Non-Linear Competition
AI is everyone's turf.
As Google announced its whole 2024 year number, one thing was clear: AI needs to be everywhere.
Google is looking at it from three perspectives:
Leading AI infrastructure (within Google Cloud).
World-class research, including models and tooling (within Google DeepMind).
And our products and platforms that bring these innovations to people at scale (within the plethora of tools and companies Alphabet owns, but first of all within Google Search).
I’ve already explained the Google’s AI Game Plan:
And here:
In this issue, I want to show you the nature of the blurred lines of competition in tech.
Which also might confuse some of you about how to build moats in the AI industry (I’ll get there in the coming issues).
In fact, contrary to the structure of other non-tech markets, which move with much slower cycles and where mature markets remain for decades.
The boundaries in the tech world are quite blurred as new markets develop continuously, and it’s tough to predict which one will be the next one that will eat them all while expanding on top.
This also makes it quite a promiscuous environment where top talent moves among “frenemies” as competition intensifies.
And where the intertwining of different ecosystem layers is the norm, not the exception.
Take the intertwining of the cloud infrastructure and AI models.
The emblematic case is Anthropic, which is tied to both Amazon AWS and Google Cloud as investors, infrastructure providers, and supercomputing architecture enablers.