A few months ago, I wrote about how the large models eat up the stack and the workflow and also expand an individual’s reach beyond their skill set (think engineers becoming product managers and GTM specialists). Carrying that analogy from individuals to companies, we have a company that could potentially eat the entire AI ecosystem: Google. They already have the full stack from the chips, the talent, the resources, models, not to mention loads and loads of data. It would not be inconceivable of them to spread their wings and embed themselves into more of the AI and business domains.
The impetus for this train of thought is a hackathon I went to that featured the app building talents of their AI Studio product. Google has been on a marketing and publicity blitz the past few months – holding a ton of meetups and hackathons publicizing this and other features. I’ve probably seen Paige Bailey more in the past few months than in the past 2 years combined.
In the hackathon, we’re given 3 hours to vibe code, deploy a product and put together a presentation with a 3-minute video (on YouTube of course). On top of that, part of the criteria for winning is how our product performs on social media. In most hackathons, this would be impossible because most new offerings from startups don’t work half the time. If something was to be accomplished in 3 hours, there would be a template or a workshop-like program where teams are walked through a reference implementation, which most would hand in anyway.
This was purely starting from scratch with nothing but the build feature of AI Studio, and it worked. We vibe coded and deployed our app into production as did so many other teams, and the variety of ideas that came into fruition was staggering.
So how does this go towards the thesis of Google eating everything?
It’s similar to the Apple Store or Amazon’s marketplace. As more apps get deployed with increasing sophistication in Google’s app ecosystem, Google gets to see what works and what doesn’t. They can then choose to buy, host, or duplicate the product. Either way, Google gets to expand their footprint throughout the AI economy (and collect all that data to boot).
So, what could get in their way? Plenty. Don’t forget Google is still a large company and unless they’ve drastically revamped their culture and structure, they’re still prone to the same missteps that plague big behemoths. Throw in antitrust and competition from another 800-pound gorilla – the Elon Musk company universe (X, XAI, Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, …) which will stop at nothing until achieving total domination, and we should see plenty of fireworks in the next few years.
I haven’t mentioned the big frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic). They’ll still be around and possibly survive, but they’re not going to 10x, let alone 100x from where they are – they still have to spend to expand, and the combination of Google, Elon, open source, and Chinese models/companies are going to eat into their margins. As an AI investor, my money, across all private and public markets, is going to be on Google.
numbersandcode 