Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI

But more piles of fascinating research are only useful to Google if they generate that most important of outputs: profit. Most customers generally aren’t yet willing to pay for AI features directly, so the company may be looking to sell ads in the Gemini app. That’s a classic strategy for Google, of course, one that long ago spread to the rest of Silicon Valley: Give us your data, your time, and your attention, check the box on our terms of service that releases us from liability, and we won’t charge you a dime for this cool tool we built. For now, according to data from Sensor Tower, OpenAI’s estimated 600 million all-time global app installs for ChatGPT dwarf Google’s 140 million for the Gemini app. And there are plenty of other chatbots in this AI race too—Claude, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama, Perplexity—many of them backed by Google’s biggest and best-funded competitors (or, in the case of Claude, Google itself). The entire industry, not just Google, struggles with the fact that ... Read full article.