a very smart take from Semafor’s Reed Albergotti on Google:
Whoever stands atop the AI race podium isn’t the main point anymore. The contest is now about using AI to accomplish real world tasks. And for that, the benchmark is simple: Does it work and what did it cost?
There has been a lot of hand-wringing in the tech news space about Demis Hassabis not being the CEO of DeepMind and what it means for Gemini but I think Albergotti has it right that it doesn’t make a difference if Gemini ever is “on top” again.
Albergotti:
The tools will start to feel a little bit magical, especially for people who haven’t been experimenting with coding agents. But the underlying models powering those features will not be state of the art, and none of the people using the features will care about that, because they will work.
Google won’t be using the top models for all of that because using the most powerful AI would be astronomically expensive, and there probably isn’t enough compute power in the world to handle it.
The “top models” don’t make a difference for everyday business or personal use and they are never the defaults anyhow.
Google has billions of users who will find some value in these tools and get real work done with them. Whether Gemini can build some game demo that titillates the likes of Matt Shumer is irrelevant. Gemini integration with all of Google’s services will help keep bringing the money in and at the end of the day that’s all that matters for Google.