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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Google is playing a different game. I don't really know what game they're playing, but they're not trying to beat Claude Code. They have coding capabilities and Antigravity, but I'd be surprised if it's much more than an afterthought. They're focusing on efficiency, models at the edge, human interaction, image and video, etc. in ways Anthropic, in particular, is not.

Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.

I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.

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If I had to summarise Google’s effort it would be: stay close but let the others burn themselves out. Position for the long game until you see something worth betting the company on.

Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.

This is 1000% not their (Google's) aim. The position they are in is due much more to their organisational laziness and incompetence than it is any grand strategy.

This is the correct take.

It's an unbelievable failure.

That might just be how it will turn out, but not because it's Google's strategy. They are just too big to fail.

> Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life.

Google wants nothing more than the world to remain stuck in 2000 - 2020 where search was king. Their organisational inertia will fight its AI progress every step of the way and this very well explains why they are not leading the AI pack despite inventing the technology.

I mean, I'm sure there are people within Google who are behaving as though they can keep the dream of the 00s alive in Mountain View, but there's also a whole bunch of people doing work at the frontier in AI. Google has a large lead in hardware, they have the smartest very small models, they have among the most efficient large models (I'd wager their margins on Gemini 3.5 Flash inference are absurd). They have among the best image, video, and audio models, going in every direction (generating, editing, understanding).

Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.

Their hardware is nowhere near Nvidia, hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.

I think the SpaceX deal was to goose the IPO. Google holds a significant stake in SpaceX, and made a fortune on the IPO.

Anthropic is paying even more to a direct competitor that now fields a model that trades blows with their Opus.

I'll eat my hat if SpaceXAI manages to produce something even close to leading edge again

Why lol? Because you don't like Elon? XAI has continued to stay within a few months of leading edge, and now suddenly they'll just never do it again, despite doing it literally today?

Culture. XAI employs were bragging about spending all weekend at the office. Many tweet that they have been fired after 8 months. Some get fired right before their first big stock vest.

The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?

I'm not talking about Anthropic.

> hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.

I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.

Google seems to become a dead business very soon. Search traffic is being split between AI and social networks and google is bad on both fronts. Its AI proposition is more or less like the Google Plus. Nobody really wants it but they know about it because google pushes it everywhere it can.

What's AdSense then, chopped liver?

AI is a blackhole and Google search along with Adsense and many other “web” publishing platforms is the big shiny star nearby. Can you feel the wrath of AI?

Hey, don't forget: Google is also bad at search!

> Its AI proposition is more or less like the Google Plus. Nobody really wants it but they know about it because google pushes it everywhere it can.

Citation needed. The gemini app has 750 million MAU, hardly a dead business.

I don't know google's AI strategy but what I can tell from my usage and others around me is that google search usage has declined considerably.

Terms like "Google it" have been completely replace by "Ask AI".

I personally mostly use google to find businesses close to me and to search reddit and wikipedia.

At the same time that they’re seemingly exiting android?

And, yet. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini....

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