Is Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.

One of the most corrosive effects of being large and old (and Google is old by this point) is institutional inertia and individual internal optimization.

The former caused by the latter.

And the latter a problem once you begin to get executives and leaders who have mostly worked inside the company, because then they subconsciously prefer the Company Way(tm) to alternatives.

And Google has some previously-optimal, now-detrimental company ways.

From my understanding (I may be wrong) what is happening now is that frontier labs are doubling down on doing RLHF on their models using the user interaction with their own tools e.g. Anthropic making their models better at producing code with claude code. Perhaps the top Google researchers do not see this kind of narrow focus as a path to more generally beneficial AI technology.

Is it failing ? Take a look at the stock price

I feel like the majority of ai use by normal people is through Google search, so that's kind of a win.

I'm confused by meta's capex though. Are they planning on becoming a cloud provider, or just throwing money away like with the metaverse?

More like sects of a major religion. Or, a minor and incredibly expensive religion, in this case.