Can you provide some context about why this is relevant to the article, which posits that Google is uniquely positioned to win the AI space and hence the future of computing?

The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services that leverage Google’s infrastructure to provide the same capabilities to businesses. Moreover, it’s a world where Google is truly integrated: the company already makes the chips, in both its phones and its data centers, it makes the models, and it does it all with the largest collection of data in the world.

I don't know enough about the AI space to comment on it specifically.

But this distinctly reminds me about articles around about the time of the first iPhone release which posited that Microsoft was in a unique position to ultimately win the smartphone market.

After all it was dominant on the desktop and Windows Mobile already had a decent (albeit not dominant) marketshare in smartphones at the time.

The theory wasn't wrong and still isn't wrong. The problem is in the execution.

The two things are related. That's the insight of The Innovator's Dilemma. They cannot do it.

But it doesn't seem to be true - there's more of a moat around search than AI it seems, and the recent trend is people replacing the Google search app on their phones with Perplexity.ai.

You currently still need search too, for AI's to access data newer than their training set, but I wonder how that's going to evolve over time ... Could see AI's being updated increasingly frequently and tapping direct into news sources (not via search) for news/sports/etc.

Because Google has burned it’s good will by cancelling so many projects.

Yet another new Google project is simply met with “ok, but when will it be canceled”.

> which posits that Google is uniquely positioned to win the AI space and hence the future of computing?

They have been "uniquely positioned" as you put it to win the AI race for the past 15 years now.

And they have done exactly zilch (other than produce an OpenAI-wannabe fake video with Gemini a couple of weeks back).

I see no reason why that will change in any way.

Astronomical payoffs is not something Google is culturally capable of anymore, because they require risk taking, and strictly no one has any incentive to take any kind of risks at Google anymore.

Chrome, gmail, google docs/sheets, google meet, google drive, cloud, pixel, chrome book, nest, fiber, waymo

Waymo?

Way too early IMO. Think about something like Google Fiber. It looked extremely promising, but the inability (or lack of desire) to expand it left it as mostly irrelevant. With Waymo they also have some major issues to work out as they're bleeding billions while charging as much, if not more, as human driven cars charge. It might end up getting worked out in the future and turned into something neat, or it might just eventually find itself on the ever-growing scrap-heap.

aghem, Stadia, aghem

> it’s already doing well

> search

many people disagree..

It needs to be at least many hundred million disagree to matter.

> hundred million

this is about how many people now going to ChatGPT while were going to Google year ago for similar searches

At least in my experience, ChatGPT uses Bing a whole lot. I wonder what the stats for Bing usage are now compared to Google since ChatGPT has been out for a while.