I mean, I'm sure there are people within Google who are behaving as though they can keep the dream of the 00s alive in Mountain View, but there's also a whole bunch of people doing work at the frontier in AI. Google has a large lead in hardware, they have the smartest very small models, they have among the most efficient large models (I'd wager their margins on Gemini 3.5 Flash inference are absurd). They have among the best image, video, and audio models, going in every direction (generating, editing, understanding).
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.
Why lol? Because you don't like Elon? XAI has continued to stay within a few months of leading edge, and now suddenly they'll just never do it again, despite doing it literally today?
Culture. XAI employs were bragging about spending all weekend at the office. Many tweet that they have been fired after 8 months. Some get fired right before their first big stock vest.
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
> hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.