GCP is by far my preferred cloud. I don't see their competition meeting them on UX, reliability, or performance. They have been investing a lot in enterprise oriented features.
Their AI portfolio has been growing. I was surprised recently by how good the OCR on handwritten text is. Their OpenAI like APIs are already being rolled out.
That being said, I'm also impressed by Microsoft. Of the 3 big players, AWS seems to be the closest to stagnation. What was the last exciting thing they did?
Avoiding conflict with Microsoft/OpenAI might be an excellent bluff-check in a world that wants to monetize, distribute and advertise AI generated content.
If Microsoft/OpenAI succeeds with driving their AI Chatbot as the public interface of the web, neither the kind of ads Google sells on external properties nor some of the core Google properties on which Google sells ads will be relevant anymore. (Youtube will be, and that’s about it.)
The problem Google faces (and probably why it hemmed and hawed until someone else was at their throat with this) is that the same problem faces them if they led the same revolution, and its not as clear how to effectively monetize the AI Chatbot. So, even though it would have left Google still dominant, disrupting the way the web works the way Microsoft/OpenAI now threaten to, would have upset Google’s golden goose with no clear replacement.
I'm no Google fan, but it increasingly feels like HN is trying to justify it's FAANG hate boner with predictions of imminent failure. The reason Google is successful is because they ignored search and focused on greener pastures. Investing further into LLMs at this point would be a money pit with plenty of room to backfire.