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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Because the market almost certainly can’t support two foundation model labs given the increasingly little difference across models and the massive sums of cash required to keep it all going. There is no big 2, just a race to survive and be the big 1.

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It probably can't support any because there's no moat and smaller, open source models are catching up. This is like investing $1T into mainframe computers in 1980.

There's at least two markets here. Consumer ad driven and worker augmentation markets. Likely a 3rd as a backend infrastructure provider to a bunch of value add companies.

I think Google has caught up enough to certainly be a player in the consumer ad driven market.

I also don't think only one foundation model adds up. Now that the trail is blazed a dozen companies can likely make a good enough model. The question is if there's a moat to make it winner take all

China will make sure they have a frontier lab, there's plenty of chance for Google to catch up once the compute crunch gets more serious.

Google needs to catch up on what? Devs mindshare? The latest Opus 4.8 carefully selected benchmarks made sure to pick Gemini 3.1 Pro and not Gemini 3.5 Flash: 3.5 Flash is beating Opus 4.8 on several of the benchmarks Anthropic posted but simply was ignored.

I don't think SOTA-wise Google has a lot of catch up to do.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is not good at coding in practice. Gemini 3.1 Pro too, in particular is known to be bad at tool calls. Many companies would love to have alternatives to Claude Code (as it's a significant risk to depend on one vendor), so far most of the buzz is about moving to Codex but much fewer talk about moving to Gemini. All these benchmarks are not very informative, the Chinese labs do better on these benchmarks than in practice, for example.

Disagree, both are coexisting fine today.

A series "H" for $65 billion and no path to profitability is existing fine?

Sure, if you think there is even a small chance that OpenAI and Anthropic will get to AGI, it's practically a bargain.

They don't seem too far off to me.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-says-its-about-t...

https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...

Yeah it's very murky, but if they're arguably profitable under some definition of profitable, then it's ridiculous to claim there's "no path to profitability"

Especially if you assume that 6 months ago they weren't very close to this version of profitable

If it cant support two competing compamies, something is very wrong. Oligopoly is bad, monopoly worst.

Well functioning market is supposed to have many, as in a lot, companies with similar products. To create competition.

isn't Google going to win the race anyway ?

That feels really hard to argue now that Anthropic/OpenAI are so much bigger

How the hell do you crush a ~1T company on the one thing they have all their focus on?

You start with a 90% share in search, I guess.

Me, not a SWE, I have never even tried Claude

(and I am not sure I prefer ChatGPT over Google)

Data. Google has access to unphasmable amount of real human-created data with zero expectations of privacy (wink wink Apple): videos, photos, search, navigation, mobile app usage including competition platforms, emails, etc.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI only has access to whatever they can buy or steal.

And it's becoming increasingly hard to get fresh uncontaminated data for training. No amount of money can buy that.

I suspect it's less true now that synthetic data has worked so well, and multimodal doesn't seem to transfer as well as many would've hoped

Claude Code and Codex are a big advantage, vs Gemini CLI which might be killedbygoogle soon? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196867

> Both Anthropic and OpenAI only has access to whatever they can buy or steal. A trillion can buy you quite a lot! Like offer some company a ton of money for data, and if they say no simply buy said company. Bonus points if it's someone like Atlassian who's stock price is getting hammered largely because of you.

In terms of personal assistant AI the monopolists have a massive advantage because they control the platforms and can box out competitors from deeply integrating with the OS.

I don't see it as merely boxing out competitors or integrating with the OS.

People have been going to Google for a quarter of a century, and I imagine they will continue to do so.

As far as I am concerned, I moved to DDG in 2013 and never looked back, but I find Google AI intriguing.

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