A little of column A and a lot of column B.
Google is slightly undervalued, Misanthropic is massively overvalued.
Let's talk timelines.
2015: Google deployed it's first TPU (tensor processing unit)... For context, openAI in 2026 is only now producing their first TPU chip. Even being generous saying it was only INT8 the same as Nvidia 20-series (2018) that's still 3 years ahead.
2017: The landmark research paper detailing "transformers" in LLM's, titled: Attention is all you need, was published... by 8 engineers working at Google's Deep Mind.
In my mind there's a few possibilities.
1. Google really were blindsided and through lack of leadership / vision were surpassed.
2. Google has already war gamed this out. They know the limits of stochastic tech with "AI" being mostly marketing hype (same as crypto / NFT's), which is why they've limited their liability by investing 10x less than most others in the space.
3. Or they knew AI is going to have some success, but stuck to principles. Google the search engine started out by running distributed (max redundancy) on absolutely dogshit hardware. Yet through clever software optimizations + minimal CAPEX / OPEX, they were able to provide the best service and out compete everyone (Alta vista, yahoo, etc.). Same thing this time around. I have a feeling they (and anyone else not caught up in religious / marketing hype e.g. Deep Seek) is looking at the OPEX and trying to figure out how to optimize.
Google is slightly undervalued, Misanthropic is massively overvalued.
Let's talk timelines.
2015: Google deployed it's first TPU (tensor processing unit)... For context, openAI in 2026 is only now producing their first TPU chip. Even being generous saying it was only INT8 the same as Nvidia 20-series (2018) that's still 3 years ahead.
2017: The landmark research paper detailing "transformers" in LLM's, titled: Attention is all you need, was published... by 8 engineers working at Google's Deep Mind.
In my mind there's a few possibilities.
1. Google really were blindsided and through lack of leadership / vision were surpassed.
2. Google has already war gamed this out. They know the limits of stochastic tech with "AI" being mostly marketing hype (same as crypto / NFT's), which is why they've limited their liability by investing 10x less than most others in the space.
3. Or they knew AI is going to have some success, but stuck to principles. Google the search engine started out by running distributed (max redundancy) on absolutely dogshit hardware. Yet through clever software optimizations + minimal CAPEX / OPEX, they were able to provide the best service and out compete everyone (Alta vista, yahoo, etc.). Same thing this time around. I have a feeling they (and anyone else not caught up in religious / marketing hype e.g. Deep Seek) is looking at the OPEX and trying to figure out how to optimize.