True, I use LLMs as glorified search engines to unearth material to read myself, but Gemini is much more useful if you decide to learn yourself. It also offers interesting expansions to your questions.

While I don't offload my work to LLMs (e.g.: Write this project, I'll be watching TV), I find them useful for closing my knowledge gap by collating information, and Google's Gemini is good at that.

They have top of the line research, I mean, they invented the thing, and they are still doing stuff that goes beyond making a bigger LLM, as it seems to be the only thing the others are doing, research-wise.

They also have hardware capabilities no one else has, they invented the TPUs, and have lots of them.

They also have the brand recognition, ecosystem, user base and lots of money.

So why are they lagging behind on the actual products, and by lagging behind? I mean they are always in the position where they are just behind the frontier, but still in the game.

It seems almost deliberate. Maybe they are playing the long game, waiting for the bubble to burst. Maybe they don't want to compete against the more profitable parts of the company. Or maybe their researchers are not interested in making an actual product unless being forced to.

Even if these numbers are correct, they don’t have any useful product for coding or search. Not sure what you’re referring to