Because the market almost certainly can’t support two foundation model labs given the increasingly little difference across models and the massive sums of cash required to keep it all going. There is no big 2, just a race to survive and be the big 1.

There's at least two markets here. Consumer ad driven and worker augmentation markets. Likely a 3rd as a backend infrastructure provider to a bunch of value add companies.

I think Google has caught up enough to certainly be a player in the consumer ad driven market.

I also don't think only one foundation model adds up. Now that the trail is blazed a dozen companies can likely make a good enough model. The question is if there's a moat to make it winner take all

China will make sure they have a frontier lab, there's plenty of chance for Google to catch up once the compute crunch gets more serious.

Disagree, both are coexisting fine today.

It probably can't support any because there's no moat and smaller, open source models are catching up. This is like investing $1T into mainframe computers in 1980.

isn't Google going to win the race anyway ?

If it cant support two competing compamies, something is very wrong. Oligopoly is bad, monopoly worst.

Well functioning market is supposed to have many, as in a lot, companies with similar products. To create competition.