4 ms·

You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now. A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all

You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now. A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

yojo 3mo ago
Google at least is serving AI results on SRPs billions of times a day, and has pre-existing expertise in data center buildouts and custom silicon. They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.
- small_model 3mo ago
  X has grok built in to every post as does every Tesla Car
  - sroussey 3mo ago
    /s
bigyabai 3mo ago
Google invented the transformer architecture. You really can't say the same about them.
- HardCodedBias 3mo ago
  Google Brain invented the transformer. GDM ... not so much.
throwa356262 3mo ago
Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.
- ur-whale 3mo ago
  > Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment. That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world. Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack. Which means, they must all be calling Google, no? How does Google make money from that?
  - LorenDB 3mo ago
    > Which means, they must all be calling Google, no? Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
    - ur-whale 3mo ago
      Yes, but all are still inferior. And it really does not matter. The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.
      - sroussey 3mo ago
        There are a lot of search APIs for AI these days.
      - ComputerGuru 3mo ago
        Bing is the easiest to buy programmatic access to. But I think they don’t tell you because they sometimes use residential proxies to scrape search results the same way they used residential proxies to scrape the web.
      - jeremyjh 3mo ago
        They really are not inferior. There are many different APIs with different strengths and there are aggregators on top of them that produce results that are significantly better than Google's. Everytime I accidentally use Google I'm shocked at how terrible it is.
bitmasher9 3mo ago
How is this any different than the browser wars? We use to have a diverse market full of choices, and now we have Chromium (almost all market share) and Firefox/Safari on the edges.
subhobroto 3mo ago
> A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again. This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out: Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in. Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks. No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM. OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone. And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!
- redanddead 3mo ago
  Why does Microsoft feel so gross
- lukan 3mo ago
  "No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product" As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general. The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.
- TheGoddessInari 3mo ago
  I still have no clue what you're implying that I was implying? Reading too much into someone's words is definitely a thing. There used to be 4+ major browser engines. Now there's only two, and Google owns almost complete share & following standards? Google prefers their monoculture. More diversity in browser engines was a good thing & standards were lovely. Not everything has to be a slug-fest between #1 & #2. & personally I'm glad there's Grok & Gemini to keep Anthropic & OpenAI on their toes even more than the competitive band of open weights models already do. The corporate models tend to be defensive and sound like HR has approved every word of the script. Not a fan.
SwellJoe 3mo ago
Google is playing a different game. I don't really know what game they're playing, but they're not trying to beat Claude Code. They have coding capabilities and Antigravity, but I'd be surprised if it's much more than an afterthought. They're focusing on efficiency, models at the edge, human interaction, image and video, etc. in ways Anthropic, in particular, is not. Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there. I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.
- redanddead 3mo ago
  At the same time that they’re seemingly exiting android?
  - SwellJoe 3mo ago
    And, yet. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini....
- richardw 3mo ago
  If I had to summarise Google’s effort it would be: stay close but let the others burn themselves out. Position for the long game until you see something worth betting the company on. Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
  - dansquizsoft 3mo ago
    This is 1000% not their (Google's) aim. The position they are in is due much more to their organisational laziness and incompetence than it is any grand strategy.
    - HardCodedBias 3mo ago

You could be typing the same about Google or a number of the other labs right now. A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again.

yojo 3mo ago

Google at least is serving AI results on SRPs billions of times a day, and has pre-existing expertise in data center buildouts and custom silicon. They have one of the more compelling cases for rolling their own.

small_model 3mo ago
X has grok built in to every post as does every Tesla Car
- sroussey 3mo ago
  /s

bigyabai 3mo ago

Google invented the transformer architecture. You really can't say the same about them.

HardCodedBias 3mo ago
Google Brain invented the transformer. GDM ... not so much.

throwa356262 3mo ago

Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.

ur-whale 3mo ago
> Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment. That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world. Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack. Which means, they must all be calling Google, no? How does Google make money from that?
- LorenDB 3mo ago
  > Which means, they must all be calling Google, no? Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.
  - ur-whale 3mo ago
    Yes, but all are still inferior. And it really does not matter. The real question is: which search service do they use anyways.
    - sroussey 3mo ago
      There are a lot of search APIs for AI these days.
    - ComputerGuru 3mo ago
      Bing is the easiest to buy programmatic access to. But I think they don’t tell you because they sometimes use residential proxies to scrape search results the same way they used residential proxies to scrape the web.
    - jeremyjh 3mo ago
      They really are not inferior. There are many different APIs with different strengths and there are aggregators on top of them that produce results that are significantly better than Google's. Everytime I accidentally use Google I'm shocked at how terrible it is.

bitmasher9 3mo ago

How is this any different than the browser wars? We use to have a diverse market full of choices, and now we have Chromium (almost all market share) and Firefox/Safari on the edges.

subhobroto 3mo ago

> A diverse market full of choices keeps it from becoming the browser wars all over again. This is a great analogy but I worry you might be implying something I don't agree with but you didn't explicitly say what I'm worried about, so let me call it out: Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E, but they are in the dirty game business. It wasn't only I.E, it was their OS, Office suite and everything else they do business in. Google Chrome took advantage of that dirty game and now you have the Chromium engine that powers a lot of browserlike frameworks. No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product foisted upon users via the Windows distribution system - a dishonorable product from an ethically corrupt company forever lost in history, right alongside Clippy and DCOM. OTOH, I am glad that Microsoft played a dirty game with I.E and didn't just stop playing dirty there - they jacked up the price of Windows if an OEM even dared to bundle in Netscape Navigator instead - who knows, if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been a Google or Apple. We would all be using Windows and Windows Search and Windows Phone. And without Google, we might not have had the modern LLM as we know it. We would have had some trashy Windows Autocomplete Copilot Clippy. Ugh!

redanddead 3mo ago
Why does Microsoft feel so gross
lukan 3mo ago
"No one born in the LLM age even knows what I.E means or stands for, as it should be - a horribly designed, poorly working product" As one of my first jobs involved getting a website to work with IE6 I surely hated it, but when it came out, it seemed to have pushed the web technologies in general. The problem was not the browser technology, but microsoft abusing it's monopoly to don't give a shit about (open) web standards.
TheGoddessInari 3mo ago
I still have no clue what you're implying that I was implying? Reading too much into someone's words is definitely a thing. There used to be 4+ major browser engines. Now there's only two, and Google owns almost complete share & following standards? Google prefers their monoculture. More diversity in browser engines was a good thing & standards were lovely. Not everything has to be a slug-fest between #1 & #2. & personally I'm glad there's Grok & Gemini to keep Anthropic & OpenAI on their toes even more than the competitive band of open weights models already do. The corporate models tend to be defensive and sound like HR has approved every word of the script. Not a fan.

SwellJoe 3mo ago

Google is playing a different game. I don't really know what game they're playing, but they're not trying to beat Claude Code. They have coding capabilities and Antigravity, but I'd be surprised if it's much more than an afterthought. They're focusing on efficiency, models at the edge, human interaction, image and video, etc. in ways Anthropic, in particular, is not. Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life. Merely being the best at coding is not how you get there. I am more bullish on Google in AI than most folks, I think, as they have been focused on efficiency in a way most US vendors have not. They've published a ton of papers on ways to make LLMs more efficient and capable on smaller devices.. Google wants to own the on-device market for AI, and I don't see many credible competitors in that space.

redanddead 3mo ago
At the same time that they’re seemingly exiting android?
- SwellJoe 3mo ago
  And, yet. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini....
richardw 3mo ago
If I had to summarise Google’s effort it would be: stay close but let the others burn themselves out. Position for the long game until you see something worth betting the company on. Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
- dansquizsoft 3mo ago
  This is 1000% not their (Google's) aim. The position they are in is due much more to their organisational laziness and incompetence than it is any grand strategy.
  - HardCodedBias 3mo ago