It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier.
Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche.
From day one everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market, but it looks more remote than ever. Maybe Hassabis' personal inclination towards AI-for-science, and physics/chemistry in particular -- as opposed to consumer AI and coding AI -- has hurt them commercially.
for all these reasons, is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage? some day the pace of improvement will slow, and google will vacuum up the market. they'll be able to compete with open-weight models just on pure cost advantage from their vertical integration
They may not capture enterprise use, but I don't think they have to. That's only one piece of the market. AI that's useful to consumers will still get delivered via a smartphone, and Google is in a great place to capture that.
I also don't think LLMs have to be a "winner takes all" situation. Value isn't going to come from having direct access to a chatbot or selling API inference, value is going to be in the form of a specific product (for most, devs aside here). Something a consumer, or a non-tech business can buy off the shelf and plug and play. A "ready made" customer service agent system, a "ready made" BI platform using AI, etc.
For consumers, that's probably going to look like whatever is bundled and tightly integrated into their mobile OS of choice.
Whether this happened because they bet on "world models -> better reasoning" and that bet didn't pay off, or failed a frontier run for technical reasons like OpenAI did with 4.5, or something else went down? We don't know.
Will they bleed talent, fall further behind until they give up, or clean the organizational and infrastructural cobwebs and get back in the saddle? We don't know.
I think the question is whether that's even relevant.
If AI becomes a commodity (will it?) you're better off being Google than OpenAI.
Microsoft struggled to keep up with the mobile industry frontier and here they are, healthier than ever.
Yeah, this is one of the things I find so weird on the discourse. If you get there negligeably later, but without astonishing spend and waste, you might even be better off in the long term.
This is in addition to bumping their CapEx spend to the extent their cash flow turned negative for the first time ever this quarter: https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/07/google-just-had-its-f...
The world doesn’t realize how desperately compute-crunched hyperscalers are to meet AI demand.
This is a better problem to have than SpaceX, which is renting out capacity obviously because it’s own AI products aren’t selling.
I don’t think this reflects desperation as much as strategy.
- In a world where open source Chinese models decimate Frontier models ability to charge a high price, it's the operators of efficient inference data centers that will win. Like Google
- Google is probably the biggest provider of "free" AI because it's on Google.com. That forces them to focus on cost. And in a commodity market, low-cost providers are the ones that make the money.
10 years from now, its gonna be Google, Apple and Microsoft left standing in the AI game. Well, until the US wakes up and starts attempting to break the oligopoly like the EU has recently started to do.
There's an old saying, if you judge a fish's smarts by how well it can ride a bicycle, it will always seem dumb.
The people who have risen to the top of at Google are built for a different environment than what's needed right now. They are good at playing their political games, sabotaging each other, etc.; i.e. all of the petty games that managers play in big companies. But the AI era demands a different skill set: how to bring together incredibly smart people and forge them into a battle group that will achieve victory in the ongoing battle for AGI! It's as if you have built an army of tanks, but the next battle is being fought on the high seas.
The group running the company, is the company.
my take on this is eventually the money is going to run out and there's going to be acquisitions and consolidation. I think that's when Google will come out on top.
For agentic work, but especially for web search, 3.6 Flash has an important leg up, its fast speed, that no other model comes close to matching. I guess nobody pays attention to it because it's not the one big flashy number that you compare to other models.
They are quietly trying to become the chatbot that everyone uses to look things up. That strikes me as an intelligent move - not everything has to be done by an expensive frontier model.
Edit: hmm, no, they seem to be mentioning AGI and frontier models in https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/n...
model training and inference is the opposite. people switch LLMs like people change clothes in the morning. there are popular services (openrouter) that make moving as easy as changing a model string.
To its credit Google seems willing to disrupt itself before its competitors can.
They need to route all browser search strings to an LLM, and slowly begin to charge where people will pay. Likely ad space.
No, the top talent is clearly at Anthropic and OpenAI