Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
25 comments
·December 1, 2025RoddaWallPro
biophysboy
I like and read Ben's stuff regularly; he often frames "better" from the business side. He will use terms like "revealed preference" to claim users actually prefer bad product designs (e.g. most users use free ad-based platforms), but a lot of human behavior is impulsive, habitual, constrained, and irrational.
Groxx
yeah... and it's (partly) based on the claim that it has network effects like how Facebook has? I don't see that at all, there's basically no social or cross-account stuff in any of them and if anything LLMs are the best non-lock-in system we've ever had: none of them are totally stable or reliable, and they all work by simply telling it to do the thing you want. your prompts today will need tweaking tomorrow, regardless of if it's in ChatGPT or Gemini, especially for individuals who are using the websites (which also keep changing).
sure, there are APIs and that takes effort to switch... but many of them are nearly identical, and the ecosystem effect of ~all tools supporting multiple models seems far stronger than the network effect of your parents using ChatGPT specifically.
spyckie2
A better product to make money of course.
alecco
Indeed. Why do people follow these clowns? They seem to read high level takes and spew out their nonsense theories.
They fail to mention Google's edge: Inter-Chip Interconnect and the allegedly 1/3 of price. Then they talk about software moat and it sounds like they never even compiled a hello world in either architecture. smh
And this comes out days after many in-depth posts like:
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...
A crude Google search AI summary of those would be better than this dumb blogpost.
sho_hn
"Better product" here means "monetizes harder". You just have a different concept of product quality than hardline-capitalist finance bros.
raw_anon_1111
I do all of my “AI” development on top of AWS Bedrock that hosts every available model except for OpenAIs closed source models that are exclusive to Microsoft.
It’s extremely easy to write a library that makes switching between models trivial. I could add OpenAI support. It would be just slightly more complicated because I would have to have a separate set of API keys while now I can just use my AWS credentials.
Also of course latency would be theoretically worse since with hosting on AWS and using AWS for inference you stay within the internal network (yes I know to use VPC endpoints).
There is no moat around switching models unlike Ben says.
biophysboy
Have you noticed any significant AND consistent differences between them when you switch? I frequently get a better answer from one vs the other, but it feels unpredictable. Your setup seems like a better test of this
jasonjmcghee
Idk if I'm just holding it wrong, but calling Gemini 3 "the best model in the world" doesn't line up with my experience at all.
It seems to just be worse at actually doing what you ask.
cj
It's like saying "Star Wars is the best movie in the world" - to some people it is. To others it's terrible.
I feel like it would be advantageous to move away from a "one model fits all" mindset, and move towards a world where we have different genres of models that we use for different things.
The benchmark scores are turning into being just as useful as tomatometer movie scores. Something can score high, but if that's not the genre you like, the high score doesn't guarantee you'll like it.
everdrive
Outside of experience and experimentation, is there a good way to know what models are strong for what tasks?
wrsh07
It's a good model. Zvi also thought it was the best model until Opus 4.5 was announced a few hours after he wrote his post
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gemini-3-pro-is-a-vast-intelli...
diavarlyani
2018 me: ‘Aggregation Theory is basically unbeatable’ 2025 me, watching OpenAI voluntarily stay in the top-right quadrant while Google happily camps bottom-left with infinite ammo: ‘…maybe there’s an asterisk’ Great update to the Moat Map
cs702
The analysis fails to mention that if TPUs take market share from Nvidia GPUs, JAX's software ecosystem likely would also take market share from the PyTorch+Triton+CUDA software ecosystem.
claytonjy
not even google thinks this will happen, given their insistence on only offering TPU access through their cloud
cs702
As the OP points out, Google is now selling TPUs to at least some corporate customers.
hackernewds
they are not though
aworks
"the naive approach to moats focuses on the cost of switching; in fact, however, the more important correlation to the strength of a moat is the number of unique purchasers/users."
esafak
I was not able to find any research that posits that moat strength is determined by customer diversity.
I think customer diversity correlates instead with resilience.
caminante
Author isn't non-financial, but the "moat 2.0" doesn't feel right.
> More than anything, though, I believe in the market power and defensibility of 800 million users, which is why I think ChatGPT still has a meaningful moat.
It's 800M weekly active users according to ChatGPT. I keep hearing that once you segment paid and unpaid, daily ChatGPT users fall off dramatically (<10% for paid and far less for unpaid).
jszymborski
I'm not suggesting I know better than the author, but I think they might be confusing moat for network effect.
It's indeed the case with social nets like Xwitter and Instagram that network size serves as a moat but that's for different reasons.
Of course, ChatGPT and Claude and friends might not have reached their final form and might yet rely on networks in the future.
Jyaif
I would say that customer diversity may be a marker of past resilience, and likely results in moat.
Customer diversity says nothing about current or future resilience.
citizenpaul
Its a long article and one of the first points "google strikes back." Is completely wrong ime. Not only is Gemini much worse than all the other models. The latest release is now so bad it is almost useless half the time or more. Hard to read more with such a bad take what I've seen myself. I don't care what benchmarks it beats if it just churns out comically bad results to me.
"advertising would make ChatGPT a better product."
And with that, I will never read anything this guy writes again :)