The real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here.
Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time.
Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.
Absolutely. I don't understand why investors are excited about getting into a negative-margin commodity. It makes zero sense.
I was an OpenAI fan from GPT 3 to 4, but then Claude pulled ahead. Now Gemini is great as well, especially at analyzing long documents or entire codebases. I use a combination of all three (OpenAI, Anthropic & Google) with absolutely zero loyalty.
I think the AGI true believers see it as a winner-takes-all market as soon as someone hits the magical AGI threshold, but I'm not convinced. It sounds like the nuclear lobby's claims that they would make electricity "too cheap to meter."
So why did Google stock increase massively since about when Gemini 2.5 Pro was released, their first competitive model?
Yep, I thought they might have some secret sauce in terms of training techniques, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Especially if we're approaching a plateau, in a couple years there could be a dozen equally capable systems. It'll be interesting to see what the differentiators turn out to be.
> for these companies
They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow. They might just get a huge government contract instead of an explicit bailout, but they’ll weasel out of this one way or another and these huge circular deals are to ensure that.