alt Hacker NewsGoogle 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.
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Gmail has 1.8b active users, each with thousands of emails in their inbox. The number of emails they can train of is probably in the trillions.
> OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are in a race to the bottom
There's a bit of nuance hiding in the "etc". Openai and anthropic are still in a race for the top results. Minimax and GLM are in the race to the bottom while chasing good results - M2.1 is 10x cheaper than Sonnet for example, but practically fairly close in capabilities.