> What does that mean?

I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P

In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)

In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.

To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain_Petroleum_Company

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_Kingdom_of...

[3] The alternate hypothesis is it's at distribution.