Google is a special case - ever since LLMs came out I've been pointing out that Google owns the entire vertical.

OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are in a race to the bottom, but because they don't own the vertical they are beholden to Nvidia (for chips), they obviously have less training data, they need constant influsx of cash just to stay in that race to the bottom, etc.

Google owns the entire stack - they don't need nvidia, they already have the data, they own the very important user-info via tracking, they have millions, if not billions, of emails on which to train, etc.

Google needs no one, not even VCs. Their costs must be a fraction of the costs of pure-LLM companies.

> Google has ... company culture oriented towards optimizing the energy usage/hardware costs.

Google has a company culture of luring you in with freebies and then mining your data to sell ads.

> if Google can give away LLM usage (which is obviously subsidized) it can't be astronomically expensive

There is a recent article by Linus Sebastian (LTT) talking about Youtube: it is almost impossible to support the cost to build a competitor because it is astronomically expensive (vs potential revenue)

I do not disagree they will get cheaper, but I pointing out that none of this is being reflected in hardware pricing. You state LLMs are becoming more optimized (less expensive). I agree. This should have a knockon effect on hardware prices, but it is not. Where is the disconnect? Are hardware prices a lagging indicator? Is Nvidia still a 5 trillion dollar company if we see another 33x improvement in "energy consumed per text prompt"?