The service is the value, not the model unto itself. This is where nearly all of HN is somehow entirely blind.

Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.

China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.

It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.