I actually didn't know that 400 million number. Substantial obviously even without knowing exactly how they're defining active and how "unique" that number is (installs of the app? Does it come stock on Android somehow?). And I would've been one of the folks (glibly?) criticizing Sundar's leadership, a big part of which was because they seemed to be caught flat-footed when OpenAI took off even though they had the SOTA tech even before ChatGPT was released.
That said, it does seem like they're somehow managing through this pretty well with this earnings call being the first clear indication of it. Will they be able to continue to do that? I guess that's partially up to them maintaining parity, or better, with the competition (not that folks are going to jump overnight from one provider to another without some earth-shattering advancement).
Definitely agree and I guess hope that there will be room for multiple players in this.
If Google can fend off the US DoJ, I think they're going to be just fine.
Claude and Gemini have been very useful in helping me come up to speed on a code base written in Go (a language I have used before but not for many years). Figuring out where the business logic lies, how the dependency injection is done, how the tests are written, what overall design pattern is being etc.
Of course, I could have done all this without LLMs but it would have taken several weeks/months longer. Letting the LLM handle the boilerplate and framework jargon lets me focus on the business logic and the design patterns, and helps me contribute much faster. But LLMs do often make mistakes so it's not like I blindly trust the output. They don't replace your colleagues in terms of being the ultimate source of truth. But it has speeded up the learning process, no doubt.
Also, when writing code I provide the style guide to the LLM as context and have it review the code.