If these numbers are true then OpenAI is probably done, Anthropic too.
Still, it's hard to see an effective monetization method for this tech and it clearly is eating Google's main pie which is search.
I have a few secret prompts to test complex reasoning capabilities of new models (in law and medicine). Gemini (2.5 pro) is by a wide margin behind Anthropic (sonnet 4.5 basic thinking) and Openai (pro model) on my own benchmark and I trust my own benchmark more than public leaderboards. So it's the other way around. Google is trying to catch up where the others are. It just doesn't seem so to some because Google undercuts prices and most people don't have own complex problems with a verified solution to test against (so they could see how bad Gemini is in reality)
I think google is uniquely well placed to make a profitable business out of AI: They make their own TPUs so don't have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to Nvidia, they have a great depth of talent in building models, they've got loads of data they can use for training and they've got a huge existing customer base who can buy their AI offerings.
I don't think any other company has all these ingredients.
While I don’t disagree that Google is the company you can’t bet against when it comes to AI, saying other companies are done is a stretch. If they have a significant moat then they should be at the top all the time by then which is not the case though.
ChatGPT's moat is their name and user habit. People who are using it will keep using it. All/most of the products are _good enough_ for the people who already got used to using them, that they arent exploring competitors.
Microsoft has the chance of changing habit the most by virtue of being bundled into business contracts that have companies with policies not allowing any other product in the workplace.
> ChatGPT's moat is their name and user habit. People who are using it will keep using it. All/most of the products are _good enough_ for the people who already got used to using them, that they arent exploring competitors.
They have a long way to go to become profitable though. Those users will get less sticky when openAI starts upping their pricing/putting ads everywhere/making the product worse to save money/all of the above.
The enterprise sales cycle is often quite long, though, and often includes a lot of hurdles around compliance, legal, etc. It would take a fairly sustained loss of edge before a lot of enterprises would switch once they're hooked into a given platform. It's interesting to me that Sonnet 4.5 still edges Gemini 3 on SWE bench. This seems to bode well for the trajectory that Anthropic is on.
The TPU are a key factor. They are the most mature alternative to Nvidia. Only Google cloud, Azure, and AWS enable you to rent their respective AI chips. Out of those three, google is the only one to have a frontier model. So if they have a real advantage they're not exposed to the financial shenanigans propping up neo clouds like Coreweave.
Considering GPT 5 was only recently released, it's very unlikely GPT will achieve these scores in just a couple of months. If they had something this good in the oven, they'd probably left the GPT 5 name to it.
Or maybe Google just benchmaxxed and this doesn't translate at all in real world performance.
If not this model, Google at some point is going to get and stay ahead just because they have so many more people and compute resources they can throw at many directions while the others have to make the right choices with how they use their resources each time. Took a while to channel their numbers into a product direction but now I don't think they're going to let up
Or else it trained/overfit to the benchmarks. We won't really know until people have a chance to use it for real-world tasks.
Also, models are already pretty good but product/market fit (in terms of demonstrated economic value delivered) remains elusive outside of a couple domains. Does a model that's (say) 30% better reach an inflection point that changes that narrative, or is a more qualitative change required?
They're constantly matching and exceeding each other. It's a hypercompetitive space and I would fully expect one of the others to top various benchmarks shortly after. On pretty much every leading release someone does this "everyone else is done! Shut er down" thing and it's growing pretty weird.
Having said that, OpenAI's ridiculous hype cycle has been living on borrowed time. OpenAI has zero moat, and are just one vendor in a space with many vendors, and even incredibly competent open source models by surprise Chinese entrants. Sam Altman going around acting like he's a prophet and they're the gatekeepers of the future is an act that should be super old, but somehow fools and their money continue to be parted.
This. If I had to put my money on a survivor, it would be Google because it is an established company with existing revenue modules unrelated to AI. Anthropic and OpenAI won't stand alone without external funding
1) Not long ago Altman and the OpenAI CFO were openly asking for public money. None of these AI companies have actually any kind of working business plan and are just burning investor money. If the investors see there is no winning against Google (or some open Chinese model) the money will dry up.
2) I'm not suggesting this will happen overnight but especially younger people gravitate towards LLM for information search + actively use some sort of ad blocking. In the long run it doesn't look great for Google.
This may just be bad recollection from my part, but hasn't Google reported that their search business is right now the most profitable it has ever been?
