I'm saying Google is going to win. They're not beholden to their current architecture as much as other shovelmakers and can pivot their TPU to offer the best inference perf/$. They also hold about as much personal data as anyone else and have plenty of stuff to train on in-house. I work for a competitor and even I think there's a good chance google "wins"(there's never a winner because the race never ends).
Pixel being undermarketed is deliberate, Android is an alliance and they don't want to compete against Samsung too hard.
But Google have other weaknesses. In the most valuable market (the USA) Google is very politically exposed. The left don't like them because they're big rich techbro capitalists, the Democrats tried to break them up. The right hate them because of their ongoing censorship, social engineering and cancellation of the right. They're rapidly running out of friends.
Just compare:
https://www.google.com/search?q=conservative+ai
https://www.bing.com/search?q=conservative+ai
The Google SERP is a trash fire, and it must be deliberate. It's almost like the search engine is broken. Not a single conservative chat bot ranks. On Bing the results are full of what the searcher is looking for. ChatGPT isn't perfect but it's a lot less biased than Google is. Its search results come from Bing which is more politically neutral. Also Altman is a fresh face who hasn't antagonized the right in the same way Google has. For ~half the population Gemini is still branded as "the bot that drew black nazis and popes", ChatGPT isn't. That's an own goal they didn't need.
I think we are all forgetting that Google is a massive bureaucracy that has to move out of its own way to get anything done. The younger companies have a distinct advantage here. Hence the cycle of company growth and collapse.I think openai and the like have a very good chance here.
yeah ... poly market and other makers seem to be betting that Google by year's end or sometime next year or so will have teh best gen ai models on the market ... but I've been using Claude sonnet 4.5 with GitHub Copilot and swear by it.
anyways would be nice to really see some apples-to-apples benchmarks of the TPU vs Nvidia hardware but how would that work given CUDA is not hardware agnostic?
The problem is that Google is horrible at product. They have been so spot on at search it's covered up all the other issues around products. YT is great, but they bought that. The Pixel should the Android phone, but they do a poor job marketing. They should be leading AI, but stumbled multiple times in the rollout. They normally get the tech right, and then fumble the productizing and marketing.