It always seemed very natural to me that AI will move “down the stack”, where Open AI and Anthropic don’t really have a foot in the door.
Who makes consumer devices? Google
Who makes operating systems? Google
Who makes browsers? Google
Who makes the world’s most popular websites? Google
By the time 90% of average internet users get to chatgpt.com or whatever, they already went through several Google chokepoints, each layer is one more place Google can answer their questions.
And that’s not even getting into the chips, the data centers, the data, the talent, the consumer apps, the enterprise apps, the cloud platform, the brand, and of course the biggest cash printing machine in human history.
You would honestly have to be insane to bet against G.
Part of the pitch of AI companies is that they mediate and provide a new surface for ads, for taking an affiliate cut of sales, etc.
But it isn't like this hasn't been the long-running strategy for Google as well - provide more results on search so that people don't go to the site with ads, provide paid product results for shopping, to offer more services to keep people providing personal/behavioral queues to Google and more opportunities for ad placement.
If anything, AI turned up the heat such that the frog noticed what temperature the pot was. But that doesn't really put them in a better position to execute than Google.
There was a point in time when this would have been untrue of Google. They didn't manifest into this market position, they rose there over the years after starting with a relatively modest product offering. Nothing saying someone else can't do the same.
> You would honestly have to be insane to bet against G.
Unless you are confident that Google will be antitrust forced to weakening their hold in some of those markets. A crack is all you need for the water to rush in and widen the crack.
I think most of Google's deep research projects were done in the pursuit of pure science, not monetization or productization. In hindsight sure, it looks like they missed an opportunity. But not everything needs to be about money.
Who makes consumer devices? Google
Who makes operating systems? Google
Who makes browsers? Google
Who makes the world’s most popular websites? Google
By the time 90% of average internet users get to chatgpt.com or whatever, they already went through several Google chokepoints, each layer is one more place Google can answer their questions.
And that’s not even getting into the chips, the data centers, the data, the talent, the consumer apps, the enterprise apps, the cloud platform, the brand, and of course the biggest cash printing machine in human history.
You would honestly have to be insane to bet against G.