Since we're comparing to Meta, you just have to look at the state of their publicly facing products that feature AI. Google has better AI models (Gemini, Nanobanana) and they've integrated them successfully into way more products than Meta has.

Meta spends a lot of money on AI research with little to show for it. As imperfect as Google may be, they're still doing much better.

Google knows how to do research - and at the very least lets other people figure out the products, and then becomes the #3 or #4 player.

Both GCP and Gemini are products of this. Modern cloud was arguably built by Google (think Chubby, GFS, Bigtable as building blocks) - they just spent 10 years ceding it to Amazon before competing.

Which is almost word for word the state Microsoft have been in for over 20 years.

To the point it was a running joke at MSR.