One surprising fact is that AI seems to be feeding their business rather than eating it, even though highly technical people have reached a consensus that the quality of the results have gone down. I saw that last night with my non-techie girlfriend who entered a query into the Google search bar which would have been better served by a more powerful model in ChatGPT or Claude. And then I realized that the average person simply doesn’t care or bother to open an app, they still operate on the muscle memory of typing something into Google and expecting an answer. And then the majority of people simply take that answer as fact.

The EU may be right in that the only way to break this hideous monopoly is through fines and regulation, because Google is no longer dominating due to the quality of its service, but on sheer monopoly habits and the muscle memory of a generation of users (and deals with device makers like Apple).

I suppose the heavy infrastructure spending is intended as Google is competing in the AI space, but it'll be interesting to look back in a few years to see if this pays off.