I'm old enough to remember that around last Fall people were declaring Google AI dead and then they came out with Gemini 3.1 Pro and there was a bunch of discussion about how Google was back and was going to end up ultimately beating the rest because they have their own TPUs, vast amounts of data, etc.

My guess is that Google will (finally) release Gemini 3.5 Pro and it will be pretty decent compared to OpenAI and Anthropic and we'll see discussions again about how Google is "back". Wash, rinse, repeat.

> Google was back and was going to end up ultimately beating the rest because they have their own TPUs

Meanwhile Claude, ChatGPT, etc all now run at least partially on TPUs. At the same time, Anthropic, Meta, and others are buying TPU hardware directly for their own data centers.

Did they win with the best frontier model? Not with one they've made, but all the best frontier models do run on TPUs, and Google is making plenty of money along the way.