Pulse News

**Google Is Still Behind in AI. Why?**

By Martin Peers

Mar 7, 2025, 3:00pm PST

Here's an exercise: Try asking a selection of AI chatbots for a list of the big tech news stories of the day. OpenAI's ChatGPT and XAI's Grok both deliver a good list of specific stories—ChatGPT even offers links. Google's Gemini, not so much: Its list is a bunch of vague bullet points with no examples. Gemini's performance was no better when I asked it, along with ChatGPT and Grok, to pull some data from Securities and Exchange Commission filings. ChatGPT instantaneously pulled the numbers from every single report. Grok was a tiny bit slower but eventually delivered an equally good answer. Gemini, though, said it was "challenging" to answer "without digging into every single financial report" (yes, Gemini, that's the point!). Gemini's performance was, to be blunt, poor. (I should say I'm paying for Gemini, but not for Grok or OpenAI.)

How is it possible that Google, the once-great tech company that helped invent modern artificial intelligence, is now behind its rivals, including Elon Musk's AI company which only got started a couple of years ago? (Google shook up its AI unit today, in a sign it is trying to improve things.)

We've written extensively about Google's struggles in AI including last month and last year here and here. We'll stay on this subject (let us know if you can help explain what's going on). To be fair, it's not only Google that is surprisingly on its back foot in the AI race. Apple may be even worse off—as this Bloomberg report showed. And today we got news that Apple had delayed the rollout of its most promising AI features. (Microsoft has its own issues with AI, as we profiled today).

And as we wrote this week, China's big tech companies have been engaged in deep soul-searching since upstart DeepSeek caught everyone by surprise with its R1 reasoning model. As that story said, DeepSeek's advances are good enough that both Tencent and Baidu now promote their own products by advertising their DeepSeek offering. That's like Google selling a version of Gemini powered by ChatGPT. Come to think of it, that might be a good idea!

**The Information's Stories of the Week**

Amid the turmoil over tariff policies and other Washington stories, The Information broke some notable tech news this week. Here's the details:

- Jessica Lessin broke the story that Google co-founder Larry Page has started a new company that will use AI to transform manufacturing. Separately, Stephanie Palazzolo and Cory Weinberg revealed that OpenAI is planning to charge as much as $20,000 a month for high-end AI agents, while low-end agents might cost a tenth of that.

- Cory scooped that Genesys, a private-equity backed customer service software firm, delayed its upcoming IPO due to market volatility. It was a sign of how Washington's turmoil is complicating life for businesspeople.

- In Hong Kong, Qianer Liu broke the news that the new hot Nvidia model for smugglers in Asia is its gaming chip, which tech firms now think can run DeepSeek's models.

- We covered CoreWeave's filing of its IPO paperwork through a series of stories, including this weekend scoop on what the filing would reveal about the AI cloud firm's business growth, how CoreWeave's founders sold nearly $500 million in stock ahead of the IPO filing, and how CoreWeave was in talks to buy an AI startup for $1.7 billion.

- SoftBank is back to its old trick: borrowing lots of money to fund ambitious investments, as Juro Osawa and Cory Weinberg detailed here.

- Steve LeVine looked at what investors think about Tesla's struggles right now.

- True Value writer Anita Ramaswamy argued that investors' preference for Uber over Lyft is blinding them to the opportunity presented by Lyft's discounted stock price.

- If you want to understand why investors are excited about how Meta Platforms will benefit from generative AI, check out this deep dive into how AI tools for making ads are transforming the ad world. In a similar vein, we revealed how Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are using AI to drive sales growth.

- Coinbase is riding high under the new, pro-crypto presidential administration. But deregulation also presents challenges for the company, as Yueqi Yang explained in this piece.

- Sahil wrote about YouTube's plans for jump-starting its efforts to make the video-streaming giant a hub for subscription streaming services owned by other companies.

- Start your weekend with this excellent profile of the company behind the debut Stargate data center being built for OpenAI and Oracle.

**In Other News**

- AI search startup Perplexity struck a marketing partnership with The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show, in which Shapiro will use Perplexity to fact check a segment on his show, Adweek reported.

- Passes and Fanfix, which operate competing apps that connect creators to paying fans, discussed a merger in recent months but abandoned the talks, according to both companies. The talks, which haven't previously been reported, came to light as part of an increasingly acrimonious dispute between the two rivals.

- President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to establish a U.S. bitcoin reserve and a digital asset stockpile for non-bitcoin tokens, ahead of the first-ever White House crypto summit on Friday.

Martin Peers is a columnist and co-executive editor of The Information, where he has worked since 2014. He was managing editor from 2015 through 2021. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and Daily Variety, among other publications. He is based in New York and is on Twitter @mvpeers.