Stephen Morris

Well, when I first arrived here in San Francisco a couple of years ago, the narrative around Google and AI was very negative.

You know, there was widespread allegations they'd fumbled their early lead in this technology, allowed two now trillion, potential trillion dollar startups heading for IPO to eat their own lunch after taking their staff and technology they'd incubated.

But over the last, I would say, 12 to 18 months, that has turned around and Google really has started to show its strengths and started to back up their rhetoric that they have been building towards this AI moment for the last decade plus.

What we are seeing is both a resurgence in their actual technical capabilities, powered by their DeepMind Research Lab.

Gemini, which is the name of their chatbot and their larger family of models, is starting to be adopted by both consumers and pushed to enterprises more aggressively.

But more than that, Google has this whole ecosystem around the actual models, which they say gives them both a cost advantage and a technology advantage.

I'm thinking here of their giant cloud business.

I'm talking about their custom TPUs, which are specialized AI chips.

And then you have this vast reservoir of money that they are sitting on, which they're able to pump and recycle into AI.

I use that in the widest possible sense for attracting and retaining talent.

for building more data centers, powering research.

So we are really seeing Google completely change the narrative and like really underline their credentials.

And I think every aspect of AI here.

Now that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize them for being a bit slow to start and allowing anthropic and open AI to grow into these massive competitors right under their noses.

But if I'm going to gamble like long-term, who's still going to be there at the frontier, monetizing AI, making the best technology, my money's probably going to be on Google.

But what Google also has in its favor is that its rivals are, in addition to being nimble and able to pivot, they are also unique and often bonkers organizations.

For example, the CEO of Anthropic picking a fight with Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the appropriate military use of their technology, resulting in them being thrown into a tailspin after essentially being banned from all US government servers.

Good for their reputation in some ways, in particular among very worthy, very moral AI researchers.

Bad for their income.

And of course, you never really want to make an enemy of Donald Trump in this current environment.