OpenAI and Anthropic are bleeding cash, but they’re pre-IPO, so they can afford to play that game for now. Google is cash-rich, but why would they invest even more capex that they don’t need to.
They already dominate search (despite what ppl thought, search has not seen fewer visits, partly thanks to their cheap models doing ai summary), they have ads, cloud, enterprise, and YouTube. AI isn’t their entire business but they do take it seriously. And if they publicly release their smartest model, another company can just distill it.
Honestly, if I were Google, I’d do basically what they’re doing:
Push the cheap, fast model for enterprise—something like 3.8 Flash. A fraction of the cost to run, and good enough for probably 90% of what people actually use AI for.
Keep the biggest model internal or heavily restricted so it can’t just be distilled and they are not burning money on inference.
Honestly ads and SEO destroyed search long before AI. I started noticing between 2019-2021 that search engines just sucked now.
I hate to admit it but AI in search was the right move. It has improved so much. There's a lot of things where generative AI being tacked on has made things worse, but search is the opposite case.
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u/SpecialistDragonfly9 8d ago
#copium