That also own one of the 2 major mobile operating systems, with Gemini tightly integrated and all of the data they can gather from that. Why do you think OpenAI wants to do hardware? Owning delivery is going to be important, and right now, Google and Apple own the delivery mechanisms (to consumers).

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.

"Doomed" no, but it's pretty clear that they just had a bad cycle and are struggling to keep up with the frontier.

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 don't know if they are doomed but https://isaiprofitable.com/ seems concerning about Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.

> is being 6 months behind the frontier actually a structural, long term disadvantage?

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.