Imo the criticisms are more cultural or philosophical than technical, ie the Gemini image search kerfuffle. Clearly Google and Anthropic have a lot of solid people.

Gemini is painfully over censored. It is good at some niche tasks and probably the best commercial vision model though. I think people just don't want to spend time evaluating a model if it's mostly not great.

My opinion is quite simpler: GPT got the 1st mover's advantage from a marketing perspective, and until Google, Anthropic or another proposes something VASTLY revolutionary for the layperson, then it's unlikely they'll "catch up" (which is only a percetion ofc, perhaps a wrong one at that)

LLMs aren't nearly as monetizable (now) as search ads. Very possible that search collapses in the near future alongside the open web, and that whole line of revenue destroyed.

The problem isn't who has the best LLM, but how can you monetize a LLM the way you monetize search. Can you apply keyword auctions on LLMs and then have links? Will that work? We don't know, and I haven't read any concrete study on the issue.