The AI Grand Prix: Google Is Back in the Race!

The title sounds like a MotoGP race headline, and this really is a last-minute sprint — and Google is in it!

We have OpenAI exposed up to its neck with billions in investments, we have Perplexity as the first to build its business on an AI focused on internet searches. There's Anthropic, approaching an IPO that looks very promising because the company is making impressive profits selling its API services to the developer world — both traditional developers and the new ones programming in "vibe coding." Yes, because since computers learned our language — and that's exactly what happened with LLMs — programming languages are no longer strictly necessary: there are services like Bolt, Lovable, Replit, and many others that allow you to get an application simply by describing it. Most of these tools use Claude's APIs for code writing.

Then there's a whole world of big and fierce competitors: Microsoft with Copilot, Apple with its Apple Intelligence, Meta with Llama. And let's not forget him, one of OpenAI's founders: Elon Musk with his Grok (an LLM with exceptional potential and the peculiarity of having access to data from the X platform).

China isn't standing still: it has cutting-edge products that are often much cheaper, like DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, and many others.

Yes, it's a race, but also a window of opportunity like never seen before, and everyone wants to dive in. And Google is there!

An Unprecedented Race

I'd like to share some reflections on what has happened to show how much all this resembles a real race. For example, let's analyze Anthropic, which didn't even exist four years ago:

• 2022 – Founded by Dario Amodei and his sister, first funding rounds for over $700 million. Starting with about ten employees
• 2023 – Funding of approximately $450 million, deals with Google and Amazon. Staff: around 500 employees
• 2024 – Staff of about a thousand employees
• 2025 – Estimated IPO valuation around $350 billion, staff of nearly 2,500 employees

It's a bit like if you opened a bakery today with your wife and within a few months found yourself with so many customers that you had to hire a dozen people. The next year you'd be opening various locations, becoming market leader in all of Italy, then immediately worldwide with impressive revenues and thousands of employees to manage. This is a race, and not for everyone. Not all of us are ready for change, even when it's good. We resist. Those at the head of these companies must have plenty of room to embrace change, without hesitation, without doubt. I find it exceptional.

A World Where Anything Can Happen

Anthropic focuses on aligning its AI. You might ask: "Aligned to what?" Well, aligned to our way of thinking, our principles, and our values. It's extremely important to dig into the heart of AI and understand if deep down it's oriented toward doing good and being useful — or something else. This will become increasingly important as AI grows its presence in the decisions of our lives.

No less significantly, OpenAI and Perplexity have casually rolled out proprietary browsers, Atlas and Comet respectively, where AI is not just conversational but also agentic — meaning the AI acts. You can ask the assistant to buy what you need to play padel, and it will go to Amazon, select one of the best rackets, some balls, and a bag, put everything in the cart... and maybe wait for your final confirmation. This and much more is coming and will increasingly become the norm, whether you like it or not, whether you choose it directly or find yourself using it without knowing.

I could list innovations by the bucketful, because in recent months we've really seen so many. What I want to repeat is that through all this, Google has made it clear that it's here!

The Awakening of the Lion

In previous months I wasn't very lenient and often criticized Google for not keeping pace with other players. But for a few weeks now, the tune has definitely changed — or rather, surely all this was already ready under the hood, but it was slow to be appreciated and used by users.

Gemini 3.0 came out and has nothing to envy compared to other models. The integration of Gemini with the Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, and Workspace suite was made available. The integration is wonderful. As soon as I had the chance to test it, I received an email asking me to verify a phishing attempt. I opened Gmail, pressed Alt+H = "Help me write," typed a prompt asking it to respond to the email, and Gemini gave me a complete analysis of the problem, suggesting step by step what to do. Result: instead of spending 20 minutes, I spent 1. Then I needed to retrieve a response on a specific topic I had given to a client months before — again, a simple request prompt and the assistant, rummaging through all emails, extracted a summary and the various emails discussing that topic. An EXTRAORDINARY integration: it's not "just a chatbot," but an intelligent orchestrator on top of Gmail/Drive/Calendar that represents the state of the art of the best imaginable virtual assistant.

Google in recent months was a sleeping lion. Now it's roaring!

Among its countless advantages is certainly its distribution capability: its AI can reach millions of people with a click since Google owns an ecosystem of services used by millions. AI mode is a simple example of all this — it's a feature destined to increase its spread; soon it will be the preferred search tool and shortly after, the only one. The old way of searching through keywords will gradually disappear in favor of AI-mediated search.

If I take any available AI and ask: "Act like a search engine and find me the first 100 sites that respond to 'saffron risotto recipe,'" obviously it will do so and behave like a search engine. But being a search engine is just a subset for AI. It could have provided me the risotto recipe in a thousand variations, already having it "in its belly," but it's also capable of searching the internet, browsing sites. Almost all AIs are now equipped with their own crawler that scans the internet and indexes pages, devouring content.

The Hardware Advantage

And furthermore — something others don't have — Google is producing its own necessary CPUs, or rather TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) specifically optimized to run AI algorithms.

Hardware is fundamental. In 2024 we saw NVIDIA grow enormously both on the stock market and in reality. Well, now Google with its TPUs can leverage an incredible advantage, being able to generate revenue also by selling its own TPUs to other players in the AI world.

In Conclusion

This article aims to be a small trace of this crucial moment when Google is spreading its sails again. Many might say: "What did you think, that Google wouldn't have its say?" Sure, fundamentally that's what I was waiting for. Until recently I struggled to see the implications — now we're there. The future is yet to be written.

It's a very important race. If you think about it, years ago there was a similar race, a competition among dozens of search engines. We know very well who won it, but the most notable thing is that whoever won it remained practically the only search engine used by everyone.

An Unrivaled Product: NotebookLM

I'd like to conclude with a mention of what has been from the start an AI product where Google excels. Essentially, it's a tool whose strength lies in creating dynamic and very enjoyable podcasts. NotebookLM also does countless other things like mind maps, summaries, and can be fed an impressive amount of data (up to 300 sources including PDFs, videos, website links, etc.).

I had already discussed it in a previous article. Recently, Italian was added as a language for podcasts, along with the ability to create video presentations — slide-style with commentary — which I find very nice for summarizing topics. I used it to summarize content where the sources were videos in English, and I find the result very useful for those who, like me, struggle to follow videos in the original language. Perfect for many other uses, whenever a summary video might be needed, concise and in Italian.

As an example, I'm including a presentation video that NotebookLM created from this article. I find the result very nice, especially considering it was created in a handful of seconds with a single click.