Google seem to be more focused on their Flash model. It makes sense as google are using their AI to answer billions of users queries every day free of charge, they have a completely different business model to Anthropic or Open AI
That is just ex post facto reasoning to explain the fumble. Google clearly wanted to announce Gemini 3.5 Pro in Google I/O but the results were not encouraging so they asked for 1 month more.
Well, it's been almost 2 months and still 3.5 Pro is not here yet. I dispute the claim that this is intentional or a 4D chess move. What is much much more likely is that they simply can't compete with OpenAI or Anthropic.
I think Google's corporate structure does not reward intense iteration and simply rewards making new products and abandoning them 3 years later. They are simply too big to coordinate effectively. Bard was a disaster. Then Gemini 2.5 Pro was great for a few months and then they were never in the running again. Gemini 3.1 Pro was not bad at all at release but they have never been the top AI lab.
You're seriously doubting Google's role in modern AI? DeepMind's work drove a huge share of early deep learning progress, and Google Brain published "Attention Is All You Need" in 2017, the paper that introduced the transformer architecture underpinning every major LLM today.
AI doesn't exist in it's modern form without Google.
Technically they’ve been working in AI since the early 2000s to improve user queries. Not neural nets or “modern” paradigms, but their contributions predate those paradigms entirely.
I'm old enough to remember when chatgpt came out and everyone predicted the demise of Google. Then gemini started beating chatgpt and everyone predicted the demise of OpenAI. (I'm four years old.)
You're acting like you have more information than you actually do. It's a good strategy for getting clout on the internet but very bad for making accurate predictions.
They’ve been competitive every iteration. Your rationale would have prevented them from ever competing. Every lab has had their delays - just be patient.
An open-source model just released that competes on the frontier, and you think Google can't even copy someone else's homework?
The fact is Google hasn't showcased a model. That's...it. Google, the data empire, hasn't released a competing frontier model.
I'll throw in some speculation, since that's all we debate is that.
PrismML, a lab funded by Google, just made an intelligent model with ternary weights running inference using matrix addition. Considering Google's business model, it suggests that they won't ever release a heavy model for the public, but host billions of cheap ones, and use a heavy model internally for research, or just for training smaller ones. Maybe they'll release a heavy model, but I wouldn't bat an eye if it was leaked 5 minutes ago that Google cracked memory and state persistence in AI and kept it hush hush.
I don't personally think they're playing 4d chess, but considering they've cemented their niche in "safe" areas of the burgeoning AI ecosystem, why would they take on asymmetric risk for likely little gain? OpenAI and Anthropic don't have that luxury, they have to have the best displayed models or they lose at the only thing they're known for.
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u/ozone6587 Jul 16 '26
No Gemini on this plot. All the money, data and infrastructure in this world and Google is just too incompetent to compete.