Google isn't losing. Google is the league.

Google can’t seem to ship its flagship model right now & Gemini 3.5 Pro was supposed to arrive in June… It’s August. Apparently it’s stuck in partner testing and Google’s been publicly shifting focus to Gemini 4. According to the internet, this means Google is cooked.

But over the last few weeks I started digging and not gonna lie, I expected to write a fun little post about Google losing the AI race. That’s not what I’m going to be writing.

Because the more I dug, the more I started getting this feeling, you know that feeling where you’re laughing at somebody right up until you see what they’re actually doing?

It started with: What the hell are these guys even doing?

Then: Wait, what? Huh? Oh shit… OH… OH SHIT.

So this post is me doing my best to explain that feeling.

Before you say it. I know. I just wrote that Apple is the king of AI and no one knows it. I stand by every word, but hold that thought because by the end of this post you’re gonna see that these two takes turn out to be the same.

I love F1. Over the last three or four years it has become far and above my favorite sport. It’s the nerdiest sport on the planet. My son and I watch it together every week. I’m catching up on the latest F1 news right now as I write this. (Kimi is killing it… coincidence? Maybe not.)

Here’s how the AI world keeps score right now. A benchmark chart drops. One model beats another model by two points on a coding test. Everyone declares a new king. Next week the chart moves again, and everyone declares a different king.

It’s Formula 1 coverage. All season long, the cameras stay glued to the cars: lap times, tire strategy, who shaved a tenth of a second where. And by that coverage, Google is having a rough season. Their fastest car is late leaving the garage, and the team keeps saying “wait until you see next year’s car.”

But here’s the thing about racing: the teams are not the whole sport. Above the teams sits the league, the outfit that owns the championship itself. The calendar, the rulebook, the TV rights, the tracks, the ticket money. Teams rise and fall every season. The league gets paid no matter who wins.

Google isn’t a struggling team. Google is the league. It just also happens to race.

So set the lap times aside for ten minutes and let me show you what the league owns.

Gemini isn’t just a model. It’s a catalog.

While everyone was watching and waiting for their flagship, Google shipped a fleet. Gemini 3.6 Flash, a cheap fast workhorse running at 230 tokens per second with a million-token context window at bargain prices, is not the smartest model in the world. It’s more useful, smart enough, fast, and cheap enough to serve the billion people without lighting your money on fire.

And there’s Gemini OmniFlash, their video generator. State of the art, no question. It has Imagen and the nano banana models. It has Lyria for music. It has some of the best embedding models. It has robotics models. It has some of the best lightweight open-weight models you can get and run yourself with Gemma.

Any one of these models is good, but we’re just getting started.

Any startup with a great model has to convince you to visit their website, make an account, and change your habits. Google skips all of that. Google updates the products you already use every day.

The numbers here are absurd. Gemini powers every one of Google’s thirteen products with over a billion users. Read that again real quick. 13 products. Each one of the products has over a billion users and Gemini powers all of them. Five of those 13 have over 3 billion users. AI Overviews and the AI Answers in Google Search reach 2.5 billion people a month.

And just today Sundar Pichai announced that the Gemini app itself crossed one billion monthly users.

• Google serves 22 billion tokens a minute for outside developers.

• 9 million developers build with their models every month.

• Almost 90% of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise.

• Google Cloud is growing 82% in one year and is sitting on a $514 billion backlog, with $500 billion of work already sold.

Not one of those things requires winning a single benchmark. That’s the “oh.”

Right now everyone in AI has the same problem and it’s expensive as hell. They buy their compute from Nvidia at Nvidia’s prices, standing in Nvidia’s line. But Google saw this coming over a decade ago and built its own AI chips, TPUs. In fact, they just announced generation 8, one chip built for training, one built for cheap, fast inference. And just this spring they started selling TPU systems directly into other companies’ data centers.

Okay, both Apple and Anthropic have been training their models on Google’s TPUs. In fact Anthropic signed up for a million of them with over a gigawatt of capacity coming online this year and then they expanded the deal.

That’s the “oh shit.”

Here’s the part that should get your attention. No, I’m serious. Pay attention to this.

Google DeepMind built a system called AlphaEvolve, Gemini models that hunt for better algorithms, automatically. It’s not a demo. Per DeepMind’s own reports: it found a scheduling improvement that continuously recovers 0.7% of Google’s entire worldwide compute. At their scale, that’s whole data centers’ worth of capacity, recovered for free, forever. It designed a circuit that’s going into the silicon of next-generation TPUs. It rewrote a storage rule in Spanner (the giant database under half of Google) and cut write amplification (wasted disk work) by 20%.

Read that loop back slowly. Google’s AI is improving Google’s chips and Google’s databases, which train and serve Google’s next AI, which will be better at improving the chips and the databases. Everyone else’s improvement loop has a purchase order to NVIDIA sitting in the middle of it. Google’s loop is closed, and it’s already spinning.

Eat your heart out Anthropic.

A model is a frozen brain. It only knows what it read in training, which is why chatbots make things up about last week. The fix is letting the model look things up and act. Other labs sign licensing deals and build connectors to get at fresh information. Google’s models plug straight into the live Search index, Maps, Shopping, Gmail, Calendar, YouTube. The actual infrastructure of daily life, which Google has spent 25 years building and which is now available to developers as grounding in the Gemini API.

Listen, this post used to be a lot longer. I trimmed a lot of it because I felt like I was going on and on and on and I really was. Once you go down the Google rabbit hole and see what they’re doing, it’s endless. They have everything, they have the whole infrastructure. They touch every single surface. And it might seem like they’re going slower than Anthropic or OpenAI or even Grok lately. (Holy shit Grok’s been kinda doing some cool stuff, which… damn.)

I even had a big section about how they’re losing some of their developers, They’re under a lot of legal pressure right now. Just basically hedging, that’s what this whole section was supposed to be “Pump the brakes” ..but screw it, I’m cutting it because no one’s here for that anyway. Let’s get back to the hyperbole.

So how does this square with me calling Apple the king three weeks ago?

Cleanly. Go back to what that post actually argued: the model leaderboard is the wrong scoreboard. Models are becoming a commodity, free, downloadable, better every month. The winners are whoever owns what intelligence runs on and runs through. Apple owns the box on your desk that runs free models privately at home. That take is doing great, thanks.

Google is the other half of the same argument. Apple owns where AI runs when it comes home to hardware you can buy. Google owns the system that makes AI cheap, grounded in live information, and delivered to billions of people who never had to change a habit. The chips, the cloud, the models at every price, and the products everyone already uses. Two different kingdoms. Barely even at war. Apple literally pays Google a billion dollars a year for Siri’s brain, and trained its models on Google’s chips.

You know who’s missing from both kingdoms? The guy selling $13,000 graphics cards on the theory that the whole sport stays exactly like this forever. Apple is routing around NVIDIA at home. Google is routing around NVIDIA at industrial scale. My July timestamp stands. NVIDIA is still a dead man walking.

Listen, quick aside: can we PLEASE acknowledge the fact that NVIDIA was lucky? Their single biggest market was gamers and they lucked into the AI race, acting like that was their plan the whole time. This is not investment advice (Never take financial advice from me - I am NOT kidding.) but I’ll tell you right now. I don’t think NVIDIA can make the shift away from power-hungry, expensive hardware fast enough to compete with Apple and Google. And we haven’t even started talking about China.

The AI race is not a leaderboard. It’s a race to turn intelligence into cheap, useful, everywhere infrastructure, and Google, the company everyone’s laughing at for a late model, is further down that road than anyone else.

The lap times will keep changing hands every few weeks. Enjoy the races. Just don’t confuse the fastest car this Sunday with the company that owns the league.

There will be plenty of I told you so’s ahead, so subscribe and you’ll get each one the day they come true.