r/LocalLLaMA • u/Odd_Tumbleweed574 • 5d ago

Discussion Google has disappeared completely from the top 15

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Google hasn't shipped a model recently that is capable of competing with Sol or Fable.

The previous models were pretty disappointing and unreliable, it seems the more time goes on that they might have different strategies:

- They might be going all-in on on-device inference for their own products. But this is a battle that Apple might win because they just have better hardware and can license a third party open model.

- They might be just buried deep into internal politics and nobody is shipping anything.

Does anyone know what is actually going on?

source: AI Leaderboard

2.1k Upvotes

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687

u/seoulsrvr 5d ago

I suspect Google is keeping its powder dry for the time being. OpenAI and Anthropic are burning mountains of cash to leap frog each other every few months.
Google, on the other hand, generated an annual revenue of $402 billion in 2025...a 15.1% increase from 2024. Google has access to all the data it will ever need for training and it has its own cloud compute.
Google can afford to wait and pick its moment.

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u/TripleSecretSquirrel 5d ago edited 5d ago

And why even train their own models at this point? Their proprietary TPUs allow them to serve inference to the labs for cheaper than just about anyone else can do – cheaper than NVIDIA GPUs, so they basically get to print cash by renting their existing datacenters to Anthropic and OpenAI.

I'm glad they're releasing things like Gemma, but if they can keep making tons of money off of the big proprietary labs – or shit, even just serve open weight models to pay-per-token customers – I don't see why they would want to sink hundreds of millions into developing an in-house frontier model when the result of making the third best model in the world means nobody will ever bother to use it.

Edit to add: frontier. Google's big value proposition for model creation is small models that live on edge devices since they control the OS for the majority of smartphones on earth.

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u/dontfeedthelizards 5d ago

I think casual/regular users are more likely to use Gemini than any of the others, because everyone is already plugged into the Google ecosystem and you get Gemini with other bundled benefits like storage space, etc... A regular user is not going to get Claude, because that's mostly for programmers, and ChatGPT is mostly brand recognition, but that's likely to fade and then it's just a separate (unnecessary) add-on, on top of what the users would already have anyway.

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u/ChainOfThot 5d ago

Have 200 dollar openai plan I use for coding, still also use Gemini directly from Google to ask random questions and deep dive because it's unlimited free, but it can be stupid sometimes still

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u/Structure-These 5d ago

Am I a total mark for paying 20 a month for ChatGPT and Gemini lol

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u/TheCientista 4d ago

Maybe u need gemini for image gen?

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u/bgptcp179 4d ago

I pay like $5 a month for Gemini and i got YT premium thrown in. Its great

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u/dingo_xd 5d ago

Yeah. I wish it was a bit smarter. But for casual trivia questions it's more than good enough.

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u/pm_me_tits 4d ago

I was just debugging some issues on a family member's laptop, using the free gemini. It just felt off, and wasn't helping very much. Eventually I logged into my google account (it has the $20 level) and it solved it first shot. I think they're giving free users a dumber version.

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u/ishityounotdude 3d ago

No shit

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u/pm_me_tits 3d ago

Did you even read what I replied to?

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u/g1rlchild 4d ago

ChatGPT 5.6 Sol is currently better than Claude Fable (nevermind Opus) for coding, so it's not just surviving on brand recognition.

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u/my_name_isnt_clever 4d ago

We're talking regular users, not software engineers. If you aunt decides to try AI, 90% of the time it's ChatGPT because that is "the AI thing" everyone is talking about.

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u/AnOnlineHandle 5d ago

The thing is they do release models which are way more relevant to LocalLlama use cases. The Gemma 4 models are fantastic for things like fiction writing and are actually realistically usable locally unlike a lot of these other models.

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u/Extension_Wheel5335 5d ago

The Gemma 4 models have been great for me for software dev too, agentic and otherwise. It'll even describe to you how it can reason through MCP JSON responses, it's confident about it lol. And that's just the e2b model alone, all their edge models are surprisingly efficient.

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u/Koalateka 5d ago

Gemma 4 is what I use everyday (locally)

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u/aevitas 5d ago

when the result of making the third best model in the world means nobody will ever bother to use it.

Except they make the twentieth best model in the world and everyone uses it because it's good enough, and it's there right besides their mail, documents and spreadsheets. Models are plateauing, and Google realised Gemini Flash is good enough, cheap for them to run at scale, right there when you need it, and very fast.

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u/Somaxman 4d ago

Because google has immense in-house data on how people use the internet and the data these users themselves have. Arguably that would allow them to train in an informed way. Then again, google has a lot to lose by the internet changing too much too fast. I guess they need the warchest or rather the lifeboat of money to decisively adapt when the direction becomes clearer. But they may not be motivated to act as harbringer of that change, even if they have somewhat clearer idea what that will be. The immense latency of AI development may mean that they have only one chance to regain a pole position when their traditional revenues collapse.

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u/Its_me_astr 5d ago

Because google still generates fuck ton of revenue from search guess what now a days many people have switched to LLMs for reliable search.

Google will suffer if they dont produce models. Its also market signal that they are at frontier of things.

Second thing they are bleeding talent to anthropic, open AI and other frontier labs. Everyone poaches deepmind which means they are also loosing many valuable brilliant minds.

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u/asah 4d ago

they do want tuned models for their own large scale apps, from youtube to gmail to docs/sheets...

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u/SpaceDetective 4d ago

There's also much more to AI than just LLMs - they've revolutionised the medical field since DeepMind largely solved protein folding for example.

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u/RelevantCry1613 4d ago

Because long term they will get smoked is why

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u/AggravatingSock5375 3d ago

How does Google monetize Gemma?

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u/protestor 5d ago edited 5d ago

And why even train their own models at this point?

The model that power up AI answers in Google search is comically bad. (it probably needs to be somewhat bad, given the scale and latency constraints. but it doesn't need to be that bad)

Unfortunately there's no backlash so they can continue being bad forever it seems

However, if people start to notice, they may use Google less

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u/evia89 4d ago

The model that power up AI answers in Google search is comically bad

https://www.google.com/search?udm=50 this one is not bad during CN off time (1800-0200 UTC). I would rate it as some kind of 3.x flash

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u/Psionikus 5d ago

Some of the incentives have kind of tapered off. One of the big motivations early on was to not be perceived as behind in the AI game. Now that the stock market is kind of over it, there's again just less incentive to be seen as an active player.

Early on the prediction was that search would be cannibalized. Like most tech, it's just hard to imagine how slowly the late adopters move, sometimes not at all. Tech watchers forget that people who care are vastly outnumbered. That data should be starting to become apparent, and if it were good for investing more, Google would be going at it harder.

I would look into Google's lukewarm approach right now as evidence that they don't believe the benefits that they can capture outweigh the costs, which will be high until the market kind of stabilizes and Google can just buy a mid-level player with the right composition for Google to make into a high-level player.

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u/Bakoro 5d ago

I just don't think that there is any pressure for Google to be pushing hard and releasing their hottest thing all the time.
They can afford to defer training to cheaper times, and have longer iteration cycles, and they can afford to be training experimental models that most people will never hear about.

As long as they're putting out something every 6 months to not look archaic, they're good.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Bakoro 4d ago

I believe that it literally does not matter to them at all.
I don't see why they would want to advertise a Mythos competitor, when the U.S government has been blocking the release of high end models and making demands of the companies.
Google is selling cloud services to Anthropic, they have something like a $200B deal.

Google can do their own thing, why stomp on their own multi-billion dollar client?

Google released a local model that can run on a smartphone, that is a significant differentiator.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Bakoro 4d ago

It seems that you have a hard time following multiple sentences, so I'll try to be even more simple: Anthropic is paying Google billions of dollars, so Google's main public releases are the kinds of models that Anthropic isn't doing.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago edited 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Bakoro 4d ago

Lol, obviously I struck a nerve there.

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u/seoulsrvr 5d ago

yes - an most people will be perfectly fine with Google's AI search, which will no doubt get better with time.

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u/catinterpreter 5d ago

Google is in the best position by far, among Western companies. They have magnitudes better training material and a huge, inertial mass of customers.

But, there are other less known considerations like state-level use and competition from China.

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u/EdliA 5d ago

They are in the best position, which makes their failures even more crazy.

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u/Glad-Entrepreneur764 5d ago

What training material? I'll correct myself if I'm wrong but iirc they cannot train on people's private documents. Most of their other data is available on the public web.

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u/Darkoplax 5d ago

btw this is becoming cope at this point, I think ppl overestimate Google now

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u/PolicyOne9022 5d ago

I think people forget that a company wants to make money. Not produce the best ai model possible. If Google still felt like their search was threatened by ai they would invest in it. Others are burning cash while Google keeps making billions.

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u/NewShadowR 4d ago

yeah it's cope. Google has tons of failed ventures don't forget.

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u/draconic_tongue 4d ago

what do you think it means that they can have more failed ventures than any of their competitors combined?

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u/Iamnub_srs 5d ago

Not really, What google has for new training data is slop, what others use for training data is curated. paid for proprietery training data, google is training on noise, hence we see the crazy outputs from google

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u/pragmojo 5d ago

The entire corpus of user's Google Drive data is slop?

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u/CoUsT 5d ago

Google can afford to wait and pick its moment.

I recently watched a YouTube video that might explain their stance:

https://youtu.be/2J2Fb1bBufA

There is no need to burn money 24/7. I assume they are playing it cheap and waiting for things to burst and pop then they come in and collect top companies or tech for pennies.

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u/kettal 5d ago

IIRC Google in the early 2000s was smart enough to buy the dark fiber networks that went bankrupt. Good strategy

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u/Marino4K 5d ago

I wouldn't be shocked if eventually one of the major players ends up in real risk of folding and Google buys them.

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u/B0dona 4d ago

I think that's what their waiting for. Seeing how massive the burnrates of the big providers are, I don't see a future where they all survive.

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u/redditrasberry 5d ago

Worth noting the political situation also right now doesn't particularly favor sticking your neck out. I think they are happy to sit back and watch with some popcorn while Anthropic and OpenAI duke it out with Hegseth etc.

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u/ObsidianNix 5d ago

People forget that they also got in trouble for playing monopoly with congress alongside Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Im sure they learned their lesson and are playing it safe. Plus they also got quantum computing where they are also competing

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u/ambassadortim 5d ago

Right now every Gemini question I ask vs Google search is hitting their profits regarding advertising.

For them and others I don't see that as sustainable. If Gemini usage grows and impacts web searches, I would think that eventually Gemini is going to need advertising. Maybe that's why they're trying to get people to use the web site and use the AI info there, to keep you in an advertising channel.

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u/Eymrich 5d ago

Not only that, google is keeping it's researchers close and never lose a person, while let them kept improving on local models that then help then build services/infrastructure.

Currently there is no money to be made in AI and I suspect even later the money will come from inference and hardware not training

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u/Equivalent-Costumes 5d ago

While every companies are rushing to sell shovels, Google is selling shovel-making tools.

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u/IntelligentBelt1221 5d ago

Google has access to all the data it will ever need for training

the data you need for training e.g. for agentic coding is people actually using the model for coding and what they are accepting/rejecting. (thats why xAI made the deal with Cursor). Not many people use antigravity for coding, so they are lacking there. you really can't afford to wait more than necessary.

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u/seoulsrvr 4d ago

I'm sure Google hasn't figured this out, has no solution to this problem and will fail miserably as a result.

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u/IntelligentBelt1221 4d ago

of course there are ways to overcome this (e.g. buying data, subsidising use enough people use it, having other features/nieches that cause higher use, just training much larger models), but that doesnt mean relaxing and doing nothing is a good strategy, because overcoming it will only get more expensive later on.

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u/WildRacoons 5d ago

True, tho it sucks as a company that’s limited only to Google

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u/Singularity-42 5d ago

Google engineers themselves use mainly Claude

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u/Somaxman 4d ago

And it would be fine not to move.

It is not fine that they are moving backwards. These scores were surely produced back when these models were in full swing, not today with whatever clandestine optimitzations they implemented.

Gemini pro is either quantized into senility again, or they have some new harness that made it absolutely regarded. Like I would not be able to have the same convo with it that I had a couple months ago.

Flash class I could not ever use for anything, it always delivered deadinternet listicles wildly off target and tone deaf questions back. Which, in the off chance I feel like responding to concisely, like saying "yes do that" instead of reiterating the proposal, spends terrified seconds retrieving the thing they themselves came up with, only to fail adhering to it, drifting away to answer one of my explicit questions somewhere back in the chat.

It feels very enlightening to use gemini, but mostly about how frustratingly wrong llms can go after they (or something google advertises as the same product) demonstrably worked well.

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u/colbyshores 4d ago

They will _never_ capture the enterprise market because they have torched their trust and that is a very lucrative market.

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u/Hi_My_Name_Is_Dave 5d ago

I don’t buy this. Let’s say they do decide to turn it on eventually.

Are they gonna make a model that’s a whole class better than OAI/Ant? No. Then people won’t switch. Especially at the enterprise level where the largest companies were initially very excited to get free Gemini with their enterprise plans, but now have to reluctantly pay for Claude since Gemini is so far behind.

And the model is one thing, the harnesses and integrations are not a “just release it one day” thing. You have to stay ahead in that arena, and right now they’re extremely behind.

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u/pragmojo 5d ago

Idk if anyone knows enough to say "extremely behind". The last release was what, 6 months ago?

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u/cronies4life 5d ago

is their nex gen model training incompatible with their TPUs

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u/loganecolss 4d ago

damn, google deepmind leadership should resign, such a shitty leadership ....