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ShanuMathew93 (2026-08-01) says Google still holds major assets — search and…

2026-08-01 · 05:47 UTC ·@ShanuMathew93 ·2 min read

Brief

ShanuMathew93 warns that despite Google’s distribution (search, GCP, GSuite), infrastructure (compute, chips, networking) and DeepMind/Brain talent, there’s no evident 'code red' as OpenAI and Anthropic gain SOTA traction and cultural mindshare; a quoted reply argues Google now has 'almost zero cultural gravity,' startups are switching to OpenAI for cost/speed, and momentum (including open weights) is moving to rivals and Chinese labs.

Why it matters

ShanuMathew93 (2026-08-01) says Google still holds major assets — search and enterprise distribution (GCP + GSuite), compute/energy/chips vertical integration, and Demis/GDM/Brain talent — yet notes no visible 'code red' response as OpenAI and Anthropic push faster SOTA models and cultural mindshare.

Key details

  • Shanu and a quoted reply note competitors beat Gemini on intelligence-to-cost and speed (examples: Meta's Grok and OpenAI's instant models); the reply from signüll claims 'almost zero cultural gravity' for Google in frontier-AI conversations, that their startup replaced Gemini with OpenAI for price/performance, and that frontier discourse is now dominated by OpenAI/Anthropic with open-weight momentum shifting to Chinese labs.
Source evidence

Will never count them out given their track record + existing distribution on search + enterprise (GCP +Gsuite) + Demis/GDM/Brain talent, but it’s very odd to me there hasn’t been more of a code red moment.

Pro being completely left behind while OAI and Ant just push out better and better models and dominate mindshare culturally seems odd to let happen. If you’re a buyer of the first to RSI = widens competitive performance, then you should be really concerned given model traction feels behind what increasingly feels like a 2 horse race.

Even on simple search, Grok / Meta have gotten really good on intelligence to cost trade-off. I use one of those or the instant models from OAI if I need speed on a quick search. Gemini can’t rest on its laurels there, either. Distribution is hard to come by but OAI/ANT are growing insanely fast and perhaps the one thing that can encroach on decades long built distribution and scale advantages is a highly reliable intelligence layer across your digital surface area.

One are Google will continue to be great is compute, energy, vertical integration, chips, networking, SLE, etc. they have a really deep and talented team that relentlessly executes. But it increasingly feels like the rest of those teams lead while SOTA models are trying to just hang on despite all those advantages.

signüll (@signulll)

google right now has almost zero cultural gravity when it comes to frontier ai discussions in any of the conversations i am in, like not even mentioned once. both in consumer + enterprise contexts (i naturally tell ppl to claude it or chatgpt it instead of googling it, i can’t recall the last time i told someone to google it). for our startup, we used to use gemini for some things cuz the price of some of the flash models but even that now makes very very little sense (we started using openai & it’s been great).

in essence almost all of the frontier discourse is owned by openai/anthropic, & all of the open weight momentum has shifted entirely to aggressive chinese labs.

i don’t know where google fits in. i guess when you don’t have an existential threat anymore, there is no reason to be aggressive.

— https://nitter.net/signulll/status/2083250490691785188#m