If the Chinese labs can compete on a shoestring budget with access to much less powerful hardware, Google should be able to compete as well. They're becoming almost irrelevant for agentic coding right now.
It's not much of a shoestring budget to be receiving regular injections of investment from state lenders along with cheap credit. I don't think the comparison holds.
AI / LLM is about more than agentic coding. It is one of the least interesting use cases to me, thinking more broadly. HN may be over-indexed on it.