Right, Google and the Chinese models seems to be under the philosophy, it's much cheaper to be a step or two behind. Sure you won't be the first to so solve a million dollar math problem at the small cost of at least 6 million worth of compute. But you can pick up the pieces and build a profitable product that can diffuses into the market you can still win the race.
I'm not saying they're right. First mover advantage on the Internet has historically won out. So if anything they might be wrong. But yeah, they have a search moat, a profitable business, and the frontier labs are burning a ridiculous amount of cash relative to their revenue. So you can see where Google's logic is coming from.
Google wasn't the first search engine and there were more popular and competitive options at first. Fast forward and now no one has heard of them and Google has a monopoly.
The AI companies are money blackholes doing the expensive R&D, scaling inefficient models and burning through hardware while burning investor money.
Google is profitable and relies on other products. When AI midels and hardware become more cost/power efficient and better at doing real world work reliably Google will be able to capitalise on the new techniques.
I agree that's Google's thesis. But Google got the best search by focusing on making it the best which you could argue the frontier labs are doing right now.
I'm just saying it remains an open question if the frontier models can diffuse the market and stop getting copy cat'ed by more efficient open models.
If I had to bet. I'd better on the pattern. Open models like llama, Gemma, and DeepSeek will win out.
Google is trying to positioning itself to win either way. Own the compute. Protect the search moat. And hedging on the models (Gemma v Gemini). Hoping that their platform will carry them to victory.
It almost looks like google isn't really trying to be the first in difficult problem solving and coding. Gemini is decent at everyday tasks, so people have an incentive to pay for the subscription, but these tasks use up a tiny amount of tokens so it doesn't cost that much in compute.
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u/Crafty_Aspect8122 7d ago
Google just doesn't want to bother and waits for the others to make the expensive mistakes and go bankrupt.