I have _long_ said don't sleep on Google for precisely these reasons. They have the only vertically integrated AI stack, insane capital they can deploy, and attention and focus and phenomenal architects and engineers, and a pre-existing catalog of as much of the world's data as possible. Counting them out would be completely absurd.

It started to feel just a bit like they were potentially content staying in the effective-fast-cheap lane and ceding frontier models to frontier labs, but I don't think anyone seriously thought that Google was going to sit back and let this generational shift pass them by when they're so well positioned to remain on the top of the heap.

If anything, I thought that 4 was maybe coming up short or causing safety concerns that were forcing them to be a bit more cautious, but nothing packs a wallop like being able to launch ahead of everyone else's brand newest toys...

I've been lowkey rooting for them, not a fan of Altman, and I don't know if I trust Anthropic either, I'm not Google's #1 fan, but I think they can definitely innovate heavily in this field, they have a lot of key things as has been mentioned.

Not to mention - they have the internet already indexed (they have a local copy), all books, and youtube. Beyond that, everyone "connects" to Gmail, but google HAS Gmail.

Recently there's been a lot of talk about how Google has fallen behind and missed the AI boat. Now today with Gemini 4 they're back in the boat. But give it a few months, people will be counting Google out again. This has been a repeating pattern for at least a couple years now.

Large existing players are pretty notorious for screwing up their leads and trying to move in many directions at once, or go to hard into the wrong one. Based on Google's huge number of failed products and poor ability to maintain products outside of ads I am not yet sold. They are very good at buying out their competition, but what happens when their competition has enough money not to be bought out?

Then why have they been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic for most of the last few years, and only briefly been at the frontier?

You forgot YouTube. The source of world model data. THAT is the mother of all moats, if they can survive until capable of taping into it.

Those are competitive advantages but a "moat" usually refers to being on top of the hill and able to keep anyone else from climbing. I think it's arguable whether Google is on top of the hill at all, and if they are they're sharing it with at least two other companies.

> If that ain't a moat, then what exactly is a moat?

And Anthropic has still generally been eating their lunch at the top end.

Will the revenue stream last once people start pivoting their search volume in earnest across to LLMs? I basically never use Google search anymore.

> the vast and ominous data centers that already serve a significant fraction of the internet

Those datacenters are mostly cpu. LLMs run on gpus.

Alphabet also has nearly infinite money to pour into this endeavor from their advertising enterprise, so much so that AI/LLMs could all fall apart and they would be happy to go back to selling mid-roll campaigns on youtube videos.

Exactly. Google has all parts needed to win. It is just matter of time.

Don't forget the training data! Legal copies of all the books in the world, the entire web scraped, and all of YouTube.

Yet Gemini has been behind Claude and Open AI over the past year. How is that a moat?

Amazing. Can they now go hire some really good information architects and designers and come up with a cohesive user experience please. They have the right to win here and if they can give me something that feels like Codex / Claude desktop I am sold.

And yet, their models are often behind and the team is bleeding talent. A moat is not a compendium of intimidating features, it’s a matter of whether a company deters competitors and maintains a competitive advantage. So far, Google obviously does not have one here.

Because you don’t need TPUs and anyone can scrape the internet

I think that has been well proven so far

I don't think that other revenue stream is completely separate. It weighs on them as they need to think about tradeoffs. Classical search is going away sooner or later so they need to replace that with AI powered search.

Data centers are important but a few others also has them: Amazon, Microsoft, Meta. SpaceX will likely be in/at the top I AI dedicated precessing power in 2027 as well.

I don't see the moat. I see a company with a lot of other commitments that is not the best at delivering consumer facing products. They have some good cards but so do others.

Google wins.They have been on the frontier of ai for the last what 10-20 years (up until chatgpt)? You have the established company with tons of traininv resources at tgeir disposal from all their services and being the biggest search indexer, and also having the top minds in AI and computing in general.

Gemini wins and I said this since the beginning. Google wins in general. I never understood why they have not been the highest market cap companh for the last 10 years. And I despise google but its obvious.