They just conquered mobile hot off losing an antitrust case but getting away with it because AI exists, so they’ve never been in a stronger position. Both Google and Apple are fighting the EU to keep rival AI assistants at bay, they are on the brink of locking everyone else out almost globally.
I think they're concentrating on users and not benchmarks. Gemini still seems to be the best model at plain old searches, like, for parsing images or "what's that poem with this and this in it". It seems to have much more breadth of reasoning than any of the other models, e.g. Gemini 3.1 is still the top model on simple-bench other than Fable.
New 3.5 Flash model is clearly quite optimized for speed. People on this site just look at benchmarks, and underestimate how vital speed is to user experience. No other free model comes close in terms of speed and intelligence, and this seems like an excellent way to slowly win the mass market. Almost all people will form their experience of AI through its free version.