Google is playing a different game. I don't really know what game they're playing, but they're not trying to beat Claude Code. They have coding capabilities and Antigravity, but I'd be surprised if it's much more than an afterthought. They're focusing on efficiency, models at the edge, human interaction, image and video, etc. in ways Anthropic, in particular, is not.

Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there.

I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.

Google at least is serving AI results on SRPs billions of times a day, and has pre-existing expertise in data center buildouts and custom silicon.

They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.

Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.

How is this any different than the browser wars? We use to have a diverse market full of choices, and now we have Chromium (almost all market share) and Firefox/Safari on the edges.

Google invented the transformer architecture. You really can't say the same about them.

> A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out:

Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in.

Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks.

No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM.

OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone.

And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!