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Comment by remus | Hacker News Reader

I think google is uniquely well placed to make a profitable business out of AI: They make their own TPUs so don't have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to Nvidia, they have a great depth of talent in building models, they've got loads of data they can use for training and they've got a huge existing customer base who can buy their AI offerings.

I don't think any other company has all these ingredients.

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While I don’t disagree that Google is the company you can’t bet against when it comes to AI, saying other companies are done is a stretch. If they have a significant moat then they should be at the top all the time by then which is not the case though.

Agreed, too early to write off others entirely. It'll be interesting to see who comes out the other side of the bubble with a working business.

Anthropic has a fairly significant lead when it comes to enterprise usage and for coding. This seems like a workable business model to me.

I feel this is a tenuous position though. I find it incredibly easy to switch to Gemini CLI when I want a second opinion, or when Claude is down.

The enterprise sales cycle is often quite long, though, and often includes a lot of hurdles around compliance, legal, etc. It would take a fairly sustained loss of edge before a lot of enterprises would switch once they're hooked into a given platform. It's interesting to me that Sonnet 4.5 still edges Gemini 3 on SWE bench. This seems to bode well for the trajectory that Anthropic is on.

ChatGPT's moat is their name and user habit. People who are using it will keep using it. All/most of the products are _good enough_ for the people who already got used to using them, that they arent exploring competitors.

Microsoft has the chance of changing habit the most by virtue of being bundled into business contracts that have companies with policies not allowing any other product in the workplace.

> business contracts that have companies with policies not allowing any other product in the workplace.

Elaborate please. Are you saying that MS is forcing customers to make Copilot the only allowed LLM product?

Not quite, but in effect.

Microsoft has contracts to provide software to companies. Companies have policies that only provided software and ai is allowed. Ipso facto

> ChatGPT's moat is their name and user habit. People who are using it will keep using it. All/most of the products are _good enough_ for the people who already got used to using them, that they arent exploring competitors.

They have a long way to go to become profitable though. Those users will get less sticky when openAI starts upping their pricing/putting ads everywhere/making the product worse to save money/all of the above.

The TPU are a key factor. They are the most mature alternative to Nvidia. Only Google cloud, Azure, and AWS enable you to rent their respective AI chips. Out of those three, google is the only one to have a frontier model. So if they have a real advantage they're not exposed to the financial shenanigans propping up neo clouds like Coreweave.

100% the reason I am long on Google. They can take their time to monetize these new costs.

Even other search competitors have not proven to be a danger to Google. There is nothing stopping that search money coming in.

Making your own stuff is definitely not always economically better. Google has the same supplier cost pressure as Nvidia for DRAM, fabs, etc.

The bear case for Google was always the business side would cannibalize the AI side. AI makes search redundant which kills the golden goose

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