> Gemini is so far behind that it is effectively useless compared to Claude.

I fundamentally don't understand LLM "brand loyalty".

All of the models are constantly leapfrogging each other and always have been.

Google had a long lag between releases (and still hasn't released Argon), but why wouldn't they be able to compete? It isn't like any of this stuff requires secret knowledge, the Bitter Lesson has proved true again and again, and Google can certainly scale computation, it is like the one single thing they've always done well in spite of all their other foibles.