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> Then why have they been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic

Because they're not desperate. Slow and steady wins the race, at this rate all Google has to do is wait for OpenAI and Anthropic to exhaust themselves on aggressive training, then they can casually amble along right past them.

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Also because they are Google. Google being Google: unreliable (they could kill a product anytime), too much of a platform risk (all products in a single place, get banned and lose the company), lack of support unless you really pay a big bill (into the 7 figures), among other… things.
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> Then why have they been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic for most of the last few years, and only briefly been at the frontier?

One possible explanation: because Google is a little bit more frugal and focuses on how to make providing AI models financially feasible - combined with some willingness to burn money so that they don't strongly fall behind on their AI models.

On the other hand, OpenAI and Anthropic at least formerly concentrated on building and providing the best models that they could with concerns about financial feasibility taking a backseat.

Just to be clear: I do have the impression that by now (likely because of pressure from investors) OpenAI and Anthropic take these financial concerns more seriously, but nevertheless Google's vs OpenAI's/Anthropic's "DNAs" concerning on what to focus on differ.

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And also Google is public listed company and the other two (for now) are private. I think that fact does have a strong bearing on how they operate.
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> Google is a little bit more frugal and focuses on how to make providing AI models financially feasible

There’s no magic there. You get an account executive and a call with a systems architect to find out what you’re doing.

Clouds gonna cloud, this is the reason they rolled deepmind into gcp and arguably the inverse is true, the labs are trying to become clouds

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> because Google is a little bit more frugal and focuses on how to make providing AI models financially feasible

That feels right. It's not as if they've been missing out on great profits.

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> Then why have they been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic for most of the last few years, and only briefly been at the frontier?

Because it's not an existential battle for Google. If OAI or Anthropic disappear from the absolute frontier for ~8 months the news cycle and churn will diminish them to the second rate. Google is processing near 4 quadrillion tokens every month, that's - I'm sure - significantly more than OAI or Anthropic, because Google is interested more so in their flash models and getting these competitive, which they are.

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It’s just a division in their cloud offering that’s what AI is
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Lagging by what metric exactly? Is Toyota lagging behind McLaren? (company vs company)
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From a business perspective a frontier model does not make much sense anymore if you are not a startup. Neither for Amazon, nor for Google. Their clouds need models that are fast and perform well in their agent frameworks nothing were a frontier model excels at.

Most Google products even use flash lite underneath, so their frontier model is mostly used for distillation.

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> From a business perspective a frontier model does not make much sense anymore if you are not a startup. Neither for Amazon, nor for Google. Their clouds need models that are fast and perform well in their agent frameworks nothing w[h]ere a frontier model excels at.

A good consideration; just one point from my side: as far as I am aware (but I may be wrong), Gemini is not known to perform well in an agentic framework.

This is no contradiction to your other claims, quite the opposite: perhaps (or even likely) Google wants to avoid that their models become a commodity in some (agentic?) application where the middleman who actually writes this application gets a disproportionate of the money that the customer of the application pays for it.

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> A good consideration; just one point from my side: as far as I am aware (but I may be wrong), Gemini is not known to perform well in an agentic framework.

I used it for a month over the summer, right before they were going through the migration to antigravity. It was a fine workhorse IMO, no complaints from me.

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Alphabet issued a very oversubscribed 100-year bond with 6.1% yield earlier this year to raise capital for datacenter expension.

Meanwhile, Anthropic/OpenAI will struggle to survive the next 24 months on their current trajectory.

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So you don't know why they've been behind?
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Could it just be that Demis was checked out of the race and they lacked leadership?
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Demis wants to focus on scientific endeavors. He was probably not the right person to focus on consumer apps.
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