The company that knows everything about you - search, phone, mail and video in one pair of hands, plus its own AI, built into everything, without asking you.
You walk into your day through Google without noticing it. You search for something. You open a phone running Android, the operating system that runs most phones in the world outside the iPhone. You check Gmail. You play a video on YouTube. Each of these is a separate product, but behind them stands one and the same company, which sees what you search for, who you write to, what you watch and where you are.
Gemini is Google's answer to what artificial intelligence looks like today. It's not a separate app you have to download and get used to. It's placed inside the search engine, inside Gmail, inside the phone. You ask something in the search engine and instead of a list of links you get a ready answer, written by Gemini. That's the difference between Google five years ago and Google now: search no longer shows you a path to the answer. It carries the answer itself.
TPU sounds like a technical detail. It isn't. Most companies making artificial intelligence rent computing power from outside chips - mostly Nvidia's, the maker of graphics processors that became mandatory for AI. Google has been making its own chips for exactly this job for years. It means that while everyone else waits in line for computing power, Google has its own factory at its back.
And here's the most uncomfortable part. Android runs about three billion phones worldwide. Gmail is the mailbox of a huge chunk of the planet. Search is the first place people ask anything. It means Gemini doesn't have to convince anyone to install it. It's already there, switched on by default, waiting inside a product you open ten times a day. No other AI company has this uninvited entry.
Google is part of Alphabet, the parent company, and its market value passed $4 trillion, pushed mostly by expectations around Gemini and TPU. The number is abstract, but behind it stands a specific bet: investors think Google will win the AI race not with the smartest model on the market, but by already being everywhere, before the race even started.
The effect is calculated
It doesn't bother me that Google makes good AI. What bothers me is something else: the only reason I'm forced to use it is that I'm already deep inside its ecosystem, without ever having made that decision today. The Android phone, the Gmail mailbox, the search engine - that's pure inertia from a decade back. Gemini walks in through a door I left open myself, without thinking about it.
That's why I look at Google differently than the new AI companies. They have to convince me to give them access to something of mine. Google just has to not lose it. That's a far stronger position than anyone else's in this race - and exactly why I watch it most closely of all.