Until the funding stops for one reason or another and then everyone loses all their money at once like a star that collapses into a black hole singularity in a femtosecond.
It was obviously DOA and waaaayyy outside G'scompetence.
Google somehow manages to fumble the easiest layups. I think Anthropic et al have a real chance here.
Fact not in evidence. Google's search and advertising revenue continues to grow.
I use Claude every day. I cannot get Gemini to do anything useful, at all. Every time I've tried to use it, it has just failed to do what was required.
So it is reasonable that Claude might show significantly better coding ability for most tasks, but the better general reasoning ability proves useful in coding tasks that are complicated and obscure.
Makes CoPilot look like something from a Sci-Fi movie.
Google has AI infrastructure that it has created itself as well as competitive models, demonstrating technical competence in not-legacy-at-all areas, plus a track record of technical excellence in many areas both practical and research-heavy. So yes, technical competence is definitely an advantage for Google.
In the end I'd rather if both had failed. Although one can argue that they actually did. But that's another story.
That being said, tying bonuses for the whole company on the success of Google+ was too much even for me.
I guess we sort of got it with Slack though
It became clear they where desperate about user numbers when thay forced the merge of Youtube accounts. Or something like that.
2. Everyone already had a Google account and many millennials were using Google Talk at the time. It appeared Google could undermine the network effects.
3. The UI of G+ appeared better
4. Facebook had released the newsfeed otherwise known as ‘stalker mode’ at the time and people recoiled at the idea of broadcasting their every action to every acquaintance. The circles idea was a way of providing both privacy and the ability to broadcast widely when needed.
5. Google had tons of money and devoted their world class highly paid genius employees to building a social network.
You can see parallels to each of these in AI now. Their pre existing index of all the world’s information, their existing search engine that you can easily pop an LLM in, the huge lead in cash, etc. They are in a great position but don’t underestimate their ability to waste it.
not sure about this take, given that chrome‘s rendering engine was famously based on Safari‘s - WebKit - before they forked it (Blink). V8 was indeed faster than Safari‘s JS engine at the time. However, today, Safari is objectively faster in both rendering (WK) and JS performance (JSCore).
EG, their massive failure is why it meant nothing. The potential market was huge.
It’s the new kids in the block that will make the difference.
You know those lists on twitter about how many companies US has in top 10 and are presented as a win? Those are actually lists of capital concentrations blocking innovation. It looks like US is winning but for some reason life is better in EU and innovation is faster in China.
It’s companies like OpenAI Anthropic that will move US ahead. Even if some core innovation or and capital comes from the establishment.
NVIDIA, and contractors who build data centers, and manufacturers who supply them, will all get rich.
Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors. Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product. Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.
End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.
Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.
Giant corporations control everything, even government laws, regulations, and policies. They will buy up any competition, patent themselves toward a moat, squash competition they don't want to buy, etc.
Venture captialism doesn't care about true value or some actual addition to society. It's a giant grift just to make more money from money. They chase every trend and hype train ad nauseum. It was self-driving cars, then cryptocurrencies/blockchain, and now gen AI. The vast majority of these companies have no value to society or long-term innovation.
The government invests in areas, but a huge amount of it goes to the black hole of defense contractors. And academic institutions in the U.S. are incredibly wasteful with money and spend all their time trying to fundraise money at the same time.
Just the entire system is inefficient and effectively broken.
For example, YC announced calls for climate tech a few years ago: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech. Where did that go? I looked up YC companies in the climate space (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026&ba...), and there's only 22 companies out of the several thousand YC companies. So where's the value? Most of the companies aren't hiring and just seem like vaporware. And if you look at the leadership, almost all of them are serial VC/startup people and not actual innovators, experts, or professionals.
The GP was talking about Google specifically, and their outcomes on AI are nothing to scoff at. They had a rocky late start, but they seem to have gotten over that. Their models are now very much competitive with the startups. And it's not just that have more money to spend. They probably have more training data than anyone in the world, and they also have more infrastructure, more manpower, more of a global footprint than the startups.
The Innovator's Dilemma is an anecdotal, maybe a statistical relationship at best, but not a fundamental law of nature. When an established company has everything it should take to become a leader in a new industry in theory, and in practice their products are already on par with the industry leaders, you know at some point it becomes rational to think that maybe they might become a leader.
I don’t have any idea what comes next but Google and Microsoft look bad right now because they can’t execute a product strategy.
My personal bias is that either ms or Google or both will land just fine after it all shakes out but they started with a lead and are now playing catch up.
The models are better, the integrations are now in your email, search, youtube, docs, spreadsheets, slides, Gemini is now higher than ChatGPT in the App Stores
I think you are right with the timeline being Google was infinitely ahead in the beginning, did nothing, then fell behind, but right now, they feel ahead -- established even, and distributing AI into all their products
For technical users it’s very rare to hear people picking Gemini for general use cases unless they are required to for other reasons.
Google models do seem to get used a lot for specialized tasks though.
In the long term, big kids win no? The big kids are also going to have an easier time with hardware at scale too
Ah! Well, if we put aside "The Innovator's Dilemma" and pick up Reis and Trout's "marketing Warfare," we get the answer. Apple does have an existing business, but investing in AI does not cannibalize it. They can throw money at it, try to find a way to make it work really, really well for consumers on very specific custom hardware in their devices...
Likewise, someone like Google has all the money in the world to throw at it, but they aren't investing in a new market, they're defending their search business against everyone just asking a generative AI Chatbot questions. I\But it's possible for them to screw this up internally over turf wards, just ask the engineers who tried to make search better but were kneecapped by Prabhakar Raghavan who demanded that search be poor enough to drive people to click sponsored results.
In the "Marketing Warfare" model, Apple is attempting a flanking attack: An outsider trying to disrupt the AI giants with an approach that they can't imitate without undermining their value proposition. On-device AI flanks the big giants that areservcie-centric.
And in that model, Google is playing defence, which is what every leader is supposed to do. Their job is to "cover every move," which they are doing in textbook fashion. If AI goes away, Google dry their tears and continue to mine ad revenue.
Wouldn't on-device AI also support Google's position? If search is to be protected, on-device AI (small models) would be capable of basic usage, but inept at answering knowledge questions specifically, necessitating a search service be preserved. They have already launched local models in Chrome and Android. Meanwhile none of the big AI competition can profit off of local models, so this is a unique opportunity for big-G.
That said, I disagree with the premise you propose. It's 2026, and about 40% of their revenue over the last few years comes from non-search products (depending on quarter). Oh and Apple doesn't seem to be investing enough in AI products, because it's just making them look bad, not providing a "flanking attack".
Google is pulling in tons of AI revenue - from subscriptions, personal and enterprise, and Google Cloud (APIs etc). Cloud is seeing a ton of growth lately, and I'm sure that's largely from AI services that are uniquely available there. As long as they can serve models with a better cost structure (thanks TPUs) they can squeeze out better margins than their competitions.
It won't rewrite a large code case (although the local coding models can do small functions) but it can do a kid's homework or rewrite an email.
You have to wonder how often they hire talent just to keep them out of the market for other upstart companies to potentially use, like with no actual objective just to keep them off market. With half trillion valuation there's plenty of money for that, and given how few people actually know the really deep stuff competently, it would be so stupid of them not to be doing that right now.
The gist is, world beating(in profit and market cap terms) tech giants who made their money with innovation are now just the roadblocks to innovation. If succeeds, Anthropic will eventually be like that but until then Anthropic is the innovator. The contemporary US is able to concentrate wealth but not able to turn it into innovation or life quality improvements as efficiently as EU or China, since they are getting better outcomes with less. So it is a systematic issue.
This is a really interesting thought. I wonder why this is, fundamentally? You'd think people are people and the elite here would be much like the elite in europe or china. Maybe in china there is some sense of pride or competition among the elite for uplifting the populace these days? Kind of like when vanderbilt, carnegie, and rockefeller felt compelled to invest into things like colleges and other civic institutions to build up their personal clout. Seems here the main drive is to squeeze our population for what little it has left in its pocket vs actually improve standards of living or anything like that. Standard of living when you remove the internet (which arguably doesn't even contribute to standard of living as it is used for mindless leisure by most), is basically the same as it has been in the US since about the 70s or even a little earlier. Arguably worse considering the bog standard two kid, two car, four bed nuclear home setup is increasingly unaffordable in more places across the country.
Obviously a US individual with control over large wealth concentration can choose to do something else with it, i.e. Elon Musk choose to fight trans people or Peter Thiel choose to fight nations states. In China and EU, wealth is more communal therefore those who have control over it can buy a yacht and a mansion but can't choose to dismantle nation states to start new forms of government therefore the regime change is separate thing from use of the resources therefore resources are used to in a more communal mindset which itself can be slow on innovation when no obvious pressing needs or can be inefficient when the communities can't agree on a vision.
In Europe you do the regime change through political means and violence, check out how many regime changes occurred in Europe in the last 100 years and how many politicians were toppled/imprisoned or killed.
It just that life flows differently, not necessarily one is superior to another IMHO. They all have strong sides and weaknesses and US is currently facing its weaknesses after a long period of strength and this is happening because some people won the game and its very hard to restart the game in the American system since the winners can be colossal and as a result immovable.
In my opinion though this is a race to the bottom rather than a winner takes all situation so I don't think anyone is coming out ahead once the dust settles.
No comment on Google+, Google has a storied history of failure on any kind of social media/chat type products.
Where Google wins is just simply having enough money to outlive anyone else. As the saying goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" In this case, Google is the market and they can just keep throwing money at the wall until OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. go under.
And there was collaborative editing long before Google Wave.
Google didnt make it though, they bought a startup which did it and integrated their tech.
Only mentioning the US is wildly americentric even by HN standards.
Google makes money selling ads. Nothing else matters.
chromeos is 17
android is 18
chrome is 18
google docs is 20
google translate is 20
Are you claiming Bard wasn't an LLM???
So maybe Google is lagging on truly new products (btw, does Gemini itself with its TPUs count as a new product? I'd say yes), but "old" products are entrenched enough to carry them and compete.
Google does things I hate with their products. But the money printing machine keeps going whrrr faster and faster.
They're engaged in computing research and merely engage in consumer capitalism as a consequence of political and social constraints.
Products are a means to an end not the goal.
OpenAI and Anthropic are product companies and are more likely to fail like most product companies do as they will lack broad and wide depth.
Google has experience in design, implementation, and 24/7 ops with every type of SaaS there is. They can bin LLMs tomorrow and still make bank. Same cannot be said for OAI or Anthropic.
Look to GCP as an example. It had to be done, with similar competitive dynamics, it was done very well.
Look to Android as another.
I've yet to see anything that threatens Google's ad monopoly.
It's not that a dominant position goes away overnight. In fact that would be precisely the impetus to spur the incumbent to pivot immediately and have a much better chance of winning in the new paradigm.
It's that it, with some probability, gets eaten away slowly and the incumbent therefore cannot let go of the old paradigm, eventually losing their dominance over some period of years.
So nobody really knows how LLMs will change the search paradigm and the ads business models downstream of that, we're seeing that worked out in real time right now, but it's definitely high enough probability that Google see it and (crucially) have the shareholder mandate to act on it.
That's the existential threat and they're navigating it pretty well so far. The strategy seems balanced, measured, and correct. As the situation evolves I think they have every chance of actually not being disrupted should it come to that.
It was an idea from the creators of Kubernetes and the execs at Google fought it the whole way
I think it's a slightly different point though. What I'm saying isn't about where the idea came from or whether it was part of some precient top down bet / strategy from the very beginning.
It's more where did the strategy evolve to (and why) and did they mess it up. GCP and Android are good examples of where it at a minimum became obvious over time that these were massively important if not existential projects and Google executed incredibly well.
My point is just that there's therefore good reason to expect the same of LLMs. After all the origin story of the strategy there has a similar twist. Famously Google had been significantly involved in early LLM/transformer research, not done much with the tech, faltered as they started to integrate it, course corrected, and as of now have ended up in a very strong position.
[I've been there for nearly all the relevant time]
The current AI market is going to destroy anyone who's specialized into it compared to having alternative revenue streams to subsidize it.
Some technical advancements are not worth it if you do not respect your users.
OpenAI figured this out: it’s awesome marketing when people send each other links to the app with a convenient text box to continue the conversation. It’s viral.
Google meanwhile set this up so that “anyone with the link can view” is actually “anyone with the link and a Google account”.
That’s grade A failure of marketing.
The PM in charge of that decision ought to be walked off a plank.
E.g.: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
when logged in, up right, there are these three dots - for me it says: "share conversation" - isnt this what you are looking for?
Some of the Big Techs are building their own in house stuff (Meta, Google), but it wouldn't be crazy to see acquisitions by the others, especially if the market cools slightly. And then there's the possibility that these companies mature their revenue streams enough to start actually really throwing off money and paying off the investment.
I wouldn't argue it's that risky. Look at their past entanglements:
1. Google Default Search Bribe - brings in $20B a year for literally doing nothing
2. Google Maps: Google let them build their own custom app using Google's backend, and it worked fine all the way up until Apple chose to exit that arrangement
actually I can't think of any others, but is there an example of Apple getting burned by Google?
Tim Apple is famous for very few things but
> We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
If AI is as big as we think it will be, Apple thinks they need to own it.
Quite the fantasy, you mean.
The product they released so far are all half assed experiments.
Gemini 3 Pro is now being beaten by open source models because they can't fix or don't want to fix the problems with the Gemini models being completely useless.
The same for Microsoft.
Microsoft had GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Copilot and both of them are useless to Claude Code and Claude Cowork.
You can have all the money in the world, but nothing is stopping you from building useless garbage.
Gemini is absurdly expensive for low quality (3000 USD of tokens are not even worth what you get @ Anthropic for 200 USD).
Anecdotally GPT was also smarter than Claude which prompted my move from Claude in the first place: Gemini and Claude back in October failed to get their own harness PID.
Outside of anecdata I rely on https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding for now.
Its really astonishing how much value it delivers for ~20 USD - I doubt that this will be the case forever, its just "too useful" for only 20 USD
I also tried open code cli and desktop, but how well copilot is integrated into the ide is a plus for me.
What makes them "useless garbage"?
* Higher bitrate
* Ability to rewind
* Able to edit recordings (thumbnails, cutting out dead air etc)
* Much larger userbase
But you know what they fail at? The actual livestream watching UI with chat. There's wasted space, it doesn't darken the rest of it, getting chat on screen with as big of a video window as possible is annoying, the emotes pretty much all suck. And because of that watching on Twitch is a better experience.
Google sometimes fails at the small things. And those small things might be enough for a competitor to build a viable competing product.
You might think that they could easily solve all these problems. Maybe they could, but google.com still isn't equivalent in its mobile and desktop offering in 2026. Eg on desktop page I can select an arbitrary date range to filter results, on mobile I can only select from a preset drop-down at most until 1 year ago.
Could Google fix this? Sure, but I've been waiting for a fix for this for a decade. This isn't something that gave a competitor an edge, but Google being bigger doesn't necessarily mean they get good at the small things.
Compare it with Apple.
There is no comparison, its actually laughable and embarrassing how bad they are at it given the resources the firm has its disposal.
Anthropic went from zero to $14 billion in revenue in less than 3 years, growing at 10x per year.
That's what they're investing in.
Also Anthropic seems laser-focused, unlike some of their competitors who are throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
It took Twitter 10 years before it was profitable [1]. I'd guess that Anthropic will be one of the companies left standing when it's all said and done, assuming nothing catastrophic happens.
Anthropic lost $5.2 billion last year. So they are 40x better at spending investor money than Twitter.
Hard to call Twitter the archetype for Anthropic.
It’s the same reason Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup early… he realized he just couldn’t beat Google/FB/MSFT long term if it devolved into a money race.
Took fully 10 minutes to install from homebrew.
I do not believe in this company.
In reality LLMs have proven to be a commodity. Today OpenAI is ahead, tomorrow Anthropic, the next day Gemini and vice versa. Many others, if Qwen or Deepseek are at it's toes and for the majority of people if used unbranded wouldn't even be discernable in difference. Price will dictate who wins. And that is a commodity product.
An interesting question is whether anthropic's capex needs may grow to the point that they can take down AMZN with them should they fail.
Also, I personally experienced a mishap when Google ML-chat was unable to sync chats between the web and mobile clients. To my embarrassment, it turned out that I was using Gemini on the mobile and AI Studio on the web. How Google managed to create two similar products - I don't know, but it was obviously a tremendous misallocation of resources.
Basically "we have youtube subscribers" is the only thing that isn't all about AI, but even that i'm sure they're trying to figure out how to shoehorn AI into that product
Maybe I'm odd, but a Google search is even rare (usually use duck duck go) so I don't know, Google may have problems on it's hands. Possible anyway.
If nothing else, it means Gemini's team has priorities other than the results. Necessarily that means they will lag behind others who have clearer focus
Then the only way for Google to get ahead is to help promote regulation of AI to do what they're already doing. I know it's coming cuz regulators can't help themselves, but No thanks.
I don't know how profitable any of these companies can be, but if Anthropic fails as a company, they will be purchased for sure. I'm not saying that's good, but I can't see someone just leaving something like Claude to die away.
* OpenAI - chat that has some character to it.
* Claude - working through thoughts and coding
* Gemini - general reasoning (still blown away by gemini's reasoning, but cannot understand it's inability to tool call - maybe that's been fixed)
any real breakthrough will be instantaneously reverse engineered and replicated
none of the not-googles can win, because there is no win state
You mean Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla?
Frankly google models and the UIs google designs around their models just aren't as powerful and more training, more data and more compute is no longer tipping the scale. Anthropic did something to make their model better at coding than almost anything else.
And all of this is just what's happening right now. The money being invested is a gamble not on right now... but on the trendline to the future. I agree that the LLMs are overloaded with hype, but the people who compare it to crypto aren't thinking straight. Whether there's over investment or not a paradigm has shifted. Maybe there will be a collapse, but it won't collapse into a singularity. If it collapses at all, a new world will emerge, and that new world will generate more value than all the money currently invested in AI.
Others must pull up their revenue number.
That's about what Google creates in free cash every 2 weeks.
1. They've been in Growth mode, where it's common for companies to prioritize capturing the market over being profitable.
2. They've had no problems with money since proving their effectiveness. They can raise capital at favorable valuations (and hold secondary sales) whenever they want. It has been one of the hottest private stocks that people clamor to own.
3. As a private company whose dominant shareholder is the CEO, nobody can pressure them to raise prices. This typically changes after an IPO.
4. Previous government administrations would likely have resisted paying them much more than they charge the private sector or other governments. The new administration has proven they will do favors for companies that are friendly to them.
5. For awhile it seemed they might soon have viable competition for manned space flight (e.g. Starliner) but only in 2024 did we see how bad those are.
6. The low cost is a point of pride for Musk who liked to prove how much more efficiently he could do spaceflight than NASA.
Google leadership is pathetic.
Sundar "the manager" has presided over an enormous growth of the businesses he was handed. He also presided over the complete collapse of the internal culture. OTOH he may have fired Dianne Green, so that's something. Overall, at best Meh.
Demis ran a startup that burnt cash on vanity projects and continues to burn cash on vanity projects. Gemini is barely open source quality AI, but Google makes it nearly free and has the best distribution on the planet.
Gemini has been a joke since 1.0. No release has hurt Google's brand more. 3.0 was STOA for about 2 days, easily Gemini's best release.
Anthropic and OAI are moving at amazing pace, Google can not keep up at all.