Despite aggressive cross-selling, Google Gemini is not winning the AI race
Anish Acharya · Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z) · Sep 6, 2026 · at 1:02:29
a16z General Partner Anish Acharya pushes back on the idea that big tech incumbents possess an insurmountable distribution advantage over AI startups.
0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Gemini, despite all the kind of heavy cross-selling Google has done, nobody would say they're winning.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Anish Acharya
AI labs rely on autocatalytic progress, not recursive self-improvement
“But if you ask the most sophisticated individuals at the labs, it's not actually RSI that's occurring, which could lead to some sort of runaway winner because they were an epsilon ahead of the others. It's auto catalytic effects, which just means you're using …”
A sudden, fast-takeoff scenario for AI will not happen
“Like the line of reasoning for that case is always everything up until now, then something happens that no one can quite articulate and then fast take off. So I don't believe that that's going to happen.”
AI testing will expose PMs who lack zero-to-one product skills
“In a world where every story gets told, every product story gets told, every feature gets tried, I think a lot of PMs are going to realize they're actually not that good at zero to one. And it's much more fulfilling to work on someone else's good idea than you…”
Startups do not have growth problems, they have product problems
“Well, I, you know, here's the one thing I would say that here's the hopeful point, which is I always say that nobody has a growth problem these days. They have a product problem.”
Most commercial problems are bound by physical constraints, not intelligence
“I think the other thing that's under discussed Lenny is, you know, how many problems are truly intelligence bound? Like if you add a, you know, a data center of PhDs working at FedEx or Domino's pizza, are they going to be like exponentially dominating supply …”
Google team completes two-year product roadmap in three months using AI
“Anecdotally, I talked to a good friend who's an executive at Google and I said, Hey, have you laid anyone off? And he said, No, we didn't. What we instead do is now rip through our roadmap. So two years of roadmap happens in three months. And we're actually, o…”