I don't see it as merely boxing out competitors or integrating with the OS.

People have been going to Google for a quarter of a century, and I imagine they will continue to do so.

As far as I am concerned, I moved to DDG in 2013 and never looked back, but I find Google AI intriguing.

Data. Google has access to unphasmable amount of real human-created data with zero expectations of privacy (wink wink Apple): videos, photos, search, navigation, mobile app usage including competition platforms, emails, etc.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI only has access to whatever they can buy or steal.

And it's becoming increasingly hard to get fresh uncontaminated data for training. No amount of money can buy that.

You start with a 90% share in search, I guess.

Me, not a SWE, I have never even tried Claude

(and I am not sure I prefer ChatGPT over Google)

Sure, if you think there is even a small chance that OpenAI and Anthropic will get to AGI, it's practically a bargain.

They don't seem too far off to me.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is not good at coding in practice. Gemini 3.1 Pro too, in particular is known to be bad at tool calls. Many companies would love to have alternatives to Claude Code (as it's a significant risk to depend on one vendor), so far most of the buzz is about moving to Codex but much fewer talk about moving to Gemini. All these benchmarks are not very informative, the Chinese labs do better on these benchmarks than in practice, for example.