How Google plans to win the AI war

Google is trying to pull off one of the trickiest balancing acts in tech: aggressively disrupting its own products with AI while protecting the businesses that generate tens of billions in profit. Why it matters: Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Google enters the AI race with enormous scale, distribution and cash flow — but also a vast empire it has to defend. Driving the news : As it has for the past two years , Google used this week's I/O developer conference to focus almost entirely on AI . It's revamping its core search box to serve both traditional short queries, while seamlessly allowing it to expand for longer chatbot-style conversations. YouTube, meanwhile, is getting a new "Ask YouTube" feature where people can ask a question and get both a text result — for making a recipe, say, or fixing a clogged pipe — as well as a link to the video. The big picture: Public perception of the AI race often swings wildly based on whichever company most recently released a flashy model. For a while OpenAI was seen as unbeatable. Then late last year, Google was seen as having pulled ahead . And now many are pointing to Anthropic as having surged forward thanks to Mythos . But executives at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic increasingly describe the frontier race as effectively neck-and-neck, with companies making different tradeoffs around cost, speed and computing resources. This was highlighted by Google's choice to debut the latest Gemini not with a behemoth version to compete with Mythos but with the faster, cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash. The choice reflects a broader Google strategy: Stay at the frontier, but also prioritize models cheap and fast enough to deploy across products used by billions, rather than chasing benchmark supremacy alone. In other words, Google's key advantage may be in not just competing for the best model, but being able to pair that leading model with enormous platforms that dwarf even ChatGPT in scale. What they're saying: "...

Original source: Axios