falling further behind day by day. Gemini 3.5 Pro is allegedly months behind. If they can't keep up they're going to be left in the dust.
Lol. The average American isn't ponying up $20/mo for the latest and greatest model. Barring major breakthroughs, being months ahead is a race to the bottom of who can burn more money to get 0.1% on a benchmark with no practical relevance.
Their niche is that you get the quality of a Chinese model for the price of an American model.