Yes, but I think Google was playing that strategy from essentially day 1 or very early in this AI race, where as the others are there now because of their lack of access of compute.
The general narrative I would read on HN/others, was that Google would be able to outlast/outcompete OpenAI and Anthropic because Google had both more money and more compute. Playing the game of subsidizing their most capable models to capture market share longer than the VCs could.
But instead I feel like Google opted out of that much earlier. Shifting their focus on efficiency and scaling much much earlier. Flash and Gemma being where Google was actually ahead of the competition while everyone was focused on bigger more capable models.
In the last month the environment has changed, compute is constrained, costs for consumers are way higher than expected. Copilot pretty much imploded, and I'm guessing both Anthropic and OpenAI are starting to feel the squeeze.
My personal opinion was this was necessary because integrating AI into products like AI overview, search meant scaling to billions of users was a requirement right out of the gate. And theres not enough money/compute no matter who you are to use frontier models for that.
alt Hacker News
Yes, but I think Google was playing that strategy from essentially day 1 or very early in this AI race, where as the others are there now because of their lack of access of compute.
The general narrative I would read on HN/others, was that Google would be able to outlast/outcompete OpenAI and Anthropic because Google had both more money and more compute. Playing the game of subsidizing their most capable models to capture market share longer than the VCs could.
But instead I feel like Google opted out of that much earlier. Shifting their focus on efficiency and scaling much much earlier. Flash and Gemma being where Google was actually ahead of the competition while everyone was focused on bigger more capable models.
In the last month the environment has changed, compute is constrained, costs for consumers are way higher than expected. Copilot pretty much imploded, and I'm guessing both Anthropic and OpenAI are starting to feel the squeeze.
My personal opinion was this was necessary because integrating AI into products like AI overview, search meant scaling to billions of users was a requirement right out of the gate. And theres not enough money/compute no matter who you are to use frontier models for that.