OpenAI vs Google is the Wrong Game
The AI game is one between tenants and landlords and OpenAI is a tenant paying steep fees to its landlords
Most of the Google pulled ahead of OpenAI discourse is misframed. It treats them as rival labs in a model race: GPT vs Gemini, who’s ahead on benchmarks, whose demo looks better this month.
That’s not the real game.
We’re now in an AI regime where the decisive variables are land, pipes, and defaults, not parameter counts. In that world, Google and Microsoft look like what they are: landlords. OpenAI is not a landlord. OpenAI is a very important tenant.
The right way to think about this isn’t OpenAI vs Google. It’s:
Landlords vs tenants in the AI stack, and
Which layers actually get to keep the profits
Once you look at it that way, the current Code Red moment stops being dramatic and starts looking inevitable.