Strongly disagree with that take. Kimi K3 is a distilled model. I'm not saying that as a moral judgement, or to disparage the team behind it, but distilling and building on that is significantly easier and cheaper than building from the ground up.

And Gemini is kinda good enough at everything. Never the top, but it is decent at every task, and it is much faster than Kimi K3 and significantly cheaper. Kimi is very focussed on coding, Gemini isn't.

More importantly, it natively understands text, audio and video. If/when we are able to make the jump to robotics, this becomes essential. As you say, Google has a lot of deep background and deep pockets, they are able to make more of a long play. No idea if it will pay off, but it is way to early in the game to count them out.

None of the startups are profitable. What exactly are they getting beaten at?

My advice is to listen less to brainrot 'influencers' that optimise for engagement through sensationalism.

Have you used Google search at all on the past few months? Every single search brings up a live chat prompt. They're serving fast AI to billions of users at huge scale everyday

And they're making money doing it.

Perhaps they don't have the best coding model right now (although 3.8 flash is arguably SOTA at some benchmarks), but is that the be-all and end-all of AI? Only coding matters?

Their live models have been and continue to be at the frontier. I like them a lot!

Uh, what? This is SOTA for a live model. What are you talking about?

It makes Meta look not that bad.

And yet they might become one of the winners "in the end" because they have near infinite money and others have not. I will drink tea and watch the show.