And Gemini is kinda good enough at everything. Never the top, but it is decent at every task, and it is much faster than Kimi K3 and significantly cheaper. Kimi is very focussed on coding, Gemini isn't.
More importantly, it natively understands text, audio and video. If/when we are able to make the jump to robotics, this becomes essential. As you say, Google has a lot of deep background and deep pockets, they are able to make more of a long play. No idea if it will pay off, but it is way to early in the game to count them out.
My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.
They have "unlimited" resources and has researched AI since the very beginning - PageRank is a form of AI even. And still, Gemini is behind Claude, GPT, Grok, Muse, GLM, Kimi and is maybe on par with DeepSeek?
As I said, it is embarrassing.
No one is behind grok. It literally has "be funny and irreverent when appropriate" (whatever the hell "when appropriate" means for them) baked into the system prompt. To me, that is all you need to know about how useful it is.
No serious people use it and the numbers bear it out tbh. It has the smallest market share of the "big companies" for a reason - and it's by a very, very large margin (~2.5% last I checked).
And they're making money doing it.
Perhaps they don't have the best coding model right now (although 3.8 flash is arguably SOTA at some benchmarks), but is that the be-all and end-all of AI? Only coding matters?
Just because it shows up does not mean it is being used. I only click the feedback button to tell them how much I dislike their Ai summaries. They have removed that feedback button this week. Can't take the heat I suppose.
I've also never know anyone who finds them trustworthy nor heard someone say anything besides how they also dislike them
"It's AI but anyway", seems to be a way to use it, but not promote that your using it?
There's a significant amount of people in my friend group who don't like "AI", but everyone seems to use what google's doing, even if they add the "the AI said this" disclaimer to it.
Even the people who don't like 'AI', will still reference the LLM output, which seems like they're just slow to accept it, I guess.
Given the very high margins on inference, once volume is large enough the other can also start printing enough money.