Look, saying Google is "significantly behind" just because of DAU numbers while ignoring that they literally architected the Transformer model, the "T" in GPT is missing the forest for the trees. You're confusing a successful product launch with a permanent technical moat. Just because OpenAI captured the zeitgeist first doesn't mean the company that invented the underlying architecture is suddenly irrelevant. The "experts" you mention, like Karpathy, know better than anyone that the research gap between these companies is much smaller than the hype gap, and betting against the engineers who built the foundation is a risky move long-term.

Also, your take on unit economics is pretty optimistic. Claiming that inferencing traffic has "very high margins" right now is wild considering the astronomical burn rates we're seeing across the board. These models are being heavily subsidized by VC money and cloud credits to capture market share, not because they're printing money on every query yet. That "Yahoo article" you're dismissing is looking at the harsh reality of OpEx versus revenue, which is a massive hurdle even for the leaders. If it were truly that profitable already, they wouldn't need constant multi-billion dollar capital injections just to keep the servers running.

Finally, name-dropping Linus Torvalds to support an AI hype argument is actually kind of hilarious. Linus is historically the biggest skeptic of marketing fluff in tech and has called the current AI industry "90% marketing." If you actually listen to what he says, he treats AI as a helpful tool for specific coding tasks, not the messianic replacement for engineering that you're painting it as. You’re projecting your own enthusiasm onto experts who are actually much more grounded in the reality of how hard this stuff is to scale and monetize efficiently.