Google Is Winning on Every AI Front

Summary

Even in my most bullish days for OpenAI, I secretly preferred DeepMind. I felt Demis Hassabis was trustworthy in a way Sam Altman couldn't be—a true scientist, not a businessman. Also, AlphaGo and AlphaZero. To me, they're not historical milestones but nostalgia. ChatGPT is cool, but do you remember move 37? And the AlphaZero-Stockfish 8 chess games? My love and interest for AI grew parallel to DeepMind’s successes. I was rooting, almost like a sports fan, for them.So, for years, I’ve been low-key saddened by their constant fumbling. They had the tech, the talent, the money, the infrastructure, the prestige, and the conviction to make ChatGPT—or whatever else they wanted—before OpenAI. They didn't. CEO Sundar Pichai was afraid to thwart Google’s main revenue source (search and ads). He chose prudence over boldness. Good—they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.Because they didn’t shoot at all.But that was the last mistake they made. Today, two and a half years after the ChatGPT debacle, Google DeepMind is winning. They are winning so hard right now that they’re screaming, “Please, please, we can’t take it anymore, it’s too much winning!” No, but really—I wonder if the only reason OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Co. ever had the slightest chance to win is because Google fumbled that one time. They don’t anymore.I’d been holding off on writing about Gemini 2.5. Focusing on the AI model didn’t feel like enough to tell the full story of Google’s comeback. Gemini 2.5 is only a piece—albeit a big one—of something much larger. Back in December 2024, I said they would come out on top by the end of 2025. We’re not even halfway there and it’s already happened. (For reasons I still don’t understand, some people genuinely thought xAI had a shot.)Anyway, to avoid turning this post into an over-stylized narrative—which I do more often than I’d like—I’m keeping it to bullet points. It hits harder that way. You’ll see what I mean when the list just... doesn’t end.Google and DeepMind f...