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points by lifeisloving 1 day ago | 0 comments

It makes the best case for why Anthropic isnt worth its potential valuation. Anthropics customers are almost only turbo nerds.

Google has the products, the brand recognition, the hardware, the data and most importantly a billion normies.

Google was always going to win this thing, although I wouldn't discount meta. The only thing that matters is mindshare and Anthropic and OpenAI have largely generated NEGATIVE sentiment, outside some fanboys.

Google and Meta can plop cute products into your daily driver apps and you wont know the difference.

[–] pennomi 1 day ago

If Google is going for the casual group of users, why do they make their AI offerings so hard to buy?

[–] gimlichgu 1 day ago

because selling inference is not their end-goal product, its just a milestone to continue to maintain positive public sentiment and attract talent

[–] helpyou840 1 day ago

> its just a milestone to continue to maintain positive public sentiment and attract talent

Google’s talent is solid B tier in 2026. Better than IBM but worse than Microsoft and Amazon.

Even if Google had “talent” this talent wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything due to corporate politics.

[–] kridsdale1 1 day ago

I work at Google. My response to your comment would get me banned from HN.

[–] tjwebbnorfolk 1 day ago

I worked at Google up until 2 months ago. In my exit survey, the #1 reason I left: "Bureaucracy"

[–] lifeisloving 1 day ago

Thats kind of the brilliant thing, you dont need to seek it out. Their AI will just slowly get integrated into their products you already use. I'm more so saying that normies will use AI when it lands in the apps they already use. Google AI features have been popping up all over their ecosystem. Normies do not want claude code and they think Dario and Sam are both disgusting human beings, stictly off of vibes.

Anthropics only moat is vendor lock on Claude Code, especially if they cant maintain being the front runner of the frontier model space, this is a really brittle moat. Brittle moats wont attract strong investment at a 1-2T valuation (not to mention all the other fiscal unknowns).

I just want OpenAI and Anthropic to lose because they seem to be the ones going around saying they're going to replace peoples jobs, and usurp the value of human labor.

Id rather Meta and Gemini suceed who will genuinely just integrate it into normal products we already use. Their sales teams are not approaching my boss and telling them they can reduce their payroll burden by spending my paycheck on tokens and firing me.

Coding is going to be one of the smaller pieces of the AI revolution. People on this site are focused on it, but there are 10000x more opportunities outside of coding where Anthropic and OpenAI have zero presence. Anthropic might as well be an IDE company, Is jetbrains worth 2T? to signal that they can be useful in other fields because they know this is an issue.

[–] yunwal 5 hours ago

> Normies do not want claude code

I don’t think this is really true. If you work at tech companies the people in non-technical roles all request Claude code access, and I think this will gradually expand to most people who aren’t vehemently anti-AI

[–] usef- 1 day ago

> they seem to be the ones going around saying they're going to replace peoples jobs, and usurp the value of human labor.

I don't see why an alternative provider that is quiet but also scrambling to make AI smarter is any safer for jobs. Wouldn't we rather orgs speak honestly about the risks of the industry?

I find it odd that we talked for decades about companies being evil for covering up problems (chemical companies, etc), yet it turns out people hate the ones that talk about risks openly even more.

[–] TuxSH 1 day ago

> Google has the products

Outside their most successful products (YouTube, Android, GMail, Chrome, Search), their products are usually worse than their competitors (e.g. GMeet vs Zoom)

> the brand recognition

Of not maintaining/outright abandoning their products, and making Search worse over the years?

> most importantly a billion normies

ChatGPT has 1.2B weekly active users, all the normies know what ChatGPT is but don't know about Gemini (outside the "AI Mode" stuff)

[–] Marsymars 1 day ago

> (e.g. GMeet vs Zoom)

I dunno if that's a great example - I'm sure Zoom has more awareness in the zeitgeist, but from my standpoint it's an app most well-known for security problems and abusing OS conventions, while Google Meet just quietly and simply works whenever I want to call my mom.

[–] HFguy 1 day ago

Agree 100%. I generally find Google Meet to be the least bad video conference option (with Teams = Worst).

[–] jfoster 1 day ago

If you go from Zoom to Google Meet you will notice a massive difference in audio quality.

[–] willis936 1 day ago

Google meet screen sharing is a horrendous UX, reactions are clunkier than zoom, the tiling options are worse than zoom, and I have yet to see a conference room setup that actually works with HDMI inputs.

But yeah, other than that meet is fine.

[–] RajuChacha108 1 day ago

Outside of their successful products their products are terrible isn't even an argument.

They have many successful products. Most have only 1-2.

Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search, Photos, Workspaces, Cloud, Fitbit, Pixel Phones, Waymo not to mention dozens of open source projects.

> Of not maintaining/outright abandoning their products, and making Search worse over the years?

You just said their products are terrible. They do shut the products that do not meet the bar. That is good thing.

> ChatGPT has 1.2B weekly active users, all the normies know what ChatGPT is but don't know about Gemini (outside the "AI Mod

No one needs to know what Gemini are. If they have used search they have used it.

[–] kridsdale1 1 day ago

The Gemini app has the same number of users almost as GPT app. Sundar said so today.

[–] pstuart 1 day ago

Sure, bug Google always seems to be unable to deliver good UX. UX matters if it's bad enough and there are competing options that are much friendlier and easy to engage.

[–] lifeisloving 1 day ago

Android is a UX, and so is gmail and calender. This is where 99% of people will use AI for the remainder of their lives. Very little of the forward looking value proposition of AI has to do with coding/harnesses. AI + coding is rapidly deflating as far as revenue potential, and TAM has been saturated and is possibly shrinking.