social media is a completely different market though - since there are massive returns to scale, it's incredibly hard for a new entrant to break in.
replymodel 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.
Which poses the question: Why does Google even need to catch up? At least currently, the name of the game is integration. The actual model is a commodity.
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