Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away, meanwhile the hype cycle is propping up its upstart competitors to truly ludicrous valuations.
Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be, once again, PM led–lots of constantly-changing brands being merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.
They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do. (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)
Chugging away not releasing products or releasing ones worse than their competition typically. Not sure that’s what a normal competent company should be doing.
Furthermore, Gemini is just all around a less trustworthy and mature model, for many reasons. Very smart but lacking the precision and holistically exhibited in the more recent models from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the flip side, Google's work on Gemma is unmatched.
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold...
Isn't that Checkers right from the dawn of reinforcement learning?
In other words, can AI tech help? Probably, but I doubt it's going to be a major money maker, and it won't make a ton of money overnight. It's not like Claude Code where every programmer can begin using it instantly.
We're looking at ~$725B combined hyperscaler capex in 2026 (on a path to $1.08T by 2028) against roughly $25B of AI service revenue in 2025 on $250B+ of infrastructure spend. By 2030, the global data center build-out will require $6.7 trillion in capital expenditure. If hyperscalers require a 25% return on AI-specific capex, the industry needs to generate ~$169B in AI-attributable revenue annually by end of 2028.
A flexible compute market plus three well-capitalized competitors plus Google's internal silicon means nobody gets to hold price. SpaceX's public offering is the best signal we have on this type of thing and it's down 15% from offer price.
It's incredibly unlikely that BOTH OpenAI and Anthropic will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years. Also very unlikely that even one will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years.
It is more likely (but still not very) that they both will be simply profitable (not obscenely).
The most probable scenario is that ONE will be somewhat profitable (probably Anthropic) and the other still burning.
Yes, I will wait for the correct valuation when all stocks enter the liquidity pool.
OpenAI/Anthropic obscenely profitable is an easy bet (for me)
This entire industry might be hopelessly tribalist, nowadays.
For example, today, investors are celebrating Microsoft's Azure growth as evidence that its AI investments are paying off: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110965>