If you want to win at AI – and I mean win in the biggest, most fascinating, most reshaping of the world in your image – you’re going to have to do several hard things at once. You must have a model that is undoubtedly one of the best on the market. You need almost infinite resources to continue improving that model and deploying it at scale. You need at least one AI-based product that is used by a lot of people, and ideally more than one. And you need access to as much of your users’ other data – their personal information, their online activity, even the files on their computers – as you can possibly get.
Each of these elements is complex and contested; That’s why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman keeps yelling about how they need trillions of dollars in computation alone. But Google is a company that has everything already in place. Over the past year, and even the past few days, the company has taken steps that show it’s poised to become the biggest and most influential force in AI.
A lot of essential infrastructure work took place last year. In November, Google released Gemini 3, widely regarded as the best overall large language model on the market. It wins most (somewhat questionably) benchmark tests, and most experts agree it’s at or near the top of the list for most tasks. Of course, its reign won’t last forever — we’re still in the “there’s a new best model every six weeks” phase of AI — but Google has proven that its best work is consistently the industry’s best work.
A key factor for Gemini 3 was the way it was trained: using Google’s own TPU, a highly specialized chip that the company has been building for years for just this type of purpose. Google is certainly vulnerable to some manufacturing problems and rising RAM prices, but unlike almost all of its competitors, it is not dependent on Nvidia’s supply chain. Google has been able to optimize its entire system to make it better, faster, and cheaper. No one else has this kind of full-stack control over their AI destiny.
So what do you do when you have the technology? Put it in front of people and put it to work. On Monday, Google and Apple announced that Gemini will power the next-generation Siri coming later this year. This is a big win for Apple, which is reportedly paying $1 billion a year in hopes of turning Siri into an AI assistant that’s actually useful for a change.
Siri has quickly become one of the most popular ways to interact with Geminis
For Google, this is just as important. Apple saying “this is the best technology available” is obviously a powerful signal to the market, but more than that, Siri has instantly become one of the most popular ways to interact with Geminis. Apple’s Craig Federighi said in 2024 Siri processes “approximately 1.5 billion requests every day,” and while we don’t know the exact details of the new deal, presumably some large percentage of them will go through Gemini soon. (Here’s hoping “set a timer”, the only thing Siri is consistently good at, doesn’t get a new and more complex back end.) Compare that to ChatGPT, which Altman said last year got 2.5 billion prompts per day. The Gemini app is growing fast but still lags far behind ChatGPT, but adding Siri to the mix will help Google catch up more quickly.
Of course, a technology deal isn’t the same as Gemini taking over Siri outright, and Google would certainly want Gemini to ask Siri questions the way it currently does with ChatGPT. But the deal still makes sense because every user matters: The more user activity and data these companies can collect, the better their models and products can be. The recent discovery test was partly about this flywheel, and the same is equally true with AI.
Google’s other announcement this week is even bigger. It announced an opt-in feature called “Personal Intelligence” that connects Gemini to the vast ocean of information Google has about you to respond to you better. Every time you ask a question, Gemini can now answer it by looking at your recent searches, videos you’ve watched on YouTube, your emails, your photos, your files, and more. You can’t really explain how big of a deal this is: Google no longer has to ask you to give it lots of context, hope you’ll provide excellent and detailed hints every time, or build complex custom instruction systems. Google already knows a lot about you, and now Gemini does too.
Right now, Personal Intelligence is in beta for a subset of paying AI customers. Eventually, Google plans to bring it to everyone, everywhere. And he plans to bring it to the most important Google product, the most popular webpage on the planet: its search engine. AI mode in search is still just a tab on the side of normal search results, but Google very clearly sees it as the future of search. And it wants to turn Gemini into a portal to all of Google’s data about you, the Internet, and the world.
In 2022, when ChatGPT launched, it was clear that Google was in for a disappointment. But credit where it’s due: For a company that’s not exactly known for its ability to focus on a coherent product strategy, Google managed to marshal its substantial resources in a single direction. Now, if chatbots are indeed the future – and much of the AI industry is betting that they are – then there is currently no other company to truly compete with Google. Google has models. It has the resources to improve them. It now has the delivery needed to get people to use its bots and the data needed to make them uniquely personal and useful. At least for now, ChatGPT has the brand power and daily active users. But Google has almost everything else. Even iPhone.
