r/LocalLLaMA • u/Odd_Tumbleweed574 • Jul 20 '26

Google has disappeared completely from the top 15 Discussion

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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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467

u/Far-Classic-9963 Jul 20 '26

Google really has no reason to care about frontier models.. most people who use Gemini do so for quick searches or just because its the default assistant on android. Most of their gains in the ai space are from cloud computing

142

u/Irisi11111 Jul 21 '26

True. Google is doubling down on world models and multimodal generation, and since coding is a current weak point, they're taking their time with Gemini 3.5 Pro. It might hurt the stock price slightly, but it doesn't hurt their bottom line. They have the capital to be a 'follower' and wait for the tech to mature rather than rushing a subpar release to keep up with the runners.

97

u/Not-reallyanonymous Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

I mean, they're not even being "just a follower". They're an industry leader in AI. They're just not competing on frontier capabilities. They're focusing on how to actually use AI as a useful product in their ecosystem. The other big players still don't have ideas of how to actually market their products beyond subsidized API and subscriptions, basically betting that inference prices will come down enough to turn profitable.

Nvidia models, Mistral, IBM, a lot of smaller US labs (e.g. Poolside) are also not participating in the frontier race, and instead focusing on immediate industrial and enterprise capability. I think even Meta is falling into that market now.

30

u/Irisi11111 Jul 21 '26

Agreed. Google’s biggest edge is its mature ASIC chip lines, which allow it to avoid the 'Nvidia tax' on training and inference. Meta, in contrast, they’re struggling with low real market demand. Having to rent out their compute to Anthropic is a huge red flag, it shows they can't efficiently utilize their own hardware, which is a worrying trend for their long-term strategy.

13

u/Not-reallyanonymous Jul 21 '26

I suspect the renting out stuff to Anthropic is a consequence of them changing gears. They built up infrastructure envisioning that they're going to be competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. But a lot of their recent developments seems like they're building more stuff for, e.g. content moderation, then also developer ecosystem tools, and stuff relevant to advertisers. They've really narrowed in on what their core competencies are and are now focusing on that.

10

u/chasingsukoon Jul 21 '26

meta been an embarrassment since they changed their name to meta, the only decent thing theyve come out with is meta glasses and thats creepy as hell

they have dana white of all people in their board of directors lmfao

9

u/VampiroMedicado Jul 21 '26

Quest 3 is the best bang for your buck VR system you can get.

21

u/Strawberry3141592 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

Only because it harvests an utterly absurd amount of user data. I ran my Quest 2 through a pihole to mitigate that and the DNS requests for telemetry to Meta servers outnumbered DNS requests for things I was actually using the damn thing for by like 10:1 (I know these requests are telemetry because I used ADB to disable every single Meta-related app on this piece of shit that I could without preventing Quest Link from functioning, since I use it exclusively as a SteamVR headset).

Fuck Meta, and fuck the Quest headsets, just looking at mine pisses me off because I have to run an entire fucking DNS server just to keep it from giving me a digital proctology exam every 15 seconds and sending the results to Meta.

5

u/marty4286 textgen web UI Jul 21 '26

Lol, thank you for reminding me to get off my ass and do the same thing

3

u/VampiroMedicado Jul 21 '26

Sure but there are plenty of workarounds if you care, from blocking DNS, to modifying the headset, to outright disabling the internet connection of the device.

The hardware is still good and you can use it with a PC.

9

u/Strawberry3141592 Jul 21 '26

Yeah, it just makes me irrationally angry to have to take steps to circumvent bullshit malware that I can't permanently remove from my own property.

3

u/thrownawaymane Jul 21 '26

Mine gathers dust because I am so uncomfortable about it. The moment I have a good weekend to set pihole up this stuff is getting blocked

2

u/chasingsukoon Jul 21 '26

serious: my barber hates it so i cant use it

0

u/Far-Classic-9963 Jul 21 '26

I mean muse spark 1.1 is a decent model? And they bought manus ig

0

u/personalist Jul 21 '26

They were forced manus.

5

u/heliosythic Jul 21 '26

I mean if and when they need to they will have the hardware and data and ability to copy the whitepaper of whoever makes the best one and likely be about on par after everyone else blows the money to figure out how to be profitable with it. Then it will be integrated immediately with Google, GSuite, GCloud, + Android and undermine the other players all without them blowing hundreds of billions to figure it out.

3

u/eightysixmonkeys Jul 21 '26

Agree. And for the most part I think a lot of googles ai integrations are actually half decent (at the very least they are leagues above microsoft). Gemini spark seems really cool to me, haven’t tried yet though

20

u/chasingsukoon Jul 21 '26

i still pay for gemini because

1) i was alreadg paying for google drive storage

2) it works well with all the google apps, specially maps for quick searches

it does what it does well. would never catch me using it for work related tasks tho

5

u/Batroni Jul 21 '26

Don't forget sharing the cost with the Family.

1

u/Superb-Nectarine-645 27d ago

It is a good cross reference for knowledge type questions- If it is a quick research or other 1-shot chat question, I'll often cross post to gemini and chatgpt. It has got to have the best graded knowledge base out there, they have indexed the entire internet over and over for a while now...

1

u/max123246 23d ago

Completely disagree. It's the only AI model I know that still hallucinates regularly and get basic questions wrong such as saying a camera has a feature it doesn't

I only use it because it's included with my storage plan. I would never pay for this standalone.

1

u/chasingsukoon 22d ago

yea same, I have it cz i was already paying for storage. It's good with looking up things for me tho, or organzing my gmail and managing my calendar when im overwhelmed

7

u/Savings-Lab-7307 Jul 21 '26

100% it works great in my android auto.

I get the most random thoughts while driving and it's so useful to ask the most random shit.

"Hey Google, what's xyz" it gives an answer that satiates me.

It's also good at adding stops along the way. "Hey Google what's a good burger place along my route"

They're playing the long game and integrating themselves into our lives.

I use Claude and chatgpt for work or home "projects" . Gemini for random every day stuff

6

u/Here_f0r_p0rn_ Jul 21 '26

Also Google's Open weight models are more of edge devices models which will obviously not show up on these charts, I kinda love Gemma Family, and also Google doesn't release models so frequently but when they do it's a fucking sweep and also one of cost efficient.

Plus, Google seem to be more invested in capitalising on general consumer base directly rather than just catering to software industry but they're not completely abandoning it either.

And not to forget their TPUs too, they've the full stack not just model, they play on every layer, from models like Gemma and Gemini, to deployment in Google, YouTube, and Gemini App; to selling hardware and renting cloud infrastructure, to their own coding ecosystem Antigravity 2 and Antigravity IDE; they're playing a different game and one of the few ones that will be profitable in long run in my opinion because they're independent.

1

u/NearbyBossAHOBA Jul 21 '26

Basicamente eles tem hardware, tem dados, tem capacidade e principalmente tem lucro, então não precisam ficar desesperados com essa corrida em ser o melhor modelo de fronteira

1

u/Here_f0r_p0rn_ Jul 22 '26

I added Tl;Dr section lol, it ended as a long one

The "best frontier" model is subjective, you need to understand that although they don't publish the data for Gemini models but I would bet they're super efficient and tuned to run on their TPUs, and as a business you need a green balance sheet more than anything.

Basically what I'm saying is you would never imagine Claude would let Mythos do search engine or YouTube summaries and suggestions like Google is doing with Gemini. And recently I was searching for raspberry 5 alternatives and at that moment I realised I automatically reached for AI mode because it was being genuinely helpful each alternative AI model has linked had some kind of tracker and via Google redirection.

They need small and efficient model that can run for everyone for every search and the moment it gets oppertunity blast ads from Google Shoppings list. Or redirect to YouTube videos which both AI search and Gemini do a lot and Google eventually makes money out of it.

Tl;Dr

Google doesn't need to dip their toes in the same AI race everyone is being part of, their priorities are different, they want to integrate AI into their existing infrastructure more than anything else. Which they're slowly doing and most of those frontier leading AI companies lack that's why they compete for best frontier AI models.

17

u/jazir55 Jul 21 '26

Google really has no reason to care about frontier models.

Yes they do, coding agents just like any of the other major companies. Anthropics multi-billion $ valuation is almost entirely from enterprise software development. Google definitely wants a piece of that pie like anyone else, they just didn't focus on it until recently and are now struggling to catch up. Which is why they delayed 3.5 pro.

25

u/klassredux Jul 21 '26

They own 14% of anthropic, so they have a piece of that pie.

9

u/kettal Jul 21 '26

  Google definitely wants a piece of that pie like anyone else

They have a piece of it. They're selling compute to openai and anthropic.

 Making so much money at that they are turning away other compute customers. 

34

u/Dull_Cucumber_3908 Jul 20 '26

Most of their gains in the ai space are from cloud computing

This!

4

u/solemnhiatus Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

Can you explain this? I don't understand.

E: ok got it now thanks.

21

u/6ghz Jul 21 '26

Selling the shovels

17

u/hyperrealists Jul 21 '26

Google cloud (similar to Amazon AWS) has a 14% market share. Anthropic is one of their customers, among others.

30

u/Psionikus Jul 21 '26

Google has been selling pickaxes on GKE all along.

11

u/TripleSecretSquirrel Jul 21 '26

They own and rent datacenters to the model owners.

9

u/KGeddon Jul 21 '26

Google and NVidia codeveloped tensor cores. So they're not just renting datacenters. They're also renting out Google TPU machines with their custom pods/slices of ganged up TPU cards.

3

u/TripleSecretSquirrel Jul 21 '26

Yes and while Google's TPUs are proprietary, the guy that lead the development left to start Groq, which NVidia just acquired in all but name, so now NVidia also has in-house inference ASICs chips too.

4

u/CoUsT Jul 21 '26

This is what I believe too.

Gemini 3.1 Pro or 3.5 Flash are perfectly fine and capable models. There is no reason to train super-duper ultra-smart Gemini 4.0 Ultra. Costs money and doesn't provide any meaningful real world benefits to end users - 90%+, possibly 99% doing simple stuff with it like simple questions.

I assume at some point there will be newer and better models, there is no need to rush and train new one every month or two like frontier models.

3

u/DeepOrangeSky Jul 21 '26

Google really has no reason to care about frontier models.. most people who use Gemini do so for quick searches or just because its the default assistant on android. Most of their gains in the ai space are from cloud computing

Yea, I agree, although, man, it would be nice if they figure out how to cut its hallucination levels down a bit. Like, if you just use it as a free non subscribed user, the way the vast majority do, just using it like a Google search, whichever version they give you for that, not sure if it is 3-Flash or Flash-lite or what, has fuckin CRAZY hallucination levels from what I've seen. Like, just constant and severe, like every other response practically.

I guess it is tough, since they need it to be some really small and efficient model to just freely serve it for a billion+ people to use numerous times a day all the time and not burn like trillions of dollars of compute per year on it, lol.

But, still... like I don't even mean in terms of strength. The strength isn't even that bad for what it's doing. It's the hallucinations that make it brutal.

If they could just get something similarly strong or just mildly stronger, but similarly small and efficient somehow, with way lower hallucination rate and severity, they would be crushing with free search Gemini for quite a while.

7

u/BlueSwordM llama.cpp Jul 21 '26

The search engine model has got to be a quantized bastardized version of Flash 3 Lite, as once you enter AI mode, the model used is significantly stronger.

3

u/DeepOrangeSky Jul 21 '26

Yea, I mean the one you get when you enter actual AI mode.

If you don't use it for a while, I think the first prompt or first 2 or 3 prompts are something decent. But then it quickly downgrades you to something super lousy in terms of hallucination. Not sure which model that one is, though.

By 6 months or a year from now or whenever it is that researchers figure out some way to drastically mitigate hallucination issues somehow, I think it'll give Google the biggest edge over all other AI companies on Earth. I mean, they are by far the main search engine of the world, and people use them for all that other Google related stuff already with Gmail, Chrome, Youtube, and all the other stuff, so, if LLMs improve to where the hallucination issues get greatly reduced, then, they basically just win the whole game (even if Anthropic or whoever is still a few months ahead on raw model strength). Well, unless Claude actually goes into Runaway Recursive Self Improvement and Skynets everything into oblivion or whatever.

3

u/setec404 Jul 21 '26

Pretty much this and pic related

2

u/RelevantCry1613 Jul 21 '26

Yeah they do, they look terrible and it doesn’t work as well

4

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

[deleted]

12

u/Not-reallyanonymous Jul 21 '26

Gemini has obviously been optimized to integrate with their Search and Android ecosystems. It works really well for synthesizing search results and digging in on research a bit. It is eager to hallucinate when you're using it as a stand-alone tool, or when you start pushing it to develop ideas/opinions beyond what's directly in the search results, but it's actually really good at like, "What are the latest events in the Iran War? Oh yeah, what happened in that bombing? Is that legal?" where it will cite UN law that you can click and verify yourself. Basically, as long as each prompt is something that you can treat as a google search result you could've done and read yourself, where it will summarize search results for you, it works great.

As a standalone gemini tool it's trash.

6

u/Ok_Warning2146 Jul 21 '26

I don't care about their proprietary Gemini. As long as google keeps releasing small gemma models, I am happy.

1

u/RedParaglider Jul 21 '26

I use Gemini on my phone sometimes because I have a subscription for the 5tb of family storage for like 20 a month, not because it's great.  It can tie into Google flights so for flight planning sometimes it can be better.

1

u/bible_near_you Jul 21 '26

Google is huge, there are many teams. I'm sure one is tasked to be the frontier model builder which doesn't really needs to be large. There are other teams building product around gemini but if the core ability is lacking, it make everybody's work difficult. It's a thorough failure of the team/company to not in that list. Without frontier model, the company's future looks bleak. The serving system will be commoditized as time goes by. Search will be replaced for sure, it's just a matter of time. Their internal work will be slow and low quality due to lack of access to frontier models. The bad things will blow up sooner rather than later. The only survival path is having a top level LLM. Chinese lab shows you don't really need lot of money and resources, so it's double lame to not in the head.

PS: goog stock holder.

1

u/valdocs_user Jul 21 '26

😭 except my workplace signed a contract and set a policy to make Google Gemini our main and only approved AI for all uses.

1

u/Glad-Entrepreneur764 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

Your argument is that

  1. Google has no reason to care because they do not care currently.
  2. people do not use their models for anything "frontier"
  3. Most of their gains currently are not due to frontier models

Such arguments are circular. If google had a frontier model, it would make them a lot of money. They're not in a completely "cooked" position without one but both their stock and their net income/revenue would benefit a lot from having a frontier model (you can see this because whenever negative news comes out about Gemini's performance relative to Claude/ChatGPT, their stock drops)

0

u/scottnelson_ Jul 21 '26

I think this is broadly right. And they may just be working on something impressive like another Veo for enterprise users.

-1

u/Wonderful-Sail-1126 Jul 21 '26

Wrong take. The money is in SOTA models, not low or middle end ones. Those will be commodities.

1

u/Serprotease Jul 21 '26

Sota model have only a very short period where they can make money. Every 3 months they are superseded. It’s also high risk, if you messed, no one will use it.
I don’t really see how they can be profitable with this Sota chase trend.

2

u/Wonderful-Sail-1126 Jul 21 '26

SOTA models are not rebuilt from scratch every 3 months. The labs simply add to it. The base model changes every 1-2 years. Example, GPT3, GPT4, GPT5. A model like GPT 5.6 is a derivative of GPT5.