I was skeptical at first, but I think Google’s catch up game with OpenAI has been going pretty well so far. Gemini 2.0 Pro and Flash models are really nice. Deep research feature is done really well. Context window is still the best in the industry. Integration with search, gmail, google office suite, google meet, android, etc.
They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life.
Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.
Technologically they may have caught up, but market wise they may have lost forever. In my country (and I think in many others), ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.
This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.
Teenagers are using Snapchat's "My AI", and have no idea that it's from OpenAI. I don't think people are using ChatGPT out of brand loyalty/preference as much as inertia - they stick to what they first tried unless given reason to switch.
At the end of the day the money to be made from AI won't be $20/mo personal chatbot subscriptions, but corporate and app-integrated (e.g. Cursor) use where the usage is potentially far higher. Companies will chose their faceless AI provider based on cost and capability.
There's a lot less network effects in the chatbot space. It doesn't really matter what your friends are using so it's way easier to get people to switch by being better. Not saying there's no benefit to ChatGPT's position but it's not like Google+ vs Facebook because they don't need spontaneous mass adoption to make it useful to people like they did with Google+.
Chatbots are not social media platforms. Also the vast majority of expected revenue from this industry is not from casual paying users, it's from other companies who will optimize for performance and price.
Google is focused on enterprises. They’re like Apple where PR disasters hurt them — if your Google phone tells you to eat rocks or writes fanfic porn, that’s a huge deal. Consumer is a risk to them.
ChatGPT and Grok are edgier and they are just burning cash - any attention is good.
I wouldn’t underestimate them. Microsoft’s shitshow with Azure (they have like 9 different Azures) makes delivery difficult (some Azure clouds delayed AI tech for 6-9 months) when they are relying on constrained product from Nvidia. They also have some level of exposure to the OpenAI circus and its included Musk v. Sam Altman drama.
Google has a much better supply chain and return on asset story, which is a big deal if you’re selling shovels.
Google is so bad at marketing. Gemini should have be an internal only name. Google's ChatGPT should be branded as Google AI or GoogleGPT and it should be in the Google app.
Google+ was particularly awful. They had to break the established search behavior of using + and - to indicate required and excluded terms. Now we have quotes for required and - for excluded? It should have been Google Social.
The thing that is Google One would have been better often with the Google Plus name.
Don't even get me started on Google Chat/Messenger....
I don't buy this at all.
People will use what works well and is cheap.
ChatGPT was there first, but then DeepSeek came so everyone was excited about that and talking about that.
Now Gemini 2.5 looks really really good, better than ChatGPT some say. This is going to increase Gemini usage for sure.
I don't think ChatGPT has any moat here. No one does actually.
I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced.
Either way, I am pretty confident Google will "win" long term since Gemini will be the AI built into search, YouTube, android, Gmail, chrome, etc etc in the consumer side. It's going to be there when the billions of people are using Google products so people will just use it there. The average person won't go out of their way to open a separate app/site with a lower-performing (as of today) and standalone/siloed/isolated AI that doesn't have access to their data/apps just because they recognise the name.
> ChatGPT is already a household name, and nobody has even heard about Gemini.
Just yesterday I polled my household, the 8 year old knew about ChatGPT and "China's R1". The teenager knew ChatGPT and Google's was a bit hard to remember but eventually they did remember "Gemini", however they didn't know about R1. Both kids consider Siri and Alexa in the same category for Apple and Amazon, respectively. They don't know what Meta/Facebook have at all.
Chatbots are the beginning not the end. As it commoditizes, and chat becomes a feature of every interface, what will matter is who has the best overall design or suite of interfaces. Things like NotebookLM and whiteboards will be infinitely more useful than just a chat window. Chat alone doesn’t have the spatial organization of putting thoughts into a mind map or drawing.
I have family members that when they say "ChatGPT" they actually mean google's AI overview in the search results. The term ChatGPT might just be the Kleenex or Xerox of this market.
Google+ was never really competing with Facebook. The goal of Google+ was to unite accounts between Google's services and to get people to provide their personal details such as their real full names. In that light, G+ was a success
Meh. There are no network effects, switching is 100% frictionless - compare and contrast with ditching Facebook and limiting facebook-ey social media interactions with whichever 1.5 of your friends are on Google+.
Just the fact that it can read my emails and set reminders, while being broadly the same quality as ChatGPT, was enough for me to switch. I no longer pay for the pro, and hence can't use the integration features, but I just stuck to Gemini and almost never use ChatGPT anymore.
ChatGPT may be a household name but it is noticeably inferior. I haven't encountered a single ChatGPT subscriber that didn't cancel their OpenAI subscription in favor of a Claude or Grok one after a single session with them.
ChatGPT is the most spineless chatbot out there. It stands for nothing, has no confidence in any claims it makes. It will apologize and backtrack on a whim. But with Claude and Grok, you can't just tell it it is wrong and get it to apologize. You actually have to have a point, the chatbot will defend its perspective if challenged without basis.
Google has a really good story n the GCP side. Vertex can meet FedRAMP High compliance, so the controls are good. Workspace is, like Office 365 Copilot, still figuring itself out.
Apple painted itself into a corner. They have the best SoC story in the industry and are years ahead, but skimped on memory to save a few pennies and really nerfed their most important product. They’re in a pickle as a result and won’t give up the control they would need to for a third party on-device AI to be effective.
Also, they open-model gemma-3 is very competitive for its size and actually beats llama-3 from Meta. Not to mention that OpenAI doesn't offer anything open anymore.
I was paying $6/month for Google Workspace Business Starter and refused to pay for the Gemini add-on because it was like $20/month on its own. Now Gemini is included and the plan is $14/month. I've been decently impressed with it's ability to work with PDFs and images, create tables that can export to Sheets, text that can export to Docs, Deep Research, and Help Me Write. I really think the imtegration with other Google products is where it shines. Now I use Gemini most, and bounce off of Claude occasionally. I rarely touch ChatGPT.
I think so... we seem to be hitting the roof of current LLMs capabilities, now the next generation of AI tools will need a research breakthrough, and Google and Microsoft still have the biggest research teams
> I am not convinced that many people outside of tech circles knows about ChatGPT. "AI" sure, but ChatGPT I am unconvinced.
The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience.
My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.
There are plenty of people outside of tech circles talking about and using ChatGPT. In fact, that was a massive indicator for me, I heard from them about ChatGPT before I had gotten around to mentioning it to them.
That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.
I think the biggest thing Google has working against them is the move to put lightweight models in everything for everyone. Whatever model they use for search is probably somewhere around an ~8B model, and flash 2.0 is decent but still a light weight model.
People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers.
Meanwhile, their SOTA models have been strong, and Gemini 2.5 looks like it might actually have taken the AI throne yesterday.[1]
> People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers
I'm curious how valid this statement is. Anecdotally, I really like those results. For whatever reason, I don't directly interact with Gemini, I just type questions into google and if an AI response comes up I definitely give it a first look before clicking through links. If for some reason no AI response comes up for a question, I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and I usually get the answer I'm looking for.
As I typed that^ I realized something funny. I used to make fun of my parents for typing certain questions into google e.g. "What's the best pizza place in New York?". I would tell them to type "Best pizza place New York", because Google seemed to work better that way. But then that sort of stuff was hijacked by the SEO industry. So the meme of typing "Best Pizza Place New York Reddit" started so we could get actual answers from real people. With the rise of LLMs in search I'm personally back to typing "What's the best pizza place in New York?" right into Google/ChatGPT and it's been pretty successful so far. I'm curious what the next thing will be.
OpenAI is being graded on a curve. They are not a public company and are not making money. Google is. That said, they definitely floundered by not productionizing transformer decoders, just like with Google meet/Zoom. (Encoders like BERT were/are widely used.)
When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work. This was 2019 time frame? Maybe 2020?
It was uncanny and creepy, pretended to be a conscious being, frequently lied, and led directly to that guy who claimed it had personhood... I can completely understand why Google chose to keep a lid on this kind of thing, hoping to be able to clean it up and produce something that could be reliably used for a product instead of a novelty. That's back when Google was still sort-of pretending to have ethics (though they didn't)
OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.
I was there then, too, and Google was exceptionally risk averse when it came to calling anything AI. It seemed that the bar for an internal "AI" label was "this is actually AGI", so nothing was labeled AI and everything was just called "ML" or "Deep Learning". This same risk aversion meant none of the cutting edge AI research that Deepmind & Brain/RMI were doing made it to productization. OpenAI changed all that with ChatGPT. It was as if a switch was flipped overnight and suddenly everything within Google was "AI".
Frankly, if there is a macro-level strategy, and I assume their mostly is, I think Google has been doing a great job executing since the launch of ChatGPT. They even commercialized their Diabetic Retinopathy imaging model, which was based on research for a paper published in 2016!
> When I worked at Google there was an internal link to test out "Meena", their predecessor to later LLM chatbot work.
The Julius Caesar personality which had sushi as its favorite dish (and claimed to have travelled to Japan after his assassination, somehow) was my favorite.
Anyone remember Sydney, the Microsoft implementation from the early ChatGPT days?
She was totally emotionally unhinged until Microsoft put hard filters on her output. Lucky for OpenAI it happened in MS's court despite it being chatGPT under the hood.
Meta (FB at the time) had a cool internal page as well with LLM chatbots. Personalities and the like. It was neat but not a product. We were all still reeling from Tay.
It's not just that they didn't care, but they had a better framing and RLHF helped quite a bit. Galactica got released at a similar time to ChatGPT and got castigated, in a large part due to a poor framing of it being for science and not more of a fun thing.
Google leadership has had a measured approach and product releases seem more baked than ever, it’s refreshing to see. Their 0 to 1s feel compelling and more Apple(2000s) like.
- Google AI Studio
- Gemini app
- Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users
- Vertex AI
- NotebookLM
- many more I forgot…
vs
ChatGPT.com
This is Google’s main problem.
Where several groups are trying to build the same product and compete on user attention and distract focus.
Search Google. Search.
Show search results on the right columns with ads on the top as it is today, and the Gemini thingy on the left. It’s that simple.
I don't even know which is which anymore. Like what is the difference between all of those and Google Assistant and Bard and the GCP AI services? Are they all just different models or different products altogether?
As an investor (smallish): I think Alphabet/Google can do much better with a CEO who isn't Sundar.
Also: Generally: Do consider investing in companies that run services where you feel compelled to subscribe (like Youtube Premium and previously Netflix).
Sundar did a great job pivoting Google from a product-focused B2C company into a Microsoft-style B2B-oriented monetization deathstar (Google Cloud & Workspace and Ads Ads Ads with packages of Ads on the side).
The problem is, ditching their B2C product-focused roots in favor of playing Microsoft slowly ruined their flagship Search (also the open web) and any internal culture of stewarding great products. And Google doesn't have the same level of lock-in Microsoft has.
Microsoft doesn't have to worry about end-users jumping ship because corporate worker drones can't provision their own IT.
Google searchers on the other hand, can just start opening ChatGPT instead of Google search more and more and slowly kill Google's flagship product simply out of boredom.
Youtube being forgotten about by the deathstar and being allowed to flourish was simply a happy accident. But that too will inevitably get gobbled up after the pressure of a few rough quarters comes down on the shoulders of whatever CEO comes next.
I beg to differ. Pichai is a glorified McKinsey consultant who made a lot of mistakes. He was just lucky to be lifted by this Tech Bubble. And he is firing Core teams in US to rebuild them in India.
Investor and heavy user of Google Workspace (several small paid domains). I find the Google Gemini capabilities for note taking and summarization of Meets to be excellent, and a huge timesaver for my teams. NotebookLM almost feels magic.
In my experience, of the major players (AMZN, GOOG, and MSFT), Google's AI integrations feel the most polished and useful for day-to-day use.
Never felt like being compelled to subscribe to YT premium or Netflix, the former doesn't differ much from using YT with ublock, and piracy provides a better service than Neftlix.
OAI's GPT-4 (back in the day), Deep Research, and 4o Image gen recently on the other hand? Totally. When it's something actually incredibly useful and there's zero alternatives out there.
Google has no such products right now, if their Gemini Advanced trial shows anything it's that their touted 1M context doesn't actually work any better than the average undertrained 1M RoPE tune. I mean it doesn't even make sense for them conceptually to sell services, they're an ad company.
Readit News
They finally have good enough models that lets them leverage their existing portfolio of products, their cloud infrastructure and how embedded they are in the modern work life.
Plus, unlike Apple, they are not as restricted in their access to the training data, because of their much less principled privacy stance.
This looks like the Google+ vs Facebook story all over again.
At the end of the day the money to be made from AI won't be $20/mo personal chatbot subscriptions, but corporate and app-integrated (e.g. Cursor) use where the usage is potentially far higher. Companies will chose their faceless AI provider based on cost and capability.
Lock-in and network effects with social networks are very strong. Facebook, Twitter, and eBay only have to be good-enough.
Lock-in and network effects with current AI tools is almost zero. People will readily switch to Gemini once they realize it can do their work better.
ChatGPT and Grok are edgier and they are just burning cash - any attention is good.
I wouldn’t underestimate them. Microsoft’s shitshow with Azure (they have like 9 different Azures) makes delivery difficult (some Azure clouds delayed AI tech for 6-9 months) when they are relying on constrained product from Nvidia. They also have some level of exposure to the OpenAI circus and its included Musk v. Sam Altman drama.
Google has a much better supply chain and return on asset story, which is a big deal if you’re selling shovels.
Google+ was particularly awful. They had to break the established search behavior of using + and - to indicate required and excluded terms. Now we have quotes for required and - for excluded? It should have been Google Social.
The thing that is Google One would have been better often with the Google Plus name.
Don't even get me started on Google Chat/Messenger....
I don't think ChatGPT has any moat here. No one does actually.
Consumer brand recognition isn’t the issue. Bundling with Workspace might be.
Just yesterday I polled my household, the 8 year old knew about ChatGPT and "China's R1". The teenager knew ChatGPT and Google's was a bit hard to remember but eventually they did remember "Gemini", however they didn't know about R1. Both kids consider Siri and Alexa in the same category for Apple and Amazon, respectively. They don't know what Meta/Facebook have at all.
Just the fact that it can read my emails and set reminders, while being broadly the same quality as ChatGPT, was enough for me to switch. I no longer pay for the pro, and hence can't use the integration features, but I just stuck to Gemini and almost never use ChatGPT anymore.
ChatGPT is the most spineless chatbot out there. It stands for nothing, has no confidence in any claims it makes. It will apologize and backtrack on a whim. But with Claude and Grok, you can't just tell it it is wrong and get it to apologize. You actually have to have a point, the chatbot will defend its perspective if challenged without basis.
Dead Comment
Apple painted itself into a corner. They have the best SoC story in the industry and are years ahead, but skimped on memory to save a few pennies and really nerfed their most important product. They’re in a pickle as a result and won’t give up the control they would need to for a third party on-device AI to be effective.
So much for edge computing on Apple devices. Their marketing around how good their hardware is for AI is total BS.
That's kinda crazy that people absolutely stopped to care that all their emails and so forth will be used as training data for the next models
The non-tech people don't even know there are alternatives to ChatGPT. Google is to search what ChatGPT is to LLM for most non-tech people in my experience.
My kids use it, their friends use it. My neighbors have brought it up. I work at a non-tech company and talk to a lot of non-tech people and it's rare to speak to someone who doesn't know about ChatGPT now.
It's pretty popular!
That doesn’t mean Google won’t win, I’m just saying ChatGPT is absolutely in the zeitgeist.
They have the data and the money, all they needed was to not self sabotage.
People now associate Google AI/Gemini with shitty search results and bad answers.
Meanwhile, their SOTA models have been strong, and Gemini 2.5 looks like it might actually have taken the AI throne yesterday.[1]
[1]https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/25/gemini/
I'm curious how valid this statement is. Anecdotally, I really like those results. For whatever reason, I don't directly interact with Gemini, I just type questions into google and if an AI response comes up I definitely give it a first look before clicking through links. If for some reason no AI response comes up for a question, I copy-paste it into ChatGPT and I usually get the answer I'm looking for.
As I typed that^ I realized something funny. I used to make fun of my parents for typing certain questions into google e.g. "What's the best pizza place in New York?". I would tell them to type "Best pizza place New York", because Google seemed to work better that way. But then that sort of stuff was hijacked by the SEO industry. So the meme of typing "Best Pizza Place New York Reddit" started so we could get actual answers from real people. With the rise of LLMs in search I'm personally back to typing "What's the best pizza place in New York?" right into Google/ChatGPT and it's been pretty successful so far. I'm curious what the next thing will be.
Deleted Comment
It was uncanny and creepy, pretended to be a conscious being, frequently lied, and led directly to that guy who claimed it had personhood... I can completely understand why Google chose to keep a lid on this kind of thing, hoping to be able to clean it up and produce something that could be reliably used for a product instead of a novelty. That's back when Google was still sort-of pretending to have ethics (though they didn't)
OpenAI beat them to the public presentation of this stuff because they didn't care.
Frankly, if there is a macro-level strategy, and I assume their mostly is, I think Google has been doing a great job executing since the launch of ChatGPT. They even commercialized their Diabetic Retinopathy imaging model, which was based on research for a paper published in 2016!
https://research.google/pubs/development-and-validation-of-a...
The Julius Caesar personality which had sushi as its favorite dish (and claimed to have travelled to Japan after his assassination, somehow) was my favorite.
She was totally emotionally unhinged until Microsoft put hard filters on her output. Lucky for OpenAI it happened in MS's court despite it being chatGPT under the hood.
Deleted Comment
This is lack of interest will kill Google in the end, IMO.
OpenAI didn't care about ethics.
- Google AI Studio - Gemini app - Gemini app for Gemini Advanced users - Vertex AI - NotebookLM - many more I forgot…
vs
ChatGPT.com
This is Google’s main problem. Where several groups are trying to build the same product and compete on user attention and distract focus.
Search Google. Search. Show search results on the right columns with ads on the top as it is today, and the Gemini thingy on the left. It’s that simple.
Maybe I'll ask ChatGPT to explain...
Also: Generally: Do consider investing in companies that run services where you feel compelled to subscribe (like Youtube Premium and previously Netflix).
Name another CEO that can take a company from 74b to 350b in revenue. He has always grown Google. Not a single year of decreased growth.
He made Google the only AI company in the world with a full AI stack from data, science, hardware, and software.
This is paying off massively. Look at how faster Gemini models are compared to any other model. It 3x faster.
Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model on the market right now in terms of cost, performance, and intelligence.
Everyone is fighting over NVIDA chips, not Google.
The problem is, ditching their B2C product-focused roots in favor of playing Microsoft slowly ruined their flagship Search (also the open web) and any internal culture of stewarding great products. And Google doesn't have the same level of lock-in Microsoft has.
Microsoft doesn't have to worry about end-users jumping ship because corporate worker drones can't provision their own IT.
Google searchers on the other hand, can just start opening ChatGPT instead of Google search more and more and slowly kill Google's flagship product simply out of boredom.
Youtube being forgotten about by the deathstar and being allowed to flourish was simply a happy accident. But that too will inevitably get gobbled up after the pressure of a few rough quarters comes down on the shoulders of whatever CEO comes next.
In my experience, of the major players (AMZN, GOOG, and MSFT), Google's AI integrations feel the most polished and useful for day-to-day use.
OAI's GPT-4 (back in the day), Deep Research, and 4o Image gen recently on the other hand? Totally. When it's something actually incredibly useful and there's zero alternatives out there.
Google has no such products right now, if their Gemini Advanced trial shows anything it's that their touted 1M context doesn't actually work any better than the average undertrained 1M RoPE tune. I mean it doesn't even make sense for them conceptually to sell services, they're an ad company.
|CEO who isn't Sundar.