How Google plans to win the AI war

Google is trying to pull off one of the trickiest balancing acts in tech: aggressively disrupting its own products with AI while protecting the businesses that generate tens of billions in profit.

Why it matters: Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Google enters the AI race with enormous scale, distribution and cash flow — but also a vast empire it has to defend.

Driving the news: As it has for the past two years, Google used this week's I/O developer conference to focus almost entirely on AI.

• It's revamping its core search box to serve both traditional short queries, while seamlessly allowing it to expand for longer chatbot-style conversations.
• YouTube, meanwhile, is getting a new "Ask YouTube" feature where people can ask a question and get both a text result — for making a recipe, say, or fixing a clogged pipe — as well as a link to the video.

The big picture: Public perception of the AI race often swings wildly based on whichever company most recently released a flashy model.

• For a while OpenAI was seen as unbeatable. Then late last year, Google was seen as having pulled ahead. And now many are pointing to Anthropic as having surged forward thanks to Mythos.
• But executives at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic increasingly describe the frontier race as effectively neck-and-neck, with companies making different tradeoffs around cost, speed and computing resources.
• This was highlighted by Google's choice to debut the latest Gemini not with a behemoth version to compete with Mythos but with the faster, cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash.
• The choice reflects a broader Google strategy: Stay at the frontier, but also prioritize models cheap and fast enough to deploy across products used by billions, rather than chasing benchmark supremacy alone.
• In other words, Google's key advantage may be in not just competing for the best model, but being able to pair that leading model with enormous platforms that dwarf even ChatGPT in scale.

What they're saying: "The competition is fierce," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday during an on-stage interview with Future Forward's Matthew Berman. "A few labs are really at the frontier and then there's a big gap."

Zoom in: A strong existing business is helping Google invest upwards of $180 billion in capital expenses this year — up sixfold from 2022 — without having to constantly raise money in the ways its rivals do.

• Plus, having so many products allows Google to test a lot of things at scale and spread out the costs of developing state-of-the-art models.
• "One of the cool things we get to do here at Google is build technologies that get immediately deployed into multibillion-dollar products," Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Axios in an interview Tuesday. "It's pretty, pretty exciting, and I would say pretty unique."

Yes, but: Adding AI everywhere risks not only making the products more complicated for users, but threatens to disrupt Google's highly lucrative business model.

• If people get the answer they want from search directly, they may be less likely to click on an ad.
• Letting people ask questions of YouTube videos could mean fewer people are watching the full videos — and the ads within, potentially making YouTube less attractive to creators in addition to less lucrative to Google.
• Meanwhile, ads within chatbots are still in the experimental phase, though Google announced some new tests at I/O and OpenAI is also charging forward, saying it sees AI ads as a $100 billion business by 2030.

The bottom line: Google is betting it can do what few incumbents manage: reinvent its core products fast enough to survive the next platform shift while still funding the transition from the old business.