Oh, So Google's "Awake" Now? Give Me a Break.
Alright, folks, buckle up. Another day, another corporate narrative shoved down our throats. The latest gem? Google, the so-called "Google, the sleeping giant in global AI race, now ‘fully awake’" in AI, has apparently decided to roll out of bed. Three years after ChatGPT exploded onto the scene and sent every tech exec into a cold sweat, we're suddenly supposed to believe Google is "fully awake." My ass.
Let’s be real. Google didn’t just wake up. Google was always awake. It just had its eyes closed, napping on a pile of money, probably dreaming of more ad revenue. They pioneered the tech underpinning OpenAI’s chatbot, for crying out loud. They've been hoarding data like a digital dragon on a goldmine – search indexes, Android phones, YouTube... it’s all there. But for years, we heard the whispers, the outright declarations even, from analysts and even a Google engineer that they were behind. Now, suddenly, they’ve released some new software, Gemini 3, and struck a chip deal with Anthropic, and boom! The stock is soaring, Alphabet’s market cap is pushing $4 trillion, and everyone’s singing Kumbaya. It’s a comeback story. No, scratch that—it's Google remembering it has a bazooka in its closet after watching a kid with a slingshot cause a ruckus.
The "Awakening" and Why I’m Not Buying the Fairy Tale
The narrative goes something like this: ChatGPT showed up, Google panicked, Google reorganized, Google released Gemini 3 (which some OpenAI founding member calls "clearly a tier 1 LLM" – because, offcourse, his word is gospel), and now everything’s hunky-dory. Investors are "reassured." Warren Buffett even threw $4.9 billion at them. You know, because Buffett is known for his cutting-edge AI insights, not just sniffing out a good deal when a company's stock is undervalued due to a perception problem. Meanwhile, SoftBank, a big OpenAI backer, is taking a hit. Nvidia, the chip king, saw its shares drop 5.51% and lost $243 billion in market value. Their spokesperson then had the gall to say, "We’re delighted by Google’s success." Yeah, I bet you are, pal. That’s like your ex-wife saying she’s "delighted" you found someone else, right after she took half your house.
This whole "sleeping giant" thing? It’s pure PR spin, a convenient excuse for why a company with Google’s resources wasn't leading the charge from day one. CEO Sundar Pichai now trots out, "We’ve taken a full, deep, full-stack approach to AI," like it's a new revelation. Really? You mean the company that makes the apps, the software models, the cloud, and the chips has a full-stack approach? Shocking. It’s like discovering water is wet. They’ve had their own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for over a decade, designed for search, adapted for AI. But for years, they were mostly their own sole customer. Now, Anthropic’s in for "tens of billions of dollars" worth of TPUs, and Meta might be using them too. Funny how that works. You finally open up your toy chest, and everyone wants to play.
Here’s the rub, though. Google's chips are only accessible through their cloud service. "As soon as you use TPUs, you’re locked into" the Google cloud ecosystem, as Meryem Arik, CEO of Doubleword, points out. So, it's not just about offering a choice; it's about building a digital walled garden, just like every other tech giant out there. This ain't about open innovation, folks. It's about market share, always has been, always will be. And let's not forget the antitrust stuff. They just avoided a breakup in a US anti-monopoly case, "in part because of the perceived threat from AI newcomers." Convenient, isn't it? Nothing like a new boogeyman to keep the regulators at bay.
The Real Score: It’s About Control, Not Just Innovation
You want to talk about Google’s "edge"? It’s economics. It’s the sheer, mind-boggling scale of their operation. They're one of the few that produces the entire computing "full stack." They control the data goldmine, the infrastructure, the models, the apps. That means they don't have to pay suppliers like OpenAI does. They can just... keep it all in-house. This isn't just about making better AI; it’s about controlling the means of AI production. And while their cloud business is growing, it's still trailing Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. So, yeah, they're "back in the game," but it's a game they should have been dominating from the jump, if all those "deep, costly research" claims were truly about leading, not just defending.
The fact sheet talks about Google consolidating its AI efforts under Demis Hassabis, who’s apparently a rockstar computer scientist. And they’re focused "almost squarely on foundational models that keep pace with OpenAI." Keeping pace. Not leading. Just keeping pace. That’s the real story here. They had to be forced awake by a competitor. They had to reshuffle, had some "botched rollout of an image-generation product" along the way, because even Google can trip over its own feet. Consumer interest, by the way, is still a question mark. ChatGPT boasts 800 million weekly users; Google's Gemini app had 73 million monthly downloads as of October, well shy of ChatGPT's 93 million. So, while the enterprise customers might be lining up for Gemini 3, the actual people, the ones using these things every day, well, they're still largely with the original disruptor.
This isn’t about Google suddenly becoming a benevolent innovator. It’s about a behemoth realizing its prime real estate was being encroached upon. It’s about protecting profits and market share. It’s about throwing billions at a problem until it goes away, or at least until the stock market thinks it has. They want us to swallow this whole, and honestly... it just tastes like old news with a fresh coat of paint.